“I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman the Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours!” I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered. “I liked white better,” I said. “White!” He sneered. “It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.” “In which case it is no longer white,” said I. “And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.” [1]
Anglican poet and pastor George Herbert (1593–1633) arranged the literary structure of his collected poems in a manner that led the reader into—The Church Porch—through—The Church—and back out of—The Church Militant—the gathered worship of the Church of England. In Clifford Davidson’s phrase, The Temple immerses one in, “the architecture of Anglican worship.”[2] Very near the middle of the substantial central section—at the thematic heart of The Church—Herbert rejoiced in the loveliness of the Anglican church over against her Roman and Reformed alternatives. Central to his recommendation was a chromatic contrast:
I joy, dear Mother, when I view
Thy perfect lineaments, and hue
Both sweet and bright.
Beauty in thee takes up her place,
And dates her letters from thy face,
When she doth write.
A fine aspect in fit array,
Neither too mean, nor yet too gay
Shows who is best.
Outlandish looks may not compare:
For all they either painted are,
Or else undrest.[3]
For Herbert, the sweet proportionality of her face, the shimmering hue of her skin, the fitness of her apparel in the fineness of its color and the modesty of its style, constitute a beauty that testifies to the theological (and especially the ecclesiological) rectitude of the institution it adorns. The compelling nature of this testimony becomes all the more apparent when it is contrasted with the painted beauty of the Roman church, arrayed to remind the reader of the harlotrous Dame Folly of Proverbs 7, and the nakedness of Genevan Calvinism which stands in need, much like the younger sister in Song of Solomon 8, of being kept safely at home until she has sufficient time to develop and mature.
Crucial to Herbert’s embrace of the British Church, then, is the link between beauty and truth. His earlier question, “is there no truth in beauty?” was a rhetorical device designed to encapsulate this self-evident relationship.[4] For Herbert, then, the morose mono-chromaticism of the Puritans—as the English heirs of the continental Reformed churches—argued as strongly against their Presbyterian (not to mention Congregational) polity as would the gawdy idolatry of Rome against papal claims to legitimacy. Beauty’s attestation to truth was both inescapable and theological.
In his Colour and Culture, however, John Gage calls attention to the ways in which the 17th century marked, “the most thoroughgoing and far-reaching changes in the European understanding of colour as a physical phenomenon.”[5] That last phrase, intended as a benign observation of scientific advance, alerts us to the fact that, even as Herbert wrote, the cultural threads binding visible beauty to spiritual truth were beginning to fray. Particularly, to highlight the aspect of beauty central to this paper, color was increasingly perceived as a natural phenomenon reduceable to its physical properties rather than a created witness to metaphysical, much less theological, realities.[6]
During the decades Herbert was writing the poems Nicholas Ferrar (1593–1637) would publish as The Temple, Puritan minister John Cotton (1585–1652) was preaching in Boston, Lincolnshire.[7] In many ways a foil for the Anglican orator—a non-conformist whose poetic efforts were in every way inferior to Herbert’s own––Cotton shared with Herbert the crucial conviction that, “the works of nature are intended and contrived of God to signify and indigitate spiritual things.”[8] Cotton contended that “there is a workmanship of God” discernable in the study of the natural world. In fact, for Cotton, nature revealed not only “the things which may be known about God,” but also “a map and shadow of the spiritual estate of the souls of men.”[9] The varied beauty of creation, including its color, constituted a theological witness to the character of the Creator and opened up a rich vein of insight for the practice of pastoral casuistry. With Herbert, therefore, Cotton considered color—whether observed in nature or recorded in Scripture—to be a fit subject for poetic meditation and pastoral (sermonic) exposition.
It is my contention in this article that this shared commitment to a theological interpretation of color provides a profitable way to explore common ground between Anglican and Puritan spirituality.[10] There was a greater degree of alignment, perhaps, than Herbert was prepared to admit in his poetry. This is not to deny the presence of meaningful ecclesiological, and especially liturgical, differences—there is a reason color was the place Herbert put down his finger to distinguish the two traditions. Nevertheless, and against all caricatures of Puritan chromophobia, it is in comparing this expression of their theological aesthetic that the extent and significance of their shared convictions becomes clear.[11] In what follows I examine three sermons that allow Cotton to showcase his theology of color, comparing each treatment with passages from Herbert’s poetry.
Washed and Made White in the Blood of the Lamb
John Cotton
Cotton’s series God’s Mercie Mixed with His Justice was preached as six sermons between 1622–1632 and first published in London in 1641. In his second sermon, aimed to comfort saints in their affliction by calling attention to God’s good design in their suffering, Cotton lingered over John’s vision in Revelation 7:9–14. The apostle’s vision included a great multitude who had emerged victorious from the waters of tribulation. Their distinguishing mark was the robes they wore, having been washed and made white in the blood of the Lamb. Both their clothing and its color held significance for Cotton.
The preacher was first sensitive to the fact that this entire congregation—doubtless including rich as well as “many poor men”—are here shown not merely wearing “garments,” but are all “set up with robes.”[12] In a social environment stratified through a series of sumptuary laws, such indiscriminate possession of “royal robes” required comment.[13] Cotton’s interpretation began by admitting the uniqueness of royal apparel. “It shows you that the servants of God that come well out of tribulations, they get more royal spirits than ever before; for robes become royal persons and princes; when robes in good earnest are put upon any, they put upon them princely majesty, a spirit of glory and royalty is put upon them.”[14]
Cotton’s next move was to invert the link society assumed between royal apparel and high status by setting up a counter-cultural and distinctly spiritual peerage. This new royal court John beholds is marked by their mindset, by their willingness to count the things of this world as “but husks.” Royalty in the kingdom of heaven requires one to “sit loose” to the things of this earth. In a series preached contemporaneously with this one, Cotton extended this point by commenting on the color, as well as the style, of royal clothing. He acknowledged the usual significance of the color “scarlet,” which was reserved for “notable” and “eminent” persons. Such persons were meant, by virtue of the uniquely splendid color of their clothing, to be set apart from common men and “seen afar off.” Their personal worth was advertised in the color and cut of their clothes.
The gospel, Cotton explained, subverts this cultural norm. It is now our sins that Scripture colors “as scarlet of a double dye, committed over and over again… and such like scarlet that will never be washed out.” The white robes of the saints in Revelation 7, therefore, testify not to their own inherent quality or worth, but to the royal virtue of their Redeemer. Though our sins be “notable, notorious sins, though eminent and seen a far off,” Cotton preached, “yet there is power in the blood of Christ to make them white as snow.”[15]
Cotton next turned to unfold the theological significance he saw in the whiteness of the robes in Revelation 7. “White,” he preached, “implies three things.”[16] In the first place, it signifies the purity of our progressive sanctification. He distinguished here between the white of Christ’s imputed righteousness, seen for example in the “bright and pure” wedding garment the Bride received in Revelation 19:8, which does not admit any need of being “washed and made white,” over against the gradual process of a believer’s progressive sanctification. The whiteness of our own believing good works often finds our graces “be-mixt and be-smeared with soul spots.” He continued, “Not only [are] soul spots and greater defilements rubbed out [by the waters of tribulation], but likewise the graces of God are resplendent and bright and clear without that mixture.”[17]
Second, “this brightness or whiteness of garments…shows their glory and excellency.”[18] Reinforcing the Christological referent from point one, Cotton argues that the excellency, or beauty, of this increasing whiteness must be measured by its likeness to Christ. Cotton calls us to consider the transfiguration as the aesthetic benchmark for the believer. There on the mountain, Christ’s “raiment was white and bright so as no colour on earth was like unto it.” No mere lack of soul-spots could be considered as constituting Christ’s spiritual brilliance and beauty. What the disciples were shown was, rather, a positive revelation of his glory.
Likewise, Cotton’s aesthetic goal for Christian discipleship is that, in a slow but similar way, “all Christians are thus washed and whitened” until their soul-spots are removed and their graces glisten. This is why Cotton identified the value and virtue of Christ’s life with the cleansing efficacy of his blood. The agent mixed into the waters of affliction and able to produce such brilliant apparel for the soul is the blood of the Lamb, who is Himself the standard of spiritual purity, and glory, and beauty.
Third, the whiteness of the robes “expresses comeliness of spirit, joyfulness of spirit.” Cotton drew this connection between whiteness of gladness from Ecclesiastes 9:10, where the Preacher parallels the exhortation to “let your garments always be white,” with the command, “and anoint your head with oil.” These three gifts—purity, glory, and joyous beauty—represent the good the saints receive from their experience in the waters of affliction.
Continuing his commentary, Cotton showed himself attentive only to different hues of whiteness (signifying our positional and our progressive sanctification) but also to key aspects of the process of whitening. He discriminated, for example, between “such washing and rubbing as gets out the filth and mire, and yet not be comely” and that washing by which a clean (but gray) garment becomes white.[19] This distinction allowed him to call attention to the cleansing agent in the waters of affliction. Affliction alone does not purify, sanctify, or beautify the believer. The agent of transformation, the soap that effects the whitening of our works, is the blood of Christ. “There is the blood of Christ in that water.”[20]
This sets up the central chromatic paradox of the passage: our scarlet sins are whitened by the blood of Christ. Cotton did not comment directly on how scarlet sins can be laundered with blood and become white. Yet his thinking elsewhere regularly connected the blood of Christ with the full virtue and power of His pure and perfect life.[21] To be submerged and scoured in the blood of Christ, in other words, was to be robed in all the benefits bought by the obedience, death, and resurrection of Jesus. In his commentary on the Song of Solomon, for example, Cotton linked “red, being the color of blood [which] expresseth the bloody death of Christ and the efficacy thereof to cleanse sin,” with that “white [which] implieth purity of holiness in the prophetical Scriptures… this setteth forth the innocency and holiness of the life of Christ.”[22] The beauty of this Christ-like mindset is granted to the saints, Cotton preached, as “the apparel of his soul.”
George Herbert
Several of these themes map well onto the poetry of George Herbert. Over a sequence of four poems, Herbert meditates on the ways in which the condition of our inner life is mirrored in the color of our clothing. He begins by considering the disruption that would follow if we, quite literally, wore our divided heart on our sleeve.
Oh what a sight were Man, if his attires
Did alter with his mind;
And like a Dolphin’s skin, his clothes combin’d
With his desires.[23]
The visibility to others of our variegated heart would mean the dissolution of community.
Surely if each one saw another’s heart,
There would be no commerce,
No sale or bargain pass, all would disperse,
And live apart.
In this sense, our polychromatic nature testifies to our need for salvation. And so it is that, for Herbert, “Christ’s pure veil” accomplishes the saving substance only foreshadowed by the multicolored veil of the Solomonic temple.[24] Our fractured spiritual condition must be purified and unified by the Lord Jesus who appears as “pure” and “white.”
Lord, mend or rather make us: one creation
Will not suffice our turn:
Except thou make us daily, we shall spurn
Our own salvation.[25]
The fourth poem in this series begins at a similar point. “Man’s Medley” pictures our heart, our joy, as a cloth woven with wools of different colors or shades. Here, however, this diversification is redemptive, with “man alone” of all God’s creation able to unite both temporal and spiritual joys in their proper order and proportion. This “art,” Herbert argues, is the key to lasting happiness.[26] And it runs a close parallel to the royal mindset Cotton described as sitting loose to the things of this world.
The difference between these treatments of our many-hued heart, from negative to redemptive, results from the work of the two intervening poems. In the first, Herbert appropriates Israel’s crossing of “the Red sea, the sea of shame” as a picture of the salvation accomplished by Christ.
But much more him I must adore,
Who of the Law’s sour juice sweet wine did make,
Ev’n God himself, being pressed for my sake.[27]
It is with Herbert’s next poem, however, that we see the new covenant promises purchased at the cross of Christ brought to bear on the human heart. This application is pictured as a laundering process very similar to Cotton’s own. As the poet brings the Lord his divided heart,
The servant instantly
Quitting the fruit, seiz’d on my heart alone,
And threw it in the font, where did fall
A stream of blood, which issu’d from the side
Of a great rock: I well remember all,
And have good cause: there it was dipt and dy’d,
And washt, and wrung: the very wringing yet
Enforceth tears. Your heart was foul, I fear.[28]
As with Cotton, Herbert’s imagery acknowledges a difference between our perfect position in Christ—“in him I am well drest”—and our ongoing need for progressive sanctification—
Profaneness in my head,
Defects and darkness in my breast…
Poor priest thus am I drest.[29]
Also like Cotton, not only is the believer’s transformation pictured here in terms of washing, dipping, dying, and wringing, but the crucial agent is the blood of Christ in the water. His heart is softened as “I bath’d it often, ev’n with holy blood.”[30] As Christ himself testified in a poem entitled “The Sacrifice” and positioned alongside “The Altar” to open the collection’s large central section:
Then with a scarlet robe they me array:
Which shows my blood to be the only way,
And cordial left to repair man’s decay.[31]
Significantly, the virtue of this healing cordial, the blood in the water of affliction, is not limited to the poet’s regeneration. It continues to work “each day, each hour, each moment of the week” as Herbert grows in heavenly-mindedness and in likeness to Christ.[32] In two poems not included among those in The Temple, Herbert continued to consider his soul “more spotted than my flesh can be.”[33] And so he continued to pray:
Lord, make thy Blood
Convert and color all the other flood
And streams of grief
That they may be
Julips and Cordials when we call on thee
For some relief.[34]
Herbert was alert to the chromatic paradox at play in the image of Christ’s blood purifying scarlet sins. As his contemporary poet John Donne, called to his own soul:
Oh, make thyself with holy mourning black,
And red with blushing, as thou art with sin;
Or wash thee in Christ’s blood, which hath this might
That being red, it dyes red souls to white.[35]
But Herbert’s chief consideration, and one shared again with Cotton, was the way Christ himself was colored both red and white, with this unique combination constituting the perfection of beauty. Herbert wrote,
Thou art my loveliness, my life, my light,
Beauty alone to me:
Thy bloody death and undeserv’d, makes Thee
Pure red and white.[36]
Later, he echoes the Bride’s declaration in Song of Solomon 5:10 that the one who is white and ruddy is (therefore) chief among ten thousand. He does this by reflecting that the superior beauty of Jesus moves any application of the biblical language to human love as beyond the pale.
Each Cloud distills thy praise, and doth forbid
Poets to turn it to another use.
Roses and Lilies speak thee; and to make
A pair of Cheeks of them, is thy abuse.[37]
It is this one, red and white, roses and lilies, whose blood purifies us as we take on the beauty of His love and life.
Red-Wine, which is the Best Wine
Cotton
Cotton’s third sermon, “God’s Mercy Manifest in His Justice” is an exposition of the opening verses of Isaiah 27, where the Lord delights over the remnant of His people as, “a vineyard of red wine.” In parentheses, Cotton appends the opinion of Proverbs 23:32 that red wine, when it gives its color in the cup, advertises itself as “the best wine.”[38] Wine here, much like the robes of Revelation 7, pictures one’s “frame of spirit.” As the categorical superlative, therefore, red wine characterizes those imbued with “the best frame of spirit.” Having introduced this symbol within the first paragraph of his sermon, “a vineyard of red wine” becomes regular short-hand for the true believers within the broader and briar-infested vineyard of the parish church.
Cotton developed the beauty of this wine-like redness by calling attention both to its process and its effects. He first draws on aspects of viticulture to describe the process by which wine becomes excellent or red, that is, “sweet and savory to God and our brethren.” Production begins with the selection of the right fruit. The spiritual analog to such fruit is a heart that “submits to [God’s] colours and brings forth fruit that he himself relisheth.” Such spiritual fruit is contrasted with “wild and unsavory…bitter grapes…carnal fruits of the flesh.”[39] Employing the idea that the geographical location of a vineyard characterizes the nature of its fruit, Cotton alerts us that the church’s divine Husbandman may choose to change our terroir. And yet, eager to enjoy our produce, God will transplant us with such skill that we will “keep our root” and, in the improved soil of our new circumstances, yield fruit that is “more sweet and savory.”[40]
The observable effects of red wine provide Cotton another avenue for comment. While Solomon’s red wine, giving off its color in the cup, cautioned temperance in Proverbs 23, all such restraint is lifted in approaching its spiritual analog. Our spiritual fruit, most generously intoxicating, will be “relished” not only by God, but will rejoice the heart of the church as “God [fills] their hearts with the generous liquor of savory grace.”[41] Cotton likens such a church to the figure of Judah in Genesis 49, who is “described by the redness of his eyes,” which Cotton takes as an allusion to “that excellent life and spirit” that is in him.[42] Likewise the church, as a kind of corporate Judah, “should not only bring forth good fruit, such as hath lawful warrant from the word, and within bounds of calling, but such as hath in it some measure of life and spirit and power of grace breathing forth in it.”[43]
Herbert
Throughout The Temple, gold is the color most often associated with excellence. In one poem, for example, the Holy Spirit is invited to “spread thy golden wings in me,” and the authors of are pictured as “pipes of gold,” apostolic aqueducts bringing “that cordial water to our ground.”[44] In “The Elixir,” Herbert identifies the Reformation erasure of the sacred-secular divide as the philosopher’s stone, having the power to color even the mundane tasks of life in a golden hue.
Teach me, my God and King,
In all things thee to see,
And what I do in anything,
To do it all for thee…
All may of thee partake:
Nothing can be so mean,
Which with his tincture (for thy sake)
Will not grow bright and clean…
This is the famous stone
That turneth all to gold.[45]
Yet gold represented a need for caution in Herbert’s poetry as often as excellence. The gold and glory of Solomon’s temple was “not Thy aim” and so “is not so dear to Thee as one good groan.”[46] Further, it is souls “made of earthly mold” that “love gold.”[47] And Herbert ends his collection with the admission that “gold and grace did never yet agree.”[48] While these last references speak more to greed than merely a golden hue, they introduce an ambivalence into Herbert’s use of the color.
This ambivalence is not present with the redness of wine linked, as it often was in Herbert, with the efficacious life and bloody death of Christ. This red wine was often described as “fair,” “bright,” and of a “surpassing” hue. To take one example from Herbert’s meditation on the crucifixion, he invites:
Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike
Did set abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.[49]
The excellence—“sweet and most divine”—of the red wine of Christ’s blood makes an oblique appearance in the image of his side “set abroach” by the lance; a parallel between Christ’s body and a wine bottle pierced and overflowing. The imagery intensifies when we recognize that the central metaphor of the poem is derived from Isaiah 63:1–3, the reading for Epistle appointed for the Monday before Easter in the BCP, “What is he this that cometh from God…Wherefore is thy clothing red, and thy raiment like his that treadeth in the wine press?” This reading is enforced by the structure of the poem itself, which is in the shape of a (wine) press.
Reading Red in the Face of the Sky
John Cotton
The vineyard of red wine pictured in Isaiah 27 was not undisturbed. It was encircled by Leviathan from without (vss. 1-2), and it was antagonized by briars and thorns from within (vs. 4). Cotton identified this latter group as hypocrites, “such as undermine the peace and welfare of the church.”[50] His final three sermons in the series, all drawn from Jesus’ warning in Matthew 16:1-3, share a focus on identifying hypocrisy and rooting it out of the church. Christ’s rebuke pictures the Jewish leaders as being “weather-wise” yet remaining ignorant with regard to the greater and much clearer matter of “the estate of their own souls.”[51]
Jesus exposes this hypocrisy with a double reference to the color red; a red sky in the evening forecasting fair weather but a red sky in the morning foreshadowing a storm. Cotton observes that experience often supports this pattern and then takes it upon himself to sketch a rudimentary meteorology to explain why it is so:
The best reason given that I meet with in this case is this: the brightness of the clouds in the evening is a sign, they say, of the rarity or thinness of the air in which these clouds are, and is thoroughly pierced by the beams of the sun, and easily shed or driven away, and so the matter of foul weather is removed… And so for a reason of the other… if the morning is red and lowring…it is a sign there is thicker matter in the cloud than the sun beams can readily pierce through…and drive those clouds away…and in the end [the clouds] will burst forth into wind and rain that day.[52]
Cotton locates the difference between these two reds in their relationship to the light. The first red, in the evening, is “bright” and “thin” and so a sign of clouds that have been “thoroughly pierced” by the sun’s rays. This luminous red is a positive sign, not for its own sake but in its promise that an unobstructed sunrise is in store. By way of contrast, the early-morning red is foreboding because it remains “thick” and “lowring” and proves impenetrable by sun. This dull red is cause for concern because it is indicative of resistance to illumination.
“God having usually made this world to be a map and shadow of the spiritual estate of the souls of men,” Cotton is now able to develop a spiritual meteorology based on this contrast between airy and thick, translucent and opaque.[53] We may know, for example, that we are in a season of receiving grace, “if God has been pleased to vouchsafe to any Christian heart a blushing redness, a bright redness for countenance.”[54] Drawing on the connection in Ezra 9 and 10 between the prophet blushing with shame over sin and the divine promise of hope he receives in return, Cotton assures his congregation that, “there is hope of Reformation when God gives his people hearts to blush for shame for all the evils they have done in his sight.”[55]
This does not preclude the heart of many hypocrites from remaining “thick and massive and heavy” toward Christ. Cotton sees such a case in the rich young ruler of Mark’s gospel, who, in the morning of his life, was invited to sell all and follow after Jesus. Jesus discerns, “a blush of colour of virtue in him, and had he come on and been a bright cloud, and had been thoroughly pierced and enflamed with the beams of Christ’s love, he had had fair weather in this world and in another.” Instead, “there was too much thickness in his heart” and he went away “sad,” which, Cotton teaches, is the same word Jesus uses here of the “lowring” clouds.[56]
Herbert
Herbert regularly deployed the idea of translucence, or how the colors of our heart are pierced and enflamed with divine light, as the tell-tale mark of spiritual health and maturity. He pictured the holiness of God, for example, as “all brightness, perfect purity” such that “the sun holds down his head for shame.”[57] These “bright beams” bring life, and yet Herbert recognizes that our hearts often tend toward coldness. Our sin, or loss of spiritual comfort, “thickens” our hearts like “an Egyptian night” as “my lust hath still sow’d fig leaves to exclude thy light.”[58] When that happens, the Spirit’s enlivening breath cools as it rises and so condenses into a dark cloud, falling back toward the earth.
As a young exhalation, newly waking,
Scorns his first bed of dirt, and means the sky;
But cooling by the way, grows pursie [swollen] and slow,
And set’ling to a cloud, doth live and die
In that dark state of tears: to all, that so
Show me, and set me, I have one reply,
Which they that know the rest, know more than I.[59]
Herbert recognizes a similar dullness creeping into his life through sickness and the approach of old age.
The harbingers are come. See, see their mark;
White is their color, and behold my head.
But must they have my brain? Must they dispark
Those sparkling notions, where therein where bred?
Must dullness turn me to a clod?
Yet have they left me, Thou art still my God.[60]
“Yet…thou art still my God.” Whether our dullness and heaviness are caused by sickness or by sin, the faith Herbert articulates here—clinging to God in the loss of all else—is key to our renewal. Faith admits that we have no light of our own but need an imputed light. Further, finding the source of this light in Christ is pictured as hanging the sun in our sky.
When creatures had no real light
Inherent in them, thou didst make the sun
Impute a lustre, and allow them bright;
And in this show, what Christ hath done.
That which before was darken’d clean
With bushy groves, pricking the looker’s eye,
Vanisht away, when Faith did change the scene:
And then appear’d a glorious sky.[61]
This scene-changing, light-admitting faith operates most often for Herbert in the gathered worship of the church, particularly in the preaching of the word. In a poem entitled, “The Windows,” he positions the life and doctrine of the preacher as the aperture through which divine light enlivens the people of God.[62]
Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?
He is a brittle crazy [weak] glass:
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
This glorious and transcendent place,
To be a window, through thy grace.
But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story, [to fix colors by heating after painting]
Making thy life to shine within
The holy Preacher’s; then the light and glory
More rev’rend grows, and more doth win:
Which else shows wat’rish, bleak, and thin.
Doctrine and life, colors and light, in one
When they combine and mingle, bring
A strong regard and awe: but speech alone
Doth vanish like a flaring thing,
And in the ear, not conscience ring.[63]
Conclusion
My aim in this article has been to suggest that, for all their very real ecclesiological differences, Anglican poet George Herbert and Congregationalist preacher John Cotton shared a remarkable amount of aesthetic overlap, not least in their commitment to theologically interpret the colors they encountered in nature and in Scripture. In Cotton’s words, God revealed his own character in the colors of his creation, as well as making “this world to be a map and shadow of the spiritual estate of the souls of men.” Herbert made a similar point poetically, imagining nature arrayed in the robes Christ set aside at his incarnation.
Hast thou not heard that my Lord JESUS di’d?
Then let me tell thee a strange story.
The God of power, as he did ride
In his majestic robes of glory,
Resolv’d to light; and so one day
He did descend, undressing all the way.
The stars his tire of light and rings obtain’d,
The cloud his bow, the fire his spear,
The sky his azure mantle gain’d.
And when they ask’d, what he would wear;
He smil’d and said as he did go,
He had new clothes amaking here below.[64]
This commitment takes on increased significance when it is set alongside the increasing cultural propensity to secularize color as a physical phenomenon.
I conclude with several summary observations regarding the common theological aesthetic embraced by both Cotton and Herbert. First, both men are discriminating viewers of the colors around them. They identify gradations within the spectrum of a single color and are familiar with the various processes by which these different levels of purity, in the case of whiteness, can be achieved. They speak of “kinds” both of washing and of resultant whiteness. Second, while they reference a fairly broad palette (including red, white, gold, green, and black), their interest in color fixes as much on luminosity as it does on hue. The central contrast in Cotton, for example, is between the soul-spots that cling to us as we are pressed into the filthy mire, and the brilliant whiteness—“shin[ing] white and bright and clearly white, full of purity and brightness”—of our clean apparel as we are drawn out.[65] This luminosity (white as light rather than a hue distinct from red or green) is the feature of our apparel in which both Cotton and Herbert locate beauty. This beauty, as a third observation, is itself defined by increasing likeness to the spiritual appearance of Christ. We become beautiful as we are irradiated by his beauty, as our character becomes more responsive to and reflective of his. Finally, whether Cotton and Herbert chose to reference a color, and the meaning they assigned to it, is controlled by the text of Scripture itself rather than a pre-set list of associations.[66] The meaning they make of biblical colors, in other words, is not drawn from the church (i.e. the green or purple of liturgical seasons) or the crown (i.e. the red and white of the Tudor roses), but is drawn from the text. They were thus well positioned to resist early Enlightenment pressure to make color in Scripture a merely natural phenomenon. Future study should broaden the scope of individuals to consider to include contemporaries of Cotton and Herbert such as the “reforming conformist” Richard Sibbes, the Congregationalist Edward Taylor, and the Anglican John Donne.[67]
Nathan Tarr is Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology and Doctor of Ministry Program Director at Phoenix Seminary.
*Image Credit: Pexels
