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GIORDANO BRUNO
Filosofo, arso vivo a Roma,
PER VOLONTA DEL PAPA
IL 17 FEBBRAIO 1600
by John J. Kessler, Ph.D., Ch.E.
GIORDANO BRUNO,
THE FORGOTTEN PHILOSOPHER
In the year 1548 an Italian boy was born in the little town of
Nola, not far from Vesuvius. Although, he spent the greater part of
his life in hostile and foreign countries he was drawn back to his
home at the end of his travels and after he had written nearly
twenty books.
When he was thirteen years old he began to go to school at the
Monastery of Saint Domenico. It was a famous place. Thomas Aquinas,
himself a Dominican, had lived there and taught. Within a few years
Bruno had become a Dominican priest.
It was not long before the monks of Saint Dominico began to
learn something about the extraordinary enthusiasm of their young
colleague. He was frank, outspoken and lacking in reticence. It was
not long before he got himself into trouble. It was evident that
this boy could not be made to fit into Dominican grooves. One of
the first things that a student has to learn is to give the teacher
the answers that the teacher wants. The average teacher is the
preserver of the ancient land marks. The students are his audience.
They applaud but they must not innovate. They must learn to labor
and to wait. It was not Bruno's behavior but his opinions that got
him into trouble.
He ran away from school, from his home town, from his own
country and tried to find among strangers and foreigners a
congenial atmosphere for his intellectual integrity that he could
not find at home. It is difficult not to get sentimental about
Bruno. He was a man without a country and, finally, without a
church.
Bruno was interested in the nature of ideas. Although the name
was not yet invented it will be perfectly proper to dub Bruno as an
epistemologist, or as a pioneer Semanticist. He takes fresh stock
of the human mind.
It is an interesting fact that here, at the close of the 16th
Century, a man, closed in on all sides by the authority of priestly
tradition, makes what might be termed a philosophical survey of the
world which the science of the time was disclosing. It is
particularly interesting because it is only in the 20th Century
that the habit of this sort of speculation is again popular. Bruno
lived in a period when philosophy became divorced from science.
Perhaps it might be better to say that science became divorced from
philosophy. Scientists became too intrigued with their new toys to
bother about philosophy. They began to busy themselves with
telescopes and microscopes and chemical glassware.
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GIORDANO BRUNO
In 1581 Bruno went to Paris and began to give lectures on
philosophy. It was not an uncommon thing for scholars to wander
from place to place. He made contacts easily and was able to
interest any group with whom he came in contact with the fire of
his ideas. His reputation reached King Henry III who became curious
to look over this new philosophical attraction. Henry Ill was
curious to find out if Bruno's art was that of the magician or the
sorcerer. Bruno had made a reputation for himself as a magician who
could inspire greater memory retention. Bruno satisfied the king
that his system was based upon organized knowledge. Bruno found a
real patron in Henry Ill and it had much to do with the success of
his short career in Paris.
It was about this time that one of Bruno's earliest works was
published, De Umbras Idearum, The Shadows of Ideas, which was
shortly followed by Ars Mernoriae, Art of Memory. In these books he
held that ideas are only the shadows of truth. The idea was
extremely novel in his time. In the same year a third book
followed: Brief Architecture of the Art of Lully with its
Completion. Lully had tried to prove the dogmas of the church by
human reason. Bruno denies the value of such mental effort. He
points out that Christianity is entirely irrational, that it is
contrary to philosophy and that it disagrees with other religions.
He points out that we accept it through faith, that revelation, so
called, has no scientific basis.
In his fourth work he selects the Homeric sorcerer Circi who
changed men into beasts and makes Circi discuss with her handmaiden
a type of error which each beast represents. The book 'Cantus
Circaeus,' The Incantation of Circe, shows Bruno working with the
principle of the association of ideas, and continually questioning
the value of traditional knowledge methods.
In the year 1582, at the age of 34 he wrote a play Il
Candelajo, The Chandler. He thinks as a candle-maker who works with
tallow and grease and then has to go out and vend his wares with
shouting and ballyhoo:
"Behold in the candle borne by this Chandler, to whom I
give birth, that which shall clarify certain shadows of ideas
... I need not instruct you of my belief. Time gives all and
takes all away; everything changes but nothing perishes. One
only is immutable, eternal and ever endures, one and the same
with itself. With this philosophy my spirit grows, my mind
expands. Whereof, however obscure the night may be, I await
the daybreak, and they who dwell in day look for night ...
Rejoice therefore, and keep whole, if you can, and return love
for love."
There came a time when the novelty of Bruno had worn off in
France and he felt that it was time to move on. He went to England
to begin over again and to find a fresh audience. He failed to make
scholastic contact with Oxford. Oxford, like other European
universities of this time, paid scholastic reverence to the
authority of Aristotle. A great deal has been written about the
Middle Ages being throttled by the dead hand of Aristotle. It was
not the methods of Aristotle nor the fine mind of Aristotle which
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GIORDANO BRUNO
were so much in question as it was the authority of Aristotle. A
thing must be believed because Aristotle said it. It was part of
the method of Bruno to object in his own strenuous fashion to the
cramming down one's throat of statements of fact because Aristotle
had made such statements when they were plainly at variance with
the fresh sense experience which science was producing.
In his work The Ash Wednesday Supper, a story of a private
dinner, being entertained by English guests, Bruno spreads the
Copernican doctrine. A new astronomy had been offered the world at
which people were laughing heartily, because it was at variance
with the teachings of Aristotle. Bruno was carrying on a spirited
propaganda in a fighting mood. Between the year 1582 and 1592 there
was hardly a teacher in Europe who was persistently, openly and
actively spreading the news about the "universe which Copernicus
had charted, except Giordano Bruno. A little later on another and
still more famous character was to take up the work: Galilee.
Galileo never met Bruno in person and makes no mention of him
in his works, although he must have read some of them. We may not
blame Galilee for being diplomat enough to withhold mention of a
recognized heretic. Galilee has often been criticized because he
played for personal safety in the matter of his own difficulties.
We demand a great deal of our heroes.
While in England Bruno had a personal audience with Queen
Elizabeth. He wrote of her in the superlative fashion of the time
calling her diva, Protestant Ruler, sacred, divine, the very words
he used for His Most Christian Majesty and Head of The Holy Roman
Empire. This was treasured against him when he was later brought to
trial as an atheist, an infidel and a heretic. Queen Elizabeth did
not think highly of Bruno. She thought him as wild, radical,
subversive and dangerous. Bruno found Englishmen rather crude.
Bruno had no secure place in either Protestant or Roman
Catholic religious communities. He carried out his long fight
against terrible odds. He had lived in Switzerland and France and
was now in England and left there for Germany. He translated books,
read proofs, and got together groups and lectured for whatever he
could get out of it. It requires no great stretch of the
imagination to picture him as a man who mended his own clothes, who
was often cold, hungry and shabby. There are only a few things that
we know about Bruno with great certainty and these facts are the
ideas which he left behind in his practically forgotten books, the
bootleg literature of their day. After twenty years in exile we
picture him as homesick, craving the sound of his own native tongue
and the companionship of his own countrymen. But he continued to
write books. In his book De la Causa, principio et uno, On Cause,
Principle, and Unity we find prophetic phrases:
"This entire globe, this star, not being subject to
death, and dissolution and annihilation being impossible
anywhere in Nature, from time to time renews itself by
changing and altering all its parts. There is no absolute up
or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space;
but the position of a body is relative to that of other
bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in
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GIORDANO BRUNO
position throughout the universe, and the observer is always
at the center of things."
His other works were The Infinity, the Universe and Its
Worlds, The Transport of Intrepid Souls, and Cabala of the Steed
like unto Pegasus with the Addition of the Ass of Cyllene, an
ironical discussion of the pretensions of superstition. This "ass,"
says Bruno, is to be found everywhere, not only in the church but
in courts of law and even in colleges. In his book The Expulsion of
the 'Triumphant Beast' he flays the pedantries he finds in Catholic
and Protestant cultures. In yet another book The Threefold Leas and
Measure of the Three Speculative Sciences and the Principle of Many
Practical Arts, we find a discussion on a theme which was to be
handled in a later century by the French philosopher Descartes. The
book was written five years before Descartes was born and in it he
says: "Who so itcheth to Philosophy must set to work by putting all
things to the doubt."
He also wrote Of the Unit, Quantity and Shape and another work
On Images, Signs and Ideas, as well as On What is Immense and
Innumerable; Exposition of the Thirty Seals and List of
Metaphysical Terms for Taking the Study of Logic and Philosophy in
Hand. His most interesting title is One Hundred Sixty Articles
Directed Against the Mathematics and Philosophers of the Day. One
of his last works, The Fastenings of Kind, was unfinished.
It is easy to get an impression of the reputation which Bruno
had created by the year 1582 in the minds of the clerical
authorities of southern Europe. He had written of an infinite
universe which had left no room for that greater infinite
conception which is called God. He could not conceive that God and
nature could be separate and distinct entities as taught by
Genesis, as taught by the Church and as even taught by Aristotle.
He preached a philosophy which made the mysteries of the virginity
of Mary, of the crucifixion and the mass, meaningless. He was so
naive that he could not think of his own mental pictures as being
really heresies. He thought of the Bible as a book which only the
ignorant could take literally. The Church's methods were, to say
the least, unfortunate, and it encouraged ignorance from the
instinct of self-preservation.
Bruno wrote: "Everything, however men may deem it assured and
evident, proves, when it is brought under discussion to be no less
doubtful than are extravagant and absurd beliefs." He coined the
phrase "Libertes philosophica." The right to think, to dream, if
you like, to make philosophy. After 14 years of wandering about
Europe Bruno turned his steps toward home. Perhaps he Was homesick.
Some writers have it that he was framed. For Bruno to go back to
Italy is as strange a paradox as that of the rest of his life.
He was invited to Venice by a young man whose name was
Mocenigo, who offered him a home and who then brought charges
against him before the Inquisition. The case dragged on. He was a
prisoner in the Republic of Venice but a greater power wanted him
and he was surrendered to Rome. For six years, between 1593 and
1600 he lay in a Papal prison. Was he forgotten, tortured? Whatever
historical records there are never have been published by those
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GIORDANO BRUNO
authorities who have them. In the year 1600 a German scholar
Schoppius happened to be in Rome and wrote about Bruno, who was
interrogated several times by the Holy Office and convicted by the
chief theologians. At one time he obtained forty days to consider
his position; by and by he promised to recant, then renewed his
"follies." Then he got another forty days for deliberation but did
nothing but baffle the pope and the Inquisition. After two years in
the custody of the Inquisitor he was taken on February ninth to the
palace of the Grand Inquisitor to hear his sentence on bended knee,
before the expert assessors and the Governor of the City.
Bruno answered the sentence of death by fire with the
threatening: "Perhaps you, my judges, pronounce this sentence
against me with greater fear than I receive it." He was given eight
more clays to see whether he would repent. But it was no use. He
was taken to the stake and as he was dying a crucifix was presented
to him, but he pushed it away with fierce scorn.
They were wise in getting rid of him for he wrote no more
books, but they should have strangled him when he was born. As it
turned out, they did not get rid of him at all. His fate was not an
unusual one for heretics; this strange madcap genius was quickly
forgotten. His works were honored by being placed on the Index
expurgatorius on August 7, 1603, and his books became rare. They
never obtained any great popularity.
In the early part of the 18th Century English deists
rediscovered Bruno and tried to excite the imagination of the
public with the retelling of the story of his life, but this
aroused no particular enthusiasm.
The enthusiasm of German philosophy reached the subject of
Bruno when Jacobi (1743-1819) drew attention to the genius of Bruno
and German thinkers generally recognized his genius but they did
not read his books. In the latter part of the 19th Century Italian
scholars began to be intrigued with Bruno and for a while "Bruno
Mania" was part of the intellectual enthusiasm of cultured
Italians. Bruno began to be a symbol to represent the forward-
looking free-thinking type of philosopher and scientist, and has
become a symbol of scientific martyrdom. Bruno was a truant, a
philosophical tramp, a poetic vagrant, but has no claims to the
name of scientist. His works are not found in American libraries.
In this age of biographical writing it is surprising that no modern
author has attempted to reconstruct his life, important because it
is in the direct line of modern progress. Bruno was a pioneer who
roused Europe from its long intellectual sleep. He was martyred for
his enthusiasm.
Bruno was born five years after Copernicus died. He had
bequeathed an intoxicating idea to the generation that was to
follow him. We hear a lot in our own day about the expanding
universe. We have learned to accept it as something big. The
thought of the Infinity of the Universe was one of the great
stimulating ideas of the Renaissance. It was no longer a 15th
Century God's backyard. And it suddenly became too vast to be ruled
over by a 15th Century God. Bruno tried to imagine a god whose
majesty should dignify the majesty of the stars. He devised no new
metaphysical quibble nor sectarian schism. He was not playing
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GIORDANO BRUNO
politics. He was fond of feeling deep thrills over high visions and
he liked to talk about his experiences. And all of this refinement
went through the refiners' fire -- that the world might be made
safe from the despotism of the ecclesiastic 16th Century Savage. He
suffered a cruel death and achieved a unique martyr's fame. He has
become the Church's most difficult alibi. She can explain away the
case of Galileo with suave condescension. Bruno sticks in her
throat.
He is one martyr whose name should lead all the rest. He was
not a mere religious sectarian who was caught up in the psychology
of some mob hysteria. He was a sensitive, imaginative poet, fired
with the enthusiasm of a larger vision of a larger universe ... and
he fell into the error of heretical belief. For this poets vision
he was kept in a dark dungeon for eight years and then taken out to
a blazing market place and roasted to death by fire.
It is an incredible story.
The "Church" will never outlive him.
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