God as Searching and Transforming Fire

“Make no mistake! God is a fire, and has come as fire, and has cast fire on the earth. The same Fire goes about looking for kindling to seize upon, for a ready disposition and will, in order to fall upon it and ignite it. And in those in whom it is kindled, it rises up into a great flame and reaches to the heavens, and it allows the one so enflamed neither delay nor rest. Neither, as some people imagine about the dead, does it consume the burning soul unawares—for the soul is not lifeless matter—but with perception and knowledge and, in the beginning, with unbearable pain, since the soul is both feeling and rational. Afterwards, when it has completely cleansed us of the filth of the passions, it becomes food and drink, light and joy without ceasing within us, and, by participation, it makes us light ourselves. It is like a clay pot that has been set on the fire. At first it is somewhat blackened by the smoke of the burning fuel, but after the fuel has begun to burn fiercely, then it becomes all translucent and like the fire itself, and the smoke can communicate none of it blackness to it. Just so, indeed, does the soul which has begun to burn with divine longing see first of all the murk of the passions within it, billowing out like smoke in the fire of the Holy Spirit. It sees in itself as in a mirror the blackness which accompanies the smoke, and it laments. It senses its evil thoughts like thorns, and its preconceptions, being consumed like dry kindling by the fire and reduced completely to ashes. After these things have been utterly destroyed and the essence alone of the soul remains, quite without passion, then the divine and immaterial fire unites itself essentially to the soul, too, and the latter is immediately kindled and becomes transparent, and shares in it like the clay pot does in the visible fire. So, too, with body. It, too, becomes fire through participation in the divine and ineffable light.”

*On the Mystical Life: The Ethical Discourses, Volume 2: On Virtue & Christian Life, St. Symeon the New Theologian (SVS Press:1996), pp.98-99. 

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