FIRE, BLESSING OF. — The blessing of fire may have originated in the earliest Christian times as a Jewish custom of offering to God the element that gives light and warmth. A remembrance of it is found in the “lucernarium” of the Ambrosian liturgy. The blessing of fire on Holy Saturday, however, is several centuries later.
The practice prevailed 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 Paschal candle (v.); the ceremony was intended to recall the three days of Christ’s burial and his Resurrection. Perhaps, in order to make the symbol still more powerful, it was decided to have a new fire on Holy Saturday, obtained from flint or some other material. Whatever the origin of this rite may have been, Pope Zachary (d. 753), writing to St. Boniface of Germany, affirms the Roman custom of the hidden lamps, while professing ignorance of the other custom, which seems to have been common among the Germans and Franks: Franz does not rule out the possibility that it was the Christian continuation of a rite in honor of Wotan at the beginning of spring. This interpretation does not conflict with the hypothesis that the symbol was given a more precise representation, a symbol so dear to the Carolingian school; indeed, the one may have prepared the way for the other, also favored by the fact that in the Middle Ages everything, before being used for worship, was blessed. Schuster says that the blessing of the fire was introduced into Rome through “that kind of compromise between Gallican usages and the Roman liturgy which was concluded in the first Carolingian period.” In the appendix to Ordo Romanus I (PL 78, 960), the new fire is obtained on Holy Thursday, but is also to 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 Ordo X (16th century), however, gives the rite as it is today, including the prayers which “were adapted to the new usage from the ancient rite accompanying the lighting of the evening candle, which at the beginning of the sacred vigil was to be lit beside the beech, 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, simultaneously with the extinguishing of the lights in the church, the fires in every home were extinguished, and then relit with pieces of wood blessed with the new fire: «Et de ipso ipso 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 the deacon will then insert into the Paschal candle. “The prayer recited for this purpose by the Celebrant formed part of the formula for the blessing of the Candle contained in the Gelasian Sacramentary” (L. Muratori, Lit. Rom. vetus, I, Venice 1718, chap. 565). To adapt it to the incense, the original term hunc incensum (= “burning light”) had to be badly distorted into hoc incensum (= “fragrance”), without noticing that the entire context instead speaks of the nocturnum splendorem, visibly lit by man but invisibly by the regenerating hand of God (Righetti). — Vedi tav. CXXII.