BLESSING OF FIRE. - The blessing of fire could have its origins in the early Christian era as a Hebrew custom of offering to God the element that gives light and heat. There is a trace of it in the "lucernarium" of the Ambrosian liturgy. The blessing of fire on Holy Saturday, however, is several centuries later.
There was a custom of hiding three lamps late on Holy Thursday at the Matins of darkness, when all the lights were extinguished, and of bringing them out again on Saturday to light the great paschal candle (v.); the ceremony was intended to commemorate the three days of Christ's burial and His Resurrection. Perhaps to make the symbol even stronger, it was decided to have a new fire on Holy Saturday obtained from flint and other material. Whatever the genesis of this rite may have been, Pope Zachary (d. 753), writing to St. Boniface of Germany, affirms the Roman use of the hidden lamps and states that he was unaware of the other use that seems common among the Germans and the Franks: Franz does not exclude that it was the Christian continuation of a rite in honor of Wotan at the beginning of spring; this interpretation is not in contradiction with the hypothesis formulated of a more accurate representation of the symbol, so dear to the Carolingian school; indeed the one may have prepared the way for the other, favored also by the fact that in the Middle Ages anything, before being used for worship, was blessed. Schuster says that the blessing of fire was introduced in Rome through "that kind of compromise between Gallican uses and the Roman liturgy, which was concluded in the early Carolingian period." In the appendix to the Ordo Romanus I (PL 78, 960) the new fire is procured on Holy Thursday, but it will also be used on Saturday. Amalarius (De eccl. offic., IV, 22), on the other hand, suggests that the lighting was performed on each of the three days of the sacred Triduum. Only the Ordo X (16th century), however, gives the rite as it is today, including the prayers that "were adapted to the new use from the ancient one accompanying the lighting of the evening candle, which at the beginning of the sacred vigil was to be lit beside the fire, as a kind of poetic sacrifice of light in homage to Him who is the light of the world" (Schuster).
The lighting of the new fire was also of great importance for domestic life. In Rome, at the same time as the candles were extinguished in the church, those in every house were extinguished, then relit with pieces of wood blessed with the new fire: "Et de ipso igne accendunt in omni domo, quia omnis anterior extingui debet" (Ord. Rom. I: PL 78, 955).
The blessing of the fire is followed by that of the five grains of incense, which will then be fixed by the deacon into the paschal candle. "The prayer, which is recited for this purpose by the Celebrant, was part of the formula for the blessing of the Candle contained in the Gelasian [Sacramentary]" (L. Muratori, Lit. Rom. vetus, I, Venice 1718, ch. 565). To adapt it to the incense, the original term hunc incensum (= "lighted lamp") had to be awkwardly twisted into hoc incensum (= "perfume"), without noticing that the whole context speaks instead of the nocturnum splendorem, visibly lit by man, but invisibly by the regenerating hand of God (Righetti). - See plate CXXII.
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Enrico Cattaneo