But if fire is a divine element, then man, at the same time, in learning how to make fire, appropriates a power that until then had been reserved for the gods, and so even the fire he lights in the temple is the effect of an act of pride. The Greek civilization immediately gives this connotation of pride to the conquest of fire and it is curious how all the celebrations of Prometheus, not only in Greek tragedy but also later in art, emphasize not so much the gift of fire as the punishment that follows it.
Fire as an Epiphanic Experience
When the artist accepts and recognizes with pride and with hubris that he resembles the gods, and sees art as a substitute for divine creation, then decadent sensibility opens the way for likening aesthetic experience to fire, and fire to epiphany.
The concept of epiphany (if not the term) first appears with Walter Pater in the conclusion to his essay on the Renaissance. It is no surprise that the famous conclusion opens with a quote from Heraclitus. Reality is a sum of forces and elements that arise and gradually fall away, and only superficial experience makes us see them as solid and fixed in an importunate presence: “But when reflexion begins to act upon those objects they are dissipated under its influence, their cohesive force seems suspended like a trick of magic.” We find ourselves among a group of impressions that are unstable, flickering, inconsistent: habit is broken, ordinary life fades away, and from this, beyond this, there remain single moments that can be grasped for an instant and immediately fade away. “Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone of the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us—for that moment only.”
To maintain this ecstasy is “success in life”: “While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend” (Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 1873).
All decadent writers feel aesthetic and sensual ecstasy in terms of radiance. But perhaps it was D’Annunzio who first linked aesthetic ecstasy to the idea of fire; we will not be so banal as to associate him only with the rather hackneyed idea that (as Mila di Codro shrills in The Daughter of Iorio) “the flame is beautiful.” The idea of aesthetic ecstasy as an experience of fire appears in his novel Il fuoco (The Flame). Before the beauty of Venice, Stelio Effrena has the experience of fire:
Each moment vibrated through the matter like an unbearable flash of lightning. Everything glittered in a sublime jubilation of light, from the crosses erect on the top of domes swollen by prayer to the delicate salt-crystal droplets hanging beneath the bridges. Just as the look-out on the mast-top shouts aloud of a storm at sea, so the golden angel on the top of the highest tower burst into flame and announced the coming. And so he came! He came seated on a cloud like a chariot of fire, the hem of his purple garments trailing behind him. (translated by Susan Bassnett)
James Joyce, the supreme theorist on epiphany, had read, loved, and was inspired by D’Annunzio’s novel. “By an epiphany Stephen meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself” (Stephen Hero). This experience always appears in Joyce as fiery. In his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the word fire is repeated fifty-nine times, and flame and flaming thirty-five times, not to mention other similar words, such as radiance or splendour. In Il fuoco, Foscarina listens to the words of Stelio and feels “attracted to that blazing atmosphere like the hearth of a forge.” For Stephen Dedalus aesthetic ecstasy always appears as flashes of splendor and is expressed using metaphors of the sun. The same happens for Stelio Effrena. Let us compare two passages. First, D’Annunzio:
The boat veered violently. A miracle caught it. The first rays of the sun pierced through the heaving sail, glittered on the bold angels on the bell-towers of San Marco and San Giorgio Maggiore, turned the sphere of the Fortuna to flame, crowned the five mitres on the Basilica with lightning . . . “Hail to the Miracle.” A superhuman feeling of power and freedom swelled the young man’s heart, as the wind swelled the sail that was transfigured for him. He stood in the crimson splendour of the sail and in the splendour of his own blood.
And then Joyce: “His thinking was a dusk of doubt and self-mistrust, lit up at moments by the lightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a splendour that in those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been fire-consumed; and thereafter his tongue grew heavy and he met the eyes of others with unanswering eyes, for he felt that the spirit of beauty had folded him round like a mantle.”
REGENERATING FIRE
For Heraclitus, as we have seen, the universe regenerates itself through fire in every era. Empedocles was, it seems, on more familiar terms with fire—it was to gain divinity, or to persuade his followers that he was divine, that he threw himself (at least according to some) into Mount Etna. This final purification, this choice of annihilation in fire, has fascinated poets from all periods. Suffice it to recall Hölderlin:
Have you not seen? They are recurring
The lovely times of my entire life again today
And something greater still is yet to come;
Then upward, son, upward to the very peak
Of ancient holy Etna, that is where we’ll go
For gods have greater presence on the heights
With my own eyes this very day I shall survey
The streams and islands and the sea.
And may the sunlight, hovering golden over all
These waters, deign to bless me in departure,
The splendid youthful light of day, which in
My youth I loved. Then all about us both
Eternal stars will scintillate in silence as
The glowing magma surges from volcanic depths
And tenderly to all-impelling spirit of the ether will
Arrive and touch us. Oh, then!
(The Death of Empedocles, translated by
David Farrell Krell)
Between Heraclitus and Empedocles, then, there is another aspect of fire—fire not only as creator but at the same time as destroyer and regenerator. The Stoics talked about ekpyrosis as the great conflagration (or fire and end of the world) through which everything, being derived from fire, returns to fire at the end of its evolutionary cycle. The idea of ekpyrosis does not actually suggest that purification through fire can be achieved by human planning and achievement. But certainly behind many sacrifices based on fire there is an idea that, by destroying, fire purifies and regenerates. And thus the sacral nature of death at the stake.
Past centuries are full of burnings at the stake, and not just those of medieval heretics but also witches burned in more recent times, at least up to the eighteenth century. And it is only D’Annunzio’s aestheticism that made Mila di Codro say that the flame is beautiful. The fires that have burned so many heretics are terrifying, not least because they followed other tortures. It is enough to quote (from the medieval Story of Fra Dolcino the Heresiarch) the description of Fra Dolcino’s torture when he and his wife, Margherita, were handed over to the civil authorities for the sentence of the Inquisition to be carried out. While the bells rang the tocsin, they were taken on a cart around the whole city, surrounded by their executioners and followed by armed troops, and in every district their flesh was pierced with red-hot tongs. Margherita was burned first, before Dolcino, whose face flinched not a muscle, nor did he utter any complaint when the tongs ripped into his flesh. Then the cart continued on its way, while the executioners plunged their irons into burning braziers. Dolcino suffered other torments and still he remained silent, except that his shoulders tightened a little when they cut away his nose, and when they tore off his male member he let out a long sigh, like a moan. His last words had the ring of impenitence, and he said that he would rise again on the third day. Then he was burned and his ashes were scattered in the wind.
For inquisitors of every age, race, and religion, fire purifies not only the sins of human beings but also those of books. There are many stories about the burning of books. Sometimes they occur by accident, sometimes through ignorance, but on other occasions, such as the Nazi bonfires of books, they are to purify and to destroy the evidence of a degenerate art. Don Quixote’s zealous friends burn his library of books on chivalry for moral reasons and for the sake of his sanity. The library in Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé burns in a way that reminds us of the sacrifice of Empedocles (“when the flames finally reach him he laughs loudly, as he has never laughed in all his life”).
Books condemned to disappearance are burned in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. My library in the abbey of The Name of the Rose is set alight by fate, but the cause is an originating act of
