Man’s Polluting Sin

Abstract

When Bishop Joseph Hall sought a visual symbol for the waywardness of sinful man, he found it in the image of a woman with a ‘loose lock erring wantonly over her shoulders’.¹ It was an apt choice: loose, erring, wantonly, do double duty as indicators of spatial position and moral status. The image is particularly effective because the abstraction it seeks to figure forth is contained in the physical representation; the response of the auditor is made in terms of the physical: he sees or imagines a lock of hair moving independently of an ordered configuration to which it nominally belongs; the lock ‘strays’ from the ‘path’ assigned to it; it is wayward. No translation is necessary; one need not allegorize the icon to extract from it the abstraction; comprehension is instantaneous, assured by the innumerable associations of female hair with seduction, and by a habit of mind which sees moral meaning in direction. Hall is hardly original. Indeed the success of the presentation depends on the familiarity of the tradition it calls upon. For students of Paradise Lost, however, Hall’s word-grouping is significant because it finds an almost exact analogue in the description of Eve.

My sin is ever before me. PSALM li