Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation. Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California, 2006.
Robert
Doran
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
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Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
2007
Vol. 10, No. 1
For this publication, a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
license has been granted by the author(s), who retain full
copyright.
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv10n1prdoran
Robert Doran
Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation. Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California, 2006.
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol10/HV10N1PRDoran.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute,
vol 10
issue 1
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study
of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth
Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the
best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
Syriac Studies
Sensory Images
Scenting
Incense
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[1] Susan
Harvey has given us a masterful treatment of the role of the
sense of smell in Late Antiquity. To change the sensory image,
it is a rich, generous platter. She alerts us to the way smells
filled the late antique air and provides a fascinating insight
into how the Constantinian revolution changed Christian
attitudes towards perfumes and incense. She also conveys how,
for the late antique Christian, the bodily life of Jesus meant
that the senses would be involved in experiencing God’s
kingdom.
[2] In the
first chapter, “The Olfactory World,” Harvey
describes how Greeks and Romans breathed an air filled with
scents and smells. Complex and pungent aromas attended
sacrifices. Aromatics were in daily use: as pesticides to drive
away insects and snakes, as air fresheners in the smelly
environment of an ancient city, as counteracting bodily odors.
They could be used for medicinal purposes or as poisons. Hence
good smells were associated with good things, bad smells with
bad. Here Harvey notes that Christians had critiqued pagan
sacrifices before the full impact of the Constantinian
revolution as had Greco-Roman philosophers; nevertheless they
had used sacrificial rhetoric to describe Christian
liturgical usage.
[3] In the
second chapter, “The Christian Body: Ritually Fashioned
Experience,” Harvey emphasizes the importance of the
Constantinian change for the Christian use of aromatics.
Christians now had a place and status in the world. The
increasing number of Christian churches and their public
liturgy meant that a ritual context was given as the place to
learn sensory meanings, to distinguish good from bad smells.
Holy oil was a component of Christian initiation and perfumed
oil used for the baptized. There was a growing use of spices in
oils, and liturgical perfume was seen as a sign of the presence
of the divine. Harvey is excellent in tracing the role incense
begins to play in ritual piety, expressly as evidence in Ephrem
and the Transitus Mariae. Excluded from Christian
ritual for 300 years, incense contained both sacrificial
symbolism as well as indicating the divine-human relationship.
Unseen and yet experienced, smells wafting through the air
connected the source to the one sensing. “Knowledge of
God was instilled in the believer who inhaled the scent of
worship.” (p. 80)
[4] Chapter
3, “Olfaction and Christian Knowing,” is a treasure
trove of ways in which olfaction was used as a powerful
theological metaphor. The Song of Songs with its rich
sensual imagery gave a strong impulse to such use. A
particularly beautiful example is where Ambrose of Milan calls
Christ the flower of Mary. Just as the flower does not lose its
odor when cut, torn or bruised, so Jesus on the cross exhaled
the gift of eternal life. Besides such use, odor could be used
diagnostically, as each person has their own individual smell.
Divine visitation could fill a holy person with its fragrance,
and this fragrance could then become known to those who visited
the holy one. Harvey also mines the liturgical commentaries and
her analysis of the consecration of the holy myron is
superb.
[5] Chapter
4, to this reader, reveals the key problem that drives this
work: How to reconcile the seemingly contradictory
post-Constantinian developments of a more complex sensory
ritual life for Christians and of a rising severity in
asceticism? Harvey sees both these as responses to a
“heightened importance of the physical realm”
(p.156). She finds a reconciliation in the notion of the
fragrance of virtue, and the way lives of ascetics are
connected to ritual activity through olfactory images. The
prime examples for her are the stylite saints: Stylite
asceticism and incense piety point to a profound reconciliation
between ascetic and liturgical discourses in late antiquity.
She captures the late antique view that the foul smells
surrounding sickness and death were a sign of humanity’s
fallen condition, and wonderfully explores how the foul stench
surrounding Simeon the Stylite’s ascetic endeavors could
be transformed at his death into a paradisial fragrance. While
her analysis works wonderfully well for the Eastern tradition,
I would have liked her to suggest how this might apply in the
Western tradition. While Martin of Tours once smelled the
presence of the devil and Jerome has the body of Hilarion give
off fragrance at his death, the life of Benedict contains no
sensory images. Does this reflect a different view of ascetic
endeavor, or perhaps a different attitude towards liturgy? Is
Western liturgy more sight and sound than smell?
[6] Harvey
ends her work with a fascinating contrast between
Augustine’s description of heaven, based primarily on
sight, and Ephrem’s, strongly based on olfactory
experience. For Harvey, sense perception is a mode of religious
knowing, and for Ephrem it is “the foundational
experience of the human-divine encounter both in the present
and in the life to come.” (p.238) With its insistence
that we be alert to our senses and to our bodily existence,
this book contributes to the ongoing discussion about the body
and religion. It is a treat to read.