Giordano Bruno: Our Forgotten Martyr
In memoriam: Giordano Bruno
1548-February 17, 1600
 | ...I shall place you in the body of the moon; your senses, through proper adaptation, will enable you to use your faculty of reason and see these things.... From this side I shall show you the face of the earth shining in the opposite region, in the light of the radiant sun diffused into the surface of the ocean. Do you see how the vast machine seems contracted into a small mass?.... Now the moon is not the moon to you, but it seems to be the true earth.... Notice how Britain is condensed to a small point and the very narrow Italy is condensed into a thin and short hair.... |
Was this written by an astronaut who had been to the moon? No! It was written 18 years before Galileo even learned that telescopes exist and almost five centuries before a man ever saw the earth from that vantage point!
On February 17th, 400 years ago, the author of these lines, Giordano Bruno, Unitarian, was burned at the stake by the Roman Inquisition, the last heretic to meet this fate. Let us honor his memory.
In 1548, in a village near Mt. Vesuvius, was born Filippo Bruno, father a mercenary, mother unspecified in biographical sources. Physically, he was what we might today call a runt, small of build and frail. Like many small men, he was feisty. But along with a combative and fiery, nay, volcanic temper, he was a genius, with ideas worth fighting for.
At the age of 15 he entered the Dominican Order to get an education, in the very monastery where centuries before Thomas Aquinas made Aristotle the cornerstone of scholasticism. This was the only way a poor Italian boy of that time could get an education. Filippo took the name by which we know him now: Giordano. By age 18 he was doubting the trinity. He quarreled with his fellow monks, telling them they had better things to read than the "Lives of the Holy Fathers." And the inquisition took note of him. The last straw was his denial of the divinity of Christ, based on his study of the Arian heresy, the primitive Christian Unitarianism. He escaped trial by fleeing to Rome in 1576 and thence to Geneva, where he expected to find a libertarian atmosphere; this was Calvin's Geneva that had burned Miguel Servetus, Unitarian, only 23 years earlier. Heretics never learn. After denouncing a Calvinist professor, he was arrested, excommunicated, but was allowed to leave Geneva after retraction. He was 18.
Came years of wandering: Toulouse and Paris, London, Oxford, Paris again, then Germany. A brilliant man, theologian, philosopher, mathematician, he was at first welcomed everywhere. But everywhere he went he argued and antagonized, developing such strange ideas as we have already mentioned. And there was worse. He not only embraced the Copernican concept of the heliocentric solar system but went much further. On purely philosophical and theological grounds he proclaimed the infinitude of the universe, with an infinity of stars like the sun and an infinity of worlds like ours.
In the same dialogue, a form used by many writers of the time, he anticipated his fellow Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei by maintaining that the Bible should be followed for its moral teaching but not for its astronomical implications. He also strongly criticized the manners of English society and the pedantry of the Oxonian doctors. In 1584 he elaborated the physical theory on which his conception of the universe was based: "form" and "matter" are intimately united and constitute the "one." Thus, the traditional dualism of the Aristotelian physics was reduced by him to a monistic conception of the world, implying the basic unity of all substances. In On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, he developed his cosmological theory by systematically criticizing Aristotelian physics; following Averroës, he also formulated his view of the relation between philosophy and religion, according to which religion is considered as a means to instruct and govern ignorant people, philosophy as the discipline of the elect who are able to behave themselves and govern others. (Nobody is perfect!)
In The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, he presents a satire on the superstitions and vices of the time, embodying a strong criticism of Christian ethics--particularly the Calvinistic principle of salvation by faith alone, to which Bruno opposes an exalted view of the dignity of all human activities.
This, of course, is pantheism, equated with atheism by Protestant and Catholic churches alike. At almost his last stop in Germany, Helmstedt, the Lutheran church excommunicated him in turn.In Germany he had wandered from one university city to another, lecturing and publishing a variety of minor works, including the 160 Articles against contemporary mathematicians and philosophers, in which he expounded his conception of religion--a theory of the peaceful coexistence of all religions based upon mutual understanding and the freedom of reciprocal discussion. This is a lesson that many today have not yet learned!I hold the universe to be infinite, as being the effect of infinite power and goodness, of which any finite world would have been unworthy. Hence I hold with Pythagoras that the earth is a star like all the others which are infinite, and that all these numberless worlds are a whole in infinite space, which is the true universe.
I place in this universe a universal providence whereby each thing grows and moves according to its nature; and I understand it two ways, one the way in which the soul is present in the body, all in all and in each part; the other way is the ineffable one in which God is present in all, not as a soul, but in a way which cannot be explained.
His last stop in Germany was Frankfurt, where he was denied residence.In August, 1591, he accepted an invitation to return to Italy, to Venice, at the time rather liberal. But he yearned for tenure, and he applied for the chair of mathematics at Padua. In an early case of age discrimination, it was refused to this 43 year old man, and went the next year to Galileo, who was all of 28!
In May of 1592 he was denounced to the inquisition in Venice.He was arrested and tried. He attempted a defense along the lines that his work was really philosophical speculation, not theological at all. Like Jan Hus at Constance, he apparently thought that reason and rational argument would convince his inquisitors and clear him. He had almost won a hung jury in Venice when Rome took an interest in him! There he was pressed for a total retraction. Finally realizing his situation, he declared that he had nothing to retract, that he didn't even know what he was supposed to retract.
Apparently the author of this article in the Catholic Encyclopedia has no word of condemnation for the action of the Roman Inquisition! There is a parallel between Servetus and Bruno: one of Servetus's heresies was to refute a view of Galen, 164 AD, like Aristotle, an irrefutable authority. Servetus contradicted Galen, describing the true function of the heart in the circulation of the blood. Bruno was the last heretic burned at the stake by the Inquisition, although burning of heretics and witches by Protestants continued for two more centuries! 16 years later Galileo was let off with a warning, and it was another 16 years before he was finally condemned to house arrest. Bruno and Galileo stand astride the continental divide between science as speculative philosophy, on the ancient Greek model, typified by the near canonization of Aristotle by the medieval church, and the age of observational and, especially, experimental science. Bruno's theories influenced 17th-century scientific and philosophical thought and, since the 18th century, have been absorbed by many modern philosophers. As a symbol of the freedom of thought, Bruno inspired the European liberal movements of the 19th century, particularly the Italian Risorgimento (the movement for national political unity). Because of the variety of his interests, modern scholars are divided as to the chief significance of his work. Bruno's cosmological vision certainly anticipates some fundamental aspects of the modern conception of the universe; his ethical ideas, in contrast with religious ascetical ethics, appeal to modern humanistic activism; and his ideal of religious and philosophical tolerance has influenced liberal thinkers. His emphasis on the magical and the occult put him in the same league as Isaac Newton. Bruno stands as a major figure in the history of Western thought, a precursor of modern civilization Not long ago the pope rehabilitated Galileo. Apparently Bruno had gone too far! Copyright 2000, Morton Nadler; Commercial Duplication Prohibited [Extensive use has been made of the Encyclopedia Britannica article on Bruno by Giovanni Aquilecchia, Emeritus Professor of Italian, University College, University of London, one of Bruno's modern biographers.]He went, in 1591, to Venice at the invitation of Mocenigo, a Venetian nobleman, who professed to be interested in his system of memory-training. Failing to obtain from Bruno the secret of his "natural magic", Mocenigo denounced him to the Inquisition. Bruno was arrested, and in his trial before the Venetian inquisitors first took refuge in the principle of "two-fold truth", saying that the errors imputed to him were held by him "as a philosopher, and not as an honest Christian"; later, however, he solemnly abjured all his errors and doubts in the matter of Catholic doctrine and practice. At this point the Roman Inquisition intervened and requested his extradition. After some hesitation the Venetian authorities agreed, and in February, 1593, Bruno was sent to Rome, and for six years was kept in the prison of the Inquisition. Historians have striven in vain to discover the explanation of this long delay on the part of the Roman authorities. In the spring of 1599, the trial was begun before a commission of the Roman Inquisition, and, after the accused had been granted several terms of respite in which to retract his errors, he was finally condemned (January, 1600), handed over to the secular power (8 February), and burned at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome (17 February). Bruno was not condemned for his defence of the Copernican system of astronomy, nor for his doctrine of the plurality of inhabited worlds, but for his theological errors, among which were the following: that Christ was not God but merely an unusually skilful magician, that the Holy Ghost is the soul of the world, that the Devil will be saved, etc.
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