Giordano Bruno: Visionary and Martyr

by Ted O’Keefe

ON A SUNNY JUNE DAY nearly 400 years ago there took place one of the most memorable and prophetic intellectual confrontations in the long history of Oxford University. On that day the renowned seat of learning on the Thames, already more than 300 years old, was crowded with the cream of Elizabethan society, nobles and professors, courtiers and dons. They had gathered to honor a visiting Polish nobleman, Albert Laski, the Voivod of Sieradz, whose military prowess in his far-off land and whose extravagance in England had won him wide repute.

For the assembled scholars, the high point of the festivities in the old university town was to be a debate on the correct interpretation of 15 tenets of the philosophy of Aristotle. In the late 16th century, as in the preceding three centuries, the authority of Aristotle in philosophical method and in diverse branches of learning, particularly the sciences, was virtually unchallenged at Oxford or any other European university, Catholic or Protestant.

Indeed, Oxford scholars were fined five shillings for each disagreement with the premises of Aristotle’s Organon; substantial divergence from the Aristotelian system was punishable by expulsion. The professors who rose to the pulpit of Oxford’s Church of the Holy Virgin to expound the Aristotelian corpus on June 11, 1583, were secure in their adherence to all its major tenets, not the least of which was a physics which postulated the Earth as the stationary center of the Universe.

Scarcely had the chief of the Oxford scholars, Dr. John Underhill, the rector of Lincoln College and chaplain to Queen Elizabeth, begun his arguments when he was challenged by a small, dark-haired man, exquisitely robed. Giordano Bruno, a fiery, independent spirit who had fled the confines of a Dominican monastery in southern Italy, had taken up residence at Oxford only two months before. His attacks on Aristotle had already evoked murmurs of discontent; now he placed himself beyond the pale.

Bruno lashed out at the Aristotelian notion of the Universe. He supported his arguments with the revolutionary discovery of Nicholas Copernicus that the Earth revolved around the Sun. And he went beyond Copernicus: Man lived under no fixed vault of heaven, but in a Universe of infinite extent, occupied by an infinite number of worlds.

To the assembled learned heads of the university, Bruno’s ideas were more than heresy; they were madness. The scholars ridiculed his arguments. In turn, the little Italian showered his opponents with scorn.

In a later writing, Bruno described the scene with typical acerbity: “…go to Oxford, and have them tell you about those things that befell the Nolan [from Bruno’s birthplace, Nola], when he publicly disputed with those Doctors of Theology in the presence of Prince Albert Laski, the Polish nobleman, and other gentlemen of the English nobility. Have them tell you how we were able to answer their arguments, how that poor doctor on 15 occasions, during the argumentation of 15 syllogisms, remained confused like a chick caught in hemp fiber, that doctor whom they placed before us on that grave occasion as the coryphaeus of the Academy.”

Despite Bruno’s boasts, there was no winner in the debate. The two sides were speaking two different languages, each of them speculative. Yet the Aristotelians of Oxford were looking backward, to the old, man-centered world view of antiquity and the Middle Ages. Bruno, with a mighty leap of intuition, was anticipating the cosmology of a new age, one which would see his race burst the shackles of an anthropocentrism which flattered his ego but bound his soul.

Shortly after the debate Bruno was forced to leave Oxford. Characteristically, he remained unshaken in the bold espousal of his vision, for which he would eventually die heroically.

Bruno was born in 1548 at Nola, in the Italian Campagna, not far from the teeming port of Naples and the looming majesty of Mount Vesuvius. His father, Goiano Bruno, was a professional soldier; his mother, Fraulissa, may have been of German descent.

Nola, which dated its foundation to pre-Roman times, had been declining in population and importance for several centuries. It retained a colorful, festive way of life, however, and its pleasant situation on the lower slopes of Mount Cicala, in the foothills of the Apennines, afforded young Filippo (as his parents christened him) endless opportunities for exploration.

In a philosophical poem which he wrote nearly 30 years later, Bruno recorded how his observation of the two mountains, Vesuvius and Cicala, brought him his first insight into the relativity of an observer’s perceptions.

Glimpsed from the fertile base of Mt. Cicala, Vesuvius, ten miles distant, was a bare cone of volcanic rock, stern and forbidding. The youth was struck by intuition that the view from Vesuvius might reverse the effect. He set out on foot for the great volcano, as he approached, the barren silhouette resolved itself, on its lower face, into a fertile expanse of pleasing greenery. Mt. Cicala, ten miles away, now took on the austere aspect which its neighbor had presented from afar. Bruno wrote, “Thus did Vesuvius and Cicala first teach the lad to doubt, and revealed to him how distance changed the face of things.”

Bruno’s parents recognized the boy’s promise as a scholar. Despite their lack of means, they arranged for his education in Naples.

In the great southern Italian metropolis, which had lately come under Spanish rule, Bruno applied himself avidly to his studies. At the local Augustinian monastery, he was privately tutored in logic, dialectics, and the humanities. He also attended lectures at the Studium Generale, where the philosopher Vincenzo Colle held forth on Aristotle.

In 1565, despite religious doubts which were surfacing even then, Bruno decided to join the Dominican order. Possibly his family lacked the means to send him to a university: For many a bright but poor youth, a clerical career gave the only promise of furthering his education. Certainly, the Dominicans, with a centuries-long tradition of scholarship crowned by Albertus Magnus and his great pupil, Thomas Aquinas, offered the 17-year-old ample opportunity for study.

Young Bruno began his novitiate at the Dominican convent of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples, taking the name Giordano, which he retained after leaving the order. He quickly mastered the obligatory Dominican philosophy, Scholasticism, which was grounded in the teachings of Aristotle.

Despite his admiration for Aquinas, the greatest of the Scholastics, Bruno came to scorn the pedantry of Aristotle’s Scholastic interpreters. An instinctive aversion to fixed, dogmatic systems of thought led him eventually to condemn Aristotle himself as “the stupidest of all philosophers.” (In fairness to both Aristotle and Bruno, it must be noted that Bruno’s understanding of the great Hellenic thinker’s works was conditioned to a large extent by a faulty textual tradition.)

It was through his study of Aristotle that the young monk found his way to the pre-Socratics, those daring Nature philosophers whose bold speculations on the makeup of the Universe have unfortunately been preserved only in suggestive fragments. Bruno acquainted himself with two of them, Leucippus and Democritus, at second hand in the Roman poet-philosopher Lucretius’ long and elegant De rerum natura (On the Nature of the Universe), which synthesized their atomic theories with the ethics of the Epicureans in a lucid naturalism.

It was the dialogues of Plato, particularly the Timaeus, and the writings of his successors, the Neo-Platonists, however, which fired Bruno’s imagination. The Neo-Platonists, the greatest of whom, Plotinus, had spent his last years in Bruno’s native Campagna, envisioned an ideal, spiritual supreme being which animated the world of creation by intellectual and spiritual emanations, to which man could reunite himself in a mystical experience climaxing a process of pure thought.

His study of Neo-Platonism led Bruno to Hermetism, a more specifically religious precursor of Neo-Platonism, the doctrines of which had supposedly been revealed to Hermes Trismegistus, regarded by Hermetists as the most ancient of Egyptian priests and wise men. Hermetism was much in vogue in the Renaissance, and its most outstanding exponents, men like Bruno and Nicholas Copernicus, interpreted it in an entirely Faustian spirit, as a system which would allow its practitioner to seize the meaning of the Universe in a series of great intuitive leaps, fueled by that purest form of knowledge, mathematics.

As Bruno moved from convent to convent in southern Italy after his ordination, his vast and systematic philosophical learning disposed him to be increasingly skeptical of Christianity. And his skepticism brought him under increasing suspicion from ecclesiastical and civil authorities (the Spanish had instituted the Inquisition in Naples the year before Bruno was born). Matters came to a head, one might say, when his superiors discovered that he had hidden some proscribed books by Erasmus, the great Dutch humanist and scathing satirist of monastic life, in the monastery outhouse.

When Bruno learned of his prior’s wrath, he hastily journeyed north to Rome, seeking an impartial hearing at the headquarters of the Dominican order. Arriving there, he discovered that the Inquisition in Naples had drawn up charges against him. Fearing that he would be surrendered to the less-than-tender mercies of the Inquisitors, he discarded his clerical garb and fled north. The year was 1576.

At that time the religious struggles which had been ignited by the Protestant Reformation were still raging. To meet the Protestant challenge, the popes, bolstered by the recently founded Jesuit order, had organized the so-called “Counter-Reformation,” which was rolling back the Protestant advance in central and eastern Europe.

Meanwhile, the Protestant center of gravity had shifted from Luther’s Wittenberg to Calvin’s Geneva, from which the embattled Huguenots of France and the Netherlanders in revolt against the Spanish crown derived their inspiration.

Bruno spent nearly two years in northern Italy, moving from city to city, supporting himself by private tutoring and editing, always wary of the Inquisitors and their spies.

In 1578 Bruno journeyed across the Alps to Geneva. As he later expressed it, “I decided to stay there only that I might live in liberty and security.”

As Bruno was to learn, however, Geneva had no room for free spirits. Although John Calvin had died 14 years earlier, the city he had remade into something approaching a Protestant theocracy still bore his stamp, and its Calvinist governors ceded nothing to the Inquisition in their zeal to extinguish heresy.

In May 1579 Bruno began to lecture on philosophy at the university. His career was brief. In August of that year he published a pamphlet attacking Antoine de La Faye, a professor of philosophy at the university and a pillar of Calvinist orthodoxy, Bruno charged that La Faye, a follower of Aristotle, had made no fewer than 20 errors in a recent lecture.

The pamphlets, their printer, and the contentious Nolan philosopher were immediately seized by the Genevan authorities. After a trial before the theological consistory, Bruno grudgingly apologized to the indignant La Faye. Thereupon he departed Geneva, unscathed, but smoldering with hatred for the dual tyranny of Aristotle and Calvin.

The wandering philosopher made his way next to France, which was in the throes of 30 years of confessional and dynastic warfare between Calvinist and Catholic. In the southern city of Toulouse, which was a Protestant stronghold, Bruno earned his doctorate in theology at the university, after which he was elected by the students to lecture on philosophy and astronomy. Once again, his unorthodox views aroused opposition. When the tide of religious warfare lapped at the gates of Toulouse once more, in 1581, Bruno looked for asylum in Paris.

16th-century Mystic Had Modern World View

At Paris Bruno published his first treatises which have come down to us, on the art of memory. For Bruno, memory was the key to mastering the knowledge of the cosmos, the internalized images of which, according to him, confer great power on the beholder, if they properly represent cosmic phenomena. During his sojourn in Paris, he also wrote Il Candelaio (The Torchbearer), a bawdy satire of monastic life entirely in the spirit of the century of Rabelais.

Bruno’s De umbris idearum (The Shadows of Ideas), on the art of memory, aroused the interest of King Henry III, to whom it was dedicated. The monarch, whom Bruno admired for attempting to steer a middle course between the extreme Catholic and Protestant factions ravaging France, invited the philosopher to his court.

Henry interrogated Bruno with an eye to acquiring the occult prowess by which he was sure the Nolan performed his mnemonic feats. When Bruno assured the king that he came by his skill entirely through the exercise of natural mental powers, Henry was doubly impressed, and he authorized the philosopher to lecture at the College de France.

After two years in Paris, Bruno procured a letter of introduction from King Henry to the French ambassador in London, Michael Castelnau, the Marquis de Mauvissiere. In early 1583 he crossed the Channel and entered the glittering world of Elizabethan England.

Bruno spent two years in England as the protege of Castelnau, who procured his entry into the highest circles of the realm. The philosopher met Queen Elizabeth, who, like many of her courtiers, spoke Italian and had a great admiration for Italian culture. Sir Philip Sidney, the poet and statesman, became Bruno’s patron for a brief time. Despite his failure to gain acceptance at Oxford, this period was the most serene and productive in Bruno’s life.

During his London years Bruno wrote six works, all in Italian, which were the fruition of his long years of study and the fullest expression of his mature philosophy. They dealt primarily with cosmology and ethics, presenting a view of the Universe which anticipated subsequent advances in astronomy and cosmology and gave voice to an essentially religious view of the cosmos in consonance with all the deepest inklings and longings of his race.

The view of the cosmos which, bolstered by the authority of Aristotle and the second-century Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy, still prevailed in 16th-century Europe, was of an Earth-centered Universe ringed by concentric spheres, in which the planets (including the Sun and the Moon) revolved. The Universe was enclosed by the sphere of the heavens, in which the stars were embedded, and the whole apparatus was set in motion around the stationary eErth by what Aristotle called the First Cause, or Prime Mover, identified by Christian theologians with the Christian divinity.

Earlier in the 16th century Nicholas Copernicus, a gifted monk of German descent and Polish citizenship, had established through a series of prolonged and brilliant mathematical calculations that the Earth revolved around the Sun. (Fearful of the wrath of his superiors, he deferred publication of his findings until after his death.) Despite this advance Copernicus still retained the Aristotelian notion of a finite Universe of planets revolving, now around the Sun, in perfect crystalline spheres, bounded by the star-studded outer sphere.

In his Cena de Ie ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Feast), Bruno enthusiastically accepted Copernicus’ Sun-centered solar system. But he went beyond Copernicus.

In De I’infinito universo e mondi (On the Infinite Universe and Worlds), Bruno wrote:

It is then unnecessary to investigate whether there be beyond the heavens Space, Void, or Time. For there is a single general space, a single vast immensity which we may freely call Void; in it are innumerable globes like this on which we live and grow. This space we declare to be infinite; since neither reason, convenience, possibility, sense perception, nor Nature consign to it a limit. In it are an infinity of worlds of the same kinds as our own.

Pervading this infinite universe, according to Bruno, was the Creator:

The one infinite is perfect, in simplicity, of itself, absolutely, nor can aught be greater or better. This is the one Whole, God, universal nature, occupying all space, of whom naught but infinity can give the perfect image or semblance.

Within this Universe Bruno envisioned the phenomena of Nature as synthesized by freely developing innate forces which fostered eternal change and growth. Everything in Bruno’s Universe was endowed with an immanent urge, in conformity with its own inward nature.

From this majestic cosmology Bruno derived an ethics and a politics based on men acting freely in accord with their own inner imperatives and their drive toward union with a higher Nature. In the Europe of Bruno’s day, the prerequisite for this development was an end to the religious warfare crippling the West and the installation of an enlightened regime headed by an enlightened monarch.

Although Bruno more than once had sharp words for particular nations, he respected the European peoples in their diversity. With characteristic foresight, he warned against the consequences of the racial intermixing already under way in the wake of the European explorations and conquests.

There was one race for which Bruno reserved unmitigated disdain. He despised the Jews, referring to them as the “excrement of Egypt,” “a pestilent, leprous, and generally pernicious generation who deserve to be extinguished before they are born.”

In 1591 Bruno decided to return to Italy. He had been invited to Venice by a young nobleman, Zuane Mocenigo, who had heard of his vast erudition and phenomenal powers of memory and wanted to be tutored by him.

Doubtless Bruno was homesick for his native land, from which he had been absent for 13 years. Venice was well known to be hostile to the papacy, and he must have thought himself relatively secure from extradition there.

Mocenigo was quickly disappointed in his famous teacher. Like Henry III, he had supposed that Bruno’s powers of mind were achieved by occult practices. Unlike the French monarch, however, the Venetian aristocrat could not be convinced otherwise. Certain that Bruno was selfishly husbanding his magic powers, he sought revenge by betraying his learned guest to the Inquisition.

Bruno got wind of his host’s plans and prepared to flee Venice. But he moved too slowly. On the night before his intended departure Mocenigo led a band of his retainers to the Nolan’s quarters, seized him, and cast him into a convenient basement dungeon. Two days later, on May 23, 1592, Mocenigo handed Bruno over to the local branch of the Holy Office.

There now ensued a long a bitter passion for the Nolan visionary. With more naïveté than cunning, he sought to defend his ideas as philosophical conceptions which lay outside the realm of theology. Indeed, he was eager for an audience with the pope, so sure was he that he could convince His Holiness how advantageous a reform of the Church in the direction of his philosophy would be for Christendom.

Bruno remained firm, however, in his revolutionary cosmology. The Venetian Inquisitors, well aware of the potential consequences of a world view which displaced the Prime Mover from his perch above the spheres, continued to imprison him.

Meanwhile, the Vatican was exerting every diplomatic pressure at its disposal to bring about Bruno’s extradition to Rome. The papal authorities were supported by the Spanish Inquisition, since the Spanish regime in southern Italy had been rocked by a short-lived revolt organized by another Dominican, the political philosopher Tommaso Campanella.

At length the Venetians complied, and Bruno was delivered to the dungeons of the Holy Office in February 1593. There he remained for nearly seven years, underfed, stifling in squalor, denied clothing, allowed only the works of Aquinas as reading matter. Periodically he was dragged up from his subterranean cell to be interrogated and urged to recant his beliefs. Bruno still insisted that his philosophy was not incompatible with an enlightened Catholicism, but he was firm as granite in hewing to his ideas.

At last the patience of the Inquisitors was exhausted. Bruno was given a speedy trial and condemned to death by nine Cardinals General. When the sentence was pronounced, Bruno raised his head defiantly and told his judges, “Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.”

On February 16, 1600, Bruno was led from his cell, chained at the neck, his tongue firmly gagged, and escorted barefoot over the sharp cobblestones of the Roman streets to the Campo de’ Fiori, the Field of Flowers, before the ruins of the Theater of Pompey. Vatican guards and ostentatiously bedecked Roman officials hemmed him in tightly; priests from the Order of St. John the Beheaded, whose office it was to attend to condemned criminals, walked behind, chanting litanies and urging a final repentance.

At the appointed spot Bruno was lashed to a stake, and the executioner’s men heaped a great pile of kindling wood all around him. As hundreds of excitement-seekers gawked, the brave philosopher from Nola was proferred a crucifix. He looked away. Then the executioner lit the pyre, and Giordano Bruno’s body was consumed by searing flames.

Eight years before his death, Bruno penned a startlingly prophetic epitaph for himself. His De Monade, a philosophical poem written in 1592, contains the following lines:

Much have I struggled. I thought I would be able to conquer . . . / And both fate and nature repressed my zeal and my strength. / Even to have come forth is something, since I see that being able to conquer / Is placed in the hands of fate. However, there was in me / Whatever I was able to do, which no future century / Will deny to be mine, that which a victor could have for his own: / Not to have feared to die, not to have yielded to any equal Infirmness of nature, and to have preferred a courageous death to a noncombatant life.

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Source: Best of Attack! and National Vanguard Tabloid, edited by Kevin Alfred Strom, transcribed by National Alliance staff