A few years before Ruskin presented his discussion of the grotesque in Modern Painters, volume 3, he argued that man's love of symbolism, like his instinctive delight in beauty, derives from fundamental laws of human nature that lead man back to the divine. The last volume of The Stones of Venice explains that we experience a sort of "Divine fear" when we perceive that something "is other and greater than it seems," and he speculates that God probably made such recognitions "peculiarly attractive to the human heart" to teach us "that this is true not of invented symbols merely, but of all things amidst which we live; that there is a deeper meaning within them than eye hath seen, or ear hath heard; and that the whole visible creation is a mere perishable symbol of things eternal and true" (11.182-3).
Ruskin, whose Evangelical religious heritage continued to color his thought long after he finally abandoned his childhood faith, always believed that the mind first perceives difficult truths in symbolic form. Symbolism, both pictorial and literary, thus has a basic, essential epistemological role. Ruskin here makes a point that he had learned from his Evangelical upbringing. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bible commentaries, annotated editions of the Scriptures, and sermons all encouraged the Victorian believer to think in terms of symbol and emblem, type and allegory, in large part because they urged that God had created such figures as an efficient means of conveying truth to man's limited faculties. For example, according to the great Evangelical Anglican divine William Romaine,
All our ideas of spiritual objects are comparative, taken from matter, and carried up to spirit. In our present stare we have no knowledge but what is first sensible, but what comes into the mind from the senses, and is borrowed from objects upon which they can make their observation.... Scripture knowledge is conveyed in this manner. God accommodates his instruction to our capacities: he makes use of outward and sensible objects to explain inward and spiritual: he applies the book of nature to illustrate the book of grace; thus bringing heavenly things down to the level of our understandings, and setting them (as it were) before our eyes by their natural pictures and just similitudes.
The enormously popular Baptist preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon used this accommodationist theory of figurative language, which has a long and honorable history in Western Christianity, as the basis for a theory of homiletic rhetoric and mass communication. Spurgeon, who extends the notion of parable to include other forms of symbol and biblical type, explained to his Victorian audience, "The masses never were, and, perhaps, never will be, able to receive instruction in any other way than by parabolic illustrations. He who would be a successful minister must open his mouth in parables; he who would win the hearts of the multitude must closely imitate his Master, and preach in parables that all men can understand." Pointing out that few men can create effective parables, the great preacher nonetheless reassures his congregation that the Bible both contains many and, "if it be rightly used, is suggestive of a thousand" others. Informing his listeners that he will employ one, he chooses "the parable of the ark" but immediately assures them: "While I do so you must understand that the ark was a real thing — that it really was made to float upon the waters, and carry in it Noah and his family and two of all flesh. This is a fact, not a myth. But I shall take this real fact and use it as a parable." Spurgeon then proceeds to employ the conventional typological interpretation of the ark as a divinely intended prefiguration of the church. "The ark which saved from the floods of water is a beautiful picture of Jesus Christ as the means of salvation, by whom multitudes of all flesh are preserved, and saved from perishing in the floods of eternal perdition."
As this example of Spurgeon's transforming a thing or event from biblical history into a "parable" suggests, such habits of mind derive chiefly from taking the Bible as a series of types and figures of Christ. Typological interpretations, which have as their point of departure the notion that historical facts exist as part of a divine pattern, emphasize, particularly in the Victorian period, the historicity of both type and antitype, the ark and Christ. Both have historical existence. Biblical typology supports emblematic habits of mind by convincing the believer that all facts and events have spiritual meaning. Such interpretive habits and attitudes formed an important part of the intellectual baggage of the original sages and their audience and do much to explain the sage's use of the symbolical grotesque.
Last modified 19 March 2008