by Umberto Eco
THE THEME OF THIS YEAR’S Milanesiana festival is the four elements. To speak about all four would be beyond me, so I have chosen to limit myself to fire.
Why? Because, though still essential to our lives, of all the elements it is the one most liable to be forgotten. We breathe air all the time, we use water every day, we continually tread the earth, but our experience of fire is in danger of gradually diminishing. The role once played by fire has slowly been taken over by invisible forms of energy; we have separated our idea of light from that of the flame, and our only experience of fire now is that of gas (which we hardly notice), the matchstick or cigarette lighter (at least for those who still smoke), and the flicker of candles (for those who still go to church).
A lucky few still have a fireplace, and this is where I would like to begin. In the 1970s I bought a house in the country with a fine hearth. For my children, then between ten and twelve, the experience of fire, of burning logs, of flames, was something entirely new, and I realized when the fire was lit they lost all interest in television. The flame was more beautiful and varied than any television program—it told countless stories, it could flare up at any moment, it didn’t follow the set patterns of the television show.
Perhaps, among our contemporaries, the person who reflected most on the poetry, mythology, psychology, and psychoanalysis of fire was Gaston Bachelard, who could hardly avoid encountering fire during his research into archetypes associated with human imagination from earliest times.
The heat of the fire recalls the heat of the sun, which itself is seen as a ball of fire; fire hypnotizes and is therefore the first object and source of wonder; fire reminds us of the first universal injunction (not to touch it), thus becoming an epiphany of law; fire is the first creature that, as it takes life and grows, devours the two pieces of wood that have generated it—and this birth of fire has a strong sexual significance since the seed of the flame is unleashed through friction—and yet, if we want to pursue a psychoanalytical interpretation, we will recall how for Freud the condition for taking control of the fire is renunciation of the pleasure of quenching it with urine, and therefore the renunciation of instinctual life.
Fire is a metaphor for many impulses, from the fire of anger to being inflamed with amorous infatuation; fire is metaphorically present in every discussion about passions, in the same way as it is always linked metaphorically to life through the color that it shares with blood. Fire as heat governs that maceration of food matter that is digestion and shares with the feeding process the fact that, to stay alive, it must be continually fueled.
Fire is ever present as an instrument for every transformation, and fire is called for when something has to be changed: to prevent the fire from dying out requires a care similar to that for a newborn baby; fire immediately highlights the fundamental contradictions in our lives; it is the element that brings life and the element that brings death, destruction, and suffering; it is the symbol of purity and purification but also of filth, since it produces ash as its excrement.
Fire can be a light too strong to look at, like the sun. But properly harnessed, as in the light of a candle, it flickers and casts shadows, accompanying our night vigils, during which a solitary flame takes hold of our imagination, with its rays that spread out into darkness, and the candle symbolizes a source of life and, at the same time, a sun that dies away. Fire is born from matter, to be transformed into an ever lighter and airier substance, from the red or bluish flame at its base to the white flame at its peak, until it vanishes in smoke . . . In that sense the nature of fire is ascendant, it reminds us of transcendence, and yet, perhaps because we learn that it lives at the heart of the earth, from which it bursts forth only when volcanoes erupt, it is a symbol of infernal depth. It is life, but it also dies down and is continually fragile.
And to conclude my consideration of Bachelard I’d like to quote this passage from Psychoanalysis of Fire (1964):
From the notched teeth of the chimney hook there hung the black cauldron. The three-legged cooking pot projected over the hot embers. Puffing up her cheeks to blow into the steel tube, my grandmother would rekindle the sleeping flames. Everything would be cooking at the same time: the potatoes for the pigs, the choice potatoes for the family. For me there would be a fresh egg cooking in the ashes. The intensity of the fire cannot be measured by an hour glass; the egg was ready when a drop of water, perhaps of saliva, evaporated on its shell. I was surprised, then, to learn that Papin watched over his cooking pot using the same methods as my grandmother. Before the egg I had to eat bread soup . . . But on the days when I was on my good behaviour, they would bring out the waffle iron. Rectangular in form it would crush down the fire of thorns burning red as the spikes of gladioli. And soon the gaufre, or waffle, would be pressed against my pinafore, warmer to the fingers than to the lips. Yes, then indeed I was eating fire, eating its gold, its odour, and even its crackling while the burning gaufre was crunching under my teeth. And it is always like that, through a kind of extra pleasure—like a dessert—that the fire shows itself a friend of man. (translated by Alan C. M. Ross)
Fire is therefore very many things. As well as a physical phenomenon, it becomes a symbol, and like all symbols is ambiguous, polysemous, evoking different meanings according to the circumstances. This evening, therefore, I will not be attempting a psychoanalysis of fire but instead a rough-and-ready semiotic exploration, searching out the various meanings it has acquired for all of us who are warmed by it and sometimes die by it.
FIRE AS A DIVINE ELEMENT
Seeing that our first experience of fire happens indirectly, through the light of the sun, and directly, through the untamable forces of lightning and uncontrollable fires, it was obvious that fire had to be associated from the very beginning with divinity, and in all the primitive religions we find some form of fire cult, from worship of the rising sun to keeping in the inner sanctum of the temple the sacred fire that must never burn out.
In the Bible fire is always an epiphanic image of the divine—Elijah would be taken away on a chariot of fire, the just would triumph in radiant fire (“So let all thine enemies perish, O Lord: but let them that love him be as the sun when he goeth forth in his might,” Judges 5:31; “And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever,” Daniel 12:3; “And in the time of their visitation they shall shine, and run to and fro like sparks among the stubble,” Wisdom 3:7), whereas the fathers of the church spoke of Christ as lampas, lucifer, lumen, lux, oriens, sol iustitiae, sol novus, stella.
The first philosophers thought of fire as a cosmic principle. For Heraclitus—according to Aristotle—fire was the archè, the origin of all things, and in certain fragments it seems that Heraclitus did actually hold this view. He is thought to have claimed that the universe regenerates itself in every era through fire, that there is a mutual exchange of all things with fire, and of fire with all things, like the exchange of goods for gold and gold for goods. And, according to Diogenes Laertius, he is said to have claimed that everything is formed from fire and returns to fire; that all things, through condensation and rarefaction, are mutations of fire (which through condensation transforms itself into humidity, humidity consolidates into earth, earth in turn liquefies into water, and water produces luminous evaporations that fuel new fire). But alas, we know that Heraclitus was by definition obscure, that “the Lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither reveals nor conceals, but gives a sign,” and many take the view that the references to fire were only a metaphor to explain the extreme changeability of everything. In other words, panta rei, everything flows movably and changeably, and not only (I paraphrase) do we never bathe twice in the same river, but things never burn twice in the same flame.
We find perhaps the most beautiful identification of fire with the divine in the work of Plotinus. Fire is a manifestation of the divine because, paradoxically, the One from which everything emanates, and about which not
hing can be said, does not move and is not consumed in an act of creation. And this primal object can be conceived only as if it were an irradiation, like a brilliant light encircling the sun and ceaselessly generated from it, while the sun remains just the same as it was, unchanging (Fifth Ennead, tractate 1, section 6).
And if things are created from an irradiation, nothing can be more beautiful on earth than fire, which is the very figure of divine irradiation. The beauty of a color, which is something simple, is created from a form that dominates the obscurity of matter and from the presence in the color of an incorporeal light, which is its formal reason. For this reason, fire is beautiful in itself more than any other thing, because of its intangibility of form: of all bodies it is the lightest, to the point of being almost intangible. It always remains pure because it does not contain within itself the other elements that make up matter, whereas all other elements contain fire within themselves: they, in fact, can be heated, whereas fire cannot be cooled. Fire alone, by its nature, contains colors; other things receive their form and color from it, and when they distance themselves from the firelight they lose their beauty.
The pages of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (fifth to sixth centuries), which influenced the whole of medieval aesthetics, show a strong neoplatonic influence. This can be seen in Celestial Hierarchy:
I believe, then, that fire manifests what is most divine in the celestial minds; for the holy authors often describe the super-essential and formless essence—which has no form at all—with the symbol of fire, since it has many aspects of the divine character, if such can be said, insofar as it can be found in visible things. In fact, the sensitive fire is found, so to speak, in all things and passes through all things without mingling with them, and is separate from everything and at the same time, being all-luminous, remains, as it were, hidden, unknown in its essential nature—until it is placed before a material toward which it can demonstrate its own action—it cannot be taken hold of, nor seen, but it takes hold of everything. (chapter 15)
Medieval perceptions of beauty are dominated by concepts of clarity and luminosity, as well as proportion. Cinema and video games encourage us to think of the Middle Ages as a succession of “dark” centuries, not only metaphorically but also in terms of nocturnal colors and dark shadows. Nothing could be more wrong. People in the Middle Ages certainly lived in dark spaces—forests, castle corridors, small rooms faintly lit by their fireplaces; but apart from the fact that they were people who went to sleep early and were more accustomed to the day than the night (of which the Romantics would be so fond), the Middle Ages was a time of bright hues.
It was a period that identified beauty with light and color (as well as with proportion), and this color was always elementary, a symphony of reds, blues, gold, silver, white, and green, without subtleties and half-tones; the splendor is generated from the overall effect rather than deriving from a light that envelops things from outside or exalts the color beyond the outlines of the figure. In medieval miniatures the light seems to emanate from the objects.
In medieval poetry this sense of radiant color is always present: the grass is green, blood is red, milk pure white, and a pretty woman, in the words of Guido Guinizzelli, has a “a face of snow colored in carmine” (not to forget, later on, Petrarch’s “clear, fresh, sweet waters”).
Fire animates the visions of mystics, in particular the writings of Hildegard of Bingen. See, for example, Liber scivias:
I saw a dazzling light and in it a human form, the color of sapphire, which was all ablaze with bright gentle fire, and that splendorous light spread throughout the whole bright fire, and this fire was bright with that splendorous light, and that light was dazzling and that fire bright with the whole human form, producing a single glow of matchless virtue and power . . . The flame consists of a splendid clarity, an inherent vigor and a fiery ardor, but the splendid clarity possesses it so that it is resplendent, the inherent vigor so that it endures, and the fiery ardor so that it burns. (book 2, part 2)
Not to forget the visions of brilliant light in Dante’s Paradise and which have been depicted in their maximum splendor by a nineteenth-century artist, Gustave Doré, who sought (as only he could) to depict those scenes of radiance, those flaming vortexes, those lamps, those suns, that clearness that hides “like an horizon brightening with the dawn” (canto 14, line 69), those white roses, those rubicund flowers that shine out in the third part of The Divine Comedy, where even the vision of God appears like an ecstasy of fire:
Within Its depthless clarity of substance
I saw the Great Light shine into three circles
in three clear colours bound in one same space;
the first seemed to reflect the next like rainbow
on rainbow, and the third was like a flame
equally breathed forth by the other two.
(canto 33, lines 115–20; translated by Mark Musa)
The Middle Ages was dominated by a cosmology of light. Already by the ninth century John Scotus Eriugena said, “This universal manufactory of the world is a vast lamp consisting of many parts like many lights to reveal the pure species of intelligible things and to sense them with the mind’s eye, instilling divine grace and the help of reason into the heart of learned followers. It is right then that the theologian calls God the Father of Enlightenment, since all things are from Him, for which and in which He manifests himself and in the light of the lamp of his wisdom he unifies and makes them” (Commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy, chapter 1).
In the thirteenth century the cosmology of light put forward by the English churchman Robert Grosseteste built up a picture of the universe formed by a single flow of luminous energy, a source both of beauty and being, making us think of a sort of Big Bang. The astral spheres and natural areas of the elements are created from the single light by gradual rarefaction and condensation, producing the infinite shades of color and the volumes of things. Saint Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (Commentary on the Book of Sentences, book 2, distinction 12, chapters 1 and 2) was to record that light is the common nature found in all bodies, whether celestial or terrestrial; light is the substantial form of bodies, and the more they possess it, the more they are a real and worthy part of existence.
HELLFIRE
But while fire moves across the sky and shines down on us, it likewise erupts from the bowels of the earth, bringing death. Thus, from the very earliest times, fire has also been associated with the infernal depths.
In the book of Job (41:19–21), from the mouth of Leviathan “go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out . . . His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth.” In Revelation, when the seventh seal is broken, hail and fire come to devastate the earth, the bottomless pit opens up, and from it emerge smoke and locusts; the four angels, set loose from the river Euphrates where they were bound, move with countless armies of men wearing breastplates of fire. And when the Lamb reappears and reaches the supreme judge on a white cloud, the sun burns the survivors. And, after Armageddon, the beast and the false prophet will be thrown into a lake of burning sulfurous fire.
In the Gospels, sinners are cast into everlasting fire:
As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world. The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. (Matthew 13:40–42)
Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels. (Matthew 25:41)
Curiously, in Dante’s inferno there is less fire than we might expect, since the poet contrives to think up a whole range of torments, but we may be satisfied with heretics lying in fiery tombs; men of violence plunged into pools of blood; blasphemers, sodomites, and usurers struck by rains of fire; simoniacs shoved head-first into pits, with flames lapping at their f
eet; and barrators submerged in boiling pitch.
Hellfire was certainly more prevalent in baroque writings, with descriptions of the torments of hell that exceed the violence of Dante, not least because they are unredeemed by the inspiration of art—like this passage by Saint Alphonsus de Liguori:
The punishment that most torments the senses of the damned, is the fire of hell . . . Even in this life, the pain of fire is the greatest of all; but there is much difference between our fire and that of hell which, says Saint Augustine, makes ours seem painted . . . Thus the wretched will be surrounded by fire, like wood inside a furnace. The damned will find themselves with an abyss of fire beneath, an abyss above, and an abyss around them. If they touch, see or breathe, they will touch, see or breathe nothing but fire. They will be in the fire like fish in water. But this fire will not only surround the damned, but will enter even their bowels to torment them. Their body will become all fire, so that their bowels will burn within their belly, their heart within their breast, their brains within their head, their blood within their veins, even their marrow with their bones: every lost soul will become in himself a furnace of fire. (Apparecchio alla morte, consideration 26)
And Ercole Mattioli, in Pietà illustrate (1694), wrote,
Great wonder will it be that a fire alone contains perfectly within it, according to great theologians, the coldness of ice, the stings of thorns and iron, the venom of asps, the poisons of vipers, the cruelty of all wild beasts, the malevolence of all elements and stars . . . Yet greater wonder, et supra virtutem ignis, will be that such fire, though one specie alone, can make distinction in tormenting those who sin most, being called by Tertullian sapiens ignis, and by Eusebius of Emesa ignis arbiter, since, having to match, according to the greatness and diversity of supplicants, the greatness and diversity of their sins . . . , the fire, almost as if it were endowed with reason and full knowledge, to distinguish between sinner and sinner, shall make its rigors felt with more or less severity.