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John Ruskin: An Unconventional Unconversion
The Victorian era demonstrated a tremendous shift in every artistic domain from
literature to architecture as the theological foundations were shaken by those who
questioned the traditionally held dogma of the Protestant and Catholic Church. During
this time, stories of great literary minds unconverting from the Christian faith were
common; many notable figures such as Matthew Arnold and George Eliot went through
major crises of faith, often ending with a leave from the Christian faith altogether. John
Ruskin, a quintessential Victorian known as a prolific essayist on matters ranging from
theology, history, science, social justice, and aesthetics, undergoes his own significant
spiritual crisis. His unconversion story, unlike many of his contemporaries, was
essentially circular. Beginning as a child brought up as in an Evangelical environment, he
ultimately became the confident Christian seen in his later essays only by first
undergoing years of struggling to understand true faith among a din of contradicting
theologies and corruption within the Church.
Ruskin’s spiritual journey can be traced through his art criticism, most
particularly in his writings on religious architecture. The various stages of his journey are
most evident in certain landmark works such as the essay “The Poetry of Architecture,”
The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Stones of Venice, Modern Painters, as well as his
autobiographical writings, Praeterita and Fors Clavigera. What he terms as “the drama
of architecture” (The Stones of Venice 1:333), becomes a vehicle used through the
entirety of his career to voice his views on morality by way of interpreting a society’s
architectural landscape as a grand, metaphorical narrative of the rise and fall of that
society’s relationship with God. In order to set these writings in the context of his

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personal life and the theological influences that molded the foundation of his essays and
major works, it is necessary to begin with a look at the beliefs that were instilled into
Ruskin in his most formative early years by his family.
From his birth in 1819, his parents brought the young Ruskin up in the
Episcopalian Chapel in Long Acre and later Beresford Chapel where they watched the
great early Victorian revival of Evangelicalism unfold. While John Thomas Ruskin was
far more concerned with his own social ambitions to climb to the status of ‘Gentleman’
(The Wider Sea 10), John Ruskin’s mother Margaret was primarily concerned with
matters of faith. Margaret came from a Scottish Presbyterian background which formed
the passionate Evangelicalism she practiced through her whole life, a belief system
founded in Old Testament wisdom literature that emphasized above all else what Ruskin
lists as “peace, obedience, and faith” (Praeterita 34). In his second autobiography,
Praeterita, Ruskin tells his readers how his well-meaning mother had “solemnly ‘devoted
me to God’ before I was born; in imitation of Hannah” though she forgets that, even if
she and her child were to pray to Christ every day, “the position is not His to give” (15).
Still, he acknowledged his mother’s significant influence on his life, thanking her “for the
resolutely consistent lessons which so exercised me in the Scriptures as to make every
word of them familiar to my ear in habitual music, —yet in that familiarity reverenced, as
transcending all thought, and ordaining all conduct” (30). Though he would eventually
leave the Evangelical Protestant tradition his mother held to with such zeal, he
maintained his mother’s belief in the textual authority of Scriptures and conducted his life
by the strict moral discipline and work ethic his parents instilled in him.

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His years memorizing and studying the scriptures with his mother, Margaret
instilled in the young writer a understanding of Biblical interpretation that shaped not
only how he interpreted scripture but also his entire theory of aesthetics. Using his
powers of association, the essayist feels it to be his duty to raise such questions of feeling
in the tradition of what Robert Hewison explains to be the typically Evangelical
“approach to biblical exegesis,” which implies that “the Bible contained not only a literal
truth but also a hidden meaning that the faithful had a duty to interpret” (Cosgrove 46).
Beyond the printed scriptures and into the physical world, from an early age Ruskin was
instructed by the Reverend Dr. Hugh Blair, whose sermons his father would read aloud to
him, to see God’s hand in creation. Blair would often remind his congregation to seek
God’s presence, “in the small and most inconsiderable, as well as in the most illustrious
works of God, equal marks appear of profound design and consummate art” (qtd. in
Wheeler 12). Traveling across Europe as a young child, he sought glimpses of that
profound design, and began to form his aesthetic ideals on these Evangelical principles.
This method would mature later in his career and gradually become disconnected from its
theological roots as he liberally applied the associative mode of interpretation in art and
landscape. Jeffrey Spear observes that in this way, expressing history “in the symbolic
truth of story, Ruskin could associate with biblical narrative,” later “this association
paved the way for his mythopoeic historiography as his Evangelical faith faded” (Spear
75). By setting himself in the position of Interpreter, Ruskin assumes a literary voice that
speaks on these tricky spiritual matters with authority through the remainder of his career,
a habit that would often give the reader a false sense of his confidence in his own beliefs.

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In these early years, his father took the boy and his mother on extensive business
trips across Europe, affording Ruskin vast amounts of exposure to the most beautiful
landscapes the Continent had to offer. During the first two decades of his life, these trips,
especially those taken through the Alps and architectural ruins in Italy, he developed a
deep appreciation for the grand natural and architectural landscapes as he watched them
pass “through the panoramic opening of the four windows of a postchaise” (Praeterita 7).
The objective vantage point of the carriage made a significant influence on the way he
saw the passing landscapes during those trips in the 1820’s that were later mythologized
into “The Poetry of Architecture.”
While at this time his efforts were primarily focused on his geological studies, the
architectural ruins seen over the course of these trips were of particular interest to Ruskin.
These ruins, “especially of castles and churches, invited the mind to complete their
fragments by recalling their histories” (A Wider Sea 41). Ruskin meditates on the
picturesque scenery of the craggy landscape of the Rhine in his earliest memoirs of his
travels, A Tour on the Continent (1833):
I love to look upon the crags that Caesar has scaled, and upon the towers that his
legions have founded. These are now as they were then, looking up to the broad
blue heaven, these are in ruins. Yet they are mighty in their ruin, and majestic in
their decay, but their Lords are departed and forgotten as the waves that once
lashed their foundations. Other snows have melted, and the Rhine yet rolls
onward unbroken, but those waves are lost in the ocean forever. (The Works of
John Ruskin 2:355)
The imagery of the ruined landscape continues into his commentary on architecture,
permeating his aesthetic judgments as the lessons of his religious upbringing and an acute
sensibility of the history surrounding many of the architectural ruins seen through his
carriage window was always with him. He writes in volume four of Modern Painters that

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he was never “free from a certain awe and melancholy, and general sense of the meaning
of death, though, in its principal influence, entirely exhilarating and gladdening” (Modern
Painters 4:73). Architectural ruins, as he saw them in the early days of his career, told an
entirely different sort of story than the natural landscapes like the crags seen above the
Rhine; in nature God is eternally glorified but structures made by man almost always
decry the sinfulness of humanity. In his commentary on Ruskin’s use of the picturesque,
John Dixon Hunt notes that Ruskin requires that a truly worthy ruin “should have been of
some grandeur and elegance and should refer to somewhat really interesting so that the
associative faculty could be brought into play. For what attracts one to ruins is their
incompleteness, their instant declaration of loss” (“Ut Pictura Poesis, The Picturesque,
and John Ruskin” 797). Still fastened in the dogma of the Protestant Evangelical, the
deterioration of the man-made architectural accomplishments, the transient nature of
human life, and the immortal natural landscape, are seen here by Ruskin as symbolic of
God’s judgment, evoking an Edenic image of the fall from grace.
His first published writing on architecture was originally printed between 1837
and 1838 as a series of essays in J.C. Loudon’s Architectural Magazine, later to be
published in their entirety as The Poetry of Architecture and would be penned under the
pseudonym “Kataphusin,” meaning “according to Nature.” These essays were to be his
first exercise in organizing his thoughts on theology and aesthetics, though the
relationship between the two branches of philosophy is never wholly or clearly defined.
Ruskin’s primary argument is for architecture to be viewed first and foremost as “a
science of feeling more than of rule, a ministry to the mind, more to than to the eye” (The
Poetry of Architecture 1). Reading architectural landscapes typologically, as he was

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trained to do reading scripture with his mother as a child, the 19 year old philosopher
runs into some difficulty applying his associative methodology to an objective landscape.
Ruskin loses himself in his own argument when he interchangeably explains picturesque
landscapes as inherently full of life, with Nature as an active force and inseparable from a
Divine mystery, all the while claiming that any sensations taken from a landscape are
from the observer himself (A Wider Sea 92). Leaving the discrepancy unresolved, the
undergraduate appears to rely on his religious upbringing to justify his logic. John Dixon
Hunt writes that “the whole aesthetic problem touched Ruskin in a most personal way;
for his own possible career as commentator upon landscape and architecture depended
upon whether the inherent qualities of things needed explication or whether it was what a
writer brought to his interpretation of them that mattered” (93).
The pen name, “Kataphusin,” reflects Ruskin’s pious adoration for the natural
world. “For Ruskin,” Michael Wheeler writes in Ruskin’s God, “nature is God’s culture,
so that art and architecture—his subjects in the major early works—provide the very
language with which also to describe the creation” (33). The first volume of Modern
Painters (1843), Ruskin compares the work of artists to nature, “Where Poussin or
Claude has three similar masses, nature has fifty pictures, made up each of millions of
minor thoughts; ...all unlike each other, except in beauty, all bearing witness to the
unwearied, exhaustless operation of the Infinite Mind” (Modern Painters 1:232).
Therefore, in his mind the artist or architect’s only hope for success is to imitate natural
forms. In “The Poetry of Architecture,” he stresses that any violation of natural laws that
govern our perception of beauty has an injurious, jarring effect on the spectator, deadens
the inhabitants responsible for the violation’s ability to recognize true beauty, and, far

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more serious, ruin the natural harmony found in the surrounding environment. He warns
those who would flippantly ignore such laws and construct or decorate their building in
such a way that clashes with the surrounding natural landscape, “the slightest
deformity…can injure the effect of the noblest natural scenery” and goes so far as to
accuse offenders of behaving as “malicious clowns who…scrabble over with the
characters of idiocy the pages that have been written by the finger of God” (172).
In the early 1840’s, Ruskin further shifts his attention from the picturesque
landscapes of nature to the man-made constructions, and begins forming a new means of
defining his aesthetics in what he calls a “natural theology.” He writes in the second
volume of Modern Painters briefly before embarking on Seven Lamps on this natural
theology, in which he identifies any work of art as having two properties, typical and
vital beauty. Typical beauty refers to the representation of the divine attributes (unity,
purity, etc.) and vital beauty refers to the representation of beauty of living things.
Ruskin’s new definition of aesthetics within this natural theology changes his taste in art
and architecture in favor of that which encourages meditation and reveals the Christian
morality of the artist or architect. For this reason, Ruskin believed architecture, as he
would later explain during a lecture on art at Oxford, must “relate to us the utmost
ascertainable truth respecting visible things and moral feelings” (Lectures on Art 43).
With the development of this concept along with his maturing sensibility of architecture,
he gradually begins to open himself to seeing the meditative merit of man-made
constructions. However, his exploration of religious architecture would lead him into
questioning the popular Evangelical doctrines of the day as well as his personal beliefs.

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During the era in which Ruskin writes “The Poetry of Architecture,” Seven Lamps
of Architecture, as well as the first two volumes of Modern Painters, the Oxford
movement was creating major rifts in the academic realms of theology and aesthetics.
The movement made considerable progress in reconsidering the doctrinal relationship
between the Anglican and Roman Catholic Church, with aims of reconnecting the
Anglican Church with its Catholic past. One of the main points debated by the
Tractarians, one of the names for those involved in the Oxford Movement, was the
reestablishment of mystery in religious ceremony. The Tractarian movement began
pushing to focus on creating a sense of the sublime in the church that was previously
ignored in the Protestant tradition once the Reformation found the Roman Catholic
church to be guilty of idolizing the material rather than the divinity it was meant to reflect
and corruptly funding such extravagances for their own pleasure rather than for the glory
of God. As seen in the negative image of Romanism held by Ruskin’s parents, the effect
of the movement on the general populace was frustrated by the vehement disapproval that
had been prevalent for so long. As Ruskin began to independently reconsider his own
feelings about the plainness of the Protestant aesthetic and the extravagance of the
Roman Catholic, he ran into a considerable obstacle of reaching a public wrestling with a
clash of sincerely held beliefs.
In his college days at Oxford from 1836 to 1840, Ruskin remained untouched by
the flurry of growing movements of reformation within the church. Somehow immune to
becoming seduced by one of the new sects of the Anglican church growing out of the
Christ Church culture, he felt a strange comfort that he was safe from hell but felt out
place among the “religious people” who “seemed to be in no hurry to go to heaven”

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(Praeterita 179). His views of religious architecture, consequently, reflected his faith and
growing distaste for religious society; while he found beauty in architecture that reflected
true craftsmanship, remained true to nature, and reflected the national spirit, he detested
cheap attempts to impress. It comes as no surprise then that the young writer who had
only felt the presence of God in nature felt little spiritual inspiration in the English
architecture. The indignant tone in “The Poetry of Architecture” and the following work,
Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) seems to fit Ruskin’s pessimistic spirit during this
time when his mother described his faith as firm in the “principles of religion…though
his feelings seem dead enough” (qtd. in A Wider Sea 96). Consequently, there is little
surprise that Ruskin would find the presence of God predominantly in vast natural
landscapes, untouched by such a discordant Church.
He records in Praeterita how, during this era, he was becomingly increasingly
convinced of “how guiltily and meanly dead the Protestant mind was to the whole
meaning and end of mediaeval Church splendor” though he still held prejudices of “how
meanly and guiltily dead the existing Catholic mind was, to the course by which to reach
the Italian soul (264). With the dichotomy of Protestant and Catholic theologies still
weighing on the young writer, he approaches his discussion of religious architecture in
The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851-53) with an
unabashed Evangelical fervor, using Protestant language to cloak his praise of the beauty
of the Romanist cathedrals. Ruskin declares in the preface of Seven Lamps of his
intention to “extricate” the high art of architecture “from the confused mass of partial
traditions and dogmata with which it has become encumbered during imperfect or
restricted practice” (Seven Lamps 3). A significant change in his spiritual convictions can

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be seen in this effort to justify to his readers and to himself the extravagances in the
Catholic cathedral. He writes of his growing appreciation of the Catholic aesthetic in a
diary entry from 1848, a year before beginning Seven Lamps:
I felt convinced, that freed from abuses, this mode of service was the right one,
that if the bishops were bishops indeed…if the doctrines of purgatory and bought
absolution….if dishonesty &doing evil that good might come, and doctrines of
salvation by works, were cast out of the Church & the Bible made free to the
people, that all these proud pillars & painted casements…could be—and ought to
be—devoted to their lofty duties…with high honor, before God. (qtd. in Wheeler
75)
In order to demonstrate the practical use of the ornate features in the Gothic
cathedral, he would have to ease into his argument carefully to keep his Protestant
reader’s attention. Michael Brooks describes Ruskin’s approach as opening these two
works “firmly within the framework of Evangelical thought” although the claims Ruskin
makes are not necessarily Evangelical at all, “only that Ruskin’s way of arguing is one
that [Evangelicals] will find familiar” (Brooks 42). Although this is the era in which
Ruskin was torn between the forces of the Roman Catholicism and Protestant Churches,
the claims made in these two works, especially Seven Lamps, were still aggressively
Evangelical.
However, the confidence in which Ruskin goes on to designate specific formulae
for building of architecture, primarily those for the purpose of worship, in the next series
of publications is contradicted by his diary entries written during the same time as he was
working on Seven Lamps. An entry from June 17th
, 1849 depicts a young man entering
his thirties still in the thick of his long battle with unbelief. He writes after a devotional
reading with his mother of Hebrews on the mystery of God and passages of Revelation,
“I have been abstracting the book of Revelation (they say the French are beaten again at

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Rome, and another revolution in Paris); many signs seem to multiply around us and yet
my unbelief yields no more than when the horizon was clear” (Praeterita 421). Though
his faith in the Evangelical doctrines is shaken, the young author maintains his pious
devotion to the god he finds in the grand landscapes of Nature and appears to rest his
theological debates in the only language he knows to use, that of obedience to Biblical
law.
From his Evangelical perspective, Ruskin endeavors defend the Catholic aesthetic
in ethical terms by putting the cathedral in the context of the Old Testament tabernacle
and emphasizing the motivation of the builder as having equal or even greater importance
than the physical appearance. He chooses to begin with the cornerstone of his Evangelical
treatise of architectural aesthetics, the Mosaical system of sacrifice. Henry Melvill, a
widely Evangelical preacher at the time whose sermons Ruskin was most certainly well-
versed, would often cite the passage from Haggai 1:3-4, “Is it time for you, O ye, to dwell
in your ceiled houses, and his house lies waste?” Michael Brooks believes that the climax
of Melvill’s sermon on the topic of the Christian Church must have greatly impressed
Ruskin, “We cannot take it as any wholesome symptom which is now to be observed in
this country, that, whilst other structures are advancing in magnificances, churches are of
a less costly style” (qtd. in Brooks 43). Ruskin draws the same point by way of beginning
in tabernacle, but going on to connect the God of the Old Testament who required
material sacrifice to the God of the new covenant. The deities of both testaments are the
same and require the same amount of personal sacrifice. The only difference in “the
Levitical and the Christian offering is that the latter may be just so much the wider in its
range as it is less typical in its meaning, as it is thankful instead of sacrificial” (Seven

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Lamps 16). Ruskin understands the New Testament concept of sacrifice to be found in
obedience to “the two great conditions,” “first, that we should in everything do our best;
and secondly, that we should consider increase of apparent labour as an increase of
beauty in the building” (21). As he continues through each of the lamps (Sacrifice, Truth,
Power, Beauty, Life, Memory, and Obedience), the influence of his parents’ insistence on
the virtues of a strong work ethic and obedience to the laws of Scripture are exceptionally
apparent.
Using the terminology of typical and vital beauty from the second volume of
Modern Painters, Ruskin makes a great effort in Seven Lamps of Architecture to apply
his system of natural theology to architecture, couched in the Evangelical understanding
of obedience to a Divine Wisdom. For this 1849 revision of his former ideals in “Poetry
of Architecture,” he writes on typical beauty as represented in the sublime landscapes
(focused on in the chapters on Power and Beauty) and, more extensively, on seeking
evidence of vital beauty in the individual and national life a work of architecture reflects.
With an importance on the expression of character of the architects and craftsman, he
extends the use of architecture as representative of the general feeling and character of a
nation to a deeper, personal exploration of the Christian virtues as shown in their
architecture. On these grounds, he sets architecture apart from the other high art forms of
poetry and painting. Just as man loses the childhood once “full of promise and interest,
—the struggle of imperfect knowledge full of energy and continuity, —but to see
impotence and rigidity settling upon the form of the developed man” (Seven Lamps 151),
architecture is susceptible to become as rigid and impotent as its inhabitants. Therefore
Ruskin urges that a building, in order to be morally sound and, in turn, aesthetically

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worthwhile, requires a spirit of sacrifice and a commitment for truthfulness in its design.
This obliged an architect to avoid such things as flying buttresses if they provided no
support to the structure or gilding a wooden ornament to appear to be made of gold. For
architecture meant for worship, it can only achieve true beauty if every aspect reveals a
spirit of reverence to God, for, as he reminds his readers, “it is not the church we want,
but the sacrifice” (19).
He continues this argument into his next major work, The Stones of Venice (1851-
1853), but broadens his discussion to the rise and fall of great architecture in the history
of civilization. The distinct turning point in the great civilizations of Greece and Italy that
marks the downfall of their architectural prowess is, for Ruskin, the moment they lose
their sacrificial spirit and integrity. Their failure, which he sees as prophetic of the
imminent failure of England’s own architectural superiority, has nothing to do with
Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, politics, war or age, only the abandonment of
obedience to God. However he believes their downfalls should stand as reminders for the
modern Christian England, and opens The Stones of Venice with a similar warning for the
contemporary Englishman:
Since first the dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three thrones, of
mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands: the thrones of Tyre, Venice,
and England. Of the First of these great powers only the memory remains; of the
Second, the ruin; the Third, which inherits their greatness, if it forget their
example, may be led through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction. (1:15)
In this introduction to the three volumes on the Venetian Gothic aesthetic, he defers to the
Eden motif as seen his early treatment of the picturesque, sadly idealizing the former
glory of Tyre and Venice to be once, “as in Eden, the garden of God” (1:15).

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Again, John Ruskin uses the drama of the Venetian architecture as a sermon, still
striving to extract the Gothic architecture he loves so much from the Evangelical’s
negative association with Catholicism. Though a great portion of the book reflects its
predecessor in analyzing the vital beauty of the individual and national character revealed
in the ruins, the tone is very unlike that of Seven Lamps in which the tone is at times so
vehemently anti-Catholic that the genuine beliefs of Ruskin come into question. Three
years later, Ruskin is far less hesitant to speak out in The Stones of Venice in defense of
the spiritual value of certain aspects of the Catholic aesthetic against Protestant prejudice.
For example, in the chapter on the church of St. Mark’s, he points to the common
denominator between the two sects of Christianity, redemption through Christ, as
portrayed in the Romanist cathedral, “the passions and the pleasures of human life
symbolized together, and the mystery of its redemption; for the mazes of interwoven lines
and changeful pictures lead always last to the Cross” (The Stones of Venice 2:75). In
further defense of the Catholic design, he turns the tables and attacks Protestants for their
own false sense of superiority:
…I have no manner of doubt that half of the poor and untaught Christians who are
this day lying prostrate before crucifixes, Bambinos, and Volto Santos, are finding
more acceptance with God than many Protestants who idolize nothing but their
own opinions or their own interests. (2:388)
Thus Ruskin makes a significant change in his art criticism, particularly in his treatment
of religious architecture, in broadening himself to the work of other forms of faith. As
Professor Landow observes, “Two things of importance stand out in this passage: first,
Ruskin has rejected the usual Evangelical intolerance toward other faiths, an intolerance
which marks the statements of even a learned and humane Evangelical clergyman such as
Melvill, who considers the Catholic Church the Whore of Babylon” (Landow).

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And yet he still uses anti-Catholic arguments as often as he attempts to avoid
such aggressive language, as seen in his description of a cornice in St. Paul’s: “Now look
to the last cornice. That is Protestantism, —a slight touch of Dissent, hardly amounting to
schism” (The Stones of Venice 1:311). Here Ruskin is firmly defending his Protestant
faith. Despite the “slight touch of Dissent,” this can be seen to be an attempt to maintain
his image as a staunch Evangelical Protestant despite his personal doubts. He continues,
“The good in [the cornice], the life of it, the veracity and liberty of it, such as it has, are
Protestantism in its heart; the rigidity and saplessness are the Romanism of it. It is the
mind of Fra Angelico in the monk’s dress” (1:311). Never quite capable of justifying his
praise of the Romanist architecture and his judgment of their religious practices, the
reader starts to perceive the author of The Stones of Venice and The Seven Lamps of
Architecture is faltering in his personal spiritual convictions.
While Stones of Venice was quite popular and greatly influential in the revival of
Gothic architecture in England (much to Ruskin’s chagrin years down the road), many of
his contemporaries shared the same nagging feeling that Ruskin was unknowingly using
his writing as an arena for his own spiritual battles. One of these contemporaries,
Brownlee Brown, concludes in The Crayon, “We are ready to hear him discourse of Art,
and we find him laboring with us on the subject of human depravity. We know he has
devoted fifteen years to the study of painting and architecture, and we cannot but suspect
beforehand that in theology and philosophy he has much to learn” (Brown 331). The
Catholic publication, the Rambler, found Stones of Venice “so transcendently ludicrous in
the notion that the Church of Rome is idolatrous, and yet that the early medieval
architecture was the result of the purest Christian faith” (qtd. in Brooks 51). Another

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publication, the Evangelical Ecclesiologist reviewed Stones of Venice, attempting to
explain his constant self contradictions as due to temper, writes that “his speculations
concerning questions of art lead him to one conclusion; his religious prejudices drive him
to another, wholly irreconcilable. He cannot harmonize the two, nor part with either”
(qtd. in Brooks 53). And indeed, Ruskin’s own autobiography discloses that the high
idealism of nobility in art he felt in his teens and twenties, seen in the first volumes of
Modern Painters, “The Poetry of Architecture,” and faltering in Seven Lamps and Stones
of Venice, was “complicated with the inevitable discovery of the falseness of the religious
doctrines in which I had been educated” (Praeterita 448).
It is important to note that Ruskin’s crisis of faith was provoked by far more than
the theological debates being waged between and among the Catholic and Protestant
Churches. The widespread Victorian crisis of faith that affected Ruskin and so many of
his contemporaries was due to a great number of developments in all aspects of
academia, particularly in science and theology. Many theologians were making serious
challenges to the authority of scripture and, at the same, new studies being put forth by
scientists like Charles Darwin that even further challenged the existence of a higher
power. Geological discoveries, which Ruskin had taken particular interest in from an
early age, created doubts that the flood described in the Old Testament had ever existed.
A distressed Ruskin writes to his friend Henry Acland in 1851 of the destructive impact
these discoveries had made on his faith: “If only the Geologists would let me alone, I
could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of
every cadence of the Bible verses” (Landow).

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Throughout the span of 1850-1860, the Victorian crisis of faith took its toll on
Ruskin who admits these years as “for the most part wasted in useless work” while his
faith broke down completely. In a rare moment of methodical narrative, the author of
Praeterita chronologically explains the events that led to his ultimate unconversion.
Multiple encounters with theologians whose liberal views harshly clashed with his
literalist understanding of scripture are listed in this account as influential in this change
of faith. On one occasion, he ventured to defend the Biblical heroines Deborah and Jael
in a Bible-reading with the liberal theologian Frederick Maurice, whose “denunciation of
Deborah the prophetess, as a mere blazing Amazon” crushed Ruskin with “a total
collapse in sorrow and astonishment; the eyes of all the class being also bent on me in
amazed reprobation of my benighted views and unchristian sentiments.” His confidence
in his faith severely shaken, Ruskin writes that he “got away how I could, and never went
back” (Praeterita 452). A new interest in Catholic prayer books were another influence,
and John makes one of many attempts to answer the question of why he never converted
to Catholicism: “It might as well be asked, Why did not I become a fire-worshipper? I
could become nothing but what I was or was growing into” (457). Early in 1858, months
before what was to be the final turning point, Ruskin’s restlessness was becoming
desperate, to the point that he aggressively shouted to the young Charles H. Spurgeon
during a conversation that “the apostle Paul was a liar…and a fool!” (qtd. in Wheeler
129). Though the process of unconversion was gradually evolving, as seen in his slow
abandonment of Evangelical egotism, the actual moment of unconversion was traced
back to a very specific encounter with the Evangelical form of Christianity.

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The final catalyst was on a solo tour of Turin in 1858, beginning from a sermon
observed in a small pastoral chapel. The pastor “led them through the languid forms of
prayer which are all that in truth are possible to people whose present life is dull and its
terrestrial future unchangeable,” and then “put his utmost zeal into a consolatory
discourse on the wickedness of the wide world, more especially the…city of Turin, and
on the exclusive favor with God” shared only by the small congregation (Praeterita 460).
Disheartened, he returned to the city of Turin to see the exotic painting of Solomon and
the Queen of Sheba by Paul Veronese and listened to the cadences of the military music
playing down the road. The beauty of the painting and the discipline of the music
reminded him of the solitary fragment of his faith that remained throughout his spiritual
journey, “that things done delightfully and rightly, were always done by the help and in
the Spirit of God.” Praeterita’s account of the unconversion ends simply and poignantly,
Of course that hour’s meditation in the gallery of Turin only concluded the
courses of thought which had been leading me to such end through many years.
There was no such conversion possible to me, either by preacher, picture, or
dulcimer. But that day, my evangelical beliefs were put away, to be debated of no
more. (461)
Ruskin compares the beauty of the music and painting, both from thoroughly non-sacred
sources, to the narrow-mindedness he heard in the sermon by the small-town Evangelical
preacher, and found a fundamental problem in the Evangelical tendency towards the
damnation of faiths other than their own.
The solution to this problem led him to a new form of art criticism based on
humanistic principles rather than his former Evangelical aesthetic guidelines based in Old
Testament regulations of sacrifice. Most important in his reinvented aesthetic philosophy
is still the human element, as in Seven Lamps and Stones of Venice, but he raises the

19. 19
importance of the vital human aspect even further, insofar that he now claims “it is,
perhaps, better to build a beautiful human creature than a beautiful dome or steeple”
(Sesame and Lilies 45). In his first autobiographical publication, Fors Clavigera, he
recounts the same unconversion story and reconciles the loss of his faith with the ever-
present belief in the value of “things done delightfully and rightly.” He writes, “that
human work must be done honorably and thoroughly, because we are now Men; —
whether we ever expect to be angels, or ever were slugs, being practically no matter. We
are now Human creatures, and must, at our peril, do Human—that is to say, affectionate,
honest, and earnest work…that in resolving to do our work well, is the only solid
foundation of any religion whatsoever” (Fors Clavigera 8). From the point of his
unconversion, the tone of Ruskin’s art criticism notably changes themes after he
abandons his Protestant faith: “You will find what was left, as, in much darkness and
sorrow of heart I gathered it, variously taught in my books, written between 1858 and
1874. It is all sound and good, as far as it goes: whereas all that went before was…mixed
with Protestant egotism and insolence” (10). For the almost two decades that followed,
Ruskin entered the realm of art criticism in the spirit of agnosticism, attempting to avoid
criticism by attempting to write on aesthetic issues without relying solely on explanations
founded on religion principles.
Despite his break from Evangelicalism, Ruskin never separated himself
completely from the religion instilled in him from his birth. However, he did make a
point to voice his break with the doctrines held by his parents that held the principles of
Evangelical faith as the sole road to salvation. He writes to his father in December of
1861,

20. 20
You know in that matter of universal salvation, there are but three ways of putting
it.
1. Either “people do go to the devil for not believing.”
2. Or “they—don’t.”
3. Or—“We know nothing about it.”
Which last is the real Fact, and the sooner it is generally acknowledged to be the
Fact, the better, and no more said about Gospel, or Salvation, or Damnation. (qtd.
in Landow)
His newly found agnosticism begins a sixteen year era of a “religion of humanity” (Fors
Clavigera 10), which lasts from his experience in Turin in 1858 until 1874. Sparked by
his understanding of the three alternatives concerning the question of salvation mentioned
in his letter, he redefines the lens in which he interprets religion and art. David Craig
observes that Ruskin’s “self-described ‘un-conversion’ in 1858 reflects his growing sense
that religions should be read as historical repositories of human wisdom and that there is
no access to transcendent truth apart from the cultural forms by which people practice
their worship” (Craig 336-337). Ruskin calls out every sect of Christians, both Catholic
and Protestant, in the 1864 “Sesames and Lillies” for the fallacy of thinking “they
themselves exclusively in the right and others wrong; and preeminently, in every sect,
those who hold that men can be saved by thinking rightly instead of doing rightly”
(Sesames and Lillies 33). Therefore he challenges the narrow-mindedness of the
Evangelical Christian as he opens himself to considering the architectural productions of
religions from non-Christian civilizations, particularly those of the Greeks and Egyptians.
His curiosity with pre-Christian civilizations, like the Greeks and Egyptians,
shows his desire to understand the nature of faith apart from dogma pushed by the
Church of England. Ruskin admits to his friend Henry Acland, a former college
classmate from his time at Christ Church of Oxford, he was “endeavoring to make out

21. 21
how far Greeks and Egyptians knew God; or how far anybody every may hope to know
Him” (qtd. in O’Gorman 565). In a series of lectures in 1864 entitled, “The Crown of
Wild Olive,” Ruskin notes that “every great national architecture has been the result and
exponent of a great national religion” which is not founded on Church authority, dogma,
or “the hieroglyphic writing of an initiated priesthood; it is the manly language inspired
by resolute and common purpose and rendering resolute and common fidelity to the
legible laws of an undoubted God” (The Crown of Wild Olive 62). Again, in his 1865
series of lectures to a school for young girls, Ethics of the Dust, he makes the same
argument in the form of a children’s story about the Egyptian goddess of wisdom, Neith.
Ruskin responds to a concern many of his critics posed about the validity of personifying
figures from pagan religions even merely as an analogy for Christianity, by posing the
question to his young audience,
Mary: But is not that only a personification?
L: If it be, what will you gain by unpersonifying it, or what right have you to do
so? Cannot you accept the image given you, in its life; and listen, like children, to
the words which chiefly belong to you as children; “I love them that love me, and
those that seek me early shall find me” (The Ethics of the Dust 35)
This excerpt from Ethics of the Dust shows two important details about Ruskin’s
spirituality at this time in his life. The first, the confidence in the truth of scripture, as
evident in the reference to Proverbs 8:17, demonstrates that he retained his faith in
scriptural authority. The passage also reflects a shift towards what could almost be
considered a Universalist form of Christianity. Ruskin, frustrated with the flimsiness of
faith seen in his Protestant England, required only a sincerity of reverence to a Divine
power by good and believing men no matter the language used to describe that power.

22. 22
The agnosticism of this era in Ruskin’s career can be seen in the extensive use of
the term “religion” over the heavy handed use of specifically Christian terminology such
as Protestantism or Roman Catholicism from his earlier works. Possibly as a defense
mechanism for his own spiritual uncertainties (a habit of projecting such uncertainties
also seen in his aggressive attacks on Romanism is also seen in earlier works, like Seven
Lamps), Ruskin emphatically maintains through the better part of the 1860’s that religion
of any kind is better than none at all. In an important essay that significantly marks the
influence of Ruskin’s agnosticism on his understanding of architecture, “The Study of
Architecture,” in 1865, he accredits religion to drive the artist to work in “the service of
the gods” giving the “granite shrine to the Egyptian, golden temple to the Jew, sculptured
corridor to the Greek, pillared aisle and frescoed wall to the Christian” (On the Old Road
388). Additionally, in the same essay, he draws an important distinction between religion
and superstition (in which the reader is led to associate with the false dogma within the
Evangelical and Catholic traditions) in the same paragraph, “Superstition made idols of
the splendors by which religion had spoken: reverenced pictures and stones, instead of
truths;…” and “kneels in the temple while it crucifies the Christ” (388). He voices a spirit
of tolerance for any brand of religion unheard of in his former writings, a tolerance heard
most vehemently in his challenge to his Protestant readership in Athena in the Heavens
(1869),
I will only pray you to read, with patience, and human sympathy, the thoughts of
men who lived without blame in a darkness they could not dispel; and to
remember that, whatever charge of folly may justly attach to the saying—“There
is no God,” the folly is prouder, deeper, and less pardonable, in saying, “There is
no God but for me.” (Essays and Letters 283)

23. 23
Alternatively, Ruskin responds to the relationship of art and the church with some
trepidation in his 1870 lectures on art at Oxford. Questioning the value of religion itself,
Ruskin continues to weaken his theological terms and often replaces the word “faith”
with “imagination” during these lectures on the grounds that he is still unconvinced that
there is difference between “impressions resulting from the imagination of the
worshipper, and those made, if any, by the actually local and temporary presence of
another spirit” (Lectures on Art 49). Consequently he gives a largely pessimistic view of
religion’s affect on art as a whole. In stark contrast to the aesthetic of feeling he uses to
analyze art and architecture prior to this lecture as well as the years following the return
of his Christian faith, Ruskin is critical of the use of art as a means of inducing or
inspiring belief in a deity. The lecturer warns his audience, “you must not allow the
expressions of your own favorite religious feelings by any particular form of art to
modify your judgment of its absolute merit; nor allow the art itself to become an
illegitimate means of deepening and confirming your convictions, by realizing to your
eyes what you dimly conceive with your brain” (52). Generally the lectures remain true
to the general purpose of his “religion of humanity” as he maintains an open acceptance
of dutiful religions founded on morality. However, Ruskin’s belief that art, if misapplied,
has the power to create “accidental pieties” implies that he is reconsidering his views on
the Catholic aesthetic.
These apparent shifts in his opinions of aesthetics as they relate to religion are
best understood in the context of his private struggle with spirituality. The late 1860’s
through the middle of the 1870’s were particularly difficult on Ruskin, and the events of
those years did much to cut the final ties with his former Evangelicalism. While he

24. 24
neglected his art criticism during this time, modern scholars of Ruskin’s work have
generally turned to his prolific letters from this point in his career to better understand his
theological views; however, these letters can be interpreted in many ways. In 1867 he
writes in a letter to his dear friend Charles Norton of his frustrations with faith in the
unknown: “All you say of religion is true and right, but the deadly question with me is—
What next? or if anything is next?” (Letters of John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton
1:168). Dr. George Landow justifies his belief that Ruskin had a definitive, albeit brief
stint as an atheist, quoting such letters as the one quoted above to Charles Norton or
another letter written in 1869 to the painter William Hunt in which Ruskin states he has
come “to conclude that there is no Eternal Father to whom we can look up, that man has
no helper but himself.” On the other hand, Michael Wheeler appears to have an
appreciation for Ruskin’s self-admitted inability to declare any kind of decisive, clear
stance on his theological views. Wheeler quotes in Ruskin’s God a passage from Letter 5
of Fors Claviger, written in 1871 that complains about modern science “gives
lectures…on Humanity, to show that there is no such thing as a Man; and on Theology, to
show there is no such thing as a God…” (qtd. in Wheeler 185). He observes that Ruskin’s
moody relationship with Christianity, even those lowest moments when he was tempted
to reject the faith entirely, fueled the aggression toward atheism in his modern society,
commenting that “the strength of feeling in this passage reflects the fact that Ruskin had
been there, or thereabouts, himself” (185).
From his research of Ruskin’s unpublished letters, John Dixon Hunt shows two
examples of the unsettling affect the spiritual battles had on Ruskin in the early 1870’s.
The first was a remark Ruskin had made in observance of an early Christian church in

25. 25
Campagna, where “he ‘saw exactly how Christianity changed the temper and work of the
Roman’; but since ‘all things have become to me so ghastly a confusion and grotesque
mistake and misery’, he felt nothing” (A Wider Sea 351). Looking back at a letter the
writer wrote to his friend Mrs. Cowper in 1866, in the heat of his struggle with his faith,
the discouraged Ruskin hopes for a day to come where he felt secure in a faith of any
kind:
If I thought it my duty to fancy anything, I could fancy it—and get into passionate
states of reverence or affection—or anything else—for my imaginary God. But I
do not think it my duty—it seems to me I am bound to act only on what I know to
be fact—and that is little enough. But I shall come out of this state—for good or
evil—some day, —so it is of no use talking about it. (qtd. in Wheeler 185)
And the day did come, though his return to the Christian faith was almost as gradual and
imperceptible as his unconversion had been before. The deciding moment of his recovery
is set in a particular moment in Ruskin’s personal life, similar to Turin; yet, again, the
actual reconversion experience is still ambiguous. Many scholars, including John Dixon
Hunt and George Landow, point to a séance Ruskin attended with Mrs. Cowper-Temple
in 1874. During the séance, the medium described his recently deceased lover, Rose, in
perfect detail without ever once seeing the young girl. John Dixon Hunt writes that the
event confounded his earlier skepticism, and quotes Ruskin’s diary entry from December
14, “[the séance was] the most overwhelming evidence of the other state of the world that
has ever come to me…” and the experience “left him like a flint stone suddenly changed
into a firefly, and ordered to flutter about—in a bramble thicket” (A Wider Sea 358). He
wrote of his partial retreat back to Christianity to his old friend, Charles Norton in 1876,
“I have no new faith; —but am able to get some good out of my old one, not as being
true, but as containing the quantity of truth that is wholesome for me. One must eat one’s

26. 26
faith like one’s meat, for what good’s in it.” (Letters of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot
Norton 2:131). Though his former Evangelicalism was buried forever, the séance gave
back in a sense his faith in the supernatural and in a Divine Presence, perhaps due in part
to the return of the fanatic Evangelistic fervor of Rose and her family that seemed again
to haunt him as he felt Rose’s presence constantly beside him.
Her presence drove him again to return to his writings on nature and art, just as
she had done in their short years together before she died of in 1875. He used Fors
Clavigera, his ninety-six monthly addresses written in letter form to the working men of
England from 1871-1880, as a vehicle to discuss what he felt to be pertinent issues to the
English working class, opening debates on art, social pressures, and theology. Within
these letters he became more and more inclined toward the Catholic tradition. Most
significantly, he adored the idealism of the saints and developed the St. George Society
(later to become Company and then Guild). Michael Wheeler describes the Guild
developed through Fors as preaching salvation by works, setting out to respond to the
doctrines being taught in Protestant England, “an attempt to fill a gap left by the
established Church” (Wheeler 211). Still searching for signs from Rose, he experienced
moments of insanity, which would worsen over time and eventually take his life in 1899.
After being stricken down with pain suddenly on Christmas day in 1876, he regained
consciousness several days later and began to frantically try to piece together the events
leading to his mental breakdown on Christmas, convinced they had a significant meaning.
Hunt notes that “the contrasting elements of his Christmas Day were, he now realized, a
psychomachia, a battle between good, evil, and human powers” (A Wider Sea 366).

27. 27
Permanently pushing aside his religion of humanism, Ruskin’s newfound spirituality was
now found on this battleground between Heaven and the world below.
And so Ruskin returned to some semblance of his former Christianity. He also
returned to his greatest passion of architecture now armed with a fresh take on his former
system of aesthetics to fit his refreshed faith. A new work, St. Mark’s Rest (1877-1884),
returned to his favorite church in Venice, with an emphasis on reassessing the
significance of St. Mark’s, discussed at length decades earlier in Stones of Venice. “My
eyes were unsealed,” writes Ruskin, “and the preface to the Stones of Venice was,
spoiled, in the very centre of its otherwise good work” (64). The Achilles heel of his first
analysis of the chapel was that it was merely a private chapel and a final resting place for
a duke, after his eyes were “unsealed” he now saw that “whatever is represented here, be
it flower or rock, animal or man, means more than it is itself” (65). After years of
studying religious symbolism, the mosaics covering the walls of the church now spoke to
Ruskin with an intensity of the Holy Spirit he once found in the mountain landscapes and
an admiration for the devoted worship he found in the man-made craftsmanship. He now
discovered in the cathedral a collaboration of the two branches of his natural theology,
typical and vital beauty, as he remarks, “it does not matter to the Greek how far his image
be perfect or not. That it should be understood is enough—if it can be beautiful, also,
well; but its function is not beauty, but instruction” (66).
Additionally, in the unfinished work The Bible of Amiens (1880-1885), Ruskin’s
opinions of another cathedral in Northern Europe, the cathedral of Amiens, were in direct
contrast to his former, vehemently anti-Catholic views from his prior form of
Christianity. Though he admits the cathedral is not as aesthetically dignified as others like

28. 28
Chartres and Rheims, he still heralds the small cathedral as “The Parthenon of Gothic
Architecture,” exemplary of Gothic architecture in its purest form. Now comfortable in
discussing a structure’s beauty in the terms of the Catholic theology, he walks the reader
through every inch of the church’s interior, encouraging spectators to observe with a
willingness to share a “sympathy with the spiritual imagination out of which it rose” (The
Works of John Ruskin 33:124). He challenges the prejudiced Protestant, in part speaking
to his youthful self that looked with disgust or ignored the traces of Catholic symbolism:
“We talk foolishly and feebly of symbols and types: in old Christian architecture, every
part is literal: the cathedral is for its builders the House of God” (33:124). It is
remarkable to note how far he has traveled from the prejudiced tone of his early writings,
from his early publications when he referred to Catholics as “the idolatrous Romanist”
(1849, Seven Lamps 14) to the way he treats the showpiece of the cathedral, the statue of
Christ, at the end of his career:
Of the statue of Christ, itself, I will not speak here at any length, as no sculpture
would satisfy, or ought to satisfy, the hope of any loving soul that has learned to
trust in Him…[the statue is to be] understood, observe, just as clearly to be no
more than a symbol of the Heavenly Presence, as the poor coiling worms below
were no more than symbols of demoniac ones. No idol, in our sense of the
word—only a letter, or sign of the Living Spirit, —which, however, was indeed
conceived by every worshipper as here meeting him at the temple gate. (The
Works of John Ruksin 33:147)
St. Mark’s Rest and the unfinished work, The Bible of Amiens, were the two final
attempts to voice his revised aesthetics, now fashioned in his broader, more Universalist
conception of Christianity. Commenting on these last fragments of art criticism written
before dementia would take hold of Ruskin’s sharp mind, Michael Wheeler contends that
“The Bible of Amiens, together with a few other fragments, is all that we have of an

29. 29
ambitious scheme which would have worked from the parts to the whole, tracing in its
hermeneutics the contours of Christendom in Ruskin’s understanding” (Wheeler 250).
Ruskin intended to produce entirely new versions of The Seven Lamps of Architecture
and The Stones of Venice, to correct the mistakes made in his former “Protestant
egotism,” but settled for republishing the texts with new prefaces and footnotes to counter
or elaborate on the hasty claims and unfounded generalizations made in his youth. As a
preface to the 1880 edition of Seven Lamps, Ruskin opens, “I never intended to have
republished this book, which has become the most useless I ever wrote…here it is given
again in the old form; all but some pieces of rabid and utterly false Protestantism” (v). In
Letter 59 of Fors Clavigera, written in 1875, Ruskin tells his readers he intends to “ratify,
and fasten with nails in a sure place, with instant applicability to school and university
exercises, of my former writings on art,” with a note attached at the bottom of the page
which reads, “Namely, Modern Painters, Stones of Venice, Seven Lamps, and Elements
of drawing. I cut these books to pieces, because…all the religious notions are narrow, and
many false” (Fors Clavigera 194). The religious notions left standing are those that
sought out the unifying elements that tied together the varied sects of Christianity, those
that looked to dispel doctrinal conflicts and promoted a simple reverence to God.
Ruskin’s final writings in the late 1870’s and 80’s show a man returning home
from the almost nomadic spiritual existence of his life since early childhood. The winding
path is circular, filled with retraced steps, uncertainty, and precociousness. Aesthetically,
he has gone from a theory of architecture based on religious values, to an agnostic
religion of art, and finally a faith in which he finds the true essence of Christianity, in its
purest form, within the art and craftsmanship made in the spirit of worship. By the end of

30. 30
his career, he argues for high art’s rightful place within the tenets of a liberalized
Protestant faith, hoping for a collaboration of the direct communion with God in the
Protestant tradition with the reverence for the sublimity of the sacred presence of the
Roman Catholic tradition.

31. 31
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