Giordano Bruno

gigatos | February 14, 2022

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Summary

Filippo Bruno, known as Giordano Bruno (Nola, 1548 – Rome, February 17, 1600), was an Italian philosopher, writer and Dominican friar who lived in the sixteenth century.

His thought, framed in the Renaissance naturalism, merged the most diverse philosophical traditions – ancient materialism, Averroism, Copernicanism, Lullism, Scotism, Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, mnemonics, Jewish and cabalistic influences – but revolved around a single idea: the infinite, understood as the infinite universe, effect of an infinite God, made of infinite worlds, to be loved infinitely.

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Training

There are not many documents about Bruno”s youth. It is the philosopher himself, in the interrogations to which he was subjected during the process that marked the last years of his life, to give information about his early years. “I have the name Giordano of the family of Bruni, of the city of Nola near Naples twelve miles, born and raised in that city”, and more precisely in the district of San Giovanni del Cesco, at the foot of Mount Cicala, perhaps the only son of the soldier, the standard bearer Giovanni, and of Fraulissa Savolina, in the year 1548 – “as far as I have understood from my own”. Mezzogiorno was then part of the Kingdom of Naples, included in the Spanish monarchy: the child was baptized with the name of Philip, in honor of the heir to the Spanish throne Philip II.

His house – which no longer exists – was modest, but in his immense De he remembers with fondness the environment that surrounded it, the “very pleasant Cicala mountain”, the ruins of the twelfth century castle, the olive trees – perhaps in part the same as today – and in front of it, Vesuvius, which he explored as a young boy, thinking that beyond that mountain there was nothing more in the world: He will learn from this not to rely “exclusively on the judgment of the senses”, as the great Aristotle did, according to him, learning above all that, beyond every apparent limit, there is always something else.

He learned to read and write from a priest from Nola, Giandomenico de Iannello, and completed his grammar studies in the school of a certain Bartolo di Aloia. He continued his higher studies, from 1562 to 1565, in the University of Naples, which was then in the courtyard of the convent of St. Dominic, to learn letters, logic and dialectics from “one who was called the Sarnese” and private lessons in logic from an Augustinian, Friar Teofilo da Vairano.

The Sarnese, that is Giovan Vincenzo de Colle, born in Sarno, was an Aristotelian of the Averroist school and he is responsible for the anti-humanistic and antiphilological formation of Bruno, for whom only the concepts count, the form and the language in which they are expressed having no importance.

There is little information about the Augustinian Theophilus of Vairano, whom Bruno always admired, so much so that he made him the protagonist of his cosmological dialogues and confided to the Parisian librarian Guillaume Cotin that Theophilus was “the main teacher he had in philosophy. In order to outline Bruno”s early education, it is sufficient to add that, introducing the explanation of the ninth seal in his Explicatio triginta sigillorum of 1583, he wrote that he had dedicated himself from a very young age to the study of the art of memory, probably influenced by the reading of the treatise Phoenix seu artificiosa memoria, of 1492, by Pietro Tommai, also called Pietro Ravennate.

In the convent

At the age of “fourteen, or about fifteen”, he renounced the name of Philip, as imposed by the Dominican rule, took the name of Giordano, in honor of Blessed Giordano of Saxony, successor of St. Dominic, or perhaps of Friar Giordano Crispo, his teacher of metaphysics, and then took the habit of Dominican Friar from the prior of the convent of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples, Ambrogio Pasca: “finished the year of the probatione, I was admitted by him to the profession”, in reality he was novice on June 15, 1565 and professed on June 16, 1566, at the age of eighteen. Evaluating retrospectively, the choice to wear the Dominican habit can be explained not by an interest in religious life or theological studies – which he never had, as he affirmed at the trial – but to be able to devote himself to his favorite studies of philosophy with the advantage of enjoying the condition of privileged security that belonging to that powerful Order certainly guaranteed him.

That he had not joined the Dominicans to protect the orthodoxy of the Catholic faith was immediately revealed by the episode – narrated by Bruno himself at the trial – in which Friar Giordano, in the convent of St. Dominic, threw away the images of the saints in his possession, keeping only the crucifix and inviting a novice who was reading the Historia delle sette allegrezze della Madonna to throw away that book, a modest devotional work, published in Florence in 1551, a periphrasis of verses in Latin by Bernard of Clairvaux, perhaps replacing it with the study of the Vita de” santi Padri by Domenico Cavalca. This episode, although known to his superiors, did not provoke any sanctions against him, but it shows how the young Bruno was completely foreign to the devotional counter-reformist themes.

It seems that around 1569 he went to Rome and was introduced to Pope Pius V and Cardinal Scipione Rebiba, to whom he would have taught some elements of that mnemonic art that so much part will have in his philosophical speculation. In 1570 he was ordained sub-deacon, deacon in 1571, and presbyter in 1573, celebrating his first mass in the convent of St. Bartholomew in Campagna, near Salerno, at that time belonging to the Grimaldi, princes of Monaco, and in 1575 he graduated in theology with two theses on Thomas Aquinas and Peter Lombard.

It should not be thought that a convent was only an oasis of peace and meditation of chosen spirits: only from 1567 to 1570, against the friars of St. Dominic Major were issued eighteen sentences for sexual scandals, theft and even murder. Therefore, the contempt that Bruno always showed towards the friars, to whom he reproached in particular the lack of culture, should not be surprising; and not only that, but, according to a hypothesis of Vincenzo Spampanato commonly accepted by critics, in the protagonist of his comedy Candelaio, Bonifacio, he most likely alluded to one of his brothers, a friar Bonifacio from Naples, defined in the dedicatory letter To Mrs. Morgana B. “candlestick maker in the flesh”, i.e. a sodomite. However, the possibility of forming a broad culture was certainly not lacking in the convent of San Domenico Maggiore, famous for the richness of its library, even if, as in other convents, the books of Erasmus of Rotterdam were forbidden, but Bruno obtained some of them by reading them in secret. Bruno”s experience in the convent was in any case decisive: there he could carry out his studies and form his culture by reading everything from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas, from St. Jerome to St. John Chrysostom, as well as the works of Raymond Llull, Marsilio Ficino and Nicholas Cusanus.

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The denial of the Trinitarian doctrine

In 1576 his independence of thought and his intolerance towards the observance of dogmas were unequivocally manifested. Bruno, discussing Arianism with a Dominican friar, Agostino da Montalcino, who was a guest in the Neapolitan convent, argued that Ario”s views were less pernicious than he believed, declaring that:

And in 1592 to the Venetian inquisitor he expressed his skepticism on the Trinity, admitting to have “doubted about the name of person of the Son and the Holy Spirit, not intending these two persons distinct from the Father” but considering the Son, neoplatonically, the intellect and the Spirit, pythagorically, the love of the Father or the soul of the world, not therefore distinct persons or substances, but divine manifestations.

Escape from Naples

Brother Agostino denounced him to the provincial father Domenico Vita, who instituted a trial for heresy against him and, as Bruno himself will tell the Venetian inquisitors: “doubting not to be put in prison, I left Naples and went to Rome”. Bruno reached Rome in 1576, as a guest of the Dominican convent of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, whose procurator, Sisto Fabri da Lucca, became a few years later general of the Order and in 1581 censured the Essays of Montaigne.

They are years of serious disorders: in Rome there seems to be nothing else, wrote the chronicler Guido Gualtieri from Marche, than “stealing and killing: many thrown in the Tiber, nor of people only, but the monsignors, the sons of tycoons, put to the torment of the fire, and grandchildren of cardinals were removed from the world” and blamed the old and weak Pope Gregory XIII.

Bruno is also accused of having killed and thrown into the river a friar: the librarian Guillaume Cotin writes, on December 7, 1585, that Bruno fled from Rome for “a murder committed by one of his friars, for which he is blamed and in danger of his life, both for the slander of his inquisitors who, ignorant as they are, do not conceive his philosophy and accuse him of heresy”. In addition to the accusation of murder, Bruno had news that in the Neapolitan convent were found, among his books, works of St. John Chrysostom and St. Jerome annotated by Erasmus and that a trial for heresy was being prepared against him.

Thus, in the same year, 1576, Giordano Bruno abandoned the Dominican habit, took the name Filippo, left Rome and fled to Liguria.

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Peregrination in Italy

In April 1576 Bruno is in Genoa and writes that at that time, in the church of Santa Maria di Castello, the tail of the donkey that brought Jesus to Jerusalem was worshipped as a relic and was kissed by the faithful. From here, he then goes to Noli (now in the province of Savona, then an independent Republic), where for four or five months he teaches grammar to children and cosmography to adults.

In 1577 he is in Savona, then in Turin, which he judges “delicate city” but, not finding employment there, by river s”indirizza to Venice, where he stayed in an inn in the district of Frezzeria, making you print his first written, went lost, De ”signs of the times, “to put together a little money to be able to sustentar; the work I did see first to the Reverend Father Master Remigio de Fiorenza”, Dominican convent of Saints John and Paul.

But in Venice there was an epidemic of plague that had made tens of thousands of victims, including illustrious, such as Titian, so Bruno goes to Padua where, on the advice of some Dominicans, takes the habit, then he goes to Brescia, where he stops in the Dominican convent, here a monk, “prophet, great theologian and polyglot”, suspected of witchcraft for having started to prophesy, is healed by him, returning to be – writes ironically Bruno – “the usual donkey.

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In Savoy and Geneva

From Bergamo, in the summer of 1578, he decides to go to France: he passes through Milan and Turin, and enters Savoy spending the winter in the Dominican convent of Chambéry. Later, still in 1578, he is in Geneva, a city where there is a large colony of Italian Reformed. Bruno deposes again the habit and is dressed in cape, hat and sword, adheres to Calvinism and finds work as a proofreader, thanks to the interest of the Neapolitan Marquis Galeazzo Caracciolo who, a refugee from Italy, in 1552 had founded the Italian evangelical community.

On May 20, 1579 he enrolls at the University as “Filippo Bruno nolano, professor of sacred theology”. In August, he accused the professor of philosophy, Antoine de la Faye, of being a bad teacher and defined Calvinist pastors as “pedagogues”. It is likely that Bruno wanted to be noticed, to demonstrate the excellence of his philosophical preparation and his teaching skills to get a teaching position, a constant ambition of his whole life. Even his adherence to Calvinism was aimed at this purpose; Bruno was actually indifferent to all religious denominations: as long as his adherence to a historical religion did not prejudice his philosophical convictions and freedom to profess them, he would have been Catholic in Italy, Calvinist in Switzerland, Anglican in England and Lutheran in Germany.

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In France

Arrested for defamation, he was tried and excommunicated. On August 27, 1579 he was forced to recant; he then left Geneva and moved briefly to Lyon to move to Toulouse, a Catholic city, the seat of an important University, where for almost two years he occupied the position of reader, teaching Aristotle”s De anima and composing a treatise on the art of memory, which remained unpublished and was lost, the Clavis magna, which would be based on Llull”s Ars magna. In Toulouse he met the Portuguese skeptical philosopher Francisco Sanches, who wanted to dedicate his book Quod nihil scitur to him, calling him a “most acute philosopher”; but Bruno did not reciprocate the esteem, if he wrote of him that he considered it “astonishing that this ass should give himself the title of doctor”.

In 1581, because of the war of religion between Catholics and Huguenots, Bruno left Toulouse for Paris, where he gave a course of lectures on the attributes of God according to St. Thomas Aquinas. Following the success of these lessons, as he himself tells the inquisitors, “I became so famous that King Henry the Third summoned me one day, asking me if the memory I had and professed was natural or if it was due to the art of magic; to which I gave satisfaction; and with what I told him and had him try, he knew that it was not due to the art of magic but to science. And after this I had a book of memories printed, under the title De umbris idearum, which I dedicated to His Majesty; and on this occasion I made myself an extraordinary and provided reader”.

By actively supporting the political work of Henry III of Valois, Giordano Bruno would remain in Paris for just under two years, occupied in the prestigious position of lecteur royal. It was in Paris that Bruno printed his first works that have come down to us. In addition to the De compendiosa architectura et complemento artis Lullii, he published the De umbris idearum (The shadows of ideas) and the Ars memoriae (“The art of memory”), in a single text, followed by the Cantus Circaeus (The song of Circe) and the vernacular comedy entitled Candelaio.

The volume includes two texts, the De umbris idearum proper, and the Ars memoriae. In the intentions of the author, the volume, of mnemotechnical argument, is distinguished so in a part of theoretical character and in one of practical character.

For Bruno the universe is a single body, organically formed, with a precise order that structures every single thing and connects it with all the others. The foundation of this order are the ideas, eternal and immutable principles totally and simultaneously present in the divine mind, but these ideas are “shadowed” and separate in the act of wanting to understand them. In the cosmos every single entity is therefore imitation, image, “shadow” of the ideal reality that governs it. Reflecting in itself the structure of the universe, the human mind, which has in itself not the ideas but the shadows of ideas, can reach the true knowledge, that is the ideas and the link that connects everything with all the others, beyond the multiplicity of the particular elements and their change in time. It is then a matter of trying to obtain a cognitive method that grasps the complexity of reality, up to the ideal structure that supports the whole.

This means is based on the art of memory, whose task is to avoid the confusion generated by the multiplicity of images and to connect the images of things with concepts, symbolically representing all reality.

In the philosopher”s thought, the art of memory operates in the same world as the shadows of ideas, presenting itself as an emulator of nature. If the things of the world take shape from ideas, because ideas contain the images of everything, and things are manifested to our senses as shadows of those, then through the imagination itself it will be possible to go back the opposite way, that is, from shadows to ideas, from man to God: the art of memory is no longer an aid to rhetoric, but a means to re-create the world. Like any other art, the art of memory needs substrates (the subiecta), i.e. “spaces” of the imagination able to accommodate the appropriate symbols (the adiecta) through an appropriate tool. With these assumptions, the author builds a system that associates the letters of the alphabet with images from mythology, in order to make possible the encoding of words and concepts according to a particular succession of images. The letters can be visualized on circular diagrams, or “mnemonic wheels”, which by turning and grafting one inside the other, provide more and more powerful tools.

The work, also in Latin, is composed of two dialogues. The protagonist of the first is the sorceress Circe who, resenting the fact that humans behave like animals, casts a spell transforming men into beasts, thus revealing their authentic nature. In the second dialogue Bruno, giving voice to one of the two protagonists, Borista, resumes the art of memory by showing how to memorize the previous dialogue: the text corresponds to a scenario that is gradually divided into a greater number of spaces and the various objects contained therein are the images related to the concepts expressed in the text. The Cantus is therefore a treatise of mnemonics in which, however, the philosopher already allows a glimpse of moral themes that will be widely taken up in later works, especially in the Spaccio de la bestia trionfante and De gli eroici furori.

Still in 1582 Bruno finally published the Candelaio, a comedy in five acts in which the complexity of the language, a popular Italian that includes terms in Latin, Tuscan and Neapolitan, corresponds to the eccentricity of the plot, based on three parallel stories.

The comedy is set in Naples-metropolis of the second half of the sixteenth century, in places that the philosopher knew well for having stayed there during his novitiate. The candlestick maker Bonifacio, although married to the beautiful Carubina, courts the lady Vittoria resorting to magical practices; the greedy alchemist Bartholomew is obstinate in wanting to transform metals into gold; the grammarian Manfurio expresses himself in an incomprehensible language. These three stories include that of the painter Gioan Bernardo, voice of the author himself, who with a court of servants and evildoers makes fun of everyone and conquers Carubina.

In this classic of Italian literature, an absurd, violent and corrupt world appears, represented with bitter comedy, where events follow each other in a continuous and lively transformation. The comedy is a fierce condemnation of stupidity, avarice and pedantry.

Interesting in the work is Bruno”s description of himself:

In England

In April 1583 Giordano Bruno left Paris and left for England where, in London, he was hosted by the French ambassador Michel de Castelnau, who was joined by the man of letters of Italian origin Giovanni Florio as Bruno did not know English, accompanying him until the end of his stay in England. In the depositions left to the Venetian inquisitors he glosses over the reasons for this departure, referring generically to the riots there in progress for religious issues. However, other hypotheses remain open about his departure: that Bruno had left on a secret mission on behalf of Henry III; that the climate in Paris had become dangerous because of his teachings. We must also add the fact that in front of the Venetian inquisitors, a few years later, Bruno expressed words of appreciation for the Queen of England Elizabeth whom he had known by going often to court with the ambassador.

In the month of June Bruno was in Oxford, and in the church of St. Mary he held a public dispute with one of those professors. Returning to London, he published there, in a single text, the Ars reminiscendi, the Explicatio triginta sigillorum and the Sigillus sigillorum, in which text he included a letter addressed to the Vice Chancellor of the University of Oxford, writing that there “they will find very willing and very ready a man with whom to test the measure of their strength”. It is a request to be able to teach in the prestigious University. The proposal is accepted: in the summer of 1583 Bruno leaves for Oxford.

Considered a work of mnemotechnical argument, the Sigillus, in Latin, is a concise theoretical treatment in which the philosopher introduces decisive themes in his thought, such as the unity of cognitive processes, love as a universal bond, the uniqueness and infinity of a universal form that is expressed in the infinite figures of matter, and the “fury” in the sense of impulse towards the divine, topics that will be developed in depth in the following Italian dialogues. It is also presented in this fundamental work another of the nuclear themes of Bruno”s thought: magic as a guide and an instrument of knowledge and action, a topic that he will expand in the so-called magical works.

At Oxford Giordano Bruno held some lessons on Copernican theories, but his stay in that city lasted very little. we learn that Oxford did not like those novelties, as evidenced twenty years later, in 1604, the Archbishop of Canterbury George Abbot, who was present at the lessons of Bruno:

The lectures were then interrupted, officially for an accusation of plagiarism to the De vita coelitus comparanda of Marsilio Ficino. These were difficult and bitter years for the philosopher, as can be seen from the tone of the introductions to the works that immediately followed, the London dialogues: the heated controversies and rejections were experienced by Bruno as a persecution, “unjust outrages”, and certainly the “fame” that had already preceded him from Paris did not help him.

Back in London, despite the adverse climate, in just under two years, between 1584 and 1585, Bruno published at John Charlewood six of the most important works of his production: six philosophical works in dialogue form, the so-called “London dialogues”, or even “Italian dialogues”, because all in Italian: La cena de le ceneri, De la causa, principio et uno, De l”infinito, universo e mondi, Spaccio de la bestia trionfante, Cabala del cavallo pegaseo con l”aggiunta dell”Asino cillenico, De gli eroici furori.

The work, dedicated to the French ambassador Michel de Castelnau, where Bruno was a guest, is divided into five dialogues, the protagonists are four and among these Theophilus can be considered the spokesman of the author. Bruno imagines that the nobleman Sir Fulke Greville, on Ash Wednesday, invites Theophilus, Bruno himself, Giovanni Florio, tutor of the ambassador”s daughter, a knight and two Lutheran academics from Oxford: Doctors Torquato and Nundinio, to dinner. Answering the questions of the other protagonists, Theophilus recounts the events that led to the meeting and the unfolding of the conversation that took place during the dinner, thus exposing the theories of the Nolan.

Bruno praised and defended the theory of the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 – 1543) against the attacks of conservatives and against those who, like the theologian Andrea Osiander, who had written a disparaging preface to De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, considered the astronomer”s theory only an ingenious hypothesis.Copernicus” world, however, was still finite and bounded by the sphere of fixed stars. In the Supper, Bruno does not limit himself to supporting the motion of the Earth following the refutation of Ptolemaic cosmology; he also presents an infinite universe: without center or boundaries. Theophilus (the author”s spokesman) affirms about the universe: “and we know for sure that being an effect and started by an infinite cause and an infinite principle, it must according to its bodily capacity and its way be infinitely infinite. It is never possible to find a semi-probable reason for which it is the margin of this corporal universe; and consequently the stars which are contained in its space are of finite number; and beyond being naturally determined one hundred and a half of that”. The universe, which proceeds from God as infinite Cause, is infinite in its turn and contains innumerable worlds.

For Bruno are vain principles to support the existence of the firmament with its fixed stars, the finiteness of the universe and that in this there is a center where now the Sun should be still as before the Earth was imagined to be still. He formulates examples that appear to some authors as forerunners of the Galilean principle of relativity. Following the Docta ignorantia of the cardinal and humanist Nicola Cusano (1401 – 1464), Bruno supports the infinity of the universe as the effect of an infinite cause. Bruno is obviously aware that the Scriptures support anything but – finiteness of the universe and centrality of the Earth – but, he replies:

Just as it is necessary to distinguish between moral doctrines and natural philosophy, so it is necessary to distinguish between theologians and philosophers: the former are responsible for moral questions, the latter for the search for truth. So Bruno draws here a fairly clear boundary between works of natural philosophy and Holy Scripture.

The five dialogues of De la causa, principio et uno intend to establish the principles of natural reality. Bruno leaves aside the theological aspect of the knowledge of God, of whom, as the cause of nature, we cannot know anything through the “natural light”, because it “ascends above nature” and therefore we can aspire to know God only by faith. What interests Bruno is instead the philosophy and contemplation of nature, the knowledge of natural reality in which, as he had already written in De umbris, we can only grasp the “shadows”, the divine “by way of vestige”.

Going back to ancient traditions of thought, Bruno elaborates an animistic concept of matter, in which the soul of the world is identified with its universal form, and whose first and main faculty is the universal intellect. The intellect is the “formal constitutive principle of the universe and of what is contained in it” and the form is nothing but the vital principle, the soul of things which, precisely because they all have a soul, have no imperfection.

Matter, on the other hand, is not in itself undifferentiated, a “nothingness,” as many philosophers have argued, a brute power, without act and without perfection, as Aristotle would say.

Matter is then the second principle of nature, of which everything is formed. It is “power of being made, produced and created”, which is equivalent to the formal principle that is active power, “power to make, to produce, to create” and there cannot be one principle without the other. In contrast with Aristotelian dualism, Bruno concludes that formal principle and material principle, although distinct, cannot be considered separate, because “the whole according to the substance is one”.

Two fundamental elements of Brunian philosophy derive from these considerations: one, all matter is life and life is in matter, infinite matter; two, God cannot be outside matter simply because there is no “outside” of matter: God is within matter, within us.

In De l”infinito, universo e mondi Bruno resumes and enriches themes already dealt with in the previous dialogues: the necessity of an agreement between philosophers and theologians, because “faith is required for the establishment of crude peoples that denno esser essere governed”; the infinity of the universe and the existence of infinite worlds; the lack of a center in an infinite universe, which entails a further consequence: the disappearance of the ancient, hypothesized hierarchical order, the “vain fantasy” that held that at the center was the “densest and crassest body” and ascended to the finest and most divine bodies. The Aristotelian conception is still defended by those doctors (the pedants) who have faith in the “fame of the authors that have been put in their hands”, but modern philosophers, who have no interest in depending on what others say and think for themselves, get rid of these antiquities and proceed with a more confident step towards the truth.

Clearly, an eternal universe, infinitely large, composed of an infinite number of solar systems similar to ours and without a center takes away from the Earth, and consequently to man, that privileged role that Earth and man have in the Judeo-Christian religions within the model of creation, creation that in the eyes of the philosopher no longer makes sense, because as he had already concluded in the two previous dialogues, the universe is assimilated to a living organism, where life is inherent in an infinite matter that perpetually changes.

Copernicanism, for Bruno, represents the “true” conception of the universe, better, the actual description of the celestial motions. In the first Dialogue of De l”infinito, universe and worlds, the Nolan explains that the universe is infinite because such is its Cause that coincides with God. Philotheus, the author”s spokesman, states: “What reason do we have to believe that the agent who can make an infinite good makes it finite? and if he makes it finite, why should we believe that he can make it infinite, being in him the possession and the making all one? Because it is inmutable, it has no contingency in its operation, nor in its efficacy, but from a determinate and certain efficacy it depends on a determinate and certain effect inmutably: so that it cannot be anything other than what it is; it cannot be such as it is not; it cannot possess anything other than what it can; it cannot will anything other than what it wills; and necessarily it cannot do anything other than what it does: since having power distinct from action is only appropriate to things that are mutable”.

Since God is infinitely powerful, therefore, His explanatory act must be equally so. In God freedom and necessity, will and power coincide (consequently, it is not credible that at the act of creation He placed a limit on Himself.

We must keep in mind that “Bruno makes a clear distinction between the universe and worlds. To speak of a system of the world does not mean, in his vision of the cosmos, to speak of a system of the universe. Astronomy is legitimate and possible as a science of the world that falls within the scope of our sensitive perception. But, beyond it, extends an infinite universe that contains those “great animals” we call stars, that encloses an infinite plurality of worlds. That universe has no size or measure, no form or figure. Of it, which is at the same time uniform and without form, which is neither harmonic nor ordered, it cannot in any way give itself a system”.

Allegorical work, the “Spaccio”, consisting of three dialogues of moral argument, lends itself to be interpreted on different levels, among which remains fundamental that of the polemical intent of Bruno against the Protestant Reformation, which in the eyes of Bruno represents the lowest point of a cycle of decadence begun with Christianity. Not only religious decadence, but also civil and philosophical decadence: if Bruno had concluded in the previous dialogues that faith is necessary for the government of “uncouth peoples” trying to delimit the respective fields of action of philosophy and religion, here he reopens that boundary.

In Bruno”s vision, the link between man and the world, the natural world and the civilized world, is that between man and a God who is not “in the high heavens”, but in the world, because “nature is nothing but God in things”. The philosopher, the one who seeks the Truth, must therefore necessarily operate where the “shadows” of the divine are located. Man cannot help but interact with God, according to the language of a communication that in the natural world sees man pursuing Knowledge, and in the civil world man following the Law. This link is precisely the one that in history has been interrupted, and the whole world has fallen because religion has fallen, dragging with it law and philosophy, “so that we are no longer gods, we are no longer us”. In the Spaccio, therefore, ethics, ontology and religion are closely interconnected. Religion, and this should be emphasized, is intended by Bruno as civil and natural religion, and the model he draws inspiration from is that of the ancient Egyptians and Romans, who “did not worship Jupiter, as he was the deity, but they worshiped the deity as he was Jupiter”.

In order to re-establish the link with the divine, however, it is necessary that “first we remove from our shoulders the grievous sum of errors that holds them back.” It is the “passing off,” that is, the expulsion of that which has deteriorated that bond: the “triumphant beasts.”

The triumphant beasts are imagined in the celestial constellations, represented by animals: it is necessary to “pass them off”, i.e. chase them out of the sky as they represent vices that it is time to replace with other virtues: so away with Falsehood, Hypocrisy, Malice, “foolish faith”, Stupidity, Fierce, Sloth, Cowardice, Idleness, Avarice, Envy, Imposterousness, Flattery and so on and so forth.

It is necessary to return to simplicity, truth and industriousness, overturning the moral conceptions that have now imposed themselves on the world, according to which heroic works and affections are worthless, where believing without thinking is wisdom, where human impostures are passed off as divine counsels, the perversion of natural law is regarded as religious piety, studying is folly, honor is placed in riches, dignity in elegance, prudence in malice, shrewdness in treachery, knowledge of life in pretense, justice in tyranny, judgment in violence.

Christianity is responsible for this crisis: Paul had already overturned natural values, and now Luther, the “stain of the world”, has closed the cycle: the wheel of history, of the vicissitudes of the world, having reached its lowest point, can operate a new and positive overturning of values.

In the new hierarchy of values, the first place goes to Truth, the necessary guide not to err. This is followed by Prudence, the characteristic of the wise man who, having known the truth, draws the consequences with an appropriate behavior. In third place Bruno inserts Sophia, the search for truth; then follows the Law, which regulates the civil behavior of man; finally, the Judgment, understood as the implementation aspect of the law. Bruno makes the Law descend from Wisdom, in a rationalist vision in the center of which is the man who works seeking the Truth, in sharp contrast with the Christianity of Paul, who sees the law subordinate to the liberation from sin, and with the Reformation of Luther, who sees in the “faith alone” the beacon of man. For Bruno, the “glory of God” is thus overturned into “vain glory” and the pact between God and mankind established in the New Testament is revealed as the “mother of all forphancies”. Religion must return to being “civil religion”: a bond that favors the “communione de gli uomini”, the “civil conversation”.

Other values follow the first five: Fortitude (the strength of the soul), Diligence, Philanthropy, Magnanimity, Simplicity, Enthusiasm, Study, Industriousness, and so on. And then we will see, Bruno mockingly concludes, “how apt they are to gain a handful of land these who are so effusive and prodigal to donate kingdoms of heaven.

This is obviously an ethic that recalls the traditional values of Humanism, to which Bruno never gave much importance; but this rigid scheme is actually the premise for the indications of behavior that Bruno proposes in the work of a little later, De gli eroici furori.

The Cabala of the Pegasus Horse was published in 1585 together with the Cillenic Donkey in a single text. The title alludes to Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology born from the blood of Medusa beheaded by Perseus. At the end of his exploits, Pegasus flew in the sky transforming into a constellation, one of the 48 listed by Ptolemy in his Almagest: the constellation of Pegasus. “Cabala” refers to a mystical tradition that originated within Judaism.

The work, crossed by a clear comic vein, can be read as a divertissement, a work of entertainment without pretenses; or interpreted in allegorical key, a satirical work, an act of accusation. The horse in the sky would then be an idealized donkey, a celestial figure that refers to human asininity: to ignorance, that of the cabalists, but also that of religious people in general. The continuous references to sacred texts are ambiguous, because on one hand they suggest interpretations, on the other hand they confuse the reader. One of the interpretative strands, linked to the critical work carried out by Vincenzo Spampanato, has identified in the Christianity of the origins and in Paul of Tarsus the polemical target of Bruno.

In the ten dialogues that make up the work De gli eroici furori, published in 1585 also in London, Bruno identifies three species of human passions: that for the speculative life, aimed at knowledge; that for the practical and active life, and that for the idle life. The last two tendencies reveal a passion of little value, a “low fury”; the desire for a life aimed at contemplation, i.e. the search for truth, is instead the expression of a “heroic fury”, with which the soul, “enraptured above the horizon of natural affections, overcome by high thoughts, as dead to the body, aspires to high”.

One does not reach this effect through prayer, devotional attitudes, by “opening one”s eyes to the sky, raising one”s hands high” but, on the contrary, by “coming to the innermost part of oneself, considering that God is near, with oneself and within oneself more than he himself can be, as the one who is the soul of souls, the life of lives, the essence of essences”. A search that Bruno assimilates to a hunt, not the common hunt where the hunter searches and captures the prey, but the one in which the hunter becomes prey himself, like Actaeon who in the myth taken up by Bruno, having seen the beauty of Diana, turns into a deer and is made prey of dogs, the “thoughts of divine things”, which devour him “making him dead to the crowd, to the multitude, loosened from the knots of the perturbed senses, so that he sees everything as one, he no longer sees distinctions and numbers”.

The knowledge of nature is the purpose of science and the highest purpose of our life itself, that from this choice is transformed into a “heroic fury” assimilating us to the perennial and tormented “vicissitude” in which the principle that animates the whole universe is expressed. The philosopher tells us that in order to truly know the object of our research (Diana ignuda) we must not be virtuous (virtue as a mediation between extremes) but we must be mad, furious, only in this way we could come to understand the object of our study (research and being furious, are not a virtue but a vice. The dialogue is also a prosimeter, like Dante”s La vita nuova, a combination of prose and poetry (couplets, sonnets, and a final song).

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The return to France

The preceding English period is to be considered Bruno”s most creative period, a period in which he produced the greatest number of works until, towards the end of 1585, the ambassador Castelnau, being called back to France, induced him to embark with him; but the ship was attacked by pirates, who robbed the passengers of all their possessions.

In Paris, Bruno lived near the Collège de Cambrai, and every now and then he went to borrow some books in the library of Saint-Victor, on the hill of Sainte-Geneviève, whose librarian, the monk Guillaume Cotin, was in the habit of noting down daily what happened in the library. Having come into some confidence with the philosopher, we know from him that Bruno was about to publish a work, the Arbor philosophorum, which has not reached us, and that he had left Italy to “avoid the calumnies of the inquisitors, who are ignorant and who, not conceiving his philosophy, would accuse him of heresy”.

Among other things, the monk notes that Bruno was an admirer of Thomas Aquinas, who despised “the subtleties of the scholastics, of the sacraments and even of the eucharist, unknown to St. Peter and St. Paul, who knew nothing but hoc est corpus meum. He says that the religious murders would easily be taken out of the way, if such matters were swept away, and he trusts that this will soon be the end of the strife.”

The following year Bruno published, dedicated to Piero Del Bene, abbot of Belleville and member of the French court, the Figuratio Aristotelici physici auditus, an exposition of Aristotelian physics. It knows the salernitano Fabrizio Mordente, that two years before had published Il Compasso, illustration of the invention of a compasses of new conception and, since he doesn”t know the Latin, Bruno, that appreciated its invention, publishes Dialogi duo de Fabricii Mordentis Salernitani prope divina adinventione ad perfectam cosmimetriae praxim, where he praises the inventor but reproaches him for not having understood the full scope of his invention, which demonstrated the impossibility of an infinite division of lengths. Offended by these remarks, Mordente protested violently, so that Bruno ended up responding with the fierce satire of Idiota triumphans seu de Mordentio inter geometras Deo dialogus and Dialogus qui De somnii interpretatione seu Geometrica sylva inscribitur.

On May 28, 1586 he printed with the name of his disciple Jean Hennequin the anti-Aristotelian pamphlet Centum et viginti articuli de natura et mundo adversus peripateticos, participating in the subsequent public dispute in the Collège de Cambrai, reiterating his criticism of Aristotelian philosophy. Against this criticism rose a young Parisian lawyer, Raoul Callier, who replied with violence calling the philosopher Giordano “Brutus”. It seems that Callier”s intervention received the support of almost all the participants and that an uproar broke out in front of which the philosopher preferred, for once, to leave, but the negative reactions provoked by his intervention against Aristotelian philosophy, then still in great vogue at the Sorbonne, together with the political and religious crisis underway in France and the lack of support at court, induced him to leave French soil once again.

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In Germany

When he reached Germany in June, Bruno stayed briefly in Mainz and Wiesbaden, then moved to Marburg, where he matriculated on July 25, 1586 as Theologiae doctor romanensis. But finding no possibility of teaching, probably because of his anti-Aristotelian positions, on August 20, 1586 he enrolled in the University of Wittenberg as Doctor italicus, teaching there for two years, two years that the philosopher spent in quiet industriousness.

In 1587 it publishes the De lampade combinatoria lulliana, a comment of the Ars magna of Ramon Llull and the De progressu et lampade venatoria logicorum, comment to the Topica of Aristotle; other comments to Aristotelian works are his Libri physicorum Aristotelis explanati, texts published in 1891. He publishes again, in Wittenberg, the Camoeracensis Acrotismus, a re-edition of Centum et viginti articuli de natura et mundo adversus peripateticos. His private course on Rhetoric will be published in 1612 with the title of Artificium perorandi; also the Animadversiones circa lampadem lullianam and the Lampas triginta statuarum will be published only in 1891.

Yates” essay mentions that Mocenigo had reported to the Venetian Inquisition Bruno”s intention, during his German period, to create a new sect. While other accusers (Mocenigo will deny this claim) claimed that he would have wanted to call the new sect the Jordanites and that it would have greatly attracted German Lutherans. The author also asks the question whether there had been any relationship in this sect with the Rosicrucians since they emerged in Germany at the beginning of the seventeenth century in Lutheran circles.

The new Duke Christian I, who succeeded his father who died on February 11, 1586, decided to reverse the direction of the university teachings that favored the doctrines of the Calvinist philosopher Peter Branch to the detriment of the classical Aristotelian theories. It must have been this turning point that pushed Bruno, on March 8, 1588, to leave the University of Wittenberg, not without reading an Oratio valedictoria, a greeting that is a thank you for the excellent reception of which he had been gratified:

He was reciprocated by the affection of his pupils, such as Hieronymus Besler and Valtin Havenkenthal, who, in his greeting, calls him “Sublime being, object of wonder for all, before whom nature itself amazes, surpassed by his work, flower of Ausonia, Titan of the splendid Nola, decorum and delight of the one and the other sky”.

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In Prague and Helmstedt

In April 1588 Bruno came to Prague, in those years the seat of the Holy Roman Empire, where he remained six months. Here he published, in a single text, the De lulliano specierum scrutinio and De lampade combinatoria Raymundi Lullii, dedicated to the Spanish ambassador to the imperial court, Don Guillem de Santcliment (who boasted Ramon Llull among his ancestors), while to the Emperor Rudolph II, patron and lover of alchemy and astrology, he dedicated the Articuli centum et sexaginta adversus huius tempestatis mathematicos atque philosophos, which dealt with geometry, and in the dedication he pointed out that in order to cure the evils of the world tolerance was necessary, both in the strictly religious field – “This is the religion I observe, both because of an intimate conviction and because of the custom in force in my country and among my people: a religion that excludes all disputes and does not foment any controversy” – as well as in the philosophical field, a field that must remain free from pre-established authorities and traditions elevated to normative prescriptions. As for him, “in the free areas of philosophy I sought shelter from the fortunate waves, desiring the sole company of those who command us not to close our eyes, but to open them. I do not like to dissimulate the truth I see, nor am I afraid to profess it openly.”

Rewarded with three hundred thalers by the emperor, in autumn Bruno, who hoped to be received at court, decided to leave Prague and, after a brief stop in Tübingen, came to Helmstedt, in whose University, called Academia Julia, he registered on January 13, 1589.

On July 1, 1589, for the death of the founder of the Academy, Duke Julius von Braunschweig, he reads the Oratio consolatoria, where he presents himself as a foreigner and exile: “I scorned, abandoned, lost my country, my home, my power, my honors, and every other amiable, desirable, desirable thing”. In Italy “exposed to the gluttony and voracity of the Roman wolf, here free. There forced to superstitious and insane worship, here exhorted to reformed rites. There dead for violence of tyrants, here alive for the kindness and justice of an excellent prince”. The Muses should be free by natural right and yet “they are instead, in Italy and Spain, harassed by the feet of vile priests, in France they suffer very serious risks due to the civil war, in Belgium they are tossed about by frequent storms, and in some German regions they languish unhappily”.

A few weeks later he is excommunicated by the superintendent of the Lutheran Church of the city, the Lutheran theologian Heinrich Boethius for unknown reasons: Bruno thus manages to collect the excommunications of the major European confessions, Catholic, Calvinist and Lutheran. On October 6, 1586 he presented an appeal to the pro-rector of the Academy, Daniel Hoffmann, against what he defined as an abuse – because “whoever decided something without listening to the other side, even if he did it rightly, was not fair” – and a private vendetta. He received no response, however, because it seems that it was Hoffmann himself who had instigated Boethius.

Although excommunicated, he could still remain in Helmstedt, where he had found Valtin Acidalius Havenkenthal and Hieronymus Besler, already his pupil in Wittenberg, which makes him as a copyist and will see again briefly in Italy, in Padua. Bruno composed several works on magic, all published posthumously only in 1891: the De magia, the Theses de magia, a compendium of the previous treatise, the De magia mathematica (which presents as sources the Steganographia of Tritemio, the De occulta philosophia of Agrippa and the pseudo-Alberto Magno), the De rerum principiis et elementis et causis and the Medicina lulliana, in which he claims to have found forms of application of magic in nature.

“Magician” is a term that lends itself to ambiguous interpretations, but for the author, as he himself makes clear from the very beginning of the work, it means first of all wisdom: wise as, for example, were the magicians of Zoroastrianism or similar repositories of knowledge in other cultures of the past. The magic that Bruno deals with is therefore not the one associated with superstition or witchcraft, but the one that wants to increase knowledge and act accordingly.

The fundamental assumption from which the philosopher starts is the omnipresence of a single entity, which he calls indifferently “divine spirit, cosmic” or “soul of the world” or even “inner sense”, identifiable as that universal principle that gives life, movement and vicissitudes to every thing or aggregate in the universe. The magician must keep in mind that as from God, through intermediate degrees, this spirit is communicated to every thing “animating” it, so it is equally possible to tend to God from being animated: this ascension from the particular to God, from the multiform to the One is a possible definition of “magic”.

The divine spirit, which by its oneness and infinity connects every thing to every other, likewise allows the action of one body on another. Bruno calls “vincula” the individual links between things: “bond”, “binding”. Magic is nothing but the study of these links, of this infinite “multidimensional” plot that exists in the universe. In the course of the work, Bruno distinguishes and explains different types of bonds – bonds that can be used positively or negatively, thus distinguishing the magician from the sorcerer. Examples of bindings are faith; rites; characters; seals; bindings that come from the senses, such as sight or hearing; those that come from imagination, etc.

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In Frankfurt

At the end of April 1590 Giordano Bruno left Helmstedt and in June reached Frankfurt in the company of Besler, who continued to Italy to study in Padua. He would have wanted to stay with the printer Johann Wechel, as requested on July 2 to the Senate of Frankfurt, but the request is rejected and then Bruno went to live in the local convent of the Carmelites who, by privilege granted by Charles V in 1531, were not subject to secular jurisdiction.

In 1591 saw the light of three works, the so-called Frankfurt poems, the culmination of Giordano Bruno”s philosophical research: the De triplici minimo et mensura ad trium speculativarum scientiarum et multarum activarum artium principia libri V (De monade, numero et figura liber consequens quinque; the De innumerabilibus, immenso et infigurabili, seu De universo et mundis libri octo.

In the five books of the De minimo, three types of minima are distinguished: the physical minima, the atom, which is the basis of the science of physics; the geometric minima, the point, which is the basis of geometry; and the metaphysical minima, or monad, which is the basis of metaphysics. To be minimal means to be indivisible – and therefore Aristotle errs by claiming the infinite divisibility of matter – because, if this were the case, never reaching the minimum quantity of a substance, the principle and foundation of every substance, we would no longer explain the constitution, through aggregations of infinite atoms, of infinite worlds, in a process of formation that is just as infinite. The compounds, in fact, “do not remain identical even for a moment; each of them, by the mutual exchange of the innumerable atoms, changes continuously and everywhere in all parts.”

The matter, as the philosopher had already expressed in the Italian dialogues, is in perpetual mutation, and what gives life to this becoming is an “ordering spirit”, the soul of the world, one in the infinite universe. Therefore in the Heraclitean becoming of the universe is situated the Parmenidean being, one and eternal: matter and soul are inseparable, the soul does not act from the outside, because there is no outside of matter. It follows that in the atom, the smallest part of matter, also animated by the same spirit, the minimum and maximum coincide: it is the coexistence of opposites: minimum-maximum; atom-God; finite-infinite.

Contrary to the atomists, such as Democritus and Leucippus, Bruno does not admit the existence of vacuum: the so-called vacuum is just a word with which we designate the medium that surrounds natural bodies. Atoms have a “term” in this medium, in the sense that they are neither touching nor separated. Bruno also distinguishes between absolute and relative minima, and so the minimum of a circle is a circle, the minimum of a square is a square, etc..

Mathematicians therefore err in their abstraction, considering the divisibility of geometric entities to infinity. What Bruno exposes is, using modern terminology, a discretization not only of matter, but also of geometry, a discrete geometry. This is necessary in order to respect the adherence to the physical reality of the geometric description, investigation in the last analysis not separable from the metaphysical one.

In De monade Bruno refers to the Pythagorean traditions attacking the Aristotelian theory of the motionless motor, principle of all movement: things are transformed by the presence of internal principles, numerical and geometric.

In the eight books of De immenso the philosopher resumes his own cosmological theory, supporting the Copernican heliocentric theory but rejecting the existence of crystalline spheres and epicycles, reaffirming the concept of infinity and multiplicity of worlds. He criticizes Aristotelianism, denying any difference between terrestrial and celestial matter, the circularity of planetary motion and the existence of ether.

In Switzerland and again in Frankfurt

Around February 1591 Bruno left for Switzerland, accepting the invitation of the noble Hans Heinzel von Tägernstein and the theologian Raphael Egli (1559 – 1622), both passionate about alchemy. So Bruno, for four or five months, as a guest of Heinzel, teaches philosophy in Zurich: his lectures, collected by Raphael Egli under the title of Summa terminorum metaphysicorum, will be published by him in Zurich in 1595 and then, posthumously, in Marburg in 1609, along with Praxis descensus seu applicatio entis, remained unfinished.

The Summa terminorum metaphysicorum, or Sum of metaphysical terms, represents an important testimony of Giordano Bruno”s teaching activity. It is a compendium of 52 terms among the most frequent in the work of Aristotle that Bruno explains by summarizing. In Praxis descensus (Praxis of descent), Bruno uses the same terms (with some differences), this time exposed according to his own vision. The text allows us to compare the differences between Aristotle and Bruno. The Praxis is divided into three parts, with the same terms exposed according to the triadic division God, intellect, soul of the world. Unfortunately, the last part is completely missing and the remaining part is also not fully edited.

Bruno in fact returns to Frankfurt in July, again in 1591, to publish again the De imaginum, signorum et idearum compositione, dedicated to Hans Heinzel. And this is the last work whose publication was edited by Bruno himself. It is likely that the philosopher intended to return to Zurich, and this would also explain why Raphael He waited until 1609 before publishing that part of the Praxis that he had transcribed, but in any case in the German city events will evolve quite differently.

Then, as now, Frankfurt was the site of an important book fair, attended by booksellers from all over Europe. It was in this way that two publishers, Giambattista Ciotti from Siena and the Flemish Giacomo Brittano, both active in Venice, had met Bruno in 1590, at least according to Ciotti”s subsequent statements to the Tribunal of the Inquisition in Venice. The Venetian patrician Giovanni Francesco Mocenigo, who knew Ciotti and had bought in his bookshop the De minimo of the philosopher from Nola, entrusted the bookseller with a letter in which he invited Giordano Bruno to Venice so that he could teach him “the secrets of memory and the others that he professes, as can be seen in this book of his”.

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The return to Italy

In the context of Bruno”s biography, it seems strange that after years of wandering in Europe he decided to return to Italy, knowing that the risk of falling into the hands of the Inquisition was very real. Yates argues that Bruno probably did not consider himself anti-Catholic, but rather a sort of reformer who hoped to have a real chance to influence the Church. Or else the sense of fullness of himself or of his “mission” to be fulfilled had altered his real perception of the danger he could face. Moreover, the political climate, namely the victorious rise of Henry of Navarre over the Catholic League, seemed to provide hope for the implementation of his ideas in the Catholic sphere.

In August 1591 Bruno is in Venice. That he returned to Italy driven by the offer of Mocenigo is not at all sure, so much so that several months will pass before he accepts the hospitality of the patrician. At that time Bruno, forty-three years old, was certainly not a man who lacked the means, on the contrary, he was considered “omo universale”, full of talent and still at the height of his creative moment. In Venice Bruno stayed only a few days and then went to Padua to meet Besler, his Helmstedt copyist. Here he held for a few months lessons to German students attending that University and hoped in vain to get the chair of mathematics, one of the possible reasons why Bruno returned to Italy. He composes also the Praelectiones geometricae, the Ars deformationum, the De vinculis in genere, published posthumously, and the De sigillis Hermetis et Ptolomaei et aliorum, of uncertain attribution and gone lost.

In November, with the return of Besler in Germany for family reasons, Bruno returned to Venice and it was only towards the end of March 1592 that he settled in the house of the Venetian patrician, who was interested in the arts of memory and magical disciplines. On May 21, Bruno informed the Mocenigo that he wanted to return to Frankfurt to print his works: the latter thought that Bruno was looking for a pretext to abandon the lessons and the next day had him seized at home by his servants. The next day, May 23, Mocenigo presented a written complaint to the Inquisition, accusing Bruno of blasphemy, to despise religions, not to believe in the divine Trinity and transubstantiation, to believe in the eternity of the world and the existence of infinite worlds, to practice magic arts, to believe in metempsychosis, to deny the virginity of Mary and the divine punishments.

That same day, the evening of May 23, 1592, Giordano Bruno was arrested and taken to the prisons of the Inquisition of Venice, in San Domenico in Castello.

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The trial and conviction

Of course Bruno knows that his life is at stake and he cleverly defends himself from the accusations of the Venetian Inquisition: denies as much as he can, keeps silent, and even lies, about some delicate points of his doctrine, trusting that the inquisitors cannot be aware of everything he has done and written, and justifies the differences between the conceptions he expressed and Catholic dogmas with the fact that a philosopher, reasoning according to “the natural light”, can come to conclusions discordant with the matters of faith, without having to be considered a heretic for this. In any case, after having asked forgiveness for the “errors” committed, he declared himself willing to retract whatever was in contrast with the doctrine of the Church.

The Roman Inquisition, however, asks for his extradition, which is granted, after some hesitation, by the Venetian Senate. On February 27, 1593 Bruno is imprisoned in the Roman prisons of the Palace of the Holy Office. New texts, although not very reliable, being all accused of various crimes by the same Inquisition, confirm the accusations and add new ones.

Giordano Bruno was perhaps tortured at the end of March 1597, according to the decision of the Congregation taken on March 24, according to the hypothesis put forward by Luigi Firpo and Michele Ciliberto, a circumstance denied instead by the historian Andrea Del Col. Giordano Bruno did not deny the foundations of his philosophy: he reaffirmed the infinity of the universe, the multiplicity of worlds, the motion of the Earth and the non generation of substances – “these cannot be other than what they have been, nor will they be other than what they are, nor will their greatness or substance ever be added to, or lack any account, and only happens separation, and conjunction, or composition, or division, or translation from this place to that other”. In this regard he explains that “the way and the cause of the motion of the earth and of the immobility of the firmament are produced by me with its reasoning and authority and do not prejudice the authority of the divine writing”. To the objection of the inquisitor, who contests him that in the Bible it is written that the “Terra stat in aeternum” and the Sun rises and sets, he answers that we see the Sun “rise and set because the Earth turns around its own center”; to the contention that his position contrasts with “the authority of the Holy Fathers”, he answers that those “are less than ”philosophers prattichi and less attentive to the things of nature.

The philosopher argues that the Earth is endowed with a soul, that the stars have an angelic nature, that the soul is not a form of the body, and as the only concession, he is willing to admit the immortality of the human soul.

On January 12, 1599 he is invited to abjure eight heretical propositions, which included his denial of divine creation, of the immortality of the soul, his conception of the infinity of the universe and of the movement of the Earth, also endowed with a soul, and of conceiving the stars as angels. His willingness to abjure, provided that the propositions are recognized as heretical not forever, but only ex nunc, is rejected by the Congregation of inquisitorial cardinals, including Bellarmine. A subsequent application of torture, proposed by the consultors of the Congregation on September 9, 1599, was instead rejected by Pope Clement VIII. In the interrogation of September 10, Bruno said he was still ready to abjure, but on the 16th he changed his mind and finally, after the Tribunal had received an anonymous complaint accusing Bruno of having had the reputation of an atheist in England and of having written his Spaccio della bestia trionfante directly against the pope, on December 21 he recisively refused any abjuration, having, he declared, nothing to repent of.

On February 8, 1600, in front of the inquisitor cardinals and consultants Benedetto Mandina, Francesco Pietrasanta and Pietro Millini, he is forced to listen on his knees to the sentence that expels him from the ecclesiastical forum and delivers him to the secular arm. Giordano Bruno, after the reading of the sentence, according to the testimony of Caspar Schoppe, got up and addressed to the judges the historical phrase: “Maiori forsan cum timore sententiam in me fertis quam ego accipiam” (“Perhaps you tremble more in pronouncing this sentence against me than I do in hearing it”). After refusing the religious comforts and the crucifix, on February 17, with his tongue in his mouth – clamped by a mordacchia so that he could not speak – he was taken to Piazza Campo de” Fiori, stripped naked, tied to a pole and burned alive. His ashes will be thrown into the Tiber.

Giordano Bruno”s God is on the one hand transcendent, in that he ineffably exceeds nature, but at the same time he is immanent, in that he is the soul of the world: in this sense, God and Nature are a single reality to be loved to madness, in an inseparable panentheistic unity of thought and matter, in which from the infinity of God the infinity of the cosmos is deduced, and therefore the plurality of worlds, the unity of the substance, the ethics of “heroic fury”. These hypostatizes a God-Nature in the guise of the Infinite, being the infiniteness the fundamental characteristic of the divine. He makes Philotheus say in the dialogue De l”infinito, universo e mondi:

For these arguments and for his beliefs on Sacred Scripture, the Trinity and Christianity, Giordano Bruno, already excommunicated, was imprisoned, judged heretical and then condemned to the stake by the Inquisition of the Catholic Church. He was burned alive in Piazza Campo de” Fiori on February 17, 1600, during the pontificate of Clement VIII.

But his philosophy survived his death, led to the demolition of the Ptolemaic barriers, revealed a multiple and non-centralized universe and opened the way to the Scientific Revolution: for his thought Bruno is therefore considered a precursor of some ideas of modern cosmology, such as the multiverse; for his death, he is considered a martyr of free thought.

Giordano Bruno and the Church

400 years later, on February 18, 2000, Pope John Paul II, through a letter from the Vatican Secretary of State Angelo Sodano sent to a conference held in Naples, expressed deep regret for the atrocious death of Giordano Bruno, while not rehabilitating his doctrine: even if the death of Giordano Bruno “constitutes today for the Church a reason for deep regret”, nevertheless “this sad episode of modern Christian history” does not allow the rehabilitation of the work of the philosopher Nolan burned alive as a heretic, because “the path of his thought led him to intellectual choices that progressively revealed themselves, on some decisive points, incompatible with Christian doctrine”. On the other hand, even in the essay by Yates, Bruno”s complete adhesion to the “religion of the Egyptians”, derived from his hermetic knowledge, is repeated several times, and he also states that “the hermetic Egyptian religion is the only true religion”.

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The reception of Bruno”s philosophy

Despite the fact that Giordano Bruno”s books were put on the Index on August 7, 1603, they continued to be present in European libraries, even if misunderstandings and misrepresentations remained about the positions of the philosopher from Nola, as well as deliberate mystifications about him. Already the Catholic Kaspar Schoppe, a former Lutheran who witnessed the pronouncement of the sentence and the burning of Bruno, while not sharing “the vulgar opinion according to which this Bruno was burned because he was Lutheran”, ended up affirming that “Luther taught not only the same things as Bruno, but others even more absurd and terrible”, while the Minim friar Marin Mersenne, in 1624, identified in Bruno”s cosmology the denial of God”s freedom, as well as of human free will.

While astronomers Tycho Brahe and Kepler criticized the hypothesis of the infinity of the universe, not even taken into account by Galileo, the libertine Gabriel Naudé, in his Apologie pour tous les grands personnages qui ont testé faussement soupçonnez de magie, of 1653, exalted in Bruno the free researcher of the laws of nature.

Pierre Bayle, in his Dictionary of 1697, came to doubt the death by fire of Bruno and saw in him the precursor of Spinoza and all modern pantheists, a monist atheist for whom the only reality is nature. Deist theologian John Toland replied, who knew the “Spaccio della bestia trionfante” and praised Bruno”s scientific seriousness and courage in eliminating from philosophical speculation any reference to positive religions; he pointed out the “Spaccio” to Leibniz – who however considers Bruno a mediocre philosopher – and to de La Croze, convinced of Bruno”s atheism. With the latter agrees the Budde, while Christoph August Heumann mistakenly returns to assume a Protestantism of Bruno.

With the Enlightenment, the interest and notoriety of Bruno increases: the German mathematician Johann Friedrich Weidler knows the De immenso and the Spaccio, while Jean Sylvain Bailly calls him “bold and restless, lover of novelty and mocker of traditions”, but reproaches him for his irreligiousness. In Italy Giordano Bruno is highly appreciated by Matteo Barbieri, author of a History of mathematicians and philosophers of the Kingdom of Naples, where he states that Bruno “wrote many sublime things in Metaphysics, and many true things in Physics and Astronomy” and makes him a precursor of the theory of harmony of Leibniz and many of the theories of Descartes: “The system of vortices of Descartes, or those globules spinning around their centers in the air, and the whole physical system is by Bruno. The principle of doubt wisely introduced by Descartes into philosophy is due to Bruno, and many other things in Descartes” philosophy are Bruno”s.”

This thesis is denied by Abbot Niceron, for whom the rationalist Descartes could not have taken anything from Bruno: the latter, irreligious and atheist like Spinoza, who identified God with nature, remained tied to the philosophy of the Renaissance still believing in magic and, however ingenious, is often convoluted and obscure. Johann Jacob Brucker agrees with Descartes” incompatibility with Bruno, whom he considers a very complex philosopher, placed between Spinozian monism and neo-Pythagoreanism, whose conception of the universe would consist in its creation by emanation from a single infinite source, on which created nature would not cease to depend.

It was Diderot who wrote for the Encyclopaedia the entry on Bruno, whom he considered a precursor of Leibniz – in the pre-established harmony, in the theory of the monad, in the sufficient reason – and of Spinoza, who, like Bruno, conceived God as an infinite essence in which freedom and necessity coincide: compared to Bruno “there would be few philosophers comparable, if the impetus of his imagination had allowed him to order his ideas, uniting them in a systematic order, but he was born a poet”. For Diderot, Bruno, who got rid of the old Aristotelian philosophy, is with Leibniz and Spinoza the founder of modern philosophy.

In 1789 Jacobi published for the first time extensive extracts in German of De la causa, principio et uno by “this obscure writer”, who had however been able to give a “clear and beautiful drawing of pantheism”. The spiritualist Jacobi certainly did not share the atheistic pantheism of Bruno and Spinoza, whose contradictions he considered inevitable, but he did not fail to recognize its great importance in the history of modern philosophy. From Jacobi, in 1802, Schelling draws inspiration for his dialogue on Bruno, to whom he recognizes to have grasped what for him is the foundation of philosophy: the unity of the Whole, the Absolute, in which subsequently we know the individual finite things. Hegel knows Bruno second-hand and in his Lectures he presents his philosophy as the activity of the spirit that assumes “disorderly” all forms, realizing itself in the infinite nature: “It is a great point, to begin with, to think the unity; the other point was to try to understand the universe in its development, in the system of its determinations, showing how the exteriority is a sign of the ideas”.

In Italy, it is the Hegelian Bertrando Spaventa to see in Bruno the precursor of Spinoza, even if the philosopher from Nola oscillates in establishing a clear relationship between nature and God, who now appears to be identified with nature and now to remain as a supermundane principle, observations taken up by Francesco Fiorentino, while his student Felice Tocco shows how Bruno, while dissolving God in nature, did not give up a positive evaluation of religion, conceived as a useful educator of peoples.

In the first decade of the twentieth century is completed in Italy the edition of all works and accelerate biographical studies on Giordano Bruno, with particular regard to the process. For Giovanni Gentile Bruno, besides being a martyr of freedom of thought, had the great merit of giving a strictly rational, and therefore modern, imprint to his philosophy, neglecting medieval mysticism and magical suggestions. This last opinion is debatable, as the English scholar Frances Yates has recently highlighted, presenting Bruno as an authentic hermetic.

While Nicola Badaloni pointed out how the ostracism decreed against Bruno contributed to marginalize Italy from the innovative currents of the great philosophy of the European seventeenth century, among the greatest and most assiduous contributions in the definition of Bruno”s philosophy are currently those made by scholars Giovanni Aquilecchia and Michele Ciliberto.

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Literature

Frances Yates wondered, in the text Giordano Bruno e la tradizione ermetica (Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition), to what extent the figure and the role of the magician that Shakespeare presents with Prospero, in The Tempest, was influenced by the formulation of the role of the magician carried out by Giordano Bruno. Also in Shakespeare, the identification of the character of Berowne in Love”s Labours Lost with the Italian philosopher is now accepted by most.

A much more explicit reference is found in The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, by the English playwright Christopher Marlowe (1564 – 1593): the character Bruno, the antipope, summarizes many features of the philosopher”s story:

The very story of Marlow”s Faust calls to mind the figure of Brunian “furious” in De gli eroici furori.

Also read, biographies – David Bomberg

Latin works in Italian translation (critical edition)

Latin works in Italian translation (other editions)

Also read, biographies – James I of Scotland

Other works

Sources