Fire will come and judge all things
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πάντα γὰρ τὸ πῦρ ἐπελθὸν κρινεῖ καὶ καταλήψεται
For the fire, coming upon all things, will judge and seize them.
Preserved by Hippolytus (Refutation IX), who read it as a proof-text for a coming judgment by fire. Heraclitus: the fire, advancing upon all things, will judge them and seize them. It is the fragment most often tied to the later idea of a world-conflagration.
The verb <em>krinei</em> holds two senses at once: to judge and to separate. Fire advancing over everything both discerns and divides — it passes sentence and sorts what it takes. Paired with <em>katalēpsetai</em>, 'will overtake, seize,' the image is of an unstoppable advance that catches all things and settles their account. Hippolytus naturally heard a Last Judgment; the Stoics heard their <em>ekpyrosis</em>, the periodic burning-up of the world back into fire.
Whether Heraclitus meant a single final conflagration is genuinely uncertain — much in the fragments suggests an everlasting world that only 'kindles and goes out in measures' (B30), with no end. But the choice of <em>krinei</em> is deliberate: fire is not merely destructive here but discriminating, a judge as much as a flame, the same intelligent, steering fire of B64 and B64a. The judgment and the seizure are one act — to be caught by this fire is already to be judged by it.
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