In the Epic of Gilgamesh, we find one of the earliest versions of a cosmic flood story. The Sumerian Noah, Utnapishtim, tells Gilgamesh how he sailed in his boat on the water covering the world. When the rain stopped, he sent a swallow and a raven to see if the water has subsided. As the raven failed to return, he realized that the surface of the ground was dry, and opened the doors of his boat to the four winds. He made a sacrifice and poured out a libation on the mountaintop. He set up fourteen cauldrons on their stands and heaped up wood and cane and cedar and myrtle. When the gods smelled the sweet odor, they gathered “like flies.”1 This description is notoriously close to the biblical flood story. When Noah leaves the ark, after sending forth a raven and a dove, he builds an altar to Jehovah and sacrifices on it every clean animal and every clean bird. “And Jehovah smelled the pleasing smell, and Jehovah said in His heart, I will not again curse the land because of man” (8:21). The smell of sacrifices had a soothing effect on Jehovah. It succeeded in abating his anger, something that the horrendous scenes of human and animal suffering failed to achieve.
Jehovah seems very fond of the smell of roasted meat, but also of incense, an indispensable part his cult.2 The term “soothing [or pleasing] smell” (reach nichoach) is used systematically in relation to the sacrifices, sometimes by Jehovah himself. The subject of this book, however, is not the way God senses, but the way humans sense Him. The sources offer us very little information on God’s smell. This is not because smell was considered more “carnal” than the other senses. As we saw in chapter 10, Aristotle thought that sight, hearing, and smell are in fact nobler than taste and touch. And even if it were carnal, one would have expected the Incarnation to provide us with a reference to the way the Word incarnate became accessible to this sense as well as to the other three.3 People saw, heard, and touched Jesus. They must have smelled Him too, but we are not told about it. When He was born, He was given frankincense and myrrh by the wise men from the East (Mt 2:11). Did He smell of precious perfume? We do not know.
This may have less to do with olfactory timidity and more with the nature of the sense of smell. Smell might be the oldest sense in mammals, and until recently it was the least studied. Olfactory data are transmitted directly to the most primitive (“paleo-mammalian”) part of the brain—the limbic system. This system is primarily responsible for our emotional life, and is involved with the formation of long-term memory.4 When we smell something familiar, it is immediately associated with memories, quite often deeply buried memories, and with emotions that are not necessarily accessible to our conscious mind. Smell is the most important producer of our Madeleine cookies (especially since what we call “taste” relies heavily on our ability to smell). Smells trigger emotions—lust, nostalgia, love, revulsion, pain—that we often cannot explain. Moreover the sense of smell never shuts down. When we’re unconscious or asleep, we continue to smell as effectively as when awake and fully conscious, and are as affected by olfactory data. As an ever-growing number of studies conducted in the last decades have shown, smell functions as our emotional invisible hand. Our brain can recognize a vast array of scents and, if recognized by us, associate them with an emotional response and a memory.
This highly sensitive mechanism has surprisingly poor verbal expression. Our vocabulary for olfactory data is very limited. As William Miller has noted, “Odor qualifiers, if not the names of things emitting the odor [‘like roses,’ ‘like freshly baked bread,’ ‘like old leather’], are usually simple adjectives and nouns expressing either the pleasantness or unpleasantness of the smell, most of which are merely ‘bad’ or ‘good’ smell.”5 The lexical poverty may be explained by the way smell activates us. The limbic system deciphers olfactory data at such speed that the conscious brain is presented not with raw material but with a fait accompli. By the time consciousness kicks into action, it’s too late. What we now need are not descriptions and classifications of the original data, but explanations and excuses for our unconscious responses. We shall return to this.
The dearth of scent terms does not mean that worshipers were uninterested in their deities’ smell. In Greco-Roman, Persian, and Egyptian religions, the gods did smell. Their bodies, their hair, their garments, and their dwelling places exuded a fragrance that was sensible to humans (the Olympians smell of ambrosia, a sign of their immortality, the antithesis of the foul-smelling stench of mortality).6 But even pagan deities, unfettered by the laws of ineffability, offer a limited vocabulary of olfactory description. They do not have a distinctive smell. They are simply fragrant. The God of Israel is no exception. He smells good. We know this because He often makes His presence known by smell. When the air suddenly fills with inexplicable perfumes, it is a sign that a god is present. In a famous passage in the Antiquities, Josephus relates that when Solomon’s Temple was dedicated, the air was filled with fragrance. The sweetness reached even those who were far away and made known the arrival of God and His establishment in the place just consecrated to Him.7 About four centuries later, Severus of Minorca describes a similar occurrence of the olfactory signs of God’s presence. In his account of the conversion of the Jewish community of Minorca to Christianity, allegedly under the influence of the relics of St. Stephen (in 418), the decisive turning point is reached not when threats made the community lose heart, as a modern reader would suspect, but by a sudden perfumed rain filling the air with the odor of honey.8
The sweet odor is God’s “tell.” Mythically, it is a simple expression of His goodness. Good smells good; evil smell bad. Philosophically, things are more complicated. What exactly is the relation of these heavenly odors to the “true” essence of God? We have come upon this problem in the discussion of God’s voice: Is the scent something He creates to make his presence known or is it a necessary product of His presence? We are not sure. And does God have a preference for any particular smell? Would it be possible to identify the divine odor, as distinct from any other, perhaps like the ambrosial scent of the Olympians? Again, one is not sure what to say. The ancients often recognized in the perfumes that they identified as indications of God’s presence the precious perfumes of their times, the same scents used to produce incense, especially myrrh and frankincense. Sometimes they smelled flowers, the lily and the rose. Sometimes divine presence was indicated simply by olfactory pleasure. Scents beyond human words or even imagination filled the souls of human smellers.
Unlike with God’s other sensual epiphanies, no fear accompanies scent. When God decides to make His presence known by olfactory means, it is always pleasing. God’s image and sound can be terrible and life-threatening. Touching him may be too frightening to attempt. In contrast, the smells that accompany God (whatever we make of them metaphysically) are always soothing, refreshing, heavenly.
In real life, the good and the pleasant are often disassociated, but in the “primitive” areas of our brain they are not. Experience teaches us that beautiful people can be evil and good people ugly. It teaches us that the Sirens’ song can be pleasing and maleficent, that poison can taste good. A significant part of our rational activity is dedicated to resisting the simplistic equations of the primitive brain. We contrast physical with spiritual beauty; we learn to refuse harmful pleasures. The problem with smell, as I noted, is that its effects are so subtle and yet so deep that we often become aware of them only in retrospect. This is also true for God. The smell of burnt offering and of incense has a soothing effect on God that is purely irrational and is totally unrelated to the nature of the offense and to the appropriateness of the offering in relation to it. This irrational “essentialism” (good equals pleasant) is projected on God’s olfactory faculty. People can “wear” fake smells (the perfume industry is based on faking smells), but this is simply a disguise. The real “moral” smell of things cannot be changed; it can only be concealed. It is like the atomic mass of elements—if you change it, it won’t be the same element. While the more “sophisticated” senses allow complexity and inner tensions (God can be compassionate and terrible, sweet and bitter), smell retains its fundamental simplicity. In olfactory terms, God is good-fragrant just as the Devil is evil-stinking. The Devil occasionally disguises his “natural” (foul) smell, but God doesn’t.9 When He becomes accessible to the sense of smell, He can only be what He is: his goodness cannot be anything but fragrant. What kind of fragrance? Good. The details depend on what those becoming aware of the divine presence consider good.10
God can fill the air with his fragrance, but He can also infuse humans with his olfactory attributes. Some people close to God, the saints notably, have the gift of an “odor of sanctity”—their living bodies, and at times their cadavers, exude a powerful supernatural perfume. Some saints exude this supernatural fragrance constantly; others display it at specific occasions (often related in one way or another to the Eucharist). Still others only display it only after death—either at the moment of dying or when the tomb is opened. Sometimes their incorrupt bodies or their relics ooze perfumed oil (such saints are called myroblites).11 Unlike the fragrance of God, the heavenly odor of sanctity is not an expression of the bearers’ essential holiness, but a reward for virtue. Losing the supernatural fragrance means losing the presence of God.
There are grades in goodness and evil. No human can smell as good as God or as bad as the Devil. But in a diminished fashion, smells denote the moral and religious status of all people. Thus, in a poem celebrating the conversion of the Jews of Clermont in 576, Venantius Fortunatus tells Gregory of Tours (to whom the poem was sent) how the evil smell of the Jews (Judaeus odor amarus) was washed away by baptism (abluitur Judaeus odor baptismate divo) and replaced by a heavenly sweet (Christian) smell (vertice perfuso chrismatis efflat odor).12
We find the idea that moral status has a smell in the Chronicle of Zuqnin, a Syriac work of the eighth century. The author describes the transformation of the Christians who converted to Islam: “They grew different from the faithful people in both person and name: in person, because their once happy personal appearance became repugnant in such a way that they were recognized by the intelligent ones through their persons, odor and the look of their eyes.”13 The change of religion changes not only a person’s mental state and external appearance; it also changes body odor. This has often been alleged concerning Jews. In their unbaptized state, Jews stink as is only fitting for ministers of the Devil. Once they convert, however, all trace of the Jewish smell vanishes.14
Similar stories can be found in Jewish sources where stench naturally characterizes non-Jews. Thus, in Avot de Rabbi Natan, a collection of Midrashim published at roughly the same time as the Chronicle of Zuqnin, the following story is told about one of the heroes of the Talmud, Rabbi Akiva. When Akiva went to Rome, somebody informed the authorities of his arrival:
A certain official sent him two beautiful women. They bathed them and anointed them, and adorned them like brides for their bridegrooms. And the two women kept throwing themselves at him all night: the one saying, come to me, the other saying, no, come to me. And he was sitting between them and spitting, without looking at them. [In the morning] they went to the official and said to him: we would rather die than be given to this man. He sent [for Akiva] and said to him: “Why did you not treat these women as men do? Are they not beautiful? Are they not human like you? Were they not created by the one who created you?” “What can I do,” answered Akiva, “their smell assaulted me (ba alai)15 like the flesh of forbidden animals, carrion, and vermin.”16
All humans were created by the same God, but there is a difference. And even when “they” look and sound and feel exactly like “us,” their smell exposes them to be morally inferior. That smell is related (in saints in a major way, in all the faithful in a minor way) to the presence of God in the believer.
Smell then is both a reality (people claim to sense it physically) and a metaphor of presence. In the rest of this chapter, I would like to discuss a case where the metaphor becomes mixed.
DIABOLICAL MESS
The setting first. Toward the end of his book on the beginning of the Order of Preachers,17 Jordan of Saxony, St. Dominic’s successor as master general of the Order of Preachers, offers a short personal memoir. In 1221, he became the provincial of Lombardy. Arriving at the Dominican convent of Bologna, he discovered a community in crisis. A certain uneducated brother, Bernard, was possessed by a terrible demon. Day and night, the demon tormented him most horrendously (furiis exagitaretur). The unfortunate community suffered “beyond measure” (supra modum).18 But the problem, Jordan soon realized, was not simply the nuisance of having to deal with a raving demoniac. It was a moral, indeed a theological quandary. What was uncanny about this particular demoniac was that when not raging like a madman, Bernard, unlettered and untrained, spoke most wonderfully about scriptures and theology. “His words could rightly be considered worthy even of Augustine,” writes Jordan. For a fresh graduate of the University of Paris, as Jordan was, this is surely the highest compliment. Worse still, Bernard preached such marvelous sermons that, moved by the profundity and the piety of his words, listeners shed copious, sincere tears. Finally, and most importantly for us, the possessed brother’s body gave off an odor “sweeter than anything humans could produce” (super omnem humanam confectionem).19
As I noted, the Devil can disguise himself. He can produce artificially the smells that God’s presence produces authentically. The simplest way of distinguishing between false and authentic claims of divine presence is by a careful examination of the claimant’s moral behavior. You know a tree by its fruit. The frontal lobe cortex is summoned to examine the morally suspicious data offered by the limbic system, exactly because it tends to push us in “irrational” directions. We need to ask whether a particular person possesses the virtues that make him or her a suitable carrier of the fragrance of divine presence. The answer in Bernard’s case was not easy to give. On the one hand, it seems clear that Bernard’s “ravings” should be diagnosed as demonic. Demonic intrusion (both positive, in the form of temptations, and negative, in the form of physical and spiritual assaults) did not rule him out as a candidate for sainthood. Like many saints, Bernard could have been suffering from periodic demonic attacks: demons are attracted to saints and attempt to assault them in a variety of ways. But Bernard’s spiritual diagnosis as demoniac meant that he was seen not as a conquering hero but, at least temporarily, as a prisoner in the war against evil. This does not ipso facto make him evil. A possessed person is not responsible for what he says and does during his trances. Some saints have been possessed by demons (the most famous, traditionally, was Mary Magdalene). They broke out of the demonic prison and triumphed. The problem with Bernard was that the divine and demonic presences seemed to occur not in sequence but simultaneously. And the problem was also that both types of signals were exceptionally powerful. Bernard was a very annoying demoniac (screaming, cursing, and frothing at the mouth), and at the same time a great preacher, a profound theologian, and a subtle biblical exegete. Most confusing of all, there is no hint that there was anything wrong with Bernard’s messages. They were not heretical or otherwise subversive. Bernard’s words did not lead his listeners astray as one would expect from messages produced by the Father of Lies. On the contrary: when he was good, he was very good.
But not perfect. Bernard, Jordan tells us, was very proud of his intellectual and rhetorical achievements. Pride is diabolic, especially among the socially inferior. The first round in the battle between Jordan and Bernard was fought with traditional weapons. Jordan demanded obedience. Surely, if Bernard refused to obey, he did not possess the virtue of humility or respect his vow of obedience. When ordered by Jordan to cease from engaging in “positive” activities—his preaching, theologizing, and interpreting were all done without permission—Bernard offered his superior a tit for tat deal. He would if Jordan would. Jordan responded to this outrageous show of impudence with the righteous outrage of a young theologian: “God forbid that I should reach an agreement with death, or strike a deal with hell. Your temptations will, against your will, profit the brothers. They will lead them into the life of grace, for the life of man on earth is temptation.” When the demon tried to reason with him, Jordan rejected him out of hand: “Why do you multiply your deceptions with us?” he asked. “We are not ignorant of your real thoughts.”20
The Devil obviously did not like Jordan’s attitude. In truly egalitarian spirit, he issued a threat and a challenge: “I too know you. Now you refuse and despise the deception offered to you, but with the aid of my cunning you will easily and willingly accept it.” A little later, when Jordan was attending the possessed brother, he began to show signs of great distress and exclaimed: “Here is that smell! that smell! that smell!” Then the devil, speaking through Brother Bernard, explained to Jordan that it was the friar’s angel that gave off the perfume to console the possessed man and to torment him (the Devil). The Devil’s smell was very different. As a demonstration, he filled the air with the stench of sulfur, “hoping to conceal the false nature of the first odor’s sweetness with the succession of smells (intendens eorum successione precedentis illius suavitatis palliare fallaciam).”21
It is exactly the “succession of smells” that baffles Jordan. The Devil (Bernard) offers Jordan an explanation he could theoretically live with. Good and evil cannot mix, but they can alternate, without intermingling. Instead of conceding that the odor was false, Bernard suggested that both odors (good and foul) were authentic. Bernard has the Devil and God (or an angel of God) in him. This should have solved Jordan’s theological dilemma: the odor, the effective preaching, and the theological skill were angelic; the stench, the pride, the howling, and the contortions were demonic.
Jordan hesitated. This could be a solution. True, Bernard’s virtues were apparently not sufficient to convince him that Bernard was a saint under demonic attack. But what if the fragrance occurred in someone more worthy than Bernard? All of a sudden, Jordan himself began to give off an immensely powerful odor, constantly immersed in a cloud of heavenly fragrance. He was afraid to take his hands out of his habit, for fear the smell would overwhelm him. When he had to raise his hands during mass, he was struck by joy so powerful and so sweet (miri odoris suavitas, immensi-tate tante dulcedinis) that he almost fainted.22
For a while, a truce was reached. In the Dominican house in Bologna, there were now two theologians and preachers, both exuding a marvelous fragrance (though the odor seems to have been discernible only by the two of them). One was the official head of the community, Jordan, exercising his authority by right; the other was Bernard, exercising authority by usurpation. Who was more authoritative? Did Jordan’s sermons touch people to the heart and bring copious tears to their eyes? Who was the better theologian? Who was better at expounding Scripture? We are not told.
But the truce could not last. Jordan was undergoing an ever-deeper moral and theological crisis. He could not live with such ambivalence. He craved certainty. Was the odor divine or demonic? It could not be both. Jordan was displaying all the positive symptoms of divine presence with none of the negative ones. Why not see himself (as the Church later saw him) as one of God’s saints? Still very young, he became in a very short time the leader of men in an up-and-coming religious elite; he was praised to high heaven by his peers and brought hordes of Parisian students to the Order of Preachers; and wasn’t the odor of sanctity about him? A rash presumption of his own sainthood (temerariam sanctitatem presumptionem) was entering his heart.23 Was this the odor of his sanctity? Was he a saint? What would that make of Bernard? If his odor was a mark of divine presence, as Bernard’s Devil contended, shouldn’t he (as part of an unspoken deal) be willing to concede that Bernard was indeed the locus of both God and the Devil? “I was bewildered by great ambiguity. I doubted my own merits and yet I hesitated, uncertain. Wherever I went, I was surrounded by a wonderful fragrance. I hardly dared to pull my hands [out of my habit] for fear of losing a sweetness [or sanctity—both readings are possible] of which I was not yet aware.”24
Jordan’s reaction to the miraculous odor is highly emotional, as is often the case with smell. His bewilderment reflects the fact that his intellect has difficulty following through. He is excited by the idea that this is the odor of his sanctity, yet he finds it hard to justify in rational terms—at least “not yet.” Finally, he could take it no more:
Once, when I was about to celebrate Mass, I was praying with some fervor the psalm “Judge, O Lord, them that harm me” [35:1]—a psalm very effective for resisting temptation. When I reached the verse “all my bones shall say, Lord, who is like you?” [35:10], suddenly such an immensity of sweet smell poured over me that it truly seemed to suffuse the very marrow of my bones (repente tanta super me effusa est odoriferi dulcoris immensitas, ut re vera viderentur omnes medulle meorum ossium irrigari). Stupefied, and struck by the extreme unusualness of the phenomenon, I begged the Lord to reveal to me in His mercy if this was achieved by the wiles of the Devil and suffer not the weak, for whom there was no certain helper but Him, to be reviled by the powerful. As soon as I prayed thus to the Lord—for whose glory I tell this—I received such inner clarity of spirit and such unquestionable certainty through infused truth that I no longer had the slightest doubt (omnino nihil ambigerem) that all these were tricks of the deceiving enemy.25
Jordan’s reason finally issued its verdict: the odor of sanctity was out of the question (yet). Furthermore, it came at too high a price. Implicitly at least, it meant accepting the Devil’s deal of dividing power. Jordan was now confident, or at least this is what he felt in hindsight. The whole thing, he declared, was a delusion, a diabolical ruse. Good and evil were again clearly separated. Armed with his newly acquired certainty, Jordan rushed to Bernard and told him the news. Right away, Bernard’s fragrance as well as all the other positive aspects of Bernard’s possession stopped. Instead of preaching devout sermons, Bernard cursed and blasphemed like a proper devil:
Now that the secret of his iniquity had been revealed, I assured that brother of the diabolic nature of this temptation. The emission of smell now stopped in both of us. From then on, he, who previously used to speak to us in many words full of devotion, began to speak evil and depraved words (ex tunc mala loqui cepit et turpia, qui prius sermones multos devotione plenos narrare consueverat). When I said to him, “Where are your beautiful words now?” he replied: “Since my deceiving intent has been exposed, I wish to exercise my malice openly (manifestam iam volo exercere nequitiam).”26
It seems that, once “exposed,” Bernard’s devil, albeit a liar by nature and calling, developed a taste for consistency and transparency. The Church of the thirteenth century had little patience with ambiguities. The new, university-trained, Church leaders sought to put things in order. Are you with us or against us? You cannot be both.
We do not know what later happened to Bernard. Once the unfortunate matter of the confused smells was sorted out, Jordan lost interest in him. He was not particularly interested in demonic possession per se and he was certainly not interested in lay brothers with a scandalous penchant for theology. Had he not experienced the (fake?) odor of sanctity in his own person, he would probably not have bothered to mention Brother Bernard at all.27 But then, it did happen. What did he make of it? The answer to his personal problem came ex machina without too many details. Smell was the easiest thing to explain. One could think of it as perfume—something added to your person by an external agent (be it God or the Devil); but the other positive aspects of Bernard’s possession were not as easily explained. Were the orthodox theological insights, the deep understanding of Scriptures, and the effective preaching demonic? Was the heavenly perfume that suffused the devout Jordan as he prayed and celebrated Mass just a demonic ruse? For what purpose?
There are answers to these questions. Yes, the Devil can offer a very good imitation of God. He tempts God’s elect in a thousand strange ways. But perhaps the most important conclusion we can draw from this episode is that one never knows. Even the most impressive, seemingly trustworthy indications of God’s presence can be falsified. The age of the “Discernment of Spirits” was about to begin—a concentrated effort to tell the divine from the demonic.28 In vain. After all these efforts—the desperate witch hunts, the burning of suspects, the many learned guides written by the greatest experts—the smells of God and the Devil remained, and still remain, intermixed.