by Umberto Eco
Perhaps there is more to say on the absolute, but for the time being nothing comes to mind.
[La Milanesiana, 2007]
5. Beautiful Flame
When they asked me to talk about one of the four elements, I chose fire.
Why? Because although fire is fundamental to all our lives, of all the elements it is the one most likely to be forgotten about. We breathe air unceasingly, we use water every day, we constantly tread the earth, but our experience of fire runs the risk of diminishing more and more. Fire’s former functions have gradually been taken over by invisible forms of energy; we no longer associate the idea of light with that of a flame and our experience of fire is limited to gas (which we barely notice), and matches and lighters (but only for those who still smoke), and candle flames (but only for churchgoers).
For the privileged few, this leaves the hearth, and that is where I would like to begin. Back in the Seventies I bought a house in the country with a fine fireplace. For my children, then aged ten and twelve, the experience of fire—the burning logs, the flames—was an absolutely new phenomenon. And I noticed that when the fire was lit they were no longer interested in the television. The flames were more beautiful and more varied than any program, told countless stories, changed constantly, and did not follow set routines like TV shows. Among recent philosophers, the person who perhaps reflected most on the poetry, mythology, psychology, and psychoanalysis of fire was Gaston Bachelard. Given the focus of his research on the archetypal figures that have populated the human imagination since the dawn of time, he could hardly fail to come across fire.
The heat of fire evokes the heat of the sun, in its turn seen as a ball of fire. Fire is hypnotic and is therefore a prime subject and mainspring of the imagination. Fire is a reminder of the first universal prohibition (do not touch it), thus becoming the epiphany of the law. Fire is the first creature that, if it is to be born and grow, must devour the two pieces of wood that generated it. And this birth of fire has a strong sexual valence, because the seed of the flame issues from rubbing—and if we wish to take this psychoanalytic interpretation even further, we could recall Freud’s view that “the control of fire could be gained only after man had renounced the homosexually tinged pleasure of extinguishing it with urine.” Mastery of it meant foregoing our biological drives.
Fire serves as a metaphor for many drives, from burning rages to flames of amorous infatuation; fire is metaphorically present in every discourse on the passions, just as it is always metaphorically linked with life through the color it shares with blood. Fire as energy accomplishes the maceration of nutritional matter we call digestion, and like the feeding process it must be continuously fueled.
Fire is the immediate instrument of all transformation and is called for when something needs to be changed. To keep a fire from going out, it must be cared for like a newborn child. The contradictions of our life instantly emerge in fire: it is an element that gives life and also one that gives death, destruction, and suffering. It is a symbol of purity and purification but also produces filth, leaving ashes as its excrement.
Fire can be a light so dazzlingly bright that you cannot look at it directly, any more than you can look at the sun. But when properly tamed, as when it becomes candlelight, it regales us with a play of light and shade, nocturnal vigils in the course of which a solitary flame induces our fancy to wander, with its gleaming rays that fade away in the darkness, and at the same time the candle hints at a source of life and a sun that is dying. Fire is born from matter and is transformed into an ever lighter and airier substance, from the red or bluish flame at its base to the white flame at its tip, until it fades away in smoke. In this sense, fire is ascensional in nature, it reminds us of transcendence, and yet, perhaps because we have learned that it lives in the heart of the earth from where it spews out only when volcanos erupt, it is a symbol of infernal depths. It is life but it is also the experience of life’s quenching and constant fragility.
And, to sum things up with Gaston Bachelard, I would like to quote from his Psychoanalysis of Fire:
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 under the ashes. The intensity of a fire cannot be measured by the egg timer; the egg was done when a drop of water, often a drop of saliva, would evaporate on the shell. Recently I was very much surprised to read that Denis Papin used the same procedure as my grandmother in tending his cooking pot. Before getting my egg I was condemned to eat a soup of bread and butter boiled to a pulp.… But on days when I was on my good behavior, they would bring out the waffle iron. Rectangular in form, it would crush down the fire of thorns burning red as the spikes of sword lilies. 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 odor 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 dessert—that fire shows itself a friend of man.
Fire is therefore too many things and—as well as being a physical phenomenon—it becomes a symbol, and like all symbols it is ambiguous, polysemic, and evokes different meanings according to the situation. So I will not attempt a psychoanalysis of fire here, but a rough and ready semiotics, trying to seek out the various meanings it has acquired for all of us who warm ourselves with it and sometimes die from it.
Fire as a Divine Element
Since our first experience of fire is indirect, through sunlight, and direct, through lightning bolts and uncontrollable blazes, fire clearly had to be associated with divinity from the beginning, and in all primitive religions we find some kind of fire cult, from the greeting extended to the rising sun to tending the sacred fire that must never go out in the penetralia of the temple.
In the Bible fire is always the epiphanic image of the divinity: Elijah was carried off on a chariot of fire, and the just will rejoice amid the splendor of fire (Judges 5:31: So perish all thine enemies, O Lord, but let them that love him be as the sun when he goeth forth in all his might; Daniel 12:3: 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; Wisdom 3:7: In the time of their visitation they will shine forth, and will run like sparks among the stubble). The Fathers of the Church refer to Christ as lampas, lucifer, lumen, lux, oriens, sol iustitiae, sol novus, and stella.
The first, philosophers thought of fire as a cosmic principle. According to Aristotle, Heraclitus thought that fire was the archè, the origin of all things, and in some fragments it seems that Heraclitus actually supported this idea. He is believed to have said that in all eras the universe is renewed through fire, that there is a reciprocal exchange of all things with fire and vice-versa, like goods for gold and gold for goods. According to Diogenes Laertius, he also claimed that all things are formed from fire and return to fire—that all things are, by condensation or rarefaction, mutations of fire (which on condensing becomes moisture, which on consolidating becomes earth, which in its turn liquefies into water, allowing the water to produce luminous evaporation that fuels new fire). But, alas, it is well known that Heraclitus was obscure by definition, and that the lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither reveals nor conceals, but shows things through signs. Many believe that the references to fire were merely metaphors to express the extreme mutability of all things. In other words, panta rhei, everything flows, and not only (I might add) can we never step in the same river twice, we can never be burned twice by the same flame.
Perhaps the finest identification of fire with the divine is found in the works of Plotinus. Fire is the manifestation of divinity precisely because, paradoxically, the One from which
all things emanate and of which nothing can be said does not move or consume itself in the act of creation. And it is possible to conceive of this “First” only as if it were an irradiation that spreads out from itself, like the brilliant light that encircles the sun and irradiates it in an ever-changing way, while the sun remains exactly as it was, without consuming itself (Fifth Ennead, tractate 1, section 6).
And if things are born from an irradiation, nothing on earth can be more beautiful than the very image of divine irradiation: fire. The beauty of a color, which is a simple thing, springs from a form that conquers the darkness of matter and from the presence in the color of an incorporeal light, which is its formal reason. This is why fire is more beautiful in itself than any other body, because it has the intangibility of form: it is the lightest of all bodies, to the point that it is almost intangible. It always remains pure, because it does not hold within itself the other elements that make up matter, whereas all the other elements hold fire within themselves: they, in fact, can be warmed, whereas fire cannot be cooled. Thanks to its nature, only fire has colors and all other things receive form and color from it, and when they move away from the light of the fire they are no longer beautiful.
The works of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (who lived from the fifth to the sixth century), which influenced all of medieval aesthetics, are Neo-Platonic in nature. This can be seen from the Celestial Hierarchy (XV):
I think, then, the similitude of fire denotes the likeness of the Heavenly Minds to God in the highest degree; for the holy theologians frequently describe the superessential and formless essence by fire, as having many likenesses, if I may be permitted to say so, of the supremely Divine property, as in things visible. For the sensible fire is, so to speak, in everything, and passes through everything unmingled, and springs from all, and whilst all-luminous, is, as it were, hidden, unknown, in its essential nature, when there is no material lying near it upon which it may shew its proper energy. It is both uncontrollable and invisible, self-subduing all things.
Together with the concept of proportion, medieval ideas of beauty were dominated by that of claritas and light. Films and role-playing games encourage us to think of the Middle Ages as a succession of “dark” centuries, not only metaphorically but in terms of nocturnal colors and gloomy shadows. Nothing could be further from the truth. The people of the Middle Ages certainly lived in dark places, forests, castle halls, and cramped rooms feebly illuminated by firelight; but apart from the fact that they were folk who went to bed early and were more accustomed to the day rather than the night (something that the Romantics liked so much), they portrayed themselves in vivid colors.
In poetry this sense of brilliant color was ever present: grass is green, blood is red, milk is pure white, and, according to the poet Guinizelli, a beautiful woman has a “snow-white face tinged with carmine” (and, later, we find Petrarch’s “clear, fresh, sweet waters”).
Nor should we forget those visions of dazzling light in Dante’s Paradiso, whose finest portrayal we owe, oddly enough, to the nineteenth-century artist Doré, who tried (as best he could, but failed) to depict that refulgence, those swirls of flame, those flashes, those suns, the clarity that arises “as the horizon, at the rising sun, grows brighter,” those white roses, those rubicund flowers that shine out in the third part of Dante’s work, where the vision of God appears as an ecstasy of fire:
In the deep, transparent essence of the lofty Light
there appeared to me three circles
having three colors but the same extent,
and each one seemed reflected by the other
as rainbow is by rainbow, while the third one seemed fire,
equally breathed forth by one and by the other.
The Middle Ages were dominated by a cosmology of light. In the ninth century, in John Scotus Eriugena’s Commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy, it is said that:
This universal factory of the world is a very great lamp made up of many parts like many lights to reveal the pure species of intelligible things and to see them in the mind’s eye, filling the hearts of the wise faithful with divine grace and the aid of reason. This therefore is why the theologian calls God the Father of Lights, since all things come from Him, through which and in which He reveals himself and in the light of the lamp of his wisdom he unifies and makes them.
Between the twelfth and the thirteenth century, the cosmology of light proposed by Robert Grosseteste evolved into an image of the universe formed by a single flow of luminous energy, a source both of beauty and being, leading us to think of a kind of Big Bang. From this single light the astral spheres and the natural zones of the elements were gradually derived through rarefaction and condensation, and consequently the infinite shades of color and the volumes of things. Saint Bonaventure of Bagnoregio was later to say in his Commentary on the Sentences that light is the common nature found in every body, be it celestial or earthly, and is the substantial form of bodies, which, the more light they possess, the more truly and worthily they are a part of being.
Hellfire
But even though fire moves through the sky to reach us, it also erupts from the bowels of the Earth, sowing death and destruction, and this explains why fire has been associated with the infernal realms since earliest times.
In the Book of Job (41:1–27), 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 the Book of Revelation, when the seventh seal is broken, hail and fire come to devastate the earth, the bottomless pit opens, and smoke and locusts emerge from it; the four angels, released from the river Euphrates to which they were bound, lead countless armies whose soldiers wear breastplates of fire. And when the Lamb reappears and the supreme judge arrives on a white cloud, the sun burns up the survivors. And, after Armageddon, the Beast will be plunged together with the false prophet into a lake of fire and burning sulfur.
According to the Gospels, sinners are hurled into the fires of Gehenna (Matthew 13:40–42):
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.
Oddly, there is less fire in Dante’s hell than one might think, because the poet does his utmost to come up with a range of diverse torments, but we can be content with heretics lying in fiery graves, men of violence plunged into a river of boiling blood, blasphemers, sodomites, and usurers pelted by fiery rain, simoniacs stuck head down in pits with their feet ablaze, and barrators submerged in boiling pitch.
Hellfire was certainly far more marked in Baroque texts, where descriptions of the torments of hell exceed the violence of Dante, also because they are unredeemed by artistic inspiration. As in this page from Saint Alphonsus Liguori (Apparecchio alla morte, 1758, XXVI):
The punishment that most torments the senses of the damned is hellfire.… Even in this world the pain of fire is the greatest of all; but there is a vast difference between our fire and the fire of hell, which according to Augustine makes ours seem as if painted.… The damned souls will be surrounded by fire, like logs in a furnace. They will find themselves with an abyss of fire below, an abyss above, and an abyss all around. If they touch, see or breathe; they will touch, see or breathe only fire. They will swim in fire as fish swim in water. But this fire will not merely be all around the damned, it will also penetrate their entrails whence it will torment them. Their bodies will become nothing but fire, so that their bowels will burn in their belly, their heart in their breast, their brain in their head, their blood in their veins, even the marrow in their bones: all damned souls will become a furnace of fire in themselves.
And Ercole Mattioli, in Pietà illustrata (1694), wrote:
In the opinion of the gravest of theologians, a great prodigy will be that
a single fire will contain within itself the cold of ice, the sting of thorns and iron, the gall of asps, the venom of vipers, the cruelty of all wild beasts, the malevolence of all the elements and the stars.… A greater prodigy, however, et supra virtutem ignis, will be that such fire, even though a single kind, can make distinctions and hence torment most those who have sinned most; Tertullian called this fire sapiens ignis and Eusebius of Emesa named it ignis arbiter, because as it must match the greatness and diversity of the torments with the greatness and diversity of the sins … and almost as if it had reason and full knowledge to distinguish between one sinner and another, the fire will make the harshness of its rigors felt to a greater or lesser degree.
And this brings us to the revelation of the last secret of Fatima on the part of Sister Lucia, former shepherd girl:
The secret comprises three parts, of which I shall reveal two. The first was the vision of hell. Our Lady showed us a huge lake of fire, which seemed to be under the ground. Amid this fire, demons and souls in human form, blackish or bronze in color but transparent, fluttered amid the blaze where, borne up by flames that came from their own bodies together with clouds of smoke, they fell all around like the sparks that fall from great conflagrations, with neither weight nor balance, amid shrieks and groans of suffering and desperation that chilled our blood and made us tremble with fear. The demons could be distinguished by their horrid and revolting resemblance to terrifying unknown animals, but black and transparent.
Alchemical Fire
Midway between heavenly fire and hellfire we find fire as an alchemical agent. Fire and the crucible seem to be essential to the alchemical process, the aim of which is to subject materia prima, or first matter, to a series of operations with a view to obtaining from it the philosopher’s stone, which can effect projection—that is to say, the transmutation of base metals into gold.