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 nothing 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
