The smell of sin – Christina Mirabilis’ sensitive nose

by dr. Caro Verbeek, art and scent historian

These lyrics are by the poet and musician Nick Cave. The song ‘Christina the Astonishing’ is about the life of an almost forgotten saint known in Dutch as Christina de Wonderbare (ca. 1150-1224). Christina was labeled a witch and considered mad during her lifetime. But she was also accepted as clairvoyant, she performed miracles and was eventually canonized after dying (which she experienced no fewer than three times). She became the patron saint for both caregivers of people suffering from mental illness and those with mental problems.

The miracle and the stench of sin

This Mystic led a tragic life. Firstly, her parents died when she was only fifteen. Not much later she died herself. However, during the funeral she miraculously rose from the dead. Those present must have had the shock of their lives when she suddenly sat upright in her coffin. Their surprise was probably even greater when she turned out to be able to fly. She ascended into the vault of the Church of Our Lady in Sint-Truiden and only came down again when the crowd left and the priest ordered her to descend. In an old Flemish text, she was compared to a bird for this reason:

She had good reason for staying there. During her death, she had experienced something miraculous, which today would be called a near-death experience by experts in this field such as Pim van Lommel. Angels had taken her – as Virgil later did with Dante Alighieri in his ‘Divine Comedy’ – to hell and purgatory. There she was given the choice of ascending to heaven or returning to the land of the living. She chose the latter.

Phantosmia

Strangely, her adventure had altered her sense of smell. Her nose was able to detect sin like an overpowering stench. That caused her a lot of discomfort, because sinners turned out to be omnipresent. The fact that the Miraculous could smell sin so well was not in itself an expression of an extraordinary gift. Anyone was able to do that according to contemporary theological insights. Earthly stenches (and also fragrant aromas) were a wordly manifestation of the transcendental, of the forces governing the beyond, because scents were attributed the ability to bridge the gap between heaven and hell and earth. What was exceptional was that her sensitivity to it appeared to be enormously increased.

Perceiving odorants that are not ‘there’ (i.e. that others do not smell) is called ‘phantosmia’, derived from the Greek ‘phantasma’ or ‘imagination’ and ‘osme’, which means ‘smell’. Phantosmia can occur due to brain injury, a cold, the coronavirus or brain tumors. The composer George Gershwin (1898-1937) regularly smelled burnt rubber in the weeks before he died. He eventually died after brain surgery which was performed to remove a tumor from the temporal lobe. Mirabilis could well have been in ‘suspended animation’ after a stroke; something that indeed provides a medical explanation for her olfactory condition and paralysis.

But the cultural context also makes the theological explanation understandable and valid. After all, perception (and its value) is always linked to beliefs that are both individual and collective in nature and do not only concern synapses and nerves. In other words, perception occurs not only through our senses, but also through mental interference.

Good and evil; a matter of the nostrils

Now, even before her (first) death, Christina was quite averse to being close to people. She spent her time with the cattle she herded in the Brustem fields, where she also devoted herself to prayer and meditation. Her remarkable choice to subsequently live among the birds in the treetops can be explained by both her human-shy nature and her aversion to the pungent scent of sin. But it also has to do with her preference to be among animals, above those of her kind. She is also said to have slept in pigpens and to have shared meals with them. The fumes from that pigsty were apparently still better than the malodorous stench that humanity exuded. Her – much better known – contemporary Franciscus of Assisi (1181-1226) had a preference for animals, just like her. He preached to the birds and befriended a wolf. The tendency towards the animal and the sacred are therefore not mutually exclusive. A big difference with Christina is that she also seemed to behave like an animal (and probably smelled like one), while Franciscus could mainly speak to them, or in other words engage with them in an almost intellectual way through language, although it was clear that he felt great respect and affection for his fellow earthlings.

Devilish shit

 Cave emphasized the sorrows of Christina by singing “The stench of human sin/ the stench is more than I can bear.” That sinfulness would have a certain smell is not something that fell from the sky, as has just become clear. It already had a long theological tradition that was extensively researched by historian Susan Ashbrook Harvey. In her book Scenting Salvation, she discusses how for centuries in Christianity it was believed that sweet smells belonged to the realms of heaven and the divine, and how stench reminded people of the earthly and the fallen state of man since original sin. The source of that stench was always the devil or human immorality. And that stench did its job:

There are even several documented malodorous incidents that were directly linked to the devil. A very beautiful one has to do with the relics of the virgins of Saint Ursula:

So Mirabilis was not just a pathetic ‘poser’ who turned up her nose at unpleasant odors. The malodorous was embedded in the belief system and life of medieval man. An evil smell – it was commonly thought – even made it impossible to practice one’s faith, because it was not only a symptom of satanic practices and sin, but also had agency and exerted its negative influence.

From an unexpected source we find a recent legacy of the way of thinking that smell had to do with morality and behavior. The philosopher Nietzsche (1844-1900) – in whom madness and genius also coexisted – stated that his wisdom was located in his nostrils (“Mein Genie ist in meine Nüstern”) and that it was possible to smell whether someone had good or bad morals, as Adam Westra argues in his article “Nietzsche’s Nose”.

Divine pleasure

Seven years after her death, in 1231, the monastic community of Christina Mirabilis moved to NonnenMielen (then Mielen). Of course, the saint’s body had to move with it. A crowd of worshipers had gathered for this event. And when the lid was pushed off her coffin, the bystanders witnessed an aroma of a completely different nature than that which had plagued the saint for some forty years:

In the Middle Ages, this unctuous air was referred to as ‘odor of sanctity’. Those present received a foretaste of paradise in which, among other things, the ‘tree of life’ and the ‘tree of knowledge of good and evil’ exhaled their own perfumes according to the Christian faith (as was researched by Susan Ashbrook Harvey). It is fascinating how both olfactory extremes play a role in the life story of this saint. Yet this was simply an expression of how essential aroma and stench were in thinking about and understanding a world that was generally believed to be ruled by the opposites of good and evil, heaven and earth. Christina – just like scents themselves – seemed to bridge all these domains effortlessly.