Christian symbolism: Blue
Next on our series on Christian symbolism, Mthr Melanie Clark writes on the history and significance of the Church’s use of the colour blue. Mthr Melanie is Curate of Lichfield S Michael with S Mary and Wall S John. She is an early modern historian: her PhD thesis (Selwyn College, Cambridge) was on the English Civil Wars and Restoration period in the seventeenth century.
The debate over whether colour should have a place in the Christian church is ancient, but like sounds and gestures, it has become part of our church experience. As a symbol within our churches it conveys meaning, story, value, identity, and the presence of the divine. Yet the history of colour in a religious context, particularly its symbolic meaning, has been little studied. Michel Pastoureau, professor of medieval history and an expert in Western symbology, has begun to address this with several important studies on colour’s social, artistic, and religious history, but there is still much to be understood regarding the aesthetic and liturgical use of symbolic colour in churches.
A problem encountered by historians of colour is that no colour has a universal, trans-cultural symbolic meaning. It is transitory and often elusive. A temporary social construct, imbued with meaning and value by the society in which it exists, and one which is constantly evolving depending on context.
Colour’s relative importance, popularity and meaning is also shaped by its material culture. Its rarity and the difficulty and expense of extracting it as a pigment, for example, but also how colour itself is viewed as a material substance. A question which has divided theologians and liturgists through the ages and shaped the use of colour in church symbolism is over colour’s quality and material nature: is colour substance or light, material or immaterial, earthly or divine?
Onement VI. Barnett Newman.
Once despised by the Romans as the colour of barbarians, blue is now one of the most popular colours in Europe, and the Pantone colour of the year 2020. "It's a colour that anticipates what's going to happen next," said Laurie Pressman, the vice president of the Pantone Color Institute, suggesting that blue is currently cutting edge. This trajectory is to some extent mirrored in blue’s use in churches. Now a common feature in church decoration and aesthetics, it was only in the twelfth century that blue began to be a prominent colour in the Christian church. Pastoureau goes as far as to argue that “blue was essentially absent from Christian worship during the thousand years preceding the creation of blue stained glass in the twelfth century” [1]
This essay will attempt to trace some of the historical trajectory of the meaning of blue in Christianity, and locate its place in church symbolism today.
The Virgin in Prayer. Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato.
A matter of current debate is whether blue has a place in liturgical colour schemes for church vestments and paraments. Blue is not recognised as an authorised liturgical colour by the Church of England, or associated with key festivals in the same way as white, green, red and purple/violet (the two are often viewed as interchangeable). Blue does, however, fulfil an important role as the colour associated with LLM/Licensed Lay Minister, distinguishing them from members of the clergy and helping to create identity around this important lay-ministerial role.
Although the Church of England offers guidance on the use of liturgical colours, it concedes that such guidance is “not mandatory and traditional or local use may be followed”. Blue vestments can certainly be found tucked away in many vestry cupboards, but when they are used, if at all, is in no was standardised or uniform, and thus somewhat shrouded in mystery. As will be discussed, absence of any uniformity in the use of blue, and perhaps liturgical colours more broadly, has historically long been the case.
Blue as a liturgical colour has often been associated with Sarum Blue, part of the Sarum Rite, which refers to the use of liturgical colour in mediaeval Salisbury Cathedral. Although the Sarum Rite is not officially recognised by the Church of England, since the Anglo-Catholic revival of the nineteenth century some churches have adopted the Sarum liturgical colours as an expression of Anglo-Catholicism. Sarum blue has been viewed as a penitential colour and therefore used during Advent and Lent as an alternative to purple. Yet historical evidence to support the use of Sarum blue for particular liturgical seasons, or indeed the colour code now known as the Sarum Rite, seems to be somewhat tenuous.
Percy Dearmer, the English priest and liturgist, questioned the use of the Sarum Rite in his Parson’s Handbook [2]. On the use of liturgical colour in general, he lamented the “still great confusion on the subject, and almost universal misunderstanding”. Dearmer highlighted the lack of uniformity in how liturgical colours had been used, even before the Reformation. For Dearmer, lack of evidence for any uniform liturgical code in Salisbury during the mediaeval period meant that the Sarum Rite was “really one-half made up from the fancy of nineteenth-century ritualists”. As Dearmer highlighted, it is clear from extant inventories that blue vestments were used in Salisbury Cathedral during the thirteenth century, but it is not clear when and how they were used. Other inventories from different diocese during the same period showed a considerable amount of variation. Moreover, there was no clear evidence for when and how blue was used “owing to imperfect information of the books”.
Sarum blue’s use as a symbolic liturgical colour in Advent has more recently been questioned by J. Barrington Bates [3] [4], who consulted, amongst other sources, two of Salisbury’s existing consuetudinary, or liturgical rule books, from the mediaeval period. From this evidence Bates argues that Sarum blue’s current use during Advent appears “to be based on erroneous assumptions and scholarship about the past that is more creative than comprehensive”. He suggests that during the mediaeval period decisions over which vestments were to be used for different liturgical seasons were not based on colour but on how precious the vestments were, the most precious being used on the most solemn occasions. This was certainly the case for Lichfield Cathedral in thirteenth century, which in its list for vestments during the Christmas season simply states “only the most precious”. For the medieaval period, Bates argues colour sequences in churches were “local, informal and loosely defined, at best”. He also suggests that blue may have only appeared as a substitute for purple, perhaps occurring as an accidental variant in dyeing processes. Without knowing when and how blue was used, understanding its symbolic relevance as a liturgical colour during this period is complicated and limited.
If arguments for the use of Sarum blue during the mediaeval period lack historical evidence, an understanding of blue’s symbolic significance and use during the ancient period is just as fraught with complications. There is little evidence of its meaning because it was rarely used. In the ancient world the colours which were considered the most meaningful and important were red, white and black. Because blue had little symbolic value it was not used to convey ideas or story. It was also rare and expensive. Blue as a colour pigment was difficult to extract. It came from the stone lapis lazuli which was expensive and rare and it took a great deal of effort to turn the mineral into pigment. It was only in the mediaeval period that a technique was found using soap and wax to enhance the extraction of the colour.
Using the Bible as a source of evidence for understanding the symbolism of blue during the early Christian period is complicated by problems of translation. Again the question often comes down to material culture, understandings of substance, and the difference in how cultures viewed colour as matter or light. The problem goes back to Latin translations of the Bible. For example, the Hebrew for “shining” was translated in Latin as the material colour “white” or even “red”. Hebrew words which do not denote colour but meanings such as richness, love, beauty and death are often translated in French, English and German as red. Some argue that the word tekhélet which appears in the Hebrew Bible refers to a deep shade of blue. As Pastoreau argues, however, this is problematic as the word may refer to the colour’s source, a mollusc shell, which could have produced a number of different colour dyes. Understanding what the Bible can tell us about the meaning of blue in the ancient world offers some challenging interpretive issues.
Treatise on the religious symbolism of colour became more common in the early middle ages, but blue is noticeable by its absence in these works. It is almost as if the colour did not exist. White was the dominant colour in churches because it was so charged with meaning and symbolism. White represented the glory of eternal life, purity and resurrection. This is corroborated by Bates’s argument that, according to extant evidence, white was the colour for Lent well into the fourteenth century.
From the middle ages onwards church authorities and theologians argued over the presence of colour in church and again the matter hinged on colour’s material nature. Some were hostile to colour because they viewed it as material rather than luminous in its nature. Many, however, believed that colour participated in the nature of light and was the only part of the sensory world which was both visible and immaterial. Colour banished darkness and made room for the divine. It bridged the gap between heaven and earth. For many, God was light, and if colour was light, it made the symbolism of colour extremely important, and its role in church worship and decoration essential.
Rose window. Basilica of Saint-Denis.
It was through innovation in stained glass making that blue could begin to carry meaning and symbolism. From the twelfth century blue glass began to be favoured for its luminosity and used to represent divine light and provide background colour. A new theology of light began to develop, first beginning in the late Carolingian (10th cent) period but fully developing in the twelfth, which favoured blue. Blue became the colour of heaven, and, most significantly, the Virgin Mary.
Debate over the symbolism and use of blue in worship and church decoration became a matter of heated debate as blue’s prominence rose in churches during the late Mediaeval period. The role of colour, and its material nature continued to be far from a neutral subject and divided ecclesiastical authorities. A proponent of colour was Abbot Suger who, during the 1130s and 1140s oversaw the extensive reconstruction of Saint-Denis Abbey north of Paris. He believed that colour was light and that it made space for the divine. The colour scheme as Saint-Denis gave blue a central prominence. Blue was not only used throughout the Abbey to symbolise celestial and divine light, but it was also used alongside gold to represent creation.
Madonna of the Book. Sandro Botticelli.
Blue’s symbolic association with the Virgin Mary began in the twelfth century when its popularity and social value as a colour began to increase. Mary did not always wear blue. Before the twelfth century she was almost always depicted wearing dark colours, often black, grey, green or violet, which were used to convey suffering and grief. Mary wore colour to carry meaning about her mourning for her crucified son. But by the twelfth century a luminous paler blue alone represented Mary’s mourning. The brightness of this blue connected Mary with the new theology of colour championed by clerics such as Abbot Suger, which associated blue in stained glass with divine illumination. As the symbolism of blue changed under the new theology of colour, Mary, by dressing in it, became enveloped in divine light. By being depicted in vivid blue, images of Mary were a major factor in the rise in blue’s value, popularity and meaning in mediaeval society.
The reformation saw another shift in the theology of colour and blue’s symbolic place in church worship and decoration. Colour played a role in the protestant reformers war against images and idolatry, but it was not the only contributing factor. The urge to remove colour was not the same thing as iconoclasm, and more study needs to be done on whether the symbolic meaning of colour itself, as distinct from images, played a role in the reformer’s decision to remove it. The reformers did not seek the total eradication of all colour, and some colours faired better than others. For Protestant reformers, the colour considered to be the most virtuous was black, whilst red was associated with the worst forms of sin and considered an abomination. Blue, however, escaped the vitriol of the reformers and its meaning began to convey temperance and honesty, evoking sky and spirit. It might be argued that blue’s lack of meaning and presence in liturgical colour codes during the mediaeval period, compared to colours such as red, made it less of a target for reformers and more easily adopted for meaning and symbolism after the reformation.
But what of the meaning of blue in church worship and decoration today? Although the use of blue in vestments and paraments still occurs in churches and cathedrals, its use is often the exception rather than the norm, and is based on the individual preference and tradition of the church. As a colour, blue continues to have no role in the liturgical code authorised by the church of England, and is often considered merely a substitute for purple. Pastoreau argues that blue no longer carries significant symbolic meaning in today’s society and that is why it is so popular. It has no strong associations and therefore causes no offence. But in the sacred rather than secular world, blue remains the colour of the Virgin Mary and continues to play a prominent role in church decoration. In her article, “A Blue Epiphany”, Ann Thurston [5] describes an experience which emphasises how blue continues to carry the same meaning, and story that it has since the twelfth century, particularly through its use in stained glass. Furrow recalls stepping into a small church in Tudeley and being “bathed in a pool of blue light”’. The church had several windows created by Marc Chagall and the predominant colour was blue. Just as Abbot Suger had done in the twelfth century, Chagall partnered blue with gold and used it not only to convey divine light, but also the splendour and glory of creation. The experience of blue, and the meaning and story it carried in that context, drew Thurston into ‘not merely looking at the creation of an artist, but it was as if you were taken into the very process of Creation itself’. It was the context of the church space married to the presence of the colour blue which created this ‘epiphany’.
Window at All Saints’, Tuddeley. Marc Chagall.
Despite its relative absence as an official liturgical colour, blue continues to carry important symbolic meaning in church aesthetics and decoration, which influences and shapes our church experience. Colour’s meaning may be transitory and elusive, but when grounded in a context such as sacred space, it can tell stories with the symbolism it has carried through the ages. Blue’s meaning as divine light, bridging the gab between earthly and divine, endures. Perhaps then, in terms of church symbolism, blue’s material culture is still significant, locating blue’s true symbolic significance not as matter but as light, shining through stained glass, luminous and divine, rather than earthly and material, continuing to transport us from art to religious experience.
1.M. Pastoureau, (2001). Blue: The History of a Color. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
2. P. Dearmer, (1899). The Parson’s Handbook. London, Grant Richards.
3. J. Barrington-Bates, (2003) Am I Blue? ‘Some Historical Evidence for Liturgical Colors’, Studia Liturgica 33, pp. 75-88.
4. A. Thurston, (2008). ‘A Blue Epiphany’, The Furrow 59:10, pp. 530-533.
