What we assuredly know is that the states of life and death are different, and the first more desirable than the other, and by effort attainable, whether we understand being ‘born of the spirit’ to signify having the breath of heaven in our flesh, or its power in our hearts.’ – From another point of view, Ruskin is here, as just previously in Sesame and later, very often, in The Bible of Amiens, prohibiting us, with a transcendental ‘this does not concern you’, from asking questions of origin and of essence, and inviting us instead to concern ourselves with questions of moral and spiritual fact.
And behold, contemporary medicine too – though it partakes of a point of view so different, so alien, so opposed – is preparing to tell us that we are ‘born of the spirit’, and that the spirit continues to control our respiration (see Dr Brugelmann’s works on asthma), our digestion (Professor Dubois, University of Bern, The Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders and other works), and our muscular coordination (see Isolation and Psychotherapy by Dr Camus and Dr Pagniez, preface by Professor Déjerine).
‘When you can dissect a dead body and show me its soul, I will believe in it’, physicians liked to say twenty years ago; now, it is not in dead bodies (which, in the wise theory of Ezekiel, are dead bodies precisely because they no longer have a soul [Ezek. 37:1-12]), but in the living body – at every step, in every disordered function – that they sense the presence and action of the soul, and to cure the body it is the soul that they address themselves to. Doctors said not long ago (and hack writers belatedly repeat it even now) that a pessimist is a man with a bad stomach.
Today, Dr Dubois states in black and white that a man with a bad stomach is a pessimist, and it is no longer his stomach that has to be cured if we want to change his philosophy, it is his philosophy that has to be changed if we want to cure his stomach. We are of course leaving aside here the metaphysical questions of origin and essence. Absolute materialism and pure idealism are equally obliged to distinguish between body and soul: for idealism the body is a lesser spirit, something still of the spirit but darkened; for materialism the soul is still matter but more complex, more subtle. The distinction between body and soul persists, in both cases, for reasons of linguistic convenience, even if both philosophies are forced to equate their natures in order to explain their reciprocal action upon each other.
- Cf. Bible of Amiens III, 41.
- An allusion to the verses in Matthew which will forever remain the most amusing portrait there is of an excessively rigid master of the house, about whom his guests say, with reason: He is terrible. The passage is as follows: ‘And when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment: And he saith unto him, Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? And he was speechless. Then said the king to the servants, Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness, there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen.’ (Matt. 22:12-14)
- Modern ‘Education’ for the most part signifies giving people the faculty of thinking wrong on every conceivable subject of importance to them. [Ruskin’s note]
- The Library Edition gives the reference: Emerson, ‘To Rhea’.
- In Henry VIII.
- Inf. xxiii. 125, 126; xix. 49, 50. [Ruskin’s note]
- Compare § 13 above. [Ruskin’s note]
- Cf. Anatole France’s worthy My Friend’s Book: ‘There!’ I cried; ‘there we have a manifestation of the passions. But let us not speak ill of the passions; they are the mainspring of all the great deeds that are wrought in this world. My daughter… let your passions be strong, let them wax greater, and yourself grow stronger with them. And if in after years you become their inexorable mistress, their strength will be your strength, and their loftiness your beauty. The passions make up the whole of man’s moral riches.’
- Cf. The Bible of Amiens: ‘one artless, letterless, and merciless monastery’.
- An allusion to the destruction of Poland (1864).
- The Library Edition informs us that this is an allusion to the heightened public interest that year in the murder of a man named Briggs on the North London line (attested in the newspapers of October and November, 1864). Matthew Arnold comments ironically on the demoralisation of our class as a result of the Bow tragedy in his 1865 preface to the Essay on Criticism.
- An allusion, according to the Library Edition, to the American Civil War and the interruption of the cotton trade due to the blockade of the Southern ports.
- An allusion, the same edition says, to the wars of 1840 and 1856 caused by Chinese resistance to the opium trade.
- See note at end of lecture. [Ruskin’s note. The note he cross-references is omitted in this edition – D.S.]
- Unfortunately, the Library Edition does not supply the contemporary fact to which Ruskin is alluding.
- The new ambassador whom England had just sent to Russia in the same year as the massacres in Poland, which was also the year that this lecture was given. The Library Edition supplies this ambassador’s name: Sir Andrew Buchanan.
- Cf. Luke 10:30 ff.
- Probably a vague allusion to Kings 12:14: the speech which Rehoboam gives, forsaking the old men’s counsel but following the counsel of the young men, ‘saying, My father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions [i.e., pointed whips].’
- Cf. Munera Pulveris 65. [Ruskin’s note]
- I meant that the beautiful places of the world — Switzerland, Italy, South Germany, and so on — are, indeed, the truest cathedrals — places to be reverent in, and to worship in; and that we only care to drive through them: and to eat and drink at their most sacred places. [Ruskin’s note]
- I was singularly struck, some years ago, by finding all the river shore at Richmond, in Yorkshire, black in its earth, from the mere drift of soot-laden air from places many miles away. [Ruskin’s note]
- Compare this to the end of the Preface of The Queen of the Air: ‘This first day of May, 1869, I am writing where my work was begun thirty-five years ago, within sight of the snows of the higher Alps. In that half of the permitted life of man, I have seen strange evil brought upon every scene that I best loved, or tried to make beloved by others. The light… the air… the waters… are dimmed and foul. This morning, on the Lake of Geneva, at half a mile from the beach, I could scarcely see my oar-blade a fathom deep. By the last marble of the foot of Jura, sloping to the blue water, and (at this time of year) covered with bright pink tufts of Saponaria, was a newly-constructed artificial rockery, with an inscription on one of its loose-tumbled stones,-
Aux Botanistes,
Le club Jurassique,
Ah, masters of modern science, give me back my Athena out of your vials, and seal, if it may be, once more, Asmodeus therein. Teach us, now, but this, which is all that man need know,- that the Air is given to him for his life; and the Rain to his thirst, and for his baptism; and the Fire for warmth; and the Sun for sight; and the Earth for his meat—and his Rest.’ I have abbreviated this passage following La Sizeranne, but note that he gives ‘repos’ with a lowercase r for ‘Rest’; I prefer ‘Repos’, restoring the capital letter as it appears in Ruskin’s text. We can understand from its sudden grandeur the kind of rest in question. Admittedly, one could argue that Ruskin is not referring here to the rest of the tomb, and one could support this assertion with a passage from the Preface to The Crown of Wild Olive: was this grass of the earth made green for your shroud only, not for your bed? and can you never lie down upon it, but only under it?’ Despite this uncertainty, which I acknowledge, I nevertheless believe, above all because of
