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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Letters to the Clergy on the Lord's Prayer and the Church," John Ruskin presents a profound exploration of spirituality, morality, and the interrelation between faith and practice. Written in a clear yet eloquent style, this collection of letters emerges from Ruskin's deep concern for the ethical implications of religious service during the Victorian era. His argument is interlaced with artful prose and philosophical insights, making it as much a work of literary art as a theological treatise. Engaging both the heart and intellect, Ruskin encourages clergy to re-examine their roles in embodying the teachings of the Lord's Prayer within the broader context of the Church's mission. John Ruskin, a renowned art critic and social thinker, was shaped by his experiences with the Industrial Revolution and its moral dilemmas. His passion for combining the aesthetic with the ethical drove him to illuminate the spiritual responsibilities of religious leaders. Ruskin's writings reflect his unwavering belief in the transformative power of art and faith, positing that genuine spirituality must be expressed through action and community engagement. This book is an essential read for anyone interested in the intersections of faith, ethics, and social justice. Ruskin's letters not only provoke thoughtful reflection on one's spiritual journey but also offer practical insights for contemporary clergy and laypeople alike. Dive into this seminal work and discover the timeless relevance of Ruskin's call to a more engaged and compassionate faith. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Letters to the Clergy on the Lord's Prayer and the Church
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume gathers a focused body of work by John Ruskin that addresses the relation between the Lord’s Prayer and the life of the Church. Rather than presenting a complete works or a broad miscellany, it offers a coherent dossier built around a sequence of letters and the discussions they prompted. The purpose is twofold: to preserve Ruskin’s sustained appeal to religious leaders on matters of devotion and institutional duty, and to situate that appeal within the exchanges it generated. Readers encounter a carefully framed conversation that illuminates the aims, tone, and reach of one of Ruskin’s most concentrated interventions.
The collection is anchored in authorial correspondence, supported by prefaces, editorial framing, essays, and an epilogue. Alongside Ruskin’s letters appear contemporary comments and replies from clergy and laity, allowing the epistolary core to be read in dialogue with its reception. The presence of introductory matter, reflections related to a later edition, and an appendix indicates a design attentive to context and reference. The internal arrangement also preserves sequences of numbered pieces and letters marked by place of writing, giving the whole the character of an organized exchange rather than a scattered assortment of occasional texts.
John Ruskin, a nineteenth-century English writer, art critic, and social thinker, is here seen addressing theological, ethical, and civic questions through the lens of Christian prayer and ecclesial responsibility. The letters do not attempt a systematic theology; they propose, instead, a practical and moral reading of worship and church life, directed to those charged with pastoral leadership. Emerging from Ruskin’s broader concern with truthfulness, justice, and the cultivation of character, these pages translate his critical habits—formed in art and political reflection—into a sustained appeal for integrity in religious teaching and practice within the public life of his time.
Across the sections runs a consistent inquiry: what does it mean for a church to pray credibly and act faithfully in the world? The petitions of the Lord’s Prayer serve as a touchstone for examining language, duty, and communal responsibility. Themes recur with cumulative force—reverence and reality in worship, the alignment of belief with conduct, the obligations owed to neighbors, and the moral dimensions of common life. Ruskin’s attention to everyday practices and institutional choices treats prayer not merely as devotion but as a rule of life, pressing readers to consider consequences as well as professions of faith.
Stylistically, the letters display the qualities that made Ruskin’s prose distinctive: direct address, moral earnestness, and an eye for the concrete. He writes with an urgency that can be admonitory yet remains pastoral in intent, seeking to persuade rather than to perform. His pages often move from principle to example, balancing analysis with illustration, and their cadence reflects both disciplined argument and rhetorical energy. Readers will recognize an ethical imagination shaped by attention to craft, nature, and language itself—features that, even in theological debate, ground abstract claims in observed realities and practical choices within communities and institutions.
A notable strength of this edition is its preservation of dialogue. Ruskin’s letters are set alongside responses and comments that register agreement, dissent, and requests for clarification. This arrangement does more than amplify voices; it reveals the texture of a living debate, documenting how ideas travel when addressed to practitioners rather than to a purely academic audience. Essays and remarks provide orientation and assessment, while the sequence of exchanges lets readers follow proposals through objection and reply. The result is a record of public reasoning in epistolary form, where argument is accountable to readers and correspondents alike.
Framing materials introduce the aims of the correspondence, and prefatory notes related to a subsequent edition testify to the work’s ongoing reception and revision. The inclusion of remarks pertinent to a later issue of the text shows that Ruskin revisited his appeals and that editors and readers considered them worthy of renewed circulation. Such apparatus clarifies points of emphasis, flags areas of misunderstanding, and registers developments in the conversation. Together, the opening and concluding pieces guide readers into and out of the central letters, preserving both the urgency of the original moment and the reflection that followed.
Several letters are indexed by place of origin, including locales associated with Ruskin’s life and with parish ministry in the north of England. These geographic anchors lend immediacy to the exchange, reminding readers that the concerns here are not abstract disputes but arise from particular communities and settings. The long view of national and ecclesial life is thus interleaved with specific pastoral contexts. By noting where a letter was written, the collection situates counsel and critique in relation to daily work, landscape, and parish, reinforcing the book’s emphasis on lived faith rather than disembodied theory.
The central sequence proceeds in clearly numbered steps, a feature that supports careful reading and cross-reference. This structure allows Ruskin to develop themes cumulatively and to revisit terms under discussion with increasing precision. The accompanying comments and replies are arranged to correspond with this progression, enabling readers to see how a given point is received and tested. The numbered organization also aids those who approach the volume as a study resource, making it possible to trace particular issues across letters and responses, and to discern shifts in emphasis as the dialogue matures.
As a whole, the volume occupies a distinct place in Ruskin’s body of work, complementing his writings on art, society, and education by addressing worship and ecclesial vocation directly. It shows a lay critic speaking to clergy with respect and candor, insisting that beauty, justice, and truth are inseparable from the language and practice of prayer. For students of Victorian religious culture, this is a primary document of public theology in action. For readers of Ruskin more broadly, it displays the same intellectual conscience and humane resolve that animate his better-known critiques and cultural analyses.
The mixture of letters, prefaces, commentary, and concluding reflections gives the collection a hybrid literary character. The letters bear the intimacy of personal address while functioning as public essays, designed to instruct, provoke, and reform. The responses retain a conversational tone even as they test ideas with pastoral experience. The supplementary materials supply context without closing questions prematurely. Readers should expect argument rather than narrative, exhortation rather than exposition for its own sake, and a steady return to first principles expressed in shared words of prayer. The reward is clarity about ends as well as means in church life.
The enduring value of this collection lies in its unflinching linkage of devotion to action and of language to responsibility. It invites readers to weigh how the terms of prayer form character and institutions, and how the Church’s witness depends upon the coherence of its speech and deeds. By preserving both Ruskin’s appeals and the conversation they sparked, the volume offers a reliable guide to a serious exchange whose concerns remain recognizable. It is presented not as a monument but as an instrument: a carefully assembled set of texts for thoughtful reading, discussion, and renewed attention to common good.
Author Biography
John Ruskin (1819–1900) was an English writer, art critic, and social thinker whose influence threaded through much of the Victorian era. Writing with a prophetic urgency and precise eye for natural detail, he addressed painting, architecture, political economy, education, and the ethics of labor. He championed “truth to nature” in art and insisted that aesthetic value was inseparable from moral judgment. Ruskin became the era’s most widely read critic, shaping public taste, defending innovative artists such as J. M. W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and pressing readers to connect beauty with justice. His books and lectures helped redefine what culture could demand of modern life.
Ruskin was born in London and educated first at home, then at Christ Church, Oxford, where in the late 1830s he emerged as a gifted prose stylist and won the Newdigate Prize for English verse. Early travels in Britain and on the Continent, often focused on mountains and cathedrals, trained his eye in geology and architectural form. The Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth, and the tradition of natural theology shaped his sense that close observation of nature carried moral significance. He sketched constantly, studied mineralogy, and began publishing essays that intertwined science, art, and devotion, laying the foundations for his mature critical approach.
His breakthrough came with Modern Painters, launched in the early 1840s as a spirited defense of J. M. W. Turner against hostile reviewers. Across five volumes issued over nearly two decades, Ruskin argued that great art arises from truthful perception, disciplined study of natural fact, and the artist’s moral character. He analyzed cloud structure, mountain formation, and vegetation with quasi-scientific detail, and connected these studies to compositional principles. The books provoked debate but won a wide audience, elevating landscape painting’s status and establishing him as the leading English art critic. Extensive fieldwork in the Alps and Italy underpinned his arguments.
Architecture became his parallel arena. The Seven Lamps of Architecture set out a vision in which buildings embodied moral virtues and communal memory, while The Stones of Venice celebrated Gothic as the product of free, skilled labor rather than mechanical uniformity. His analysis linked ornament to the dignity of work and criticized the dehumanizing tendencies of industrial production. Ruskin’s advocacy influenced the Gothic Revival and helped fertilize ideas later associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. He also publicly defended the young Pre-Raphaelites, encouraging attention to meticulous natural detail and sincerity of purpose at a time when academic conventions dominated taste.
From the late 1850s onward, Ruskin increasingly addressed society and economics. Unto This Last offered a searching critique of laissez‑faire doctrine, redefining wealth in terms of human well‑being and justice rather than mere accumulation. He developed these themes in public lectures and books such as Sesame and Lilies and The Crown of Wild Olive, arguing for serious reading, civic responsibility, and the nobility of useful work. Through Fors Clavigera, a long series of letters to workers, he tried to speak directly to contemporary labor. He also founded the Guild of St George to foster craftsmanship, land stewardship, and educational initiatives.
Teaching and institutional work broadened his impact. As Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford in the later nineteenth century, he helped establish systematic studio instruction and field observation as central to education. He published practical manuals, notably The Elements of Drawing and The Elements of Perspective, to guide students in seeing and rendering forms from nature. Ruskin assembled collections of prints, drawings, minerals, and plaster casts to support teaching, and promoted museums as civic instruments for elevating taste. His lectures—combining close visual analysis with ethical argument—drew large audiences and reinforced the link he made between artistic discipline and social conscience.
Ruskin’s later years were marked by intermittent illness and withdrawal from public life, yet he continued to write, most notably Praeterita, an unfinished autobiographical meditation on art, travel, and memory. He spent his final period in the English Lake District and died in 1900. His influence persisted across art history, architectural conservation, environmental awareness, and social reform. The Arts and Crafts movement drew on his defense of craft, while reformers and thinkers, including William Morris and Mahatma Gandhi, found inspiration in his economic ethics. Today scholars and readers revisit his work for its unifying vision of aesthetics, morality, and ecological attention.
Historical Context
John Ruskin’s Letters to the Clergy on the Lord’s Prayer and the Church belongs to his late-career effort to reunite beauty, faith, and justice amid the upheavals of Victorian Britain. Written chiefly from Brantwood, his home on Coniston Water (purchased 1871), and addressed to Anglican leaders and lay correspondents, the pieces gather questions of worship, social duty, education, and national character. The letters and appended exchanges extend themes from Unto This Last (1860), Fors Clavigera (1871–1884), and The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), arguing that true religion is tested by labor, charity, and honesty, and that the Lord’s Prayer prescribes national conduct as much as private devotion.
Victorian religious life was fractured yet vigorous. The Evangelical revival shaped Ruskin’s upbringing through his devout parents, John James and Margaret Ruskin, while the Oxford Movement (John Keble’s Assize Sermon, 1833; John Henry Newman’s conversion to Rome, 1845; E. B. Pusey’s scholarship) sought to recover catholic tradition within Anglicanism. Broad Church writers such as F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley advanced Christian Socialism, pressing ethical reform. Ruskin’s letters were pitched into this field of contest, where ritual, authority, and social responsibility were debated in parish magazines, diocesan synods, and Parliament, and where clergy were urged to judge wealth, work, and worship by Scripture and conscience.
Scientific and scholarly currents unsettled inherited certainties. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and T. H. Huxley’s advocacy of scientific method challenged teleological views of nature. German biblical criticism filtered into English debate, while Bishop John William Colenso’s studies of the Pentateuch (1862–1879) provoked controversy about inspiration and textual history. Ruskin resisted both crude literalism and the severing of Scripture from moral truth, urging attention to the text’s plain ethical commands. In the letters, exegetical reflection on “Thy Kingdom come” or “Give us this day our daily bread” becomes a critique of unjust trade and a summons to verifiable practice in parish and marketplace.
Liturgical context mattered. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer shaped common devotion; disputes over ritual culminated in the Public Worship Regulation Act (1874), policing Anglo-Catholic practices. Textual questions around the Lord’s Prayer—particularly the doxology “For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory”—intersected with the Revised Version of the New Testament (1881) and wider debates about authority. Ruskin treats the Prayer as civic charter rather than ornament: “Hallowed be thy Name” indicts shoddy workmanship and false advertising; “Forgive us our trespasses” condemns predatory finance. The letters and comments address clergy drawn into lawsuits, vestry quarrels, and press campaigns over the very meaning of worship.
Oxford was Ruskin’s platform for reform and his audience for admonition. Appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art in 1869, he taught until 1879 and again from 1883 to 1885, the University Tests Act (1871) having widened Oxford’s religious complexion. His Hinksey road-digging (1874–1875) enlisted undergraduates in practical labor, aligning aesthetic education with civic virtue. The discipline of seeing—cultivated in Modern Painters (1843–1860) and The Stones of Venice (1851–1853)—underwrote his call to clergy: teach people to see truth in stone, landscape, accounts, and Scripture alike. Prefaces and later editions in the collection reflect this professorial habit of revisiting, correcting, and instructing a shifting readership.
Industrial modernity is the collection’s constant backdrop. The Manchester School’s laissez-faire doctrines (Richard Cobden, John Bright), mills and railways, and the expanding imperial market produced wealth and squalor. Ruskin’s Unto This Last and Munera Pulveris (1862–1863) denounced “political economy” divorced from justice, insisting that value depends on life, not mere exchange. Fors Clavigera addressed workers after the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) and the Paris Commune (1871), calling for honest craft and communal stewardship. Letters to the clergy press the same case upon pastors and churchwardens: parish economies, tithes, and almsgiving must reflect righteousness, or prayers for daily bread become hypocrisy recited under factory smoke.
Place anchors the correspondence. From Brantwood on Coniston Water in the Lake District (then Lancashire, now Cumbria), Ruskin observed slate quarries, remnants of the Coniston copper mines, and the Furness Railway’s links to Barrow-in-Furness, whose ironworks and shipyards surged in the 1870s. Nearby Broughton-in-Furness, with its vicarage and market traditions, represented a rural parish negotiating industrial tides. Letters dated “Brantwood-on-the-Lake” or “Vicarage of Broughton-in-Furness” embed theology in local economies: fair wages, parish schools, tithe disputes, and the Sabbath. The geography is not picturesque backdrop but evidence—stones, streams, and workshops that embody the moral ecology Ruskin believed the Church was bound to defend.
Ruskin’s late publishing methods sharpen the collection’s character. George Allen, his former assistant turned publisher, printed these polemics from Orpington, Kent, fostering a semi-private, loyal readership accustomed to serial counsel, marginal notes, and appendices. The mixture of prefaces, editions, letters, and comments echoes his practice in Fors Clavigera and later books like The Bible of Amiens (from 1880). Victorian print culture—pamphlets, tracts, parish magazines, and the Times—formed a public square where clergy and laity answered back. The dialogues preserved here exemplify that reciprocity: queries from curates, objections from manufacturers, and corrections from schoolmasters refine Ruskin’s case for a prayer-shaped commonwealth.
Art and devotion interpenetrate throughout. Ruskin’s defense of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—J. E. Millais, D. G. Rossetti, W. Holman Hunt—began with his 1851 letters to the Times and matured into the moral aesthetics of Modern Painters. The Stones of Venice located truthfulness in Gothic labor, where free hands left honest marks. In the church, this meant meaningful architecture, legible glass, and reverent adornment serving the poor. The clergy letters inherit that program: liturgy is not theatre but training in accurate sight and righteous work. Pictures, pavements, and parish accounts should all tell the truth, for false beauty and false bookkeeping corrupt prayer at its source.
Europe’s wars framed Ruskin’s summons to peaceable labor. The Crimean War (1853–1856), the Indian Rebellion (1857), and above all the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) and Paris Commune shook his faith in political leadership and exposed the costs of vainglory. The Crown of Wild Olive interrogated warfare, trade, and work; the letters to clergy revisit these themes, warning that prayers for the Kingdom are nullified by militarism served as spectacle. Volunteer reviews, armaments from Barrow, and patriotic sermons tempted parishes to sanctify violence. Ruskin counters with the economy of mercy: better roads, clean water, good schools, and crafts that bind neighbors more strongly than flags.
Urban crisis pressed theological questions into policy. Cholera epidemics (1848–1849, 1853–1854, 1866) and slum conditions catalyzed sanitary reform and philanthropy. Ruskin financially supported Octavia Hill’s housing work from 1864, a signature instance of “daily bread” made concrete in rents, courtyards, and green space. The Elementary Education Act (1870) expanded schooling where the Lord’s Prayer was recited by millions of children; Ruskin insisted its petitions demanded just teaching materials, uncorrupted trades, and unshoddy goods. The collection’s appeals to clergy and school managers thus intersect with vestry boards and secular boards alike, resisting the segmentation of piety and policy in London or provincial towns.
Questions of land and property recur. Enclosure’s legacy, rural depopulation, and speculative building set the stage for Ruskin’s Guild of St George (founded 1871), which acquired small holdings and founded the St George’s Museum in Walkley, Sheffield (opened 1875) to educate artisans. By linking bread to rightful production and Sabbath to unhurried craft, Ruskin offered clergy a parish economics: church lands, glebe gardens, and cooperative workshops as catechisms in practice. Correspondence in the volume suggests both sympathy and resistance, as rectors weighed mortgage debts, tithe commutation, and factory owners’ influence. The Lord’s Prayer, Ruskin argues, is enacted or denied in such ledger lines.
Continental study enlarged Ruskin’s theology of culture. Venice and its stones, Amiens and its porches, and the Alps—lifelong classrooms since his youth—convinced him that cathedrals are social documents. The Bible of Amiens (commenced 1880) reads a French Gothic church as scriptural commentary in limestone; the letters to clergy appeal to a similar literacy at home. England’s parish churches, from Cumbria to Kent, could likewise tell truth if restored honestly, taught wisely, and used justly. Ruskin’s ecumenical respect for medieval Catholic craft coexists with an Anglican moralism: he asks English priests to retrieve fidelity in materials and meanings without theatrical excess or cynical neglect.
Personal circumstance shaped the collection’s cadence. Ruskin suffered severe mental collapses in 1878, 1882, and later years, interrupting his Oxford post and dictating rhythms of composition, revision, and republication. At Brantwood, with the help of his cousin and caretaker Joan Severn and of George Allen’s careful printing, he turned to letters and short essays—forms suited to intermittent strength and immediate controversy. Prefaces and “third editions” in the volume testify to a writer who re-enters the argument, clarifies terms, retracts heat, and corrects proofs, all while holding his readers—clergy and laity—to the plain work of bread, forgiveness, and truth-telling.
Victorian law and institutions mediated church practice. The disestablishment of the Church of Ireland (1869) and the Public Worship Regulation Act (1874) reconfigured authority; school boards (post-1870) redistributed influence over children’s religious formation. Tithe disputes and later agrarian unrest, especially in the 1880s, complicated clergy–farmer relations. Ruskin’s letters navigate these frontiers, refusing both mere legalism and anti-legal sentiment. He urges rectors, curates, and churchwardens to audit their symbols and expenditures: altar cloths purchased while laborers lack fuel betray the meanings of “Hallowed be thy Name” and “Deliver us from evil,” however lawfully the accounts pass diocesan inspection.
The readership spanned confessions and classes. Anglicans of Evangelical, High, and Broad temperaments; Nonconformists—Methodists, Baptists, Quakers; and secular reformers all participated in Victorian print debate. Missionary societies such as SPCK, temperance organizations, and parish reading rooms circulated tracts. Ruskin’s mixture of theology, economics, and art criticism crossed these lines; correspondents in the collection write from mills, parsonages, and colleges. The format of letters and comments mirrors the age’s argumentative civility and its sharpness, as railways, the penny post, and cheap paper pulled distant voices into local quarrels. In that forum, the Lord’s Prayer functioned as common language and contested constitution.
The collection’s legacy reaches into the Arts and Crafts movement and Anglican social thought. William Morris’s craft socialism, though differently grounded, shares Ruskin’s hatred of shoddy production and class contempt. Clerical radicals such as Stewart Headlam (Guild of St Matthew, 1877) and later Christian Socialists drew on similar convictions that worship demands justice. By the 1880s and 1890s—amid the Dock Strike (1889), further Reform Acts (1867, 1884), and debates over poor relief—Ruskin’s insistence that “Thy Kingdom come” specifies wages, streets, and schools gained a second hearing. The epilogue and appendix preserve this aspiration: that England’s prayers become policies, and its altars, tables of fair bread.
Synopsis (Selection)
Front Matter (Introduction, Preface, To the Third Edition)
Sets out the origin, purpose, and editorial history of the volume, framing the letters as Ruskin’s appeal to Anglican clergy for a more practical, ethically focused Christianity centered on the Lord’s Prayer, with notes on revisions and reception in later editions.
Mr. Ruskin’s Letters I–XI
A sequence of letters to a parish clergyman interpreting the clauses of the Lord’s Prayer and applying them to church life and social conduct, urging reform in teaching and practice, economic justice, truthful work, reverent worship, and care for the poor while criticizing complacency, usury, and competitive commercialism.
Essays and Comments (including ‘Foregoing Letters’)
Editorial essays, contextual notes, and contemporary remarks that summarize, elucidate, or challenge Ruskin’s arguments, drawing out scriptural references, theological stakes, and practical implications for parish administration and social engagement.
Letters from Brantwood-on-the-Lake and Vicarage of Broughton-in-Furness
Introductory and situating correspondence between Ruskin (from Brantwood) and the vicar at Broughton-in-Furness that frames the exchange, clarifies aims and editorial choices, and links broad principles to concrete parish concerns.
Letters from Clergy and Laity (Preface and Nos. 1–51)
A curated forum of responses from ministers and laypeople offering endorsement, critique, and questions on Ruskin’s proposals, with case-based discussions of worship, education, charity, temperance, tithes, economic relations, and the Church’s social mission.
Epilogue by Mr. Ruskin
Ruskin’s closing reflection on the correspondence, addressing misunderstandings, reaffirming moral and liturgical priorities, and sketching practical steps for clergy and laity to align church life with the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer.
Appendix
Supplementary materials—notes, extracts, and references—that document sources, clarify terminology, and provide supporting evidence for the arguments presented throughout the volume.
