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If sweet smells pointed to the divine, foul odors were constant reminders of sinfulness and moral depravity. Any smell associated with bodily decay was seen as a cue to death and the Fall. Stench was therefore a reminder of the ways in which the world was not yet redeemed. Still, people recognized that sometimes good practices yielded up bad smells—even the most devout monastics had bad breath when they fasted. This led writers into the land of metaphor, where the bad breath of fasting was reckoned as the sweet smell of asceticism. Saints were often beset by smelly bodily sores. Syncletia suffered from lung cancer and gangrene of the jaw at the end of her life, and the accompanying stench was overpowering: as one hagiography put it, "putrefaction and the heaviest stench governed her whole body so that the ones that served her suffered more than she did." The transformation of that stench to the lovely scent of flowers was the final proof of a saint's saintliness: the corpse of a saint did not decay or stink, but smelled of roses.
But smell did not just help Christians know, and know about, one another. It also helped Christians know God. Christian writers argued that, although God is separated from his Creation by a giant gulf, nevertheless the universe—and people's sensory apprehensions thereof—could reveal something about the Creator. Smells seemed particularly well poised to reveal something about God to people. Smells, after all, were a bit like God—you knew they were there, you sensed them, but you couldn't see or touch them. When you encountered an odor, you knew that odor had a source, even if the source was far away. Scents, then, pointed toward a God people could not see. The relationship between a scent and its source even became, in the hands of some writers, a helpful metaphor for the relationship of the Father and the Son. There was something deeply incarnational about this epistemology. Because God's salvation of the world had been worked out through the material and the physical, through the very body of Jesus Christ, "an enriched Christian piety" engaged the senses through which people learned about the material world, and through that world, God. The Tosteruds, perhaps unwittingly, are drawing on a very old insight when they suggest that their scented candles can help us "Sense Him in a new way."
Today we take for granted the usefulness of our senses in apprehending reality. Yet it's worth remembering that, even as Christians articulated a sensory epistemology, ascetics worried that sensory experience was decadent and distracting. Many ascetical writers warned against abuses of sensory knowledge, cautioning that sensory experience was trustworthy only when the experience occurred within liturgically or ecclesially circumscribed parameters: the scent of the Eucharist told the believer something about God; a harlot's perfume did not. (On this reading, my own dependence on lavender sheet spray may show itself to be a bourgeois indulgence.) People had to be taught to distinguish between spiritually and morally edifying scents and dangerous, wanton scents.
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