Giordano Bruno

“ Giordano Bruno wandered over Europe alone like a knight-errant of truth. Persecuted in one country, he fled to another, everywhere stirring up dispute and controversy, urging men to think, and denouncing the fanatical and pretended beliefs which were making them thoughtless and cruel. Geneva, Lyons, Paris, London, Oxford, Wittenberg, Helmstedt, and Venice—these were some of the places he visited, the centers of the world’s active thought, where he could meet the leading men of the day. ”

“ Giordano Bruno, whom you knew at Wittenberg, the Nolan, is said to be living just now among you at Padua. Is it really so? What sort of man is this that he dares enter Italy, which he left an exile, as he used himself to confess? ”

“ It was a noble dream, and shows how little physical speculation had killed ethical passion; the best interpreted earth was empty till it was made the home of happy and contented men. Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) is of all the thinkers of the Latin Renaissance the most modern; in him science becomes philosophical, and philosophy speaks the language of science, confronts, defines, and enlarges its problems. As a man he is passionate, explosive, impetuous, vain, intolerant, and indomitable ”

“ Giordano Bruno shatters the ancient crystalline vault of the firmament; every 17“fixed star” in the Milky Way is to him a flaming sun, the pulsing heart of a whole world, in which, perchance, human hearts like ours throb and leap on a hundred planets. The red, murderous flames of hate close over Bruno, but they cannot dim the light of the new stars. It is in the eye and the brain of the new men that arise, and will nevermore fade from them. ”

“ His life is of the kind which it is a pleasure to tell, in spite of the final tragedy, so full is it of incident and of manifestations of a certain stamp of character. [119] Giordano Bruno was born at Nola, near Naples, in 1548. His father was a soldier, and his mother a German woman. He became a Dominican friar very early, and his unruly character brought him speedily into difficulties with his superiors. Before he was twenty he fled from his Order, and escaped to Geneva by way of Genoa. ”

“ No doubt there are times and conceivable circumstances in which the contrary would be true, in which the thought that under this rock by the sea-shore I know that Giordano Bruno hid himself from the pursuit of the enraged priesthood, and overcome with the power and sublimity of the truths for which they sought his life, thought his life therefore given him that he might bear witness to the truths, and morti ultra occurrens, returned and surrendered himself! ”

“ For the life she has she is indebted to the enemies of superstition. A few years ago Italy was great enough to build a monument to Giordano Bruno—Bruno, the victim of the "Triumphant Beast;"—Bruno, the sublimest of her sons. ”

“ Giordano Bruno was all paradox; and my mind was not alive to his paradoxes, just as my ears might have become dead to the boatswain's oaths. He was, as has been said, a vorticist before Descartes, [66] an optimist before Leibnitz, a Copernican before Galileo. It would be easy to collect a hundred strange opinions of his. He was born about 1550, and was roasted alive at Rome, February 17, 1600, for the maintenance and defence of the holy Church, and the rights and liberties of the same. ”

“ The thirst for ideal beauty, for endless empire, and for prohibited knowledge, no poet has better expressed, and in this respect Giordano Bruno is nearest him in his own time. This thirst is his own; his great cartoon-figures, gigantic rather than heroic, proclaim it for him: their type recurs through the drama, from Richard III. to Dryden’s orotund heroes; but in Faustus and in Edward II. they become real, almost human beings. ”

“ An attempt has been made to attribute these passages to the influence of Giordano Bruno; but, as Robert Beyersdorff has strikingly demonstrated, [3] this theory assumes that Bruno's doctrine was an atomistic materialism, whereas it was, in fact, pantheism, a perpetual insistence upon the unity of God and Nature. The very atoms, in Bruno, partake of spirit and life; it is not their mechanical conjunction that produces life; no, they are monads. While cynicism is the keynote of these utterances of Hamlet, enthusiasm is the keynote of Bruno's. ”

“ The following ode was written by Giordano Bruno, under prospect of that martyrdom which he soon after suffered at Rome, for atheism: that is, as is proved by all his works, for a lofty and enlightened piety, which was of course unintelligible to bigots and dangerous to an apostate hierarchy. If the human mind be, as it assuredly is, the sublimest object which nature affords to our contemplation, these lines which portray the human mind under the action of its most elevated affections, have a fair claim to the praise of sublimity. ”

“ It is for the sake of this end of the few, the wise, that the many, the vulgar, and foolish, are to be kept at peace, in harmony with one another, following obediently their higher guides in religion or in the state. There is not in Bruno any more than in Spinoza any sense of the infinite worth, or the infinite pitifulness of man as an earth-born creature of hopes and fears, creeping towards the light, with the clogging darkness behind, groping in childish terror and childish trust, for the hand of a loving, human God. ”

“ And this ideal cannot possibly be as empty as has too often been asserted; since, as I endeavored to show, from Lisbon to Stockholm and from Archangel to Naples, it is its manifestations that foreigners have loved to come across in the masterpieces, or better, in the whole sequence of the history of our literature.
GIORDANO BRUNO (1548-1600)
illippo Bruno, known as Giordano Bruno, was born at Nola, near Naples, in 1548. ”

“ In Bruno, eager and impassioned, an Italian of the Italians, it awoke a constant, inextinguishable appetite for every form of experience—a fear, as of the one sin possible, of limiting, for oneself or another, that great stream flowing for thirsty souls, that wide pasture set ready for the hungry heart. Considered from the point of view of a minute observation of nature, the Infinite might figure as "the infinitely little;" no blade [240] of grass being like another, as there was no limit to the complexities of an atom of earth, cell, sphere, within sphere. ”

“ It is not always, or often, that men's abstract ideas penetrate the temperament, touch the animal spirits, affect conduct. It was what they did with Bruno. The ghastly spectacle of the endless material universe, infinite dust, in truth, starry as it may look to our terrestrial eyes—that prospect from which Pascal's faithful soul recoiled so painfully—induced in Bruno only the delightful consciousness of an ever-widening kinship [241] and sympathy, since every one of those infinite worlds must have its sympathetic inhabitants. ”

“ It was his theory of the solar system, coinciding as it seemed with that of the most ancient philosophers, that gave the decisive trend to Bruno’s thought, holding him fast to the one all-important fact that the earth is not the centre of the universe but one of its humblest members. ”

“ So far as this central thought is concerned, it is Bruno that is the deeper thinker. In him the One is not a dead negation, in which real things are absorbed to the loss of all their reality and life, as it is with Spinoza: rather it is a living fountain, gushing forth in the infinite streams of living beings: the whole of nature is the expression of its own inward being. The One is in process; the whole, in which this process results, is a harmony every member of which has its own [Pg 339] independent reality and worth, over against all others, as a manifestation of divinity. ”

“ It is with the more metaphysical attitude that a certain vein of optimism in Bruno’s philosophy is connected, the familiar conception of evil, natural or moral, as necessary for the good of the whole, like the discords by which a harmony is heightened. No absolute evil, for the consistent Neoplatonist, can possibly exist in a world which flows from the divine and is an outpouring of His nature. ”

“ In the midst of social cataclysms and revolutions humanity has one guiding star, a beacon which shows its light above the storms and tempests, a mystical thread running through the labyrinth of history—namely, the religion of philosophy and of thought. ”

“ From this unity, which governs variety, from this movement of every world around its sun, of every sun around its centre sun—the sun of suns—which informs all with the rays of the spirit, with the light of thought—is generated that perfect harmony of colours, sounds, forms, which strike the sight and captivate and enthrall the intellect. That which in the heavens is harmony becomes, in the individual, morality, and in companies of human beings, law. That which is light in the spheres becomes intelligence and science in the world of the spirit and in humanity. ”

“ Now in such conceptions and similitudes the human intellect of this lower world nourishes itself, till such time as it will be lawful to behold with purer eye the beauty of the divinity. As happens to him, who, absorbed in the contemplation of some elaborate architectural work, goes on examining one thing after another in it, enchanted and feeding in a wonder of delight; but if it should happen that he sees the lord of all those pictures, who is of a beauty incomparably greater, leaving all care and thought of them, he is turned intently to the examination of him. ”

“ Morte carent animae domibus habitantque receptae.
Bruno himself lived within the sphere of which he writes in the Spaccio, “surrounded by the impregnable wall of true philosophic contemplation, where the peacefulness of life stands fortified and on high, where truth is open, where the necessity of the Eternity of all substantial things is clear, where nought is to be feared but to be deprived of human perfection and justice.” His finest epitaph is to be found in his own words, “I have fought: that is much—victory is in the hands of fate. ”

“ It is doubtful, however, whether Schelling knew much more of Bruno than Jakobi’s essay and his abstract of the Causa had to tell.
Hegel took a much less enthusiastic view of Bruno’s philosophy than did his contemporary and sometime partner—to place Bruno on a level with Spinoza was to give him a higher reputation than he deserved: his doctrine was a mere re-echo of the Alexandrine. Yet Hegel, too, saw something to admire in this “Bacchantic” spirit, revelling in the discovery of its oneness with the Idea, and with all other beings, with the all of nature which is an externalisation of spirit. ”

“ Berti, in his Life of Bruno, remarks that when the latter sought refuge in Turin, Torquato Tasso, also driven by adverse fortune, arrived in the same place, and he notes the affinity between them—both so great, both subject to every species of misfortune and persecution in life, and destined to immortal honours after their death: the light of genius burned in them both, the fire of enthusiasm flamed in each alike, and on the forehead of each one was set the sign of sorrow and of pain. ”

“ But the intellect, active with its continual grief—seeing that it is not through its human condition and nature that it finds itself so wretched, so opposed, courted, solicited, distracted, and, as it were, torn by the inferior powers—sees its object stable, fixed and constant, and ever full, and in the same splendour of beauty. ”

“ But to him (the enthusiast) it is no less pleasing to perish in the flames of amorous ardour than to be drawn to the contemplation of the beauty of that rare splendour, under which, by natural inclination, by voluntary election, and by disposition of fate, he labours, serves, and dies more gaily, more resolutely, and more courageously than under whatsoever other pleasure which may offer itself to the heart, liberty which may be conceded to the spirit, and life which may be discovered in the soul. ”

“ This fine thinker—if not great thinker—penetrated by the beauty and calm of Spinoza’s pantheism, saw in Bruno a true forerunner. Bruno had “taken up the substance of the ancient philosophy, transformed it into flesh and blood, was wholly permeated by its spirit, without ceasing to be himself.” Naturally it was in the Causa that Jacobi found the greatest affinity with Spinoza, as in it the starting-point of Bruno is from the One, the Highest, which is at the same time the All—the universe, the unity of the [Pg 352] One and Many, of Spirit and Nature. ”

“ Bruno is ironically contrasting the Christian ideal, as he interprets it, with that of the Greeks and Egyptians. The former is that of a being only half-human, half-free; on one side of his nature he is reduced to the level of the beast, the ass, the bearer of burdens, unquestioning, faithful. ”

“ Neither at Venice nor in Rome can much weight have been laid upon the evidence of the weakling Mocenigo. The Cardinals cannot have imagined that Bruno would ever open his heart or even speak freely to so shallow a nature so utterly different in all things from himself. The mere fact of his having left his order was not enough, nor his refusal to return to it, nor were his heretical opinions—defended as they might be, and as Aristotle’s own teaching had to be defended in the Church, by the subterfuge of the twofold truth. ”

“ There is no without—each is, in a word, God, and so far as it is concerned there may be no other being in existence. Bruno, on the contrary, was fully conscious—at times—of the necessity of holding the balance between the infinite unity of God and the finite units or realities, which are the expression, the manifestation, the self-revelation of the one. Why this revelation? he does not indeed ask; but given it as actual, he finds the reconciliation in it at once of the necessity of the whole and the liberty of the unit, the goodness of the all and the moral frailty of the individual. ”