John Henry Newman (1801–1890) and John Ruskin (1819–1900) were two of the most influential thinkers of the Victorian era, but they occupied very different spiritual and intellectual spaces. They shared a deep concern for the culture of England and the role of the imagination in philosophical inquiry, but their direct interactions were limited by a respectful but firm distance.
Newman was the famous convert to Roman Catholicism, Ruskin was the staunch critic of Catholic ritualism, though he was a connoisseur to medieval Catholic art. Ruskin was suspicious not of Newman’s character, but of his influence. He feared that Newman’s High Church Oxford Movement and subsequent conversion to Catholicism in 1845 could lead people away from what he saw as the pure, rugged truth of nature and towards sensuous religious formalism. Newman was reserved in his public comments about Ruskin. He acknowledged Ruskin’s brilliance as a prose stylist and art critic but found his basic aesthetic principles unconvincing. Newman’s philosophy of beauty was based in Catholic tradition, where Ruskin verged on treating art as a source of divine revelation in itself.
A clash between them came indirectly through the onset of the Gothic Revival movement. Ruskin saw the Gothic style as the only “moral” expression of architecture because in its decorative carving and painting it reflected the freedom of the individual craftsman. Beauty is a moral imperative; bad art is a sign of a failing society. These ideas he explained in The Stones of Venice (1853). Newman preferred the classical style of the Baroque as more practical and modern for Catholic worship. Beauty is a “handmaid” to religion; it can be useful, but it is not a source of moral truth itself.
Newman saw Ruskin as a brilliant but wayward genius who prioritised the aesthetic over the dogmatic, while Ruskin saw Newman as a brilliant but dangerous guide leading English Christians back toward Rome. But there were points of mutual agreement. Both were anti-utilitarian. They despised the “Gradgrind” philosophy of the Industrial Revolution. They deplored the idea that everything should be measured by its economic utility. Ruskin was influenced by Newman’s The Idea of a University (1852). In that book Newman focused on the development of the mind; Ruskin expanded those ideas into the development of the “whole man” through manual labour and art. Both were regarded as great masters of English prose. Newman recognised plainly that Ruskin’s writing was very beautiful, even if he could not agree with the conclusions. Both believed the world was a “sacramental” place where physical things pointed to spiritual truths, but they parted company on the structures available to approach those truths.
The imagination was for both of key importance. For Newman, the imagination is a tool for faith. We do not reach religious certainty through logic alone. In addition, we use what he called the Illative Sense, the mind’s ability to take many small, “imaginal” clues and converge them into a single point of belief. This is to move from “notional” (abstract) assent to “real” (living) assent. Art is secondary; it should stimulate the imagination just enough to gesture towards God, but it should not become any kind of authority in itself. God is a Mystery. The imagination reaches a point where it must simply bow before the unknown.
Ruskin sees the imagination as a tool for sight. In Modern Painters (1856) he writes: “To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, all in one”. He divides the imagination into several types. The most important concept is the Theoretic Faculty, to perceive the “typical beauty” in nature as a direct reflection of God’s character in infinity, purity and symmetry. Art is a primary moral force. If you paint a leaf accurately, you are performing an act of worship because you are honouring God’s creation. The purpose of beauty is to reveal the divine energy hidden in the visible world. Yet Ruskin, too, seeks Truth. He coined the term “Pathetic Fallacy” to describe poets who project their own feelings onto nature, as, he points out, Charles Kingsley does in the line “the cruel crawling foam”. Ruskin sees the highest form of imagination as the “Imagination Penetrative,” which pierces through the surface of things to find their essence without distorting them with human emotion. Ruskin’s imagination looks outward at the divine craftsmanship of the world. Newman’s imagination looks upward toward the divine mystery.
Reading Hour 