Section 3, Chapter 4, of Part I to the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
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Ruskin opens The Seven Lamps of Architecture with the charge that in architecture, as in society, material concerns have usurped spiritual concerns as the body has tended to supersede the soul. By "material" he means technical innovations, which have responded so rapidly to the "necessities of the day" that they threaten to overwhelm all consid [84/85] ered thinking about the great ends of architecture-unless, that is, we first determine "some constant, general, and irrefragable laws of right." Now, the relationship of technique to idea is organic: practical laws are always "exponents of moral ones," "the actual expression of some ultimate nerve or fibre of the mighty laws which govern the moral world" (VIII, 20-21, 22). Material forms in fact have a double reference, exemplifying both the "spirit" of a building and also the moral condition of the workman, behind whom stands the moral condition of the society that produced him. Ruskin's aim, then, is to understand spiritual reality through a logic of evolving forms in order to determine the beneficial course of those forms. Ultimately, to describe the soul and body of architecture in their ideal relationship is to describe the soul and body of a society in their ideal relationship.
Fortunately for his argument, Ruskin ends up treating his principles as "spirits" rather than laws. Instead of another book structured by a clumsy system of deductive categories, The Seven Lamps of Architecture is lucidly and ingeniously arranged according to intuitively unified subjects that complement one another. The "lamps" are in fact the various modes by which architecture produces meaning. He had intended to use the word "spirits" for his title (as though to offer the spirit rather than the letter of moral laws), which would also imply the secondary sense of angels or guilding lights. The word he finally chose makes the secondary sense primary and enriches the metaphorical suggestions. John's first vision in Revelations is the seven lampstands representing the seven original Christian churches, which visually echo the images of redemption later in the book, particularly the resplendent City of God. To this implied nexus Ruskin adds the association of "lamp" with "word" and "law" ("The Law is light"; "Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet" [VIII, 22]). As Christ is the Word incarnate and the Law fulfilled, so is the church the spiritual body of Christ, of which all communicants are members. The imagery of guidance and illumination is continuous, then, with the seraphs and human lamps of Modern Painters II. And so Ruskin's seven lamps spread before us like beacons, or yet again, like seven virtues in an allegorical frieze.
The switch from painting to architecture transcends the principal dichotomies of Ruskin's early theories of art. In "The Lamp of Power" he writes that the interest of a great building depends upon "the impression it receives from human power" and "the image it bears of the natural creation" (VIII, 138), but in a famous passage from "The Lamp of Memory," he seriously called into question the value he had once attributed to the pleasure of natural objects. During a stroll in Champagnole, he writes, he discovered that the scene lost its charm the moment he imagined it as an uninhabited forest: "A heaviness in the boughs of the darkened forest showed how much of their former [85/86] power had been dependent upon a life which was not theirs" (VIII, 223) -- the life, that is, of human dwellers and their history. Whether this recognition in fact overthrows Ruskin's previous insistence on the inherent character of beauty is open to debate. The point for our purposes is that the contradiction is reconciled in the shape of a Gothic cathedral. Some buildings, he writes elsewhere, possess "an exceeding preciousness and delicacy," while others have a "mysterious majesty.... like that felt at the presence and operation of some great Spiritual Power"; but the sources of the beautiful and the sublime are the reverse of what we might expect, the beautiful deriving from sculptural imitation of natural forms, the sublime from "the expression of the power" of human mind (VIII, 100- 101). Unlike a painting, a cathedral can be literally entered, for humans have designed the cope of this heaven and the range of its vistas; they incorporate nature in decorative form as the mind itself incorporates the garlands of its happiest memories, while leaving the shape of power in one sense unalteredfor vaults and chapels are the "original" appearance of the heavens [86/87] when seen in prophetic ecstasy. Mind and feeling, power and memory, fact and metaphor are inscribed together upon the same enclosing sensorium, which will retain forever the strength and sweetness of an unfading human presence. It is the type of the perfect relation of God and man.
The synthesis is only possible because buildings are temporal artifacts; in Gerald Bruns's words, they are for Ruskin "events as well as structures."(Bruns, 912) In "The Lamp of Sacrifice," Ruskin describes the event of construction as a commemorative activity. In "The Lamp of Memory" he describes the event of temporal survival as a hallowing activity, the activity by which the building embodies the collective memory of a society. In the first lamp Ruskin argues that the function of a rich sacrifice of labor and craft and materials is not to compel religious awe by means of splendor but to demonstrate an inward condition of the spirit. God demanded the tabernacle as a sign of the continuance of the covenant in response to the visible sign that God had already manifested; that testimony would be not only the firstling of the flock but the tithe "of all treasures of wisdom and beauty; of the thought that invents, and the hand that labours; of wealth of wood, and weight of stone; of the strength of iron, and the light of gold." Ruskin's emphasis, then, is on the builder and his act: "It is not the church we want, but the sacrifice; not the emotion of admiration [in a human congregation], but the act of adoration; not the gift, but the giving." Of such a sacrifice, it is pointless to ask the use in human terms. An object given up or set aside is therefore "useless" or sacred (the root sacr-, which produces "sacrifice," "consecrate," "sacred," and "sacrament," contains the sense of "giving"). And so, as landscape art is for Ruskin an act of psalmic praise, architecture is an act of sacramental praise, the human reaffirmation of the Covenant. Ruskin's biblical allusions make precise the nature of the covenantal bond: as the Levitical sacrifice of the firstborn and David's sacrifice of the water at Adullam are types of Christ's supreme sacrifice, so the sacrifice of materials in architecture reconstitutes in material form the body given up on the cross.
Architecture, then, is an expressive art, not in the sense that an emotion is an expression but in the sense that a sign is an expression. The building erected as a memorial to the covenant becomes in time the living memorial of a community persisting through many generations. Ruskin's penultimate chapter, "The Lamp of Memory," reaches its climax in one of the most famous paragraphs he ever wrote:
Therefore, when we build, let us think that we build for ever.... For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. [87/88] Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, or mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity. It is in their lasting witness against men, in their quiet contrast with the transitional character of all things, in the strength which . . . maintains its sculptured shapeliness for a time insuperable, connects forgotten and following ages with each other, and half constitutes the identity, as it concentrates the sympathy, of nations: it is in that golden stain of time, that we are to look for the real light, and colour, and preciousness of architecture; and it is not until a building has assumed this character, till it has been entrusted with the fame, and hallowed by the deeds of men, till its walls have been witnesses of suffering, and its pillars rise out of the shadows of death, that its existence, more lasting as it is than that of the natural objects of the world around it, can be gifted with even so much as these possess, of language and of life. [VIII, 233-234]
Once again, to lose oneself is to find oneself. The builder who loses his time to labor turns out from the prospect of history to have redeemed time. In the first chapter Ruskin wrote, "Wealth, and length of days, and peace, were the promised and experienced rewards of [the Hebrew's] sacrifice, though they were not to be the objects of it" (VIII, 42). The language is the language of capitalist accumulation, but what for Marx would be the alienation of human work in favor of "the gods" turns into a fully humanized artifact, one that concentrates sympathy rather than personal ambition and acts as both an emblem and a virtual agent of social cohesion. Ruskinian architecture also translates into communal terms the structure of erotic sublimation. To abjure a loved object, to remember it and weave about it the "added charm" of happy associations, is to substitute the pleasures of imagination, the sweet ache of possessing and not possessing; but in architecture the remembered sympathy of a nation receives concrete and imperishable form. Time is redeemed: the "golden stain" recalls the Keatsian trope of time as a thickening substance, an autumnal ripening, which for Ruskin also renders the inorganic organic. In his physics of purity, the Heavenly City is the image of matter spiritualized, since the translucence of its elements is simply the organic energy of their internal relationships; but in the Earthly City, history, the accumulation of human actions, gives to stones both life and language, so that humans by the works of their hands can also "spiritualize matter." A great building becomes a lamp of ineffable love. [88/89]
Here surely is the metropolis of the soul's dominion. "The Lamp of Memory" is perhaps Ruskin's first truly great utterance as a theorist of art, connecting him with other great episodes in the romantic tradition -- for example with Los's vision in Milton and with the aesthetics of Stevens, for whom the supreme fiction returns to humans their own image, rendered stranger and more true. Ruskin's vision of architecture also recalls a nearly contemporaneous phrase of Marx's-the organic body of man and the humanized body of nature. The politics on which Ruskin's book rests are of course anything but Marxian, as appears most clearly in the shrill denunciation of revolution with which Ruskin concludes his final chapter. Unable at this or any point of his career to see that the "cooperative" relationships of society might simply disguise the relationships of class oppression, Ruskin could only understand the Revolutions of 1848 as particularly wretched symptoms of a weakened center, a dissipation and a forgetting of those sympathies that great architecture helps to concentrate. In one sense that response confirms Walter Benjamin's diagnosis: to invest art objects with authenticity is to reaffirm the prerogatives of bourgeois authority. Yet the resonances of Ruskin's symbols etude the ultra-Toryist principles he shared with his father (see Hewison) or indeed any fixed political program; for great buildings are also a "lasting witness against" us, recalling us not only to the past but also to the idea toward which human history must strive.
Bruns, Gerald. "The Formal Nature of Victorian Thinking," PMLA 90 (1975), 905.
Hewison, Robert. "Notes on the Construction of The Stones of Venice." in Studies in Ruskin, ed. Robert Rhodes and Del Ivan Janik. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982. Pp. 131-152.
Ruskin, John. Works ed. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. 39 vols. London: George Allen, 1903-1912.
Ruskin, John. The Ruskin's Family Letter ed. Van Akin Burd, 2 vols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973.
Ruskin, John. The Diaries of John Ruskin ed. Joanne Evans and John Howard Whitehouse, 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956.
Last modified December 2000