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Full Description
This book explores the role of bodily, sensory experience in early Christianity (first seventh centuries AD) by focusing on the importance of smell in ancient Mediterranean culture. Following its legalization in the fourth century Roman Empire, Christianity cultivated a dramatically flourishing devotional piety, in which the bodily senses were utilized as crucial instruments of human-divine interaction. Rich olfactory practices developed as part of this shift, with lavish uses of incense, holy oils, and other sacred scents. At the same time, Christians showed profound interest in what smells could mean. How could the experience of smell be construed in revelatory terms? What specifically could it convey? How and what could be known through smell? Scenting Salvation argues that ancient Christians used olfactory experience for purposes of a distinctive religious epistemology: formulating knowledge of the divine in order to yield, in turn, a particular human identity.
Using a wide array of Pagan, Jewish, and Christian sources, Susan Ashbrook Harvey examines the ancient understanding of smell through religious rituals, liturgical practices, mystagogical commentaries, literary imagery, homiletic conventions; scientific, medical, and cosmological models; ascetic disciplines, theological discourse, and eschatological expectations. In the process, she argues for a richer appreciation of ancient notions of embodiment, and of the roles the body might serve in religion.
Contents
Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction 1. The Olfactory Context: Smelling the Early Christian World A Martyr's Scent Sacrifice: The Aroma of Relation Daily Smells: Powers and Promises God's Perfume: Imagined Glory and the Scent of Life 2. The Christian Body: Ritually Fashioned Experience A New Place A Revelatory World Participatory Knowing: Ritual Scents and Devotional Uses Participatory Knowing: Scents and Sense Excursus: Incense Offerings in the Syriac Transitus Mariae 3. Olfaction and Christian Knowing Sense Perception in the Ancient Mind Christian Senses in a Christian World Olfactory Analogies as Theological Tools Revelatory Scents: Olfaction and Identity Remembering Knowledge: Liturgical Commentaries Excursus: On the Sinful Woman in Syriac Tradition 4. Redeeming Scents: Ascetic Models The Smell of Danger: Marking Sensory Contexts The Fragrance of Virtue: Reordering Olfactory Experience The Spiritual Senses: Relocating Perception Ascetic Practice and Embodied Liturgy The Stylite's Model A Syriac Tradition Continued 5. Sanctity and Stench Ascetic Stench: Sensation and Dissonance Stench and Morality: Mortality and Sin Ascetic Senses Asceticism: Holy Stench, Holy Weapon 6. Resurrection, Sensation, and Knowledge Bodily Expectation Salvific Knowing Notes Bibliography Index
