by John Harvey
The Bible recurs many times to the trope of being washed ‘whiter than snow’. ‘Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean’, says Psalm 51; ‘Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.’ The colour to be washed off is again red, since the Psalmist also says ‘Deliver me from bloodshed.’ The red of sin is not however always that of blood: there are other sins than bloodshed, and they too may be scarlet or crimson. ‘Though your sins are like scarlet,’ says Isaiah, ‘they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool’ (1:18). A sin that is scarlet or crimson sounds more in the domain of forbidden pleasure – the more lurid for the prohibition – than that of forbidden violence, but the linkage with blood is not forgotten. On the contrary, it is reinforced by the further equation of blood with red wine, and red wine with both drunkenness and illicit sex. In Revelation ‘the great harlot’ sits on a scarlet beast and is arrayed in purple and scarlet; the inhabitants of the earth are ‘drunk with the wine of her fornication’, while she herself (she holds a golden cup) is ‘drunk with the blood of the saints’ (17:2–6). The image of red stains runs through the Bible, now of sin, now of wine, now of blood, in changing equations. ‘I have trodden the winepress alone; from the nations no one was with me’, Isaiah says again. ‘I trod them down in my wrath; their blood spattered my garments, and I stained all my clothing’ (63:2–4).
If sin lives in a red triad of bloodshed, drunkenness and crimson fornication, one might ask how sin came also to be black. This change came especially with Christianity, through Christianity’s growing equation of sin with death. For if sin means death, or the death of the soul, and death itself is the result of sin – brought into the world by our first parents’ sin – then sin will deserve to take death’s colour. And this insistence on the identity of sin with death is of the New Testament. The Church later drew a distinction between venial and mortal sin, but that distinction is already made in the First Epistle of John, ‘There is a sin unto death’ (5:17). Again the doctrine of Original Sin, bringing death into the world, was later elaborated by the Church, but had been initiated in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, ‘as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, so death passed onto all men, for all have sinned’ (5:12). Jesus Himself did not preach that sin was death – an idea that seems at odds with his emphasis on forgiveness, and on the importance of simply stopping, so that one ‘sins no more’. But as Christian doctrine was formalized, so the equation of sin with death was consolidated, and with it came an emphasis on the blackness of sin which is not found in the Old Testament. Near the turn of the fourth century CE St Augustine speaks of ‘nigritudo peccatorum’ – the blackness of sins – and St Jerome of ‘nigredinem vel varietatem peccatorum’ – the blackness and variety of sins. The emphasis on the blackness of sin continues through the many centuries of Christian faith. Charles Spurgeon in the nineteenth century preached in his Tabernacle that ‘spiritually we are blind . . . unable to behold the blackness of sin’. It is through the Christian emphasis on the blackness of sin that the large abstract concept of ‘blackness’ developed, which has come in our time to be grand, vague and portentous, combining suggestions of despair, evil and the infinite. The ancient world had not known ‘blackness’ in that sense.12
Spurgeon’s reference to a blackness that we cannot see is apt, for the colour of sin would have to be called a mental colour, a head-colour. Whether sin is black or red – even scarlet or crimson – we do not see it with our retinas. Sin’s colour exists in inner space, in that mental domain where sights, words and thoughts overlap. In this space one will ‘see’ colour, even when no colour is mentioned: if someone says, ‘Think of a London bus’, one has an impression of scarlet, whatever the reason for mentioning the bus. When William Blake says, in ‘The Sick Rose’, that the invisible worm ‘has found out thy bed of crimson joy’, again we see red (and so know that he is speaking of a red, not a white, rose), though he is thinking mainly of the luridness of sex in secrecy – that is, of exhilarating sinfulness – and not of bloodstained sheets. But though in a sense we see these head-colours – even with an impression of glare or vividness – their optics obey different rules from those of actual sight. These colours do not, for instance, cancel each other, or mix to make a composite colour. On the contrary, they coexist, and in the same location. Sin did not cease to be red when it became also black. Through the centuries of Christian denunciation of pleasure one would often have to say that sin is not the less luridly red for being black, and is not the less black for being often blood-red.
Though the stain of sin, whether red or black, is not a stain that our retinas see, the idea that sin was a black stain on our being inevitably had a consequence for the people who actually are, visibly, black. The curse fell especially on Ethiopians. The ancient world did not have a problem with skin colour: it simply understood that the further south one’s homeland was, the darker one’s skin would be burned by the sun. But for Christian preachers, searching for images, examples and metaphors, the temptation was irresistible, and the ‘Ethiopian’ became at once the image and the demonstration of sinfulness. For the Ethiopian was black from the curse laid on Ham, a divine punishment laid on sin, and this curse was equated with the blackness of sin, though all Genesis says is that Ham’s descendants will always be servants (9:25).
Nor does the Christian back-projection of blackness stop at Ham, or Cain, or indeed Adam, since it followed that if evil and sin were black, then the Devil and his devils were also black, and had been since their own Fall. The Epistle of Barnabas of the fourth century CE refers to the Devil as ‘the Black One’, and the lesser devils who figure in Church history will often be called ‘a black demon’, as though their colour were taken for granted. In a lively engraving to the Life of St Benedict, Benedict scourges a monk who is being literally led astray by a small, impish demon, who is black (illus. 20). In pictures the Devil is not always black: he and his minions may be green, or red, or have a blotched skin resembling the sores of the plague. But often also the Devil is shown as black, in images that have a further cruel corollary for Ethiopians. For not only were Ethiopians thought black from ancient sinfulness – as descendants of Ham – they also provided a standard comparison when describing the Devil. In the apocryphal Acts of Bartholomew, of the third century, a demon who has hidden in a temple is brought to light, and is ‘like an Ethiopian, black as soot’. In an early stage of the temptations of St Antony, around the year 300, the Devil appears to Antony ‘as a black boy’. A fellow desert saint who had visited Antony, St Macarius the Younger, saw demons ‘like foul Ethiops’ flying round a group of monks. In the fourth-century Conferences of St John Cassian the comparison is regular and abusive too: the Devil appears to Abbot John of Lycon ‘in the shape of a filthy Ethiopian’; Abbot Apollos sees a young monk tormented by a devil in the form of ‘a filthy Ethiopian . . . aiming fiery darts at him’; and an esteemed elder sees that a young monk breaking stones is assisted by ‘a certain Ethiopian’ whom he recognizes as the Devil. The association of devils and devilry with Ethiopians was to continue for a thousand years, and when the medieval tradition of illuminated manuscripts developed it became a frequent practice, from the thirteenth century on, to represent both demons, and the torturers and executioners of Christ and Christian saints, as men with black skins and negroid features.13 In Duccio di Buoninsegna’s painting of the temptation of Christ on the mountain-top, the Devil being dismissed by Christ looks (except for the wings) like an elderly, naked black African man (illus. 21).
20 Sébastien Leclerc, ‘St Benedict scourging a monk who is being led astray by a black demon’, etching from the Vita et miracula sanctissimi patris Benedicti (1658).
21 Duccio di Buoninsegna, The Temptation of Christ on the Mountain, 1308–11, tempera and gold on wood.
It hardly needs to be said that the denigration of Ethiopians was not the purpose of Christ, or of his first Apostles. The several Christian creeds said that Christ died for all men, an
d the Acts of the Apostles record how Philip the Evangelist ‘preached Jesus’ to ‘a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians’ (8:27–35). The Ethiopian invites Philip into his chariot, and when they come to a body of water he asks to be baptized, ‘and they went down both into the water, both Philip and the eunuch; and he baptized him’ (8:38). Augustine, too, said that Christianity was to embrace ‘the Ethiopians who lived at the ends of the earth’. Ethiopia had one of the most ancient of the Christian churches.
It was nonetheless difficult for the early Christian teachers to negotiate such a text as the Song of Songs. ‘I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon’ (1:5) – the ‘but’, it should be said, comes from the Latin text, ‘nigra sum sed formosa’. The early Church Father Origen, at the turn of the second century, touched on the racial question lightly, even charmingly: ‘If you repent, your soul will be “black” because of your former sins, but because of your penitence your soul will have something of what I may call an Ethiopian beauty.’14 Origen also said it made no difference whether one was born among Hebrews, Greeks, Ethiopians or Scythians, for God created all men equal and alike. In the following centuries, however, the prejudicial weight of Christian blackness grew, and for St Bernard of Clairvaux, writing in the twelfth century, the light poise of Origen was unavailable. When Bernard comes to blackness, he begins a mighty labour of exoneration and compensation. ‘It is better that one be blackened for the sake of all “in the likeness of sinful flesh”, than for the whole of mankind to be lost by the blackness of sin.’ It is clear from the phrasing here that he is working towards a comparison of the Bride of the Song with Christ, and he goes beyond traditional iconography – and beyond probability – when he says that Christ on the cross became visibly black. ‘What did the eyes of the beholders see but a man deformed and black, his hands splayed out on the cross as he hung between two criminals?’ One would think that if Christ takes on our blackness, then blackness is ennobled. But black for Bernard is still ‘the abject hue that indicates infirmity’. The Bride will not be black in Heaven, for Bernard’s black Christ says, of his life after death, ‘But shall I still be black? God forbid! Your beloved will be fair and ruddy, strikingly beautiful, surrounded by roses and lilies of the valley.’15
Bernard honours the Bride because, in her blackness, she anticipates Christ. He is clearly emancipated from the gross identification of Ethiopians with sin. Nor does he, as his sermon proceeds, insist that blackness must signify sin. Rather he moves, by subtle steps, through an ascent among more sacred blacknesses. ‘There is another blackness’, he says, that of enduring penance in sorrow for one’s sin. Then, ‘there is also the blackness of compassion, when you condole with a brother [whose] trouble fills you with gloom’. Again, ‘there is the blackness of persecution, to be regarded as a most noble adornment.’ This brings him to a further black which had always perhaps been his destination – the black of church vestments – which allows the Bride to be identified with the named Bride of Christ, the Church. ‘The Church glories especially in . . . this dark covering from the curtains of her Bridegroom.’ The black robes of monks and priests are the black curtains of Solomon’s temple, and in the celebration of a marriage at once material and spiritual, the Church is identified with Solomon’s Ethiopian beloved. Having come so far, the sermon ecstatically soars to the blood-red black of breathless passion.
To be discolored by the sun may also mean to be on fire . . . Christ the Sun of justice had made me swarthy in colour, because I am faint with love of him. This languor . . . makes the soul swoon with desire . . . Why do you term swarthy one who yields only to the sun in loveliness?
Given Bernard’s eloquence, it is not surprising that his celebration of the Song of Songs is often cited in discussions of the teasing ‘Black Madonnas’ that can be found in some medieval European churches, some of which may date back to the thirteenth century. It is hard to make a true general statement as to how far these very ancient images of the Virgin, which often are of wood, are black from exposure to fire, dirt, damp, candle smoke or other damages of time – or from the addition, at some date, of pigment. Their colour is not always as black as soot, though they can be of a deeply dark brown. In the church at Altötting in Bavaria, the odd blackness of the small wooden figure is set off and emphasized by a vast, glittering glory of gilded church ornament – seen here, appropriately, through the shimmering tinsel of a Christmas tree (illus. 18). But no medieval evidence survives of a commission to make or purchase a Black Madonna, nor is there substantial reason to associate the Black Madonnas with Isis or other old, dark goddesses, as is sometimes done. It is perhaps best simply to record that the Black Madonnas are not new: they have long been called ‘black’, and their blackness has been no obstacle to their veneration. On the contrary, the blackness has, if anything, added to the sense of their sacred mystery, and to their reputation for assisting miracles.
To return to St Bernard, though he alludes to black vestments, he himself, as a Cistercian, would have worn white – robes whose paradisal whiteness he might have associated with lilies of the valley, a flower which evidently, like the rose and the palm, grows in heaven as on earth. It was other orders, such as the Benedictines, and their reformed brethren the Cluniac monks, who wore black – the Benedictines having done so since the fifth century. But Cistercians too wore a black scapular – a kind of black pinafore – over their white robes, in recognition of the Benedictine origin of their order. By St Bernard’s time, moreover, black was established as a liturgical colour, to be worn during Advent, Lent and on days of affliction; white was worn for Christmas, Easter, the feast of the Conversion of St Paul and the consecration of bishops.16
The founders of religious orders have seldom specified dress colours. Nor did St Benedict require the brethren to wear black. But one duty of the monk was to mourn, both for the killing of Christ and for the sinfulness of man, and to seek atonement for human evil. Early monasticism moved towards black, the traditional colour of mourning and penitence, and by the end of the first millennium different styles of black habit were widely adopted by the Roman, the Coptic and the Orthodox churches. No single fixed meaning for the colour black was instituted by the Christian church, but the values of colours were discussed among the communities; some orders were to wear brown or grey. In an exchange of letters, St Bernard himself, a white monk in a black scapular, debated colours with Peter the Venerable, a black monk of the Cluniac order. Peter and St Bernard agreed that white was fit for the joy of church festivals, while black was the colour of grief, humility and abject penitence, and so more suitable – Peter urged – for everday wear by contrite Christians.17
The etching by Alphonse Legros of a monastic refectory was made in the nineteenth century, but shows the life of the black habit as it had existed for a millennium (illus. 22). The season may be Lent, since the sole dish on the table carries a fish; the nosegay in its small vase may be Canterbury bells, which symbolize faith. One monk prays, or says grace before eating. The monk next to him claws his stomach, perhaps from the pangs of fasting, though he could be sunk in religious melancholy. With his black eye sockets and hairless tonsure he resembles a skull, a memento mori for his brothers. His neighbours, however, are talking calmly, perhaps of divinity or monastery gossip. The standing monk, whose turn it is to serve, is not over-interested, while the monk with his back to us reads from a Bible or a breviary. Their austere quarters and simple fare and furniture are more than clear. An oil lamp flares in the draught near a Christus, whose face is sunk in shadow.
Beneath the monk’s robe, of black or dyed wool, a second black garment was sometimes worn, not of sheeps’ wool but of goat-hair. In the Old Testament both prophets and people put on sackcloth and lie in ashes when consumed in lamentation; and sackcloth was made from black goat-hair. In the Book of Revelation, when the sixth seal is opened, ‘the sun became black as sackcloth of hair’ (
6:12). Under the name cilicium (later ‘cilice’), from Cicilia in Asia Minor where black goat-hair was plentiful, the hair shirt quickly found a place in early Christian asceticism. As St Jerome recorded affectionately, when the young St Hilarion entered the desert waste near Gaza, only fifteen years old and a smooth-cheeked, thin and delicate youth, he wore nothing but a shirt of sackcloth beneath a cloak of animal skin. As St Jerome knew from his own hair shirt, sackcloth caused constant pain and abrasion. Never shown and seldom laundered, the true black dress of remorse and atonement, it might on death be revealed, its black weave clotted with dirt and dried blood, and possibly crawling with vermin, like the hair shirt found on the body of Thomas à Becket.18