from C. Stephen Finley, Nature's Covenant: Figures of Landscape
in Ruskin
(The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), pp. 227-39.
Conclusion
Thus, then, for the last time, rises the question,
what is the true dignity of colour? We left
that doubt a little while ago among the clouds,
wondering what they had been made so scarlet for.
"The Hesperid Aegle"
In reading the natural types of Symmetry, Infinity, and
Repose, Ruskin seeks to provide in Modern Painters II an
initial catalogue of visionary motives. In such types
humanity gets a glimpse of the restored Eden, wherein the
curse upon Adam and Eve, delivered upon their expulsion from
the first paradise, will be lifted, and where the perfected
spirits of men and women, gathered to Christ in his
peaceable kingdom, will render the completed meanings and
the consummate antitypes of a final harvest of human
endeavor and natural forms. Such "peace and rest" is the
"utmost good and comfort" which could be "bought for us by
the Redeemer." [n.1] This glimpse, this foretaste of glory
divine is a completed world made "possible through
perfection" (4: 114), through the long, difficult, and
eminently human-centered process of being "sanctified," of
growing up "by slow degrees" to the "measure of the full
stature of Christ." [n.2] These natural types participate in the
pilgrimage of our earthly life by helping us to live in both
worlds, in two times: in the present and in the saving
sense of the present only fully attainable through the
"sweet air of futurity." Both earthly and heavenly worlds
are equally vital and real, united not by any emptying out
of the meaning of the one into the other, but by an
anagogical co-presence, in which human homelessness and
eternal habitation are both signed in the abode of the
"scarlet arch" of dawn. This arch and its color not only
convey the promise of light, God's mercy which overspans and
contains the dark and troublous sea of mortality, but also
make visible, as it were, an inherent sacred architecture,
glimpsed, in the turning of day to night and night to day,
as the threshold of another world.
As eschatological types, these three figures appear in
the landscape as part of Ruskin's theory of Christian
progress, as affective signs for human hope. They are
clearly economic signs, allowing creative mediation and
exchange between romantic nature, with its poetics of the
infinite and the sublime, and the particular Evangelical
tropology of life as journey and trial. It was William Law,
in A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1792), who best
expressed this central experience and most immediate
Evangelical doctrine when he called on the faithful to be
"as new born babes, that are born into a new state of
things, to live as Pilgrims in spiritual watching, in holy
fear, and heavenly aspiring after another life." [n.3] Law and
Ruskin both, in their great invitation to this redemptive
process of sanctification, and in their announcement that we
should "live as Pilgrims in spiritual watching," are
enduring examples of what Frei identified as
Evangelicalism's "transfer of narrative continuity" from the
canon of Biblical books and their intertextual typology to
an "applicative sense" of the present time. In this
application the "crucial and indispensable continuity or
linkage of the story is the journey of the Christian person
from sin through justification to sanctification and
perfection." [n.4]
As we have noted, such an applicative sense is
volatile, carrying within it the potential for disengagement
from what must be, for orthodoxy, its sustaining rootedness
in the figures of Biblical narrative. In this manner it is
always already more than a sense, and operates as an
imperative, urging the prophetic application of the types so
that the present may not simply echo, or even recollect the
past, but be conformed to the integral figurality of
tradition. Such conforming is the confirmation of the
individual in the community identified by its faith, and
entails, again, so much more than recollection. It requires
nothing less than participation in the prophetic "Today, and
always Today"--the urgent application behind the motto of
Ruskin's seal. At its most radical, such an applied
typology reaches toward an accommodation of sacred life, in
which spiritual literacy goes beyond the repetition of the
figures to the plenitude of co-presence, as in Paul's great
affirmation of post-Incarnational existence: "For me to live
is Christ" (Phil. 1: 21). For Ruskin this prophetic
accommodation is carried out by the "won life," the life
that has learned theoria and can grasp the demand for self-
application. In "The Requiem," drawing upon a cognate
passage in Paul, he writes that "there is only one light" by
which the "life of Christ" can be read: "the light of the
life you now lead in the flesh; and that not the natural,
but the won life: 'Nevertheless, I live; yet not I, but
Christ liveth in me'" (24: 304; Gal. 2: 20).
In the case of Ruskin's natural types, this prophetic
application keeps them close to home, however far Symmetry,
Infinity, and Repose seemed to have wandered from narrative
continuity with Abraham, Isaac, or Moses. Pushed to their
limits, these types might well have typified, in a slowly
transforming and relinquishing secular tropology, a haven of
sensibility, instead of a heaven of spirits. But the
crucial linkage to Evangelical pilgrimage is too strong for
such a development, and the typology of Modern Painters too
deeply dyed--"Grain-tinctured," indeed--by Hebrews for that
to occur. The Pauline typological exegesis is still
powerful in Modern Painters, and Hebrews remains seminal,
both in its applicative sense, as the keynote text for all
later figures of spiritual exodus, and in its ritual and
liturgical typology. It is this latter that forms the basis
of Ruskin's meditation on color as "the type of love," on
scarlet "used with the hyssop, in the Levitical law," as the
"great sanctifying element of visible beauty" (7: 419, 414-
15). [n.5] We are never far in Ruskin's theory of nature from a
progress, a process of sanctification, but the "sanctifying
element" itself must not be confused with the process, since
it does not belong to humanity, nor even to nature, but
depends upon a mystery, even "the mystery" of cloud-color--
"purple, crimson, scarlet, and gold"--in the work of
redemption (7: 158).
Moderation, Unity, and Purity are the three additional
types, making up the "signature of God upon His works" (4:
75), which draw Ruskin's analysis in Modern Painters II.
These types show a distinct shift of emphasis from the
eschatological typology that sounds the major chord of the
second volume, since they are not typical of heaven, nor are
they addressed, in the same manner as Symmetry, Infinity,
and Repose, to the pilgrim in his or her "spiritual
watching." They are more concerned, in fact, with the
"sanctifying element" itself, and they anticipate the dense
moment of integration, the foregrounding of the self-
referentiality of Ruskin's own texts, in the next volume of
Modern Painters, in the first of two chapters on medieval
landscape. There, having traversed the extraordinary decade
between 1846 and 1856, via The Seven Lamps of Architecture,
The Stones of Venice, and the Edinburgh Lectures on
Architecture and Painting, Ruskin admonishes his readers to
watch for the ingathering of his disparate texts, for
"gradually our conclusions are knitting themselves together"
(5: 280). If we have read carefully, especially the second
volume of Stones of Venice, we should be ready to understand
that "colour is the most sacred element of all visible
things" (5: 281).
This passage may be set against the youthful
disparagement of color to be found throughout the first
volume of Modern Painters, where Ruskin often dismisses
color as merely "accidental" and "feeble," beneath the
authority of a "truth of form": "colour is indeed a most
unimportant characteristic of objects" (3: 162, 159). To
write the history of Ruskin's conversion to color, one which
could be optical, mythographical, or psychosexual, would
prove analogous to this study of typology, for as we come to
consider the typology of color in Ruskin we find all about
us this deepening of the grain, this turn toward greater
concentration on the "sanctifying element." [n.6] We can see
this movement as indicative of the growth and maturation of
Ruskin's covenant. The stirring of change and the gain in
intensity can be felt, in Modern Painters II, in the types
of Moderation, Unity, and Purity. These may be classed as
soteriological types, since they are decidedly immanental,
if not sacramental, and concentrate on the means of
redemption. They begin the process by which Ruskin brings
into the typology of nature the figurative resources and the
particular theological emphasis of the Christus Redemptor
tradition.
Of these three the type of Purity is the most fertile
for the development of Ruskin's theory of nature, and
Moderation and Unity can be said to accompany it.
Moderation is the type most specifically associated with
color, since the modality of color, as between "red" and the
beauty of the "rose-color," indicates the solemnity of quiet
gradations, the scale of intensity by which the beautiful in
nature is measured (4: 140). Already here color has become
so much more than an "accidental" attribute, for it connects
that which it clothes, in "holy reference," to the deepest
truths of nature: ". . . and so of all colors, . . . there
is a solemn moderation even in their very fulness, and a
holy reference, beyond and out of their own nature, to great
harmonies by which they are governed" (4: 140). This
referentiality, "beyond and out," to the "rose-colour" and
the governing harmonies, suggests that Moderation is a type
of mediation, a conduit, a binding together of sacred and
secular worlds. It becomes for Ruskin the "girdle and
safeguard" of all the types (4: 139), providing, not least,
the connection in the type of Unity between the collegia
pietatis, what Ruskin calls the "co-working and army
fellowship" of Evangelical community, and the "necessity of
divine essence" (4: 92-93). Unity is typical of this
essence to the degree that it participates in the
"Comprehensiveness" in and of Christ. For Ruskin, quoting
John 17: 21, Unity is the most Johannine of the six major
types, since Christ's own expression of the "great
harmonies" by which creation is governed was the prayer that
"'all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in
Thee'" (4: 92).
The presence of such comprehension in the immanental
types drives Purity forward, away from the locus of meanings
that we might expect it to have in Ruskin's theoretic
program. In a remarkable development of his exegesis, he
disengages Purity from its conventional association with
cleanness or with the pureness of moral character. These
attributes are, in fact, only "metaphorical," and not
typical, for Purity is not "a type of sinlessness" (4: 131).
Ruskin does not deny that the association of Purity with
what is sinless and righteous is a frequent point of holy
scripture, but here he must correct this Biblical usage with
the greater and sustaining usage of nature. The aptness of
such correction is carried by the principle of typical
reserve, for, as Fairbairn notes, "nothing is to be regarded
as typical, which is of an improper and sinful nature." [n.7]
Since no idea of sin can be formed of God, Ruskin argues, it
is not possible for "sacred characters" (4: 144) to bear a
typical relation to that idea, either as sinful or as
sinless (4: 132). By this argument of almost scholastic
tenor, Ruskin frees Purity from old associations, and, in
doing so, opens the way forward to the typology of color.
In addition, of all the types, Purity is the least
subject to figurative dissimilitude. As a type of light, an
incarnate luminosity, it resists the inveterate darkening of
the other figures by the misprision of all natural forms and
mortal life. Ruskin reminds us in the concluding chapter of
his discussion of the types, "General Inferences Respecting
Typical Beauty," that between his reading and the invested
signs in nature there falls the dissonance of the hierarchy:
we are divided by a "gulf of specific separation" from the
lower animals in creation, but so too are we separated from
those consummate orders above us that we would fully
understand. The inevitable consequence of such "gulfs" in
the economy of creation is the resistant differance--to
understand is to understand differently. Thus, even in the
midst of his great reading of "Nature-scripture," Ruskin
affirms only the likelihood of his interpretation, the
apparent mimesis between analogous systems. The typical
beauty in nature "seems a promise of a communion ultimately
deep, close, and conscious, with the Being whose darkened
manifestations we here feebly and unthinkingly delight in"
(4: 144-45). [n.8] "Types and shadows," by their very
character, participate in what is "incommunicable"; to
whatever extent they are, finally, merely "words belonging
to earth," they cannot express the "ineffable": "[F]or, of
things different from the visible, words appropriated to the
visible can convey no image" (4: 208). Ruskin's posing of
this problem, the essential crux of the hermeneutic of
natural types, does not yet reach the radical form it takes
later in his career, when he acknowledges the aporia that
haunts all figurative economies, "the curious reversal or
recoil of the meaning which attaches itself to nearly every
great myth" (19: 317). Even so, in Modern Painters, in the
very building of the theoretical structure that undergirds
all his work, he insists upon the friability of his figures,
which he understands as part of the hiddenness and
concealment that resists and changes all interpretative
endeavor.
Ruskin's response to this systemic dissonance is to
position Purity as the actual "sanctifying element" (7:
415), the presence of light as itself a "presence," "an
actual substance," rather than, like the other types, one of
the "modes of being" (4: 128). [n.9] In this way Ruskin gives to
it a particular efficacy; it is "the type of Energy," the
"energetic action" of life itself, the vitality of the
"living and energetic whole" (4: 129). Keying his final
definition of this type to Paul's words in Acts 17: 28,
Ruskin writes that Purity is "expressive of that constant
presence and energizing of the Deity in matter, through
which all things live and move, and have their being." [n.10]
This same passage returns nearly forty years later to
become, in Deucalion, Ruskin's affirmation of a sacred
energy in nature, a holy fire and "everlasting force" that
"glows, with a deeper strength than the sun's heat or the
stars' light, through all the forms of matter, to purify
them, to direct, and to save" (26: 360).
By now it should not surprise us that this redemptive
type of Purity, as "visible energy," is typified, not only
by the light of the world but also by the "'living' . . .
rock" (4: 132-33): the "stone which the builders refused"
that has become "the Headstone of the Corner" (4: 265), the
"living stone" (1 Pet. 2: 4), the "spiritual Rock" that
followed the wandering children of Israel, "and that Rock
was Christ" (1 Cor. 10: 4). Purity is an immanent force;
incarnate in the "'living'" rock, it is manifest as "visible
energy" in mountain glory, when, through the comprehension
of theoria, as in the sanctified imagination of Angelico,
"all nature becomes literally coleur de rose " (23: 260).
For this reason we find in translucency the "most lovely
objects in nature" (4: 130), not in the disembodiment of the
transparent, but in "sacred hue of human flesh," the blessed
"Carnation" (26: 184). The "wreaths of snow" of the Alpine
summits, the "white plumage" of swan or dove, possess the
"utmost possible sense of beauty" when they are seen "under
rose light" (4: 130), since the rose is only scarlet in
Moderation and Unity, the mediated transmission of a
passional presence, the "sanguine stain" of "the rose-colour
on snow at sunset" (35: 473-74). This type of Purity
energizes the distinction between the "natural" and the
"won" life, one that is best described in Hopkins' own
employment of the "sanctity of color" (6: 69), in notes he
made on the Spiritual Exercises. "Suppose," Hopkins writes,
God showed us a vision of the entire world, "first in a drop
of water, allowing everything to be seen in its native
colours." After this, we are given "the same in a drop of
Christ's blood," by which everything is "turned scarlet,"
even as it keeps "nevertheless mounted in the scarlet its
own colour too." [n.11]
Types conceal, and beclouded, as "Dark Figures," they
"seem to promise" a great and far-off consummation (4: 144),
a coming "face to face," but in the "sanctifying element" of
scarlet (7: 415), as "crystalline vermilion," there is
"unsearchableness without cloud or concealment," only an
"infinite unknown," without "any veil or interference
between us and it" (6: 103). This is the color of the
evening sky, the literal coleur de rose of the heavens, the
color of the purple and the crimson rain (Diaries I: 103),
the "falling fire of the rainbow" (25: 250) formed of "one
broad belt of paler rose" (2: 177), the scarlet "for whose
brightness there are no words" (34: 21), the scarlet of that
priesthood of all who see, who have been "loved by Christ,
and washed in His blood" (12: 537). The type of Purity can
be known in light and color because of all visible things it
is not hindered by our "earthly" and "imperfect knowledge,"
but is typical of "the redeemed life" (6: 103-04). A
soteriological type, pre-eminently, by its saving power, it
depends upon and participates in "the power of the Gospel,"
the good news, not simply of the "History of Christ in due
place," nor even the story alone of "how He died," but the
testimony of the whole of reality as alive in him:
. . . the showing of His risen presence in
granting the harvests and guiding the labour
of the year. All sun and rain, and length or
decline of days received from His hand; all
joy, and grief, and strength, or cessation of
labour, indulged or endured, as in His sight
and to His glory. (23: 414) [n.12]
Purity is, simply yet effectively, typus Christi.. Under its
rubric, and from this starting point in Modern Painters II,
Ruskin arranges the "sacred characters" (4: 144) of the
typology of Atonement.
Having succeeded in the second volume in his exposition
of the covenantal typology in nature, the two typologies of
heavenly hope and divine love, Ruskin felt confident of his
direction and of his own power in the work that lay ahead.
He announces that, "in the succeeding volume," his "task"
will be to examine and illustrate natural types "in every
division, in stones, mountains, waves, clouds, and all
organic bodies" (4: 142). But this program was never
carried out in the way here envisioned. First the Seven
Lamps of Architecture intervened, and then the long,
passionate affair with Venice, issuing in the three volumes
of Stones of Venice during the first years of the 1850's,
and then the turbulence, both private and public, of that
decade began to alter all of Ruskin's plans. Indeed, out of
the wreck of hope came the more hallowed imagination, the
dream-work of a mind made more profound through suffering.
As a result Ruskin's reading of nature was never organized
in a complete form; it takes place, instead, in a series of
dense, theoretic passages throughout the work of the next
fifteen years, from 1845 to 1860, and in key chapters, like
"Athena Keramitis" (1869) of Queen of the Air, of books from
his later career, particularly after 1874. It reaches
toward closure in the very closing pages of Modern Painters
V, but even there, amid the culminating energies of his
greatest work, Ruskin cannot complete it, cannot translate
the "ineffable" or overcome the "incommunicable" element (4:
208). The great typological structure of the second volume
is recalled only to be fractured under the pressure of
irresolvable dilemmas, becoming part lyrical and oracular
utterance on Ruskin's part, which begs for interpretation,
and part long footnote, which resists it.[n.13] The whole of
his enterprise, as Interpreter of nature's covenant, may be
said to come down to one sentence of the chapter, "The
Hesperid Aegle": "Colour is, therefore, in brief terms, the
type of love" (7: 419).
We now have access to a more complete exposition of
this critical sentence, since, in the context of this
discussion, several key elements of its meaning are already
apparent. Our understanding of Ruskin's interpretation of
nature as a "continual Gospel" (11: 184), that in the book
of the creatures, "Deus ipse notatur" (24: 302), and that it
is Christ's "risen presence" which empowers all things (23:
414), not least the potential "redeemed life" of humanity
(6: 104), enables us to grasp each of the three significant
terms of this sentence as related to the Christocentric
emphasis of Ruskin's theology. The "colour" is, as we have
noted, the "sacred chord of colour" (6: 69), the "great
chord of perfect colour: (5: 139), associated with the
Tabernacle of the Presence, the Shekinah of God's dwelling-
place, completed, antitypically, in the pleroma of Christ,
in the scarlet of his redemptive act of sacrifice upon the
cross. Hence, scarlet is the primary color of the great
chord, the color most typical of Christ, not only in its
register of mediation as the liminal color between darkness
and light, but also in its place in the rainbow, the Bible's
own natural type, given as sign of the covenant of grace.
The word "colour" here can be read as a metonymy for
"rainbow," for it is the typology of the rainbow that
sponsors these meanings, natural and theological. [n.14] As the
sign of the Noachic covenant after the deluge, the rainbow
serves as a perpetual token of God's promise of deliverance;
it is to mark "the everlasting covenant between God and
every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth"
(Gen. 9: 16). Ruskin writes that the rainbow "signifies
always mercy, the sparing of life" (7: 418). Yet the
metonymic sense of "colour" in the sentence for "rainbow" is
only partial, and the relationship between aspect and whole
is, in actual fact, reversed. Considering the body of
Ruskin's descriptions of natural phenomenon, the peculiar
scarlet cloud, the crimson bow, draws Ruskin's most fervent
attempts at commentary. It is the color scarlet, in
gradations of itself, that makes the rainbow a covenantal
sign, and not the simple, if potent homology between the
rainbow as natural (re)occurrence and its appearance in
scripture, where it is specially authorized. The rainbow is
only one aspect of the sacred color.
Color is the "type" of love in a complex of senses, but
principally because it participates in the typology of
nature, a figurative system integral to the canon-binding
figura of Biblical narrative. Its categorical identity as a
type, its operative typicality, should be clear from the
preceding discussions of Ruskin's great project of
typological exegesis. As part of the system of typical
meanings founded in Hebrews, this "type" is principally a
ritual or liturgical one, whose primary field of reference
is the Hebrew cultus, with its rituals of purgation,
sacrifice, and atonement.[n.15] Ruskin denotes the ritual
typicality of his central "type" by directing us to "the
mystical connection between life and love, set forth in that
Hebrew system of sacrificial religion" (7: 416). In this
typical application of the Levitical law, our "sins are
indeed to be washed away," by the antitype of the cultus and
its purging Israel of transgression and ritual defilement.
But Ruskin wishes to emphasize the Johannine understanding
of this washing as an act of "love" (Rev. 1: 5), not merely
as the "agony" of sacrifice (7: 417).
Further, the co-sign here, the rainbow of the color
chord, comprehends both an historical and prophetic
typology. The rainbow occurs as part of the history of the
Bible, of its literal narrative. Appearing above the
surviving remnant of humanity, it occurs at one particular
moment in time and so can be applied to the future as part
of temporal or historical continuity. At the same time, its
literal significance, what God himself says that it means,
as a "token of the covenant" (Gen. 9: 12), foreshadows the
"blood of the new testament" (Matt. 26: 28). In this
figuring of the covenant, the rainbow becomes a prophetic
type, as well. Thus, this "type" of love, envisioned as
scarlet cloud, with "hues scarcely traceable in the "one
broad belt of crimson" (35: 282), proves remarkably
inclusive; it operates on all three levels, as ritual,
historical, and prophetic type.
In this passage the scarlet color is specifically named
as a "type of love"; indeed, in one sense, it becomes a
name, so that "type of love" is not simply the ascription of
a typical meaning, but is, itself, a name--Love as the
unfamiliar Name.[n.16] In Modern Painters III Ruskin argues
that the human imagination ought to perceive, as part of its
legitimate and noble usefulness, "the cloud of witnesses in
heaven and earth," but even more than this, it ought "to
call up the scenes and facts in which we are commanded to
believe, and be present, as if in the body, at every
recorded event of the history of the Redeemer" (5: 72). We
have seen his own attempt to present such a history in the
chapter, "Imaginative Penetrative." The significance of
such imaginative acts is widened even further, if possible,
in "Byzantine Palaces" of the second volume of Stones of
Venice, where Ruskin, in treating the iconography of the
cross in Venetian civilization, insists upon the relevance
of this enduring sign to all of human life. The sun and the
moon are placed in conjunction with the cross "in order to
express the entire dependence of the heavens and the earth
upon the work of the Redemption," the "saving power" of the
cross "over the whole of creation" (10: 167). On this cross
the Atonement confirmed the shape of providence and revealed
"love" as the Redeemer's name, for he "loved us, and washed
us from our sins in his own blood" (Rev. 1: 5). Hence, the
sacrality of color exists, and the types bear witness of
"every recorded event" of the Redeemer, because of the
priority throughout creation of "the work of Redemption."
Neither color nor typicality possess their affective
modalities apart from this priority, and, in some final
sense, the color of this "love" and the figuring that
clusters around him depend upon his self-identity, his
"risen presence," for their reality. Although "love" is the
third term, then, of Ruskin's "brief terms," it is the one
that subsumes the others, as name and "saving power."
The further consequence of this priority is to enable
Ruskin to appropriate an entire range of types of Christ to
the Book of Nature. This appropriation inheres in the
structure of many of the theoretic passages that occur in
his work after Modern Painters II. We can see this in a
passage somewhat further along in "Byzantine Palaces," where
Ruskin wishes to collate the colors veiling the Tabernacle,
with Joseph's well-known "coat 'of many colors,' with the
rape of Tamar, and, finally, with the typicality of the
rainbow, that "heavenly circle which binds the statutes of
color upon the front of the sky" (10: 174-75). Such a
passage develops with tremendous speed, reliant, as it is,
upon the Ruskinian economy between the two books. But here,
however, the violation of the king's daughter, and her
subsequent humiliation by the tearing of her "garment of
divers colours" (2 Sam. 13: 19), ruptures any single
similitude between scripture and the rainbow in nature as a
"sign of the covenant of peace" (10: 174). Only when we
understand the rainbow as a "type of reconciliation" (10:
136), do we see that what unifies this reading is the record
of suffering, even of that "crimson from the blood which is
the life" of the body (10: 172). Tamar, as a virgin, is
rent, even as the veil of the Temple is "rent in twain from
the top to the bottom" (Matt. 28: 51) by the sheer force of
the Crucifixion, even as Joseph's coat, after he is betrayed
and sold into bondage in Egypt, is dipped into blood and
carried to his father as proof of his death.
A comprehensive review of all such typical moments in
Ruskin would be lengthy, indeed, but many such collations
and their ostensible typology, whether of peace,
deliverance, sanctity, or love, are bound, ultimately, by
the scarlet thread of the Atonement. There is, perhaps, no
more beautiful example of this "sanctifying element," this
typus crucis, than in "Mountain Glory" of Modern Painters
IV, in the concluding meditation on the death of Moses and
its antitype, the work of Christ through death. In a
remarkable doubling of his typical program, Ruskin provides
in this passage both a figural reading and a modeling of
theoretic sight, for Moses, himself a type, gazes upon two
natural types in the topography of Palestine. He sees,
first, the Dead Sea, and understands it as "a type of God's
anger," bereft of motion and the Living Spirit. But against
this emblem of wrath, there exists, figured in the
landscape, the type of Atonement which he reads in the
evening light:
[T]he Dead Sea . . . laid waveless beneath him;
and beyond it, the fair hills of Judah, and
the soft plains and banks of Jordan, purple in
the evening light as with the blood of
redemption, and fading in their distant fulness
into mysteries of promise and love. (6: 462)
This is, indeed, the "Promised Land," whose figures are the
very forms of nature, the hills and plains, and the light.
Over Jordan hangs the saving chord of color because in
the distance, near the site of what will become the holy
city, is one eminence, one hill of all the world where the
Word, by whom all things were made, will know itself in
"sacred hue of human flesh--Carnation;--incarnation" (26:
184). Ruskin writes that we must acknowledge the "human
life" of Christ, the "hungering" soul, "tired" and
"sorrowful," or else we stand in danger of losing "the
efficiency of His atonement" (6: 463). "Nothing but love
can read the letters" (4: 191), the "sacred characters" (4:
144) of this intersection of "Divinity" and "Humanity" (6:
463). Hence it is Moses who sees here with theoretic sight,
for he will participate mystically, as the figure of his own
anagogue, in the Transfiguration of Christ, reappearing
beside him on the mount amid the "snow-like" radiance and
the shining "Light of His Mercy" (6: 466; Matt 17: 1-8).
From Pisgah Moses reads the meaning of mountain glory, and
imagines the energy of Christ shaping the creation.
Preparing the way, it is the "right hand of Christ" who
"first strewed the snow on Lebanon, and smoothed the slopes
of Calvary" (6: 117).
In a complexity of time, Moses foresees the antitypical
landscape of Christ's own saving and redemptive act, which
already completes what Moses has begun and must leave, in
his imminent dying, incomplete. He gazes upon the place and
time, in history, where this act of history will come to
pass. In this reading of the figures of landscape, Moses
sees the "Promised Land" as already transmuted to the points
of narrative, the clustering and memorial geography of
scripture, and registers the polysemy of Bethlehem, Galilee,
Calvary. From the Crucifixion in Jerusalem, near Jordan's
banks, history stretches forward into the "fading" and
"distant fulness" of the future, "the mysteries of promise
and love" in which time itself may be redeemed. Moses sees
the Christ-time, but he also sees--and in this the passage
reaches toward Ruskin's own time, and the time of Ruskin's
readers--how the Christ-time is itself typical, anew, of the
end-time, because in the death upon the cross is born the
afterlife of history.
Notes to the Conclusion:
1. This sentence is from a draft passage; see Cook's
note (4: 114).
2. BE, 2 (Sermon 45), p. 198.
3. Law, Serious Call, p. 8.
4. Frei, Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, p. 153.
5. See, in Hebrews, the discussion of the old and new
covenants (chaps. 8 and 9), and note, especially: "For when
Moses had spoken every precept to all the people according
to the law, he took the blood of calves and of goats, with
water, and scarlet wool, and hyssop, and sprinkled both the
book, and all the people" (Heb. 9: 19). See, also, the
network of passages in the Old Testament upon which this
typology depends, including Exodus 12 for the first Passover
(Ex. 12: 22 for hyssop); Exodus 24: 6-8; Leviticus 14: 4-6;
Leviticus, chaps. 16-17: 11, and 23: 23-32 for the great Day
of Atonement; Numbers 19: 1-10 for the ritual sacrifice of
the "red cow without blemish" (Num. 19: 6 for hyssop);
Psalms 51: 7. Compare John 19: 36-37 (with Exodus 12: 46
and Psalm 34: 20) and 1 Corinthians 5: 7. And see chapter
two above, and the central series of Ruskin's sermons, from
the Coniston Notebook, 10. "The law of sacrifice," 11.
"Sacrifices of the old law," 12. "Sacrificial ceremonies,"
and from Notebook IV, 13. "The annual atonement." There is
perhaps no more comprehensive meditation upon this nexus of
sacred meanings in all of Ruskin than the Christmas Day
portion (1876) of the great Letter 74, "Father-Law," of Fors
Clavigera, sections #3-4 (29: 32).
6. For substantial parts of such a history, see the
following essays in The Ruskin Polygon : Hunt's "Oeuvre and
footnote," pp. 13-16; George L. Hersey, "Ruskin as an
optical thinker," pp. 44-64; Stephen Bann, "The colour in
the text: Ruskin's basket of strawberries," pp. 122-36;
William Arrowsmith's marvelous study of "Ruskin's
fireflies," pp. 198-235; and the comments on these in my
"Hunting Ruskin," pp. 50-51.
7. See Fairbairn, Typology of Scripture, p. 68f.
8. McGowan's comments on this passage are astute and
helpful ("Ruskin's Mysterious Clouds," pp. 83, 89).
9. There has been little commentary on the six major
types, but the importance of this tangible Purity has been
noted; see Sherburne, Ambiguities of Abundance, pp. 5-6; and
Wihl, Rhetoric of Infallibility, pp. 44-45, 65-71.
10. First ed., p. 74 (4: 133); MP II, p. 312; and see
4: 397.
11. The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard
Manley Hopkins, ed. Christopher Devlin, S. J., (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 194. And see James Finn
Cotter, "'Hornlight Wound to the West': The Inscape of the
Passion in Hopkins' Poetry," Victorian Poetry, 16 (Winter
1978), pp. 297-313; Alison G. Sulloway, "'Heaven's Sweet
Gift': Hopkins, Ruskin, and the Plentitude of God," in her
Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Temper (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 64-114, here 79-90; and
Gerald L. Bruns, "Energy and Interpretation in Hopkins," in
Inventions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp.
125-42.
12. The context of this passage, in "The Shepherd's
Tower" of Mornings in Florence, is praise for Giotto's
expression of the gospel in his art and architecture.
13. The closing chapters of Modern Painters V,
Ruskin's central text, the great allegorical meditations
upon Turner's Garden of the Hesperides and Apollo and Python
have drawn much comment. See Hunt, "Oeuvre and footnote,"
p. 13-15; and Helsinger, Art of the Beholder, pp. 234-67,
293-98. Other significant readings of these chapters
include Landow, Aesthetic and Critical Theories, pp. 420-32;
Fitch, "The Assumption of the Dragon," Poison Sky, pp. 386-
426; Sawyer, Poetic Argument, pp. 188-93; Bann, "The colour
in the text," pp. 125-29; and Downes, Landscape of
Beatitude, pp. 82-85, 225.
14. Ruskin writes further on in a note that "the very
sign in heaven itself . . . , truly understood, is the type
of love" (7: 438). Two studies by Landow are pertinent
here: Victorian Types, pp. 111-14; and "The Rainbow: A
Problematic Image," in Nature and the Victorian Imagination,
pp. 341-68, esp. 345.
15. But note Charity's convincing argument for the
powerful historical element of the cultus, and the prophetic
contemporization of foundational events that operated in its
ritual, in his discussion of "Man and History," Events and
their Afterlife, pp. 44-51. And see n. 5 above.
16. Twice in his long footnote to color Ruskin resorts
to this capitalization, "the type of Love" (7: 417).