Why offer incense?

As my family and I have been learning to live within our new Orthodox faith, we have sometimes been queried by a well meaning Christian from another tradition as to why we use incense, candles, “those pictures of dead people” (icons), special clothes for a priest or deacon or chanter, etc. These questions are understandable (if not natural), I think, at least in America where a somewhat iconoclastic form of worship has arisen over the past half millennia (the age-old problem of gnostic influences). Sometimes, the question is a bit more of an attempted refutation, just with a question mark stuck on the end, like, “Show me in the New Testament where they used incense(!)??? (a situation I want to address in my next blog posting, perhaps). Anyhow, I read the following yesterday in Bishop Kallistos Ware’s wonderful book, The Inner Kingdom.

Why offer incense or burn candles? Why make prostrations or the sign of the Cross? If we attempt a verbal explanation, we know perfectly well that it embodies only a small part of the truth. And that, surely, is precisely the reason for the symbolic action. If the poet could express in plain prose what he has said in his poetry, if the artist or musician could express in words what she has said in paint or sound, then there would be no need for the poem or the picture or the symphony. Each exists because it expresses something which cannot be expressed in any other way. So it is in worship. If it were possible to say in words why we burn candles and incense, then we could rest content with the verbal explanation and forego the symbolic act altogether. The whole value of the symbol in worship is that it expresses something which cannot be said through the spoken word alone, that it reaches a part of our being which cannot be touched by rational arguments. The symbol is on the one hand simpler and more immediately accessible than a verbal explanation, and on the other hand it penetrates more deeply into the heart of reality.

On the purely pragmatic level all the beauty and symbolism in our worship is unnecessary and useless. We can use odor-destroying sprays instead of incense, neon lighting instead of candles. But the human being is not simply a pragmatic and utilitarian animal, and those who look more deeply into human nature will quickly appreciate how much we need this “useless” beauty. As Archpriest Alexander Schmemann has rightly said:

“The liturgy is, before everything else, the joyous gathering of those who are to meet the risen Lord and to enter with Him into the bridal chamber. And it is this joy of expectation and this expectation of joy that are expressed in singing and ritual, in vestments and in censing, in what the whole “beauty” of the liturgy, which has so often been denounced as unnecessary and even sinful.

Unnecessary it is indeed, for we are beyond the categories of the “necessary.” Beauty is never “necessary,” “functional,” or “useful.” And when, expecting someone whom we love, we put a beautiful tablecloth on the table and decorate it with candles and flowers, we do all this not out of necessity, but out of love. And the Church is love, expectation, and joy. It is heaven on earth, according to our Orthodox tradition; it is the joy of recovered childhood, that free, unconditioned and disinterested joy which alone is capable of transforming the world. In our adult, serious piety we ask for definitions and jusifications, and they are rooted in fear. Fear of corruption, deviation, “pagan influences,” whatnot. But “he that feareth is not made perfect in love” (1 Jn 4:18). As long as Christians will love the Kingdom of God, they will “represent” it and signify it, in art and beauty. And the celebrant of the sacrament of joy will appear in a beautiful chasuble, because he is vested in the glory of the Kingdom, because even in the form of man God appears in glory. In the Eucharist we are standing in the presence of Christ, and like Moses before God, we are to be covered with His glory” (For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy, 29-30)

“Beauty will save the world,” said Dostoevsky. It is a primary function of worship to render manifest the saving power of this divine beauty. When the envoys of Prince Vladimir of Kiev were won over to the Orthodox Faith, what converted them was not words, not logical arguments, but the beauty of the Holy Liturgy which they attended in Constantinople: “we cannot forget that beauty,” they said when they returned home. “Wherein does your prayer consist?” St. John of the Cross asked one of his penitents; and she replied, “In considering the beauty of God, and in rejoicing that He has such beauty.” Such is the nature of worship. To pray and to worship is to perceive the spiritual beauty of the heavenly Kingdom; to express that beauty alike through words, through poetry and music, through art and symbolic acts, and through our whole lives; and in this way to extend the divine beauty in the world around us, transforming and transfiguring the fallen creation.”

(St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press: Crestwood, NY, 2004, pp. 65-67)