The Stones of Venice, Volume 3 (of 3)

by John Ruskin

§ XCI. But if this be not so, and there be any truth in the faint persuasion which still lurks in men’s minds that architecture is an art, and that it requires some gleam of intellect to practise it, then let the whole system of the orders and their proportions be cast out and trampled down as the most vain, barbarous, and paltry deception that was ever stamped on human prejudice; and let us understand this plain truth, common to all work of man, that, if it be good work, it is not a copy, nor anything done by rule, but a freshly and divinely imagined thing. Five orders! There is not a side chapel in any Gothic cathedral but it has fifty orders, the worst of them better than the best of the Greek ones, and all new; and a single inventive human soul could create a thousand orders in an hour.[24] And this would have been discovered even in the worst times, but that, as I said, the greatest men of the age found expression for their invention in the other arts, and the best of those who devoted themselves to architecture were in great part occupied in adapting the construction of buildings to new necessities, such as those developed by the invention of gunpowder (introducing a totally new and most interesting science of fortification, which directed the ingenuity of Sanmicheli and many others from its proper channel), and found interest of a meaner kind in the difficulties of reconciling the obsolete architectural laws they had consented to revive, and the forms of Roman architecture which they agreed to copy, with the requirements of the daily life of the sixteenth century.

§ XCII. These, then, were the three principal directions in which the Renaissance pride manifested itself, and its impulses were rendered still more fatal by the entrance of another element, inevitably associated with pride. For, as it is written, “He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool,” so also it is written, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God;” and the self-adulation which influenced not less the learning of the age than its luxury, led gradually to the forgetfulness of all things but self, and to an infidelity only the more fatal because it still retained the form and language of faith.

§ XCIII. IV. Infidelity. In noticing the more prominent forms in which this faithlessness manifested itself, it is necessary to distinguish justly between that which was the consequence of respect for Paganism, and that which followed from the corruption of Catholicism. For as the Roman architecture is not to be made answerable for the primal corruption of the Gothic, so neither is the Roman philosophy to be made answerable for the primal corruption of Christianity. Year after year, as the history of the life of Christ sank back into the depths of time, and became obscured by the misty atmosphere of the history of the world,—as intermediate actions and incidents multiplied in number, and countless changes in men’s modes of life, and tones of thought, rendered it more difficult for them to imagine the facts of distant time,—it became daily, almost hourly, a greater effort for the faithful heart to apprehend the entire veracity and vitality of the story of its Redeemer; and more easy for the thoughtless and remiss to deceive themselves as to the true character of the belief they had been taught to profess. And this must have been the case, had the pastors of the Church never failed in their watchfulness, and the Church itself never erred in its practice or doctrine. But when every year that removed the truths of the Gospel into deeper distance, added to them also some false or foolish tradition; when wilful distortion was added to natural obscurity, and the dimness of memory was disguised by the fruitfulness of fiction; when, moreover, the enormous temporal power granted to the clergy attracted into their ranks multitudes of men who, but for such temptation, would not have pretended to the Christian name, so that grievous wolves entered in among them, not sparing the flock; and when, by the machinations of such men, and the remissness of others, the form and administrations of Church doctrine and discipline had become little more than a means of aggrandizing the power of the priesthood, it was impossible any longer for men of thoughtfulness or piety to remain in an unquestioning serenity of faith. The Church had become so mingled with the world that its witness could no longer be received; and the professing members of it, who were placed in circumstances such as to enable them to become aware of its corruptions, and whom their interest or their simplicity did not bribe or beguile into silence, gradually separated themselves into two vast multitudes of adverse energy, one tending to Reformation, and the other to Infidelity.

§ XCIV. Of these, the last stood, as it were, apart, to watch the course of the struggle between Romanism and Protestantism; a struggle which, however necessary, was attended with infinite calamity to the Church. For, in the first place, the Protestant movement was, in reality, not reformation but reanimation. It poured new life into the Church, but it did not form or define her anew. In some sort it rather broke down her hedges, so that all they who passed by might pluck off her grapes. The reformers speedily found that the enemy was never far behind the sower of good seed; that an evil spirit might enter the ranks of reformation as well as those of resistance; and that though the deadly blight might be checked amidst the wheat, there was no hope of ever ridding the wheat itself from the tares. New temptations were invented by Satan wherewith to oppose the revived strength of Christianity: as the Romanist, confiding in his human teachers, had ceased to try whether they were teachers sent from God, so the Protestant, confiding in the teaching of the Spirit, believed every spirit, and did not try the spirits whether they were of God. And a thousand enthusiasms and heresies speedily obscured the faith and divided the force of the Reformation.

§ XCV. But the main evils rose out of the antagonism of the two great parties; primarily, in the mere fact of the existence of an antagonism. To the eyes of the unbeliever the Church of Christ, for the first time since its foundation, bore the aspect of a house divided against itself. Not that many forms of schism had not before arisen in it; but either they had been obscure and silent, hidden among the shadows of the Alps and the marshes of the Rhine; or they had been outbreaks of visible and unmistakable error, cast off by the Church, rootless, and speedily withering away, while, with much that was erring and criminal, she still retained within her the pillar and ground of the truth. But here was at last a schism in which truth and authority were at issue. The body that was cast off withered away no longer. It stretched out its boughs to the sea and its branches to the river, and it was the ancient trunk that gave signs of decrepitude. On one side stood the reanimated faith, in its right hand the book open, and its left hand lifted up to heaven, appealing for its proof to the Word of the Testimony and the power of the Holy Ghost. On the other stood, or seemed to stand, all beloved custom and believed tradition; all that for fifteen hundred years had been closest to the hearts of men, or most precious for their help. Long-trusted legend; long-reverenced power; long-practised discipline; faiths that had ruled the destiny, and sealed the departure, of souls that could not be told or numbered for multitude; prayers, that from the lips of the fathers to those of the children had distilled like sweet waterfalls, sounding through the silence of ages, breaking themselves into heavenly dew to return upon the pastures of the wilderness; hopes, that had set the face as a flint in the torture, and the sword as a flame in the battle, that had pointed the purposes and ministered the strength of life, brightened the last glances and shaped the last syllables of death; charities, that had bound together the brotherhoods of the mountain and the desert, and had woven chains of pitying or aspiring communion between this world and the unfathomable beneath and above; and, more than these, the spirits of all the innumerable, undoubting, dead, beckoning to the one way by which they had been content to follow the things that belonged unto their peace;—these all stood on the other side: and the choice must have been a bitter one, even at the best; but it was rendered tenfold more bitter by the natural, but most sinful animosity of the two divisions of the Church against each other.

§ XCVI. On one side this animosity was, of course, inevitable. The Romanist party, though still including many Christian men, necessarily included, also, all the worst of those who called themselves Christians. In the fact of its refusing correction, it stood confessed as the Church of the unholy; and, while it still counted among its adherents many of the simple and believing,—men unacquainted with the corruption of the body to which they belonged, or incapable of accepting any form of doctrine but that which they had been taught from their youth,—it gathered together with them whatever was carnal and sensual in priesthood or in people, all the lovers of power in the one, and of ease in the other. And the rage of these men was, of course, unlimited against those who either disputed their authority, reprehended their manner of life, or cast suspicion upon the popular methods of lulling the conscience in the lifetime, or purchasing salvation on the death-bed.

§ XCVII. Besides this, the reassertion and defence of various tenets which before had been little more than floating errors in the popular mind, but which, definitely attacked by Protestantism, it became necessary to fasten down with a band of iron and brass, gave a form at once more rigid, and less rational, to the whole body of Romanist Divinity. Multitudes of minds which in other ages might have brought honor and strength to the Church, preaching the more vital truths which it still retained, were now occupied in pleading for arraigned falsehoods, or magnifying disused frivolities; and it can hardly be doubted by any candid observer, that the nascent or latent errors which God pardoned in times of ignorance, became unpardonable when they were formally defined and defended; that fallacies which were forgiven to the enthusiasm of a multitude, were avenged upon the stubbornness of a Council; that, above all, the great invention of the age, which rendered God’s word accessible to every man, left all sins against its light incapable of excuse or expiation; and that from the moment when Rome set herself in direct opposition to the Bible, the judgment was pronounced upon her, which made her the scorn and the prey of her own children, and cast her down from the throne where she had magnified herself against heaven, so low, that at last the unimaginable scene of the Bethlehem humiliation was mocked in the temples of Christianity. Judea had seen her God laid in the manger of the beasts of burden; it was for Christendom to stable the beasts of burden by the altar of her God.

§ XCVIII. Nor, on the other hand, was the opposition of Protestantism to the Papacy less injurious to itself. That opposition was, for the most part, intemperate, undistinguishing, and incautious. It could indeed hardly be otherwise. Fresh bleeding from the sword of Rome, and still trembling at her anathema, the reformed churches were little likely to remember any of her benefits, or to regard any of her teaching. Forced by the Romanist contumely into habits of irreverence, by the Romanist fallacies into habits of disbelief, the self-trusting, rashly-reasoning spirit gained ground among them daily. Sect branched out of sect, presumption rose over presumption; the miracles of the early Church were denied and its martyrs forgotten, though their power and palm were claimed by the members of every persecuted sect; pride, malice, wrath, love of change, masked themselves under the thirst for truth, and mingled with the just resentment of deception, so that it became impossible even for the best and truest men to know the plague of their own hearts; while avarice and impiety openly transformed reformation into robbery, and reproof into sacrilege. Ignorance could as easily lead the foes of the Church, as lull her slumber; men who would once have been the unquestioning recipients, were now the shameless inventors of absurd or perilous superstitions; they who were of the temper that walketh in darkness, gained little by having discovered their guides to be blind; and the simplicity of the faith, ill understood and contumaciously alleged, became an excuse for the rejection of the highest arts and most tried wisdom of mankind: while the learned infidel, standing aloof, drew his own conclusions, both from the rancor of the antagonists, and from their errors; believed each in all that he alleged against the other; and smiled with superior humanity, as he watched the winds of the Alps drift the ashes of Jerome, and the dust of England drink the blood of King Charles.

§ XCIX. Now all this evil was, of course, entirely independent of the renewal of the study of Pagan writers. But that renewal found the faith of Christendom already weakened and divided; and therefore it was itself productive of an effect tenfold greater than could have been apprehended from it at another time. It acted first, as before noticed, in leading the attention of all men to words instead of things; for it was discovered that the language of the middle ages had been corrupt, and the primal object of every scholar became now to purify his style. To this study of words, that of forms being added, both as of matters of the first importance, half the intellect of the age was at once absorbed in the base sciences of grammar, logic, and rhetoric; studies utterly unworthy of the serious labor of men, and necessarily rendering those employed upon them incapable of high thoughts or noble emotion. Of the debasing tendency of philology, no proof is needed beyond once reading a grammarian’s notes on a great poet: logic is unnecessary for men who can reason; and about as useful to those who cannot, as a machine for forcing one foot in due succession before the other would be to a man who could not walk: while the study of rhetoric is exclusively one for men who desire to deceive or be deceived; he who has the truth at his heart need never fear the want of persuasion on his tongue, or, if he fear it, it is because the base rhetoric of dishonesty keeps the truth from being heard.

§ C. The study of these sciences, therefore, naturally made men shallow and dishonest in general; but it had a peculiarly fatal effect with respect to religion, in the view which men took of the Bible. Christ’s teaching was discovered not to be rhetorical, St. Paul’s preaching not to be logical, and the Greek of the New Testament not to be grammatical. The stern truth, the profound pathos, the impatient period, leaping from point to point and leaving the intervals for the hearer to fill, the comparatively Hebraized and unelaborate idiom, had little in them of attraction for the students of phrase and syllogism; and the chief knowledge of the age became one of the chief stumbling-blocks to its religion.