Section 3, Chapter 8, of 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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The close of "The Veins of Wealth" suggests that if children are wealth, the aim of a true economy is not only to share but also to produce and that a system of monetary exchange is wholly distinguishable from a system of production (even though Ruskin is unclear about the relationship between production and "mere" exchange). The first principle, based on scarcity, permits one person's gain only at another person's expense, but if wealth is a growing thing, the rules change -- the economy becomes dynamic rather than static, and its components (money, wealth, affection, justice) circulate through four dimensions, nourishing and generating the ultimate product, which is life. Ruskin's conception of justice is similarly nourishing and generative.
"Qui Judicatis Terram" varies the structure of the previous essays by opening not with an attack on the false economy but with maxims of the true. The break in rhythm suggests that Ruskin has built enough of his argument to let the biblical message be heard in its proper context. But he surrounds his scriptural text with heavy irony: Solomon he describes anonymously as "a Jew merchant" reputed for "practical sagacity" whose writings "have fallen into disrepute, being opposed in every particular to the spirit of modern commerce," yet which may "interest the reader by their novelty" (XVII, 57). By converting Proverbs into an economic treatise and Solomon into a successful capitalist, Ruskin reveals the Scriptures as the paradigm of his own moral science while sharpening the opposition between religious precept and economic practice into a kind of battle of books. For most readers this battle is the least successful section of Unto This Last, since Ruskin is unable to avoid after all the appearance of turning from hard logic to self-righteous prescription. Ruskin's aim and design are nevertheless precise and deliberate: by integrating biblical imagery with his own metaphorical economics, he moves beyond metaphor to myth.
Justice is first of all moral law ("A fair day's work for a fair day's pay" [208/209] is a central example); second, it is a power of generating and increasing wealth. Ruskin's practical point is that if a workman is paid more than the minimum the market can bear, the workman can hire someone else to work for him with the surplus he has earned; the person hired can hire someone else, and so forth. The example is not convincing, yet the conception behind it -- that the money supply is not a fixed quantity but a volume that fluctuates according to its use-is important and further permits Ruskin to view the employer as a kind of governor who "legislates" through his bestowals, not as a capitalist who simply hoards. This legislation, the principle of which we have already seen in Ruskin's art economy, stands against the laissez-faire belief that market forces are uncontrollable and subject to their own laws only:
The waters of the world go where they are required.... No human laws can withstand its flow. They can only guide it: but this, the leading trench and limiting mound can do so thoroughly, that it shall become water of life -- the riches of the hand of wisdom; or, on the contrary, by leaving it to its own lawless flow, they may make it, what it has been too often, the last and deadliest of national plagues: water of Marah -- the water which feeds the roots of all evil. [XV{I, 60-61]
The biblical allusions of this passage form a meditation on Exodus -- appropriately, because the structure of that book resembles the typological structure of Unto This Last, and also because Moses as lawgiver is also, by divine favor, the nourisher of his people. (By his various miraculous conversions -- the rock that yields water, the almond rod that flowers, the dead land that provides manna, the bitter waters of Marah that turn sweet -- Moses shows what any employer can do by the uses of wealth.) Wisdom, which we have encountered before in Ruskin, also becomes a form of nourishment ("the water of life," "the riches of the hand of wisdom"). (The imagery and meaning of Unto This Last comes closest here to The King of the Golden River, particularly in the sudden appearance halfway through each book of the wise figure capable of turning the dry land into abundance and revealing the true relationships between gold and life.)
In fact Ruskin apotheosizes Solomon by elevating him, so to speak, from an obscure "Jew merchant" to the type of wisdom by calling up certain verses from the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon and associating them with a passage in Dante. The light, Solomon wrote, is the "sun of justice," which shall rise with healing in its wings and must be accompanied by holiness, that is, "helpfulness" (XVII, 59-60). In the wake of this quotation Ruskin opposes the ignoble modern science to the divine law of prudence, which is also "jurisprudence":
Which prudence is indeed of no mean order, holding itself, as it were, high in the air of heaven, and gazing for ever on the light of the sun of [209/210] justice; hence the souls which have excelled in it are represented by Dante as stars forming in heaven for ever the figure of the eye of an eagle; they having been in life the discerners of light from darkness; or to the whole human race, as the light of the body, which is the eye; while those souls which form the wings of the bird (giving power and dominion to justice, "healing in its wings") trace also in light the inscription in heaven: "DILIGITEJUSTITIAM QUI JUDICATIS TERRAM."XVII, 62]
Justice and holiness, traditionally conceived, rationalize the Blakean tyranny of king and priest, but Ruskin transvalues these values, so to speak, by redefinition, combining "holiness" with "helpfulness" and rex (ruling power) with lex (judging or measuring power) (XVII, 59n), so that government becomes a matter of helping and distributing. The Holy (Helpful) Ghost would be the type of both these virtues, and indeed, by linking the sun of justice, rising with healing in its wings, with Dante's eagle, Ruskin in effect converts the eagle of empire into a dove -- a symbol, like Dante's, of the temporal and spiritual power, although since economics is at once a moral science and the provision of material benefits, Ruskin's image of the social body is really a joining of the nobly animal with the nobly spiritual. All the virtues, we might say, are materialized and all physical satisfactions spiritualized. The rulers are to the nation as the eye of reason is to the body, but Ruskin's republic is once again a physical entity as well- -- Solomon as preacher and provider merges with the Platonic philosopher-king -- and in a certain sense also a democratic entity. For justice is embodied not in one man only but in all men of goodwill: "Which judging or doing Judgment in the earth is, according to their capacity and position, required not of judges only, nor of rulers only, but of all men" (XVII, 63). Both these mergings-the body of society with the spirit and the ruler of society with the citizen --are captured by Ruskin's image of the sun of heaven incorporated into the body as the light of the eye, so that this symbol, like the darkening glass in Modern Painters V, becomes the emblem of a secular faith. In these pages, then, Ruskin comes as close as any writer is likely to come to a poetry of economics -- not at this point a doctrine but a reordering of thought and feeling bearing roughly the same relationship to the welfare state that Prometheus Unbound bears to radical republicanism. Only through myth can a new heroic virtue be invented, in this case a secular version of the love that for Dante moves the sun and other stars. Ruskin's ideal ruler incidentally represents a fusion of his own identity with his father's, since the ideal merchant merges into the ideal preacher, a dispenser of wisdom and wealth. As Ruskin attacks the false economists in order to become a true one himself, he also absorbs the role of merchant into the role of writer. But what kind of writer Ruskin has become depends on the [210/211] fashioning of a metaphorical language that is both legislative and prophetic, since it is capable of forming "before unapprehended relations of thought." In his final essay he brings to a climax this prophetic use of language by first of all attacking the language of the false science.
Last modified December 2000