A life in letters: Ruskin, John (1819-1900)

I remember discovering a volume of extracts from the writings of the Victorian art critic John Ruskin one day in the mid 1990s. The old volume was in the recycling bin at the Library Support Unit:  my colleagues were discarding it. I fished the book out, and began browsing through it.  I didn’t know anything about Ruskin’s background, or about his slow retreat from orthodox Christianity, but the following episode in his life resonated profoundly with me as I lingered in the chilly garage reading it.

He describes how, one July Sunday in 1858 when he was in Turin he attended a Waldensian chapel in the southern suburbs of the city.

The assembled congregation numbered in all some three or four and twenty, of which fifteen or sixteen were grey-haired women. There solitary and clerkless preacher, a somewhat stunted figure in a black coat, with a cracked voice…put his utmost zeal into a consolatory discourse on the wickedness of the wide world, more especially of the plain of Piedmont and the city of Turin, and on the exclusive favour of God, enjoyed by the between nineteen and twenty-four elect members of his congregation….

Ruskin then walked back into Turin ‘neither cheered nor greatly alarmed by this doctrine,’ and walked into an art gallery ‘where Paul Veronese’s Solomon and the Queen of Sheba ‘glowed in full afternoon light.’

The gallery windows being open, there came in with the warm air, floating swells and falls of military music, from the courtyard before the palace, which seemed to me more devotional, in their perfect art, tune and discipline, than anything I remembered of evangelical hymns. And as the perfect colour and sound gradually asserted their power on me, they seemed finally to fasten in me the old article of Jewish faith, that things done delightfully and rightly were always done by the help and in the Spirit of God.

For Ruskin, this was a moment of insight, in which the rightness of his reflections ‘through many years’ were confirmed. ‘There was no sudden conversion possible to me,’ he writes, ‘either by preacher, picture, or dulcimer. But that day, my evangelical beliefs were put away, to be debated of no more.’

To me, standing in the garage reading Ruskin’s words was a ‘Yes! Moment; - one of those affirming instants when you connect with something which validates your own experience and gives you permission to be. Ruskin’s words confirmed my half-acknowledged recognition that God was much bigger than I had thought, that he was too colourful to be confined in a dull kind of Christian life and practice, that he was present and gloriously alive throughout his vibrant creation.

Andrew A. Bonar and Jonathan Sacks

Over the last few months, I’ve been reading the Diary of Andrew A. Bonar (1810-1892) the notable Scottish Free Churchman whose bi-centenary is celebrated this year. The resulting Christian Viewpoint column I wrote for the Highland News was a ‘soft’ piece, focussing not so much on Bonar’s theology, as on noting some of the images from everyday life which he used to illuminate the spiritual dimension. I guess for me symbols and imagery have always spoken more powerfully than ideas, I did note in passing however that Bonar’s life which, for all its seriousness seems to have been joy- and love-filled belies the stereotype of Calvinists as stern zealots.

Sometimes the diaries irritated me, and I felt an instant guilt at being irritated by someone who was patently such a godly person. But when you see him worrying that his kids, having innocent fun on holiday, might temporarily take their eyes off God you do feel like telling him to ‘get a life.’ And mixed with his joy in God’s presence were times of utter dejection when he was plagued with a sense of his failure. I guess it is true that the closer to God you are the more you’re aware of your shortcomings. But isn’t it also true that closeness to God is a constant reminder of his grace and acceptance in Christ, so that the mist of dejection at your failure is quickly burned up by the rising sun of his embracing love?

At other times, however, I was deeply blessed by Bonar’s words. I recall particularly a trip to Stirling back in April when I read the Diary for much of the way down from Inverness and then, in the afternoon, sat for an hour on the station in the bright spring sunshine immersed in Bonar as trains came and went. I was flooded with joy and peace and hope and certainty, the whisper of God. Interesting that you can be so blessed through the words of someone with whom there would no doubt be many issues on which you don’t see eye-to-eye.

I realised about ten years ago that I was a ‘complicated evangelical’ when I came to accept that for me, the old ‘evangelical paradigm’ didn’t satisfactorily explain all the issues I had, and that it was OK to embrace a bigger, more scary paradigm which involved living with mystery and unanswered questions and less dogmatism.

But then I read someone like Andrew Bonar, so prayerful, so aware of God – and so convinced that the paradigm of his essentially Calvinist take on truth is substantially accurate, and once again I feel challenges and unsettled. Are folks like Bonar right? Should I turn back to the old evangelical paradigm with its focus more on certainties than on unknowing?

Last Saturday I saw Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writing, movingly as he often does, in The Times. His subject was his own discovery of God, and he noted though a holy book and a holy land had contributed to his spiritual growth, mostly ‘I found God in people.’ He quotes a story by Jorge Luis Borges in which ‘he imagines someone coming across a stranger who has something about him – an unlikely tenderness, an exaltation – that doesn’t belong, that seems to be a reflection of someone else.’ Borges writes ‘Somewhere in the world there is a man from whom this clarity, this brightness, emanates.’

Says Sacks ‘He searches for this mysterious presence entirely by following his reflection in others. That is how I have searched for God. And that is where I have found Him, in holy people and ordinary people, in lives lifted beyond themselves, in serene grace and holy argument, in acts of quiet courage and improbably recconciliation, in gentle wisdom and soaring imagination, in forgiving eyes and gestures of love.’

As Christians, would we not say that it is from Jesus that ‘this clarity, this brightness, emanates,’ and that we see in one another as Christians glimpses of his radiance? But what do we make of Sack’s assertion that we can catch glimpses of the Source in many good people – by implication of difference faiths and none? Is it true that glimpses of God can be seen in all of us? Are these reflected glories simply residual insights from our source in God, or is God present in the everyday goodnesses of all women and men regardless of their beliefs? And if people have actively sought these goodnesses in dependence on strength from beyond themselves will God reject them because they have not had faith in Christ? And how much do I, who claim to know so much about Christian theology, reflect the Source in my everyday life?

It’s questions like these, which won’t go away, which make me uncomfortable with the austere joy of Bonar’s paradigm, much as I acknowledge his saintliness and outstanding faith.

One image he used (on 28th January 1877) particularly struck me. ‘Today,’ he wrote, ‘I was like a man standing in full sight of plenty at the door of a well-stored granary, all of it mine; but I took little of it.’ It’s true how little we sometimes appreciate and appropriate of God’s goodness to us. But I also thought that that there were things in that granary which Bonar didn’t realise were there perhaps because his theology denied them reality. Bonar hungered for the Holy Spirit and yet he does not seem to have had an insight into the present reality of the gifts of the Spirit which some 20th century Christians were to rediscover. For us, too in the 21st century there will be treasures in that granary which we don’t yet know are there.