Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (review)

This erudite and sweeping synthesis of the use of fragrance and the pervasiveness of olfactory rhetoric in late ancient and early medieval Christianity confirms the importance of historical traditions for advancing theoretical debates about ritual and identity within religious studies as a whole. The study draws on a broad pan-Mediterranean context with wide geographical and temporal dispersion, moving quickly from Gaul to North Africa to the Levant, and covering a thousand years of history. But Harvey also focuses, often in thick detail, on specific and local practices deriving from the Byzantine and Syrian Orthodox contexts that she knows so well. Using current ritual theory and critical accounts of the formation of the religious subject with a light touch, Susan Ashbrook Harvey opens a world in which the rhetoric of smell was one of the rhetorics of religion.

The origins of incense in Christian worship provide one of the puzzles that drives the inquiry. Christians in earlier centuries usually condemned the burning of incense in liturgical services as a remnant of pagan or Jewish practice, but by the middle of the fifth century scented smoke began to permeate Christian ritual action. Harvey reminds the reader that the condemnation of incense in worship had not meant the absence of smells; Christians, like all people in the ancient Mediterranean, used scented oils and candles, and cleaned their homes and ritual spaces by fumigation. Moreover, the oils used in rites of unction or chrismation had probably always smelled sweet. To a large extent, mundane uses of smell set the context for religious understandings. But Harvey argues that the Christianization of the Roman Empire in the wake of Constantine’s conversion prompted a revaluation of the created order, and particularly of the body, so that the senses became avenues for perceiving and knowing God. Scent, in fact, marks a shift in attitudes toward the body and materiality among Christians.

Chapter 1 lays out Jewish, Christian, and polytheist use of and conversation about scent and incense to situate early Christian smelling and discourse about smelling within late antique cultural imaginations. Harvey stresses the olfactory character of worship in the ancient Mediterranean world, from whole burnt offerings whose smoke rose up to (a) god to sacrificial incense cast onto fire. The sacrificial use of incense both expressed and effected the participants’ devotion. The language of scent functioned powerfully in religious discourse even in the absence of sacrificial rites: both Rabbinic Jews and pre-Constantinian Christians employed complex rhetorics of incense and odor. Paul famously described Christ as “a fragrant offering” (Phil. 4:18) and his followers as “the aroma of Christ” (2 Cor. 2:15). Thus, even while second- and third-century Christians strenuously abstained from offering incense sacrifices within the imperial cult, they figured themselves and their god through olfactory metaphors. Aromatic imagery and language saturated the writings of Clement, Origen, and Tertullian in particular. Christians enjoyed the science, economics, and lore of spices, emphasizing alternately their exquisiteness and extravagance. Incense might indicate either true or false religion. We find the author of the second-century Martyrdom of Polycarp reshaping the horrifying experience of the saint’s burning as an occasion to smell the odors of incense and of baking presumably eucharistic bread. Most acutely, and throughout the Mediterranean world, sweet smelling spices and incense indicated the presence of and interaction with the divine. Apocryphal traditions of Adam and Eve emphasized the sweet and abundant fragrance of paradise. Long before, Christians censed their offerings, they talked persistently about smell.

After the conversion of Constantine, the legalization of Christianity, and the even more important Christianization of imperial society and culture, incense and smell took on new roles. Chapter 2 follows developments from the fourth century, considering the works of the Cappadocian Fathers, Ambrose, and the hymnographer Ephrem the Syrian. Once Christian thinkers committed themselves to the proposition that God could be known, if incompletely, in creation, they argued for a positive valuation of the...