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‘Those Are Leaves’: Ruskin’s Analogical Imagination and the Pre-Raphaelite Theology of Nature

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John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Religious Imagination

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Abstract

This chapter establishes the framework of Ruskin’s metaphysics through the way in which he conceives the relationship between God and the natural world. It examines his reading of Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity to argue that Ruskin derives from it the doctrine of analogy, by which the divine and creatures are ontologically distinct, yet related by virtue of their direct creation and participation in God. Milbank uses the image of the leaf and Ruskin’s drawings of foliage, and his writing on ‘Leaf Beauty’, in order to explore how this metaphysics works in practice. She also argues how modes of analogy between natural forms demonstrate the interdependence and reciprocity of Hooker’s vision of the created order. Ruskin’s appreciation of Pre-Raphaelite leaf-painting is attributed to his engagement with analogy, which, Milbank argues, also lies behind his criticism of their work.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See George P. Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows; Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art, and Thought (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980) and Landow’s earlier The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972).

  2. 2.

    See Modern Painters Volume II, in John Ruskin, The Complete Works of John Ruskin, Library Edition, edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), Vol. 35, p. 296. All other references are to the Library Edition and are given by volume and page number in the text, for example (xxxv.14,414). Hooker was central to the Tractarians’ construction of a ‘via media’ theology between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. See Kevin Fraser Curnow, ‘Richard Hooker, John Henry Newman: A Via Media Theology of the Eucharist’. Pacifica: Australasia Theological Studies 30, no.3 (2017): 214–239 and Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Richard Hooker’s Reputation’, in Torrance Kirby, ed. A Companion to Richard Hooker (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 563–612.

  3. 3.

    Richard Hooker, The Works of that Learned and Judicious Divine, Mr Richard Hooker, with an Account of his Life and Death by Isaac Walton, 2 Vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1841), 1, pp. 162, 157.

  4. 4.

    Ibid., p. 148.

  5. 5.

    Ibid., p. 156.

  6. 6.

    Ibid., p. 173.

  7. 7.

    Malcolm Mackenzie Ross, ‘Ruskin, Hooker and “the Christian Theoria”’, in Millar MacLure and F. W. Watt, eds., Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age Presented to A. S. P. Woodhouse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), pp. 289–290.

  8. 8.

    Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 22 Vols. (London: Burns and Oates, 1922), 1.13.2.

  9. 9.

    On the analogy of being and participation, see Andrew Davison, Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

  10. 10.

    Ibid., pp. 228–235.

  11. 11.

    Paul Anthony Dominiak, Richard Hooker: The Architecture of Participation (London: Bloomsbury/T & T Clark, 2020), pp. 36–38.

  12. 12.

    Hooker, The Works, 1, p. 623.

  13. 13.

    Quoted from Hooker’s Dublin Fragments 2 in Dominiak, Architecture of Participation (2020), p. 87.

  14. 14.

    Ross, ‘Ruskin, Hooker and “the Christian Theoria”’ (1964), p. 287.

  15. 15.

    J. R. R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories (London: Harper Collins, 2014), pp. 27–84.

  16. 16.

    Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 34.

  17. 17.

    Ibid., p. 18.

  18. 18.

    Elizabeth Deas noted the error in Ruskin’s observation but perhaps unfairly she does not point out that both plants belong to the same family of Alismataceae. See Elizabeth Deas, ‘The Missing Alisma: Ruskin’s Botanical Error’, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 10 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 4–13.

  19. 19.

    Anne Neale, ‘Consider the Lilies: Symbolism and Revelation in “Convent Thoughts” (1851) by Charles Allston Collins (1828–1873)’, The British Art Journal 11:1 (2010), p. 96.

  20. 20.

    Michael Wheeler has explored the background of debate following not only the Tractarian movement but the establishment of Roman Catholic sees in Ruskin’s God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 104–106.

  21. 21.

    Neale, ‘Consider the Lilies’ (2010), p. 93.

  22. 22.

    The Exhibition of the Royal Academy, the Eighty Third (London: W. Clowes for the Royal Academy, 1851), no. 493, 26. The quotation is from the Authorised Version of Psalm 143.5.

  23. 23.

    Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio 1 Text, translated by Charles Singleton, Bollingen Series LXXX (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), Purgatorio 28.80–81: ‘ma luce rende il salmo Delectasti’ (‘but the psalm Delectasti gives light’). Dante names the Psalm from the fourth verse: ‘you have delighted me’ or ‘made me glad’ in the Authorised Version.

  24. 24.

    William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 2 Vols. (New York: Dutton, 1914 [1905]), 1, p. 204.

  25. 25.

    Quoted by Malcolm Warner, ‘John Everett Millais’s Autumn Leaves: “A Picture Full of Beauty and Without Subject”’, in Leslie Parris, ed., Pre-Raphaelite Papers (London: Tate Publishing, 1984), p. 127.

  26. 26.

    Hooker, The Works, 1, p. 623.

  27. 27.

    Ibid.

  28. 28.

    David Melville Craig, John Ruskin and the Ethics of Consumption (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2006), p. 49. Craig shares my positive evaluation of the Hookerian basis of Ruskin’s metaphysics.

  29. 29.

    Ruskin makes frequent reference to Cuvier, though occasionally notes his ‘uselessness’ (xxvi.308).

  30. 30.

    Charles Darwin, On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection … (London: Murray, 1859), p. 489.

  31. 31.

    Mark Frost, ‘“The Circles of Vitality:” Ruskin, Science and Dynamic Materiality’, Victorian Literature and Culture 39:2 (2011): p. 376.

  32. 32.

    See Clive Wilmer, ‘“No Such Thing as a Flower … No Such Thing as a Man:” John Ruskin’s Response to Darwin’, in Valerie Purton, ed., Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers (London: Anthem Press, 2013), pp. 97–108.

  33. 33.

    Dante’s epistemology is derived from Aquinas. See the classic article by Martin D’Arcy, ‘Knowledge According to Aquinas’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society n.s. 28 (1927–28), pp. 177–202, and the Summa Theologica 1a, q. 85.

  34. 34.

    Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul So Far as it is Demonstrable from the Light of Nature, ed. A. Jacob (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), p. 193.

  35. 35.

    More, The Immortality of the Soul, p. 450.

  36. 36.

    Wheeler, Ruskin’s God (1999), especially pp. 186–197 on The Queen of the Air.

  37. 37.

    Laudato Sí: On Care for Our Common Home (2015) at http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html accessed May 2022, para 139.

  38. 38.

    Ibid., para 240.

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  1. Nottingham, UK

    Alison Milbank

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  1. Bath, UK

    Sheona Beaumont

  2. Bath, UK

    Madeleine Emerald Thiele

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Milbank, A. (2023). ‘Those Are Leaves’: Ruskin’s Analogical Imagination and the Pre-Raphaelite Theology of Nature. In: Beaumont, S., Thiele, M.E. (eds) John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Religious Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21554-4_4

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