Inventing the Enemy: Essays

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 censorship.

Fernando Báez, in A Universal History of the Destruction of Books (2004), asks for what reasons fire has been the dominant agent in the destruction of books. And he answers:

Fire is salvation, and for that reason, almost all religions dedicate fires to their respective divinities. This power to conserve life is also a destructive power. When man destroys with fire, he plays God, master of the fire of life and death. And in this way he identifies with a purifying solar cult and with the great myth of destruction that almost always takes place through fire. The reason for using fire is obvious: it reduces the spirit of a work to matter. (translated by Alfred MacAdam)