Not long before his death in 1631, the Anglican poet and cleric John Donne (1572–1631) penned a series of what he called ‘Holy Sonnets’.
In the fourth of them he employed the metaphors of treason and theft to express his fear of facing the judgement of God:
Oh my black Soul now thou art summoned
By sicknesse, death’s herald, and champion;
Thou art like a pilgrim, which abroad hath done
Treason, and durst not turne to whence he is fled,
Or like a thiefe, which till death’s doome be read,
Wisheth himselfe delivered from prison;
But damn’d and hal’d to execution,
Wisheth that still he might be imprisoned.
The use of the adjective ‘black’ in this sonnet’s opening line is noteworthy. Drawing upon a long Christian tradition in which this colour has been used in relation to sinfulness, Donne sought to sum up in this one word the awful damage that sin had done to his soul. But is this coupling of moral evil and blackness biblical?
One very early instance of this traditional coupling occurs in 1 Clement, a letter that was written to the church at Corinth in the final decades of the first century after the congregation had wilfully deposed her presbyters. Noting various examples from the past where ‘ministers of the grace of God spoke through the Holy Spirit about repentance’, the author, usually regarded as a member of the Roman presbytery, urged his Corinthian audience to repent of their sin. In chapter 8 he cited a number of Old Testament texts to reinforce his exhortation: ‘Repent, O house of Israel, of your iniquity; say to the children of my people: ‘Though your sins reach from the earth to heaven, and though they be redder than scarlet and blacker than sackcloth, yet if you turn to me with your whole heart and say “Father”, I will listen to you as a holy people’. And in another place he says this: ‘… come, let us reason together, … even if your sins are as crimson, I will make them white as snow; and if they are as scarlet, I will make them white as wool’.
The second text cited here is clearly drawn from Isaiah 1:18. The source of the first citation appears to be the Jewish Apocryphon of Ezekiel, of which only a few fragments remain. Its phrase ‘though they be redder than scarlet’ is similar to a portion of the Isaiah 1:18 text cited immediately afterwards. Both citations compare sin to the reddish hues of scarlet and crimson. The Apocryphon of Ezekiel, though, also compares sinfulness to the hue of blackness, a comparison that was to become standard in Christian literature but one that is noticeably absent from the Scriptures.
‘We are Ethiopians’
Three centuries later, the North African theologian Augustine (354 – 430), influenced by this view of the colour black, spoke of the ‘blackness of sins’. And Augustine’s contemporary and correspondent, Jerome (c.347– 420), reflecting on the inclusion of black-skinned Ethiopians among the people of God, according to Psalm 87:4, noted: ‘At one time we were Ethiopians in our vices and sins. How so? Because our sins had blackened us. But afterwards we heard the words: “Wash yourselves clean!” And we said: “Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” We are Ethiopians, therefore, who have been transformed from blackness into whiteness.’
The first biblical passage cited by this text is from Isaiah 1:16, where, in the context, as noted above, the sin that is to be washed away is depicted by the hues of crimson or scarlet— not black. The second text is from David’s penitential psalm, Psalm 51:7, where again there is nary a mention of blackness.
Surely this coupling of blackness and sin played a role in the racist disparagement of African peoples in Western culture from the 16th century onwards. Would that the church had remembered that the biblical colour for sin was red, not black. John Donne, with whose problematic poem we began, knew this, for he finished that very poem this way:
Yet grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lack;
But who shall give thee that grace to beginne?
Oh make thy selfe with holy mourning black,
And red with blushing, as thou art with sinne;
Or wash thee in Christ’s blood,
which hath this might
That being red, it dies red soules to white.
