Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Transformation of the Classical Heritage) (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Susan Ashbrook Harvey has surely produced the definitive analysis of the role of scent in Early Christian ritual and theological discourse. This is a welcome new trajectory in the study of religion and the body." - Patricia Cox Miller, author of The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography"

Product 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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 442 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (June 7, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520241479
• ISBN-13: 978-0520241473
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,181,474 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sense in the Resurrection, December 10, 2007

By	John C. Marshell Jr. - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Perfume - The Story Of A Murderer
This book is a "must read" for anyone interested in the spiritual senses or early Christian mysticism--a subject I have been reading and reflecting on for over ten years. Dr. Harvey's book is well written and easy to understand touching on most of the important issues regarding the spiritual senses, and as the title indicates, focusing largely on the sense of smell. Since most of my studies have dealt with visual and auditory senses, her approach and focus were welcome perspectives helping to broaden my understanding and introduce me to new material from Syria, apparently a treasury for information on spiritual senses.

The book is largely a thematic investigation tracing the Church father's use of smell in teaching and liturgy as well as its use in spiritual and theological understanding. Olfaction was an important aspect in determining good and evil, the virtuous from the vicious, the link to Heaven and the distractions of worldy temptations, and when honed and reformed through asceticism, could allow for spiritual insights and relationships with the "Bridegroom" in the deeper contemplations. The "Song of Songs" and patristic commentaries on the text are explored here.

Though Dr. Harvey does not leave out the other four senses in her study, I could not help but feel a little "cramped" by the limits of her book, and I kept wishing she would have expanded her study. While I was grateful for the material on Syria, I couldn't help but feel that Origen and the Alexandrian school were undervalued, and Augustine, who admittedly was uninterested in smell, served mostly as a contrast for Ephrem. Though the book was clearly a religious study, she did mention some "classical" authors like Theophrastus and Galen, which left me hoping for the inclusion of more philosophical material from John Philoponus, Stephanus, and Simplicius, which would have broadened the book's epistemological explorations, but I understand the need to keep a workable scope.

For anyone not familiar with spiritual senses, chapter four, especially pages 169 through 186, could serve as an excellent introduction to the subject. The author also dealt with the issue of a sensing Resurrection body. It is a theological theme I feel is terribly neglected and was really happy the author included it in her study. The senses we have now are perhaps (hopefully) a seminal form of what we will have in paradise.

In an odd coincidence I feel compelled to mention, I purchased Dr. Harvey's book shortly after seeing the film "Perfume: Story of a Murderer." During certain poignant moments in my reading, my mind would wander back to the film, and I would have a visual recollection of Jean Baptiste Grenouille, excellently played by Ben Whishaw, running around France with his nose in the air. The more I read Dr. Harvey's book, the more creative my recollections became, until the movie became, in an odd way, a Christian allegory. I would encourage the purchase of both items.