PART I LIFE OF BRUNO (continued 2)

Prague: 1588.The court of the Emperor Rudolph II. was at Prague, in Bohemia; from there his fame as a Maecenas of the learned, and especially of those who claimed power to read the heavens or to work magic, had spread to many countries. Perhaps Sidney, who had visited him from Elizabeth on the death of Maximilian, may have spoken of him to Bruno: while two of Bruno’s friends, the Spanish Ambassador St. Clement and the mathematician Mordentius, were at Prague in 1588. Thither, accordingly, he now turned in the hope of settled quarters, introducing himself, as was his frequent habit, with a Lullian work, which he caused to be printed soon after his arrival, and dedicated to the Spanish Ambassador.[95] June 10, 1588.The introductory letter is dated from Prague, June 10, 1588, and is in praise of Lully, whose importance to philosophy Bruno values much more highly than his successors have done: it promised at the same time a future work, the Lampas Cabalistica, in which the inner secrets of Lullism were to be more fully revealed. This, so far as we know, never appeared, and Bruno tried to obtain the Emperor’s patronage by a mathematical work dedicated to him, of somewhat revolutionary type—“One hundred and sixty articles against the mathematicians and philosophers of the day.” The Emperor, however, had few funds to spare for any but the professed astrologists and alchemists in whom lay his real interest—not at all scientific, although Tycho Brahé and Kepler profited themselves and the world by it. With three hundred dollars, which the Emperor gave in recognition of his powers, Bruno left about the close of the year, and onJanuary 13, 1589.January 13, 1589, matriculated in the Julian university of Brunswick at Helmstadt.Helmstadt. This, the youngest university in Germany at the time, of only twelve years’ standing, had been founded for the Protestant cause by the reigning Duke Julius, a breezy and popular prince, who loved theologians little, Catholics not at all, and founded a model university on liberal principles. It was not, however, an unqualified success. Bruno received some recognition from the university, or from the Duke, and when the latter died in May 1589 he obtained permission to give a funeral oration some days after the official programme had been carried through (on the 1st of July)—the Oratio Consolatoria.[96]

Bruno professes as his reason for wishing to speak that he must express his gratitude to one who had made the university he founded free to all lovers of the Muses, even to strangers such as Bruno himself was:—an exile from his Italian fatherland for honourable reasons and zeal for the truth, here he had received the freedom of the university: in Italy he was exposed to the greedy maw of the Roman wolf—here he was in safety: there he had been chained to a superstitious and absurd cult—here he was exhorted to more reformed rites. What is remarkable in this speech is the bitterness of Bruno’s personal attack upon Rome, and “the violent tyranny of the Tiberine beast.” The constellations are allegorically treated as symbols of the virtues of Julius, or of the vices which he attacked and repressed: among them “the head of the Gorgon, on which for hair there grow venomous snakes, representing that monster of perverse Papal tyranny, which has tongues more numerous than the hairs of the head, aiding and serving it, each and all blasphemous against God, nature, and man, infecting the world with the rankest poison of ignorance and vice.” It was indeed strange that Bruno should have thought of entering Italy after publishing words like these.

Excommunication of Bruno in Helmstadt.However, he was not to find the Protestants much more tolerant than the Catholics. In the university archives there is extant a letter from him to the prorector of the academy, appealing against a public excommunication of himself by the first pastor and superintendent of the church at Helmstadt, Boethius. According to this letter, Boethius had made himself both judge and executioner, without giving the Italian a hearing at all: and the letter appealed to the senate and rector against the public execution of an unjust sentence, privately passed; it demanded a hearing, so that if any legal derogation were to be made from his rank and good name, he might at least feel it to be justly made, and demanded that Boethius be summoned to show he had not fulminated his bolt out of private malice, but in pursuance of the duty of a good pastor on behalf of his sheep. Oct. 6, 1589.The date of the letter is October 6, 1589. No further records of the affair have been found, so that the appeal was probably rejected. The meaning of the excommunication is not quite clear: Bruno does not seem to have been a full member of either the reformed or the Lutheran church, although attending services; and in all probability the sentence was a formal one, which, however, carried serious social inconveniences with it. The prorector, Hofmann, was not one to sympathise either with Bruno or with his philosophy; he was unhappy unless attacking some other person’s opinions: philosophy in general fell under his condemnation, although he professed knowledge of it. A few years after he drove Bruno from Helmstadt he himself was dethroned from his place of authority, “ordered to stick to his last,” and had to leave Helmstadt in the end (1601). No doubt it is against him that the invectives in De Immenso,[97] are directed:—“This scholarch, excelling director of the school of Minerva: this Rhadamanthus of boys, without a shadow of an idea even of ordinary philosophy, lauds to the skies the Peripatetic, and dares to criticise the thoughts of diviner men (whose ashes are to be preferred to the souls of such as these).” Later Boethius also had to be suppressed by the consistory.[98] 1590.The young Duke, with whom no doubt Bruno stood in favour, since he presented him with eighty scudi after the funeral oration, was of the opposite party to Hofmann, but even with this support the Italian could not struggle against his enemies, and towards the middle of 1590 he left for Frankfort, “in order to get two books printed.”

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Frankfort.These were the great Latin works he had been writing, perhaps begun in England itself;—the De Minimo, and the De Immenso, with the De Monade as a part of or introduction to the latter. The printing, however, was not begun till the following year: the censor’s permission was obtained for the first of them only in March 1591, and it appeared in the catalogue of the Spring bookmarket. He again sought and found patronage with an old friend of Sir Philip Sidney, one of the Wechels, famous printers of their day, in the house of another of whom (André) Sidney had lived. In the protocol-book of the council of Frankfort, under the date July 2, 1590, a petition of Jordanus Brunus of Nola is mentioned, in which he asks permission to stay in the house of the printer Wechel. This, as the book of the Burgomaster under the same date shows, was roughly refused:—“Soll man ime sein pitt abschlagen, und sagen, das er sein pfennig anderswo verzehre”—“his petition is to be refused and he is to be told go and spend his coin elsewhere.” In spite of this refusal, Wechel found Bruno lodging in the Carmelite Monastery, where he stayed, working with his own hands at the printing of his books, for some six months,—until December, perhaps, of that year. Frankfort was the main centre of the book world in those days; to its half-yearly book-marts printers and sellers came from all parts of Europe to see the new books of the world, to dispose of their goods, to stock their houses. Among others in this year came the booksellers Ciotto and Bertano, who afterwards were witnesses before the Inquisition, and who stayed in the monastery probably in September of that year, where they met Bruno. In the dedication of the De Minimo, of date February 13, 1591, Bruno’s publishers wrote that “he had only the last folium of the work to correct, when by an unforeseen chance he was hurried away, and could not put the finishing hand upon it, as he had done on the rest of the work: he wrote accordingly asking us to supply in his name what by chance it had been denied him to complete.” The “unforeseen chance” may, as Sigwart suggests, have been the final putting into effect of the Council’s refusal to allow him to stay in the town, which may till then have remained a dead letter; or it may have been the summons to Zurich. He had made the acquaintance of a young Swiss squire, Hainzel, an Augsburger by birth, at whose castle of Elgg in Switzerland a gay and open hospitality was extended to a number of the bizarre and the learned spirits of the time: Hainzel had leanings towards the Black Arts,—Alchemy and the rest,—but had interest to spare for any others about which an air of mystery clung, such as Bruno’s Art of Memory and of Knowledge. Zürich, 1591.Bruno spent a few months with him near Zürich and wrote for him the De imaginum compositione, etc.—as a handbook of these arts. Another of the Frankfort pupils would also be in Zürich, the brilliant but erratic Raphael Eglin, who published in 1609 at Marburg (where he was professor of theology), a work Bruno had dictated in Zürich,—the Summa Terminorum Metaphysicorum. Eglin suffered along with his friend Hainzel from the trickery of the Alchemists, to whom recourse was had in the hope of repairing the fortunes dissipated by the Squire of Elgg’s hospitality.[99] The Summa is dedicated in a letter of April 1595 (from Zürich) to Frederic a Salices, and in a personal reminiscence Eglin remarks on Bruno’s fluency of thought and speech—“standing on one foot, he would both think and dictate as fast as the pen could follow: so rapid was his mind, so forceful his spirit.”

March, 1591.In order perhaps to print the De Imaginum Compositione for Hainzel, or to complete the other works, Bruno returned to Frankfort about the beginning of March, 1591, and on the 17th of that month obtained permission to publish the De Minimo.[100] It is to this period probably that he referred when he spoke of himself before the Venetian tribunal, as having spent six months in Frankfort (Doc. 9). It was a second period of six months after his return from the Zürich visit, of which he omitted all mention—no doubt he had good reason for that.[101] At the autumn book-market his De Monade, De Immenso, and De Imag. Compositione, were ready[102]—the last works that he published. About the same time, on an evil day for himself, he responded to the invitation of a young Venetian patrician, and crossed over to his fatherland,—the last of his free journeyings.

The Frankfort works are fully dealt with in the chapters on Bruno’s philosophy that follow: in their order they were De Minimo.(1) the De triplici Minimo et Mensura:—“On the threefold minimum and measurement, being the elements of three speculative and of many practical sciences”:—dedicated to Duke Henry of Brunswick. It is the first of three Latin poems, written somewhat after the manner of Lucretius, but with prose notes to each chapter or section. The style unfortunately seldom approaches that of Lucretius, either in Latinity or in poetic imagery, but the works are full of vigorous verse, and the force of the ideas suffers little from the fact that they are pressed into the Procrustean bed of rhyme and rhythm. The others were De Monade.(2) the De Monade, Numero et Figura:—“On the Monad, number and figure, being the elements of a more esoteric (secret, or perhaps inward) Physics, Mathematics, and Metaphysics”; and De Immenso.(3) the De Immenso et Innumerabilibus:—“On the Immeasurable and the Innumerable, or on the universe and the worlds.” Both are dedicated to Duke Henry. The three works together contain Bruno’s finished philosophy of God and of Nature, of the universe and of the worlds within it, as well as a criticism of the prevailing and contrary doctrines of the time.

De Imag. Comp.In Frankfort appeared also, in 1591, (4) the De Imaginum, Signorum, et Idearum Compositione:—“On the composition or arrangement, of Images, Signs, and Ideas, for all kinds of inventions, dispositions, and memory.” It is dedicated to Hainzel, and is the last of the works published by Bruno himself. It sums up all those published earlier on the theory of knowledge and on the art of memory. It assumes an identity between the Mind from which the universe sprang, or which is expressed in the universe, and the mind of each individual by whom it is known or approached. It follows that the ideas in our own minds contain implicitly a knowledge of the inmost nature of reality. Here, however, it is chiefly the mnemonic corollaries of this thought that are developed—ideas are to be arranged or grouped about certain images or pictures, in such a way that when any one occurs to the mind, it may readily call up those others which are most closely associated with it, i.e. which belong to the same τόπος or “place” in the mind.

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Venice.During the second part of his stay in Frankfort, Bruno received an invitation from a young patrician of Venice, Giovanni Mocenigo, to come to him there and instruct him in the arts for which Bruno was famed. Aug. 1591.To the surprise of all who knew the circumstances, Bruno accepted, and re-entered, in August, the Italy which he had left some fourteen years earlier as a refugee. It was through the bookseller Ciotto that the negotiations were carried on. Mocenigo appeared in his shop one day to buy a work of Bruno which Ciotto in his deposition called at first the Heroici Furori, but this name was cancelled, and De Minimo magno et mensura written in its stead; in all probability it was neither the Furori nor any of the Latin poems to which the second (erroneous) title might refer, but one of the Lullian works. Mocenigo asked at the same time whether Ciotto knew Bruno, and where he was; and on the reply that he was probably at Frankfort (they had found lodging in the same monastery there), Mocenigo expressed a wish that Bruno would come to Venice to teach him the secrets of Memory, and the others he professed, as shown by the book that had just changed hands. Ciotto believed Bruno would come if asked; and accordingly, after a few days, Mocenigo brought a letter for Bruno, which Ciotto undertook to deliver, and in which he was besought to come to Venice. The message must have been delivered in the autumn of 1591, and Bruno seems to have replied by immediate acceptance.[103] A previous letter, however, had been written, probably before Mocenigo spoke with Ciotto, and sent by another hand; it may have been the receipt of it which brought Bruno from Zürich to Frankfort, to hasten the printing of his Latin works. In both letters there were evidently specious promises of protection.[104]

The motives of Mocenigo were more than questionable. He was of the noblest blood of Venice, the Doge’s Chair having been seven times filled by members of his family, and among the patrician youth there was a fashionable craze for Lullism and kindred much-promising arts at this time.[105] De Valeriis, another Venetian noble, wrote, in 1589, an Opus Aureum, which was published at Strassburg along with other Lullian works (including Bruno’s) in 1609. Again, Bruno believed in, and probably taught, a kind of “natural magic,” the magic of sympathetic influence from stars, animals, plants, and stones upon the life of man. Mocenigo, as his conduct abundantly showed, was shallow, mean, superstitious, weak-minded, and vain. He was just the type of man to be attracted therefore by anything that savoured of the black art, of which Bruno was popularly regarded as a devotee. His real aim may have been to be initiated by Bruno into this, although he professed the desire merely of having the Lullian mnemonics and art of invention taught him. His disappointment, when he found Bruno had nothing new to give him in that direction, might account, in a man of his character, for the revenge he took. But there may have been worse behind: Mocenigo had been one of the Savii all’ Eresia—the assessors appointed by the State to the Inquisition Board in Venice—and was therefore familiar with the intrigues of that body. He was also under the influence of his Father Confessor, by whose orders he denounced Bruno. The proceedings make it extremely probable, therefore, that the Inquisition laid a trap for Bruno, into which he unsuspectingly walked. Bruno’s reasons for returning.It is more difficult to understand how the latter so calmly entered the lion’s jaws. Acidalius (Valens Havekenthal), writing to Michael Forgacz from Bologna (January 21, 1592), expressed the general surprise. “Tell me one thing more: Giordano Bruno, whom you knew at Wittenberg, the Nolan, is said to be living just now among you at Padua. Is it really so? What sort of man is this that he dares enter Italy, which he left an exile, as he used himself to confess? I wonder, I wonder! I cannot yet believe the rumour, although I have it on good authority. You shall tell me whether it is true or false.” March 3, 1592.But clearly ill rumours were spreading, for on the third of March he wrote in a different tone, “I no longer wonder about that other sophist, so diverse and incredible are the tales I hear daily of him here.”[106] Probably Bruno did not understand what manner of reputation he had; he still regarded himself as belonging to the Catholic Church. Ciotto deposed he had heard nothing from Bruno’s lips which might suggest a doubt of his being a good Catholic and Christian. Venice was a free and powerful state, Mocenigo the son of a powerful house, so that he may well have looked for safety; and it was his beloved Italy, for which he had never ceased to yearn since the day he had crossed the Alps.

To Venice, at any rate, he came, living for a time by himself, and spending some three months also at Padua, the neighbouring university town, where he gathered pupils about him, and wrote as constantly as before. Some manuscripts that were bought in Paris a few years ago, and which had belonged to Bruno, were partly written in the hand of one of these pupils, Jerome Besler, whom Bruno had known in Helmstadt, and who acted there as his copyist. Others of his German, and possibly some English friends were met with at this renowned university.[107] It was only a few months after he left that Galilei was invited to teach in Padua—“the creator of modern science following in the steps of its prophet.”[108] The university was in a state of ferment at the time Bruno arrived, one of the hottest disputes being that between the students and certain professors, who read or dictated instead of freely speaking their lectures—Doctores chartacei they were called—and a fine of twenty ducats was imposed by the senate on every one who should be found guilty of this crime. Bruno’s memory-art may therefore, as Bartholmèss suggests, have “supplied a felt want.”

Bruno in Mocenigo’s house.Early in 1592 Bruno took a fatal step, which showed how little he realised his danger—he gave up his personal freedom and went to live in Mocenigo’s house. There the two opposite natures soon clashed, and the young patrician began to show his real character. The teaching did not satisfy him, did not give him the power over nature and man which he no doubt expected. He approached Ciotto again before the spring book-market, telling him how Giordano was living in his house at his expense, “who promised to teach me much, and has had clothes and money in plenty from me, but I cannot bring him to a point, and fear he may not be quite honest”; and asking him to make inquiries in Frankfort as to Bruno’s character, and the likelihood of his fulfilling his obligations. Ciotto returned with an unfavourable report: Bruno was known to make profession of a memory-art, and of other similar secrets, but had never been known to do any good with them, and all who had gone to him for such things had remained unsatisfied; moreover, it was not understood in Frankfort how he could stay in Venice, as he was held for a man of no religion. To this Mocenigo replied, “I too have my doubts of him, but I will see how much I can get of what he promised me, so as not to lose entirely what I have paid him, and then I will give him up to the judgment of the Holy Office”—the Inquisition. This estimable frame of mind no doubt asserted itself in the relations of pupil and master. Bruno had been introduced by Ciotto to the house of Andrea Morosini, an enlightened patrician, whose open hospitality a number of the most cultured men of the time enjoyed; they formed an Academy after the manner of those of Cosenza, Naples, and other places. “Several gentlemen meet there,” said Morosini of these gatherings, “prelates among them, for entertainment, discoursing of literature, and principally of philosophy; thither Bruno came several times, and talked of various things, as is the custom; but there was never a sign that he held any opinions against the faith, and so far as I (Morosini) am concerned, I have always thought him a Catholic, and had I had the least suspicion of the contrary I should not have permitted him to enter my house.”[109] The last statement must, of course, be taken cum grano. At this time Bruno was preparing a work on “the Seven Liberal Arts, and on Seven other Inventive Arts,”[110] which he hoped to be able to present to the Pope in order to obtain from him absolution, and have the ban of excommunication removed, without the compulsion of again entering the order. Many Neapolitan fathers of the order came to Venice to a meeting of Chapter, and to some of these Bruno spoke—to a Father Domenico especially:—he wished to present himself at the feet of his Holiness with some “approved” work, and his ultimate design, as he told Domenico, was to go to Rome and live quietly a life of letters, perhaps obtaining some lecturing in addition.[111] Among others he consulted Mocenigo, who promised to assist him so far as he could.

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Meantime Mocenigo was putting pressure on Bruno to obtain the secrets he sought to know, while Bruno at last became aware of his danger. He pretended he wished to go to Frankfort to have some books printed, and on a certain Thursday in May he took leave of Mocenigo. The latter, fearing his prey was about to escape, began to cajole him into staying, but passed to complaint and finally to threats as Bruno persisted. May 22.On the night of the following day (Friday), as Bruno had already made preparations for leaving, Mocenigo came with his servitor Bartolo and five or six men, whom Bruno recognised as gondoliers, from the neighbouring stance, seized the philosopher and locked him up in an attic-room. Mocenigo promised, if he would stay and teach what was desired—viz. “the formulæ for memory and geometry”!—to set him at liberty, otherwise something unpleasant would befal him. This novel method of drawing instruction being foiled by the self-respect of the prisoner, the latter was left for the night, transferred the following day to a cellar under the ground, and during the night was handed over to the servants of the Inquisition, who brought him to their prison. The Inquisition.On the 23rd of May, Mocenigo denounced him to the Holy Office, with a hideous but cunning travesty of some of his opinions, reporting him, for example, as saying that Christ’s miracles were only apparent, that He and the apostles were magicians, and that he himself (Bruno) could do as much or more if he had a mind; that the Catholic faith was full of blasphemies against God; that the Friars ought to be prevented from preaching, and should be deprived of their revenues, because the world was befouled by them—they were asses, and the doctrines of the Church asses’ beliefs, and so on. The arrest was on the following night (Sunday night), Second Denunciation.and on the Monday a second denunciation was entered by Mocenigo, than which there is no more pitiful self-revelation of meanness and hypocrisy extant. He confesses or rather boasts that, on locking up Bruno, he had recited the charges he would make against him, “hoping to coerce him into revealing his secrets,” i.e. the Secret Arts. Bruno’s only reply had been to ask for his liberty, to say that he had not really intended to leave, but was still ready to teach Mocenigo everything he knew, to work for him (“to be my slave,” said Mocenigo), without any further recognition, and to give him anything that he had in the house; only he asked to have returned him a copy of a book of conjurations that Mocenigo had found among his written papers and had appropriated. To explain his delay in accusing Bruno, Mocenigo professed not to have been able to get enough against the latter until he had the philosopher in his own house two months earlier (viz. in March), “and then I wished to get the good of him, and by the steps I took I was able to assure myself that he would not leave without telling me of it. All the time I promised myself to bring the matter before the censorship of the Holy Office.” These denouncements were confirmed on oath by Mocenigo, whose age is given at thirty-four years, so that the excuse of youth falls from him. The Venetian tribunal.The following Tuesday the Holy Tribunal met to consider the case. It consisted, in Venice, of the Papal Nuncio (Ludovico Taberna), the Patriarch of Venice (Lorenzo Priuli),[112] the Father Inquisitor (John Gabrielli of Saluzzo, de Salutiis),[113] along with three assessors or representatives of the State (Savii all’ Eresia), one of whom was always present, with the right of suspending the meeting if he thought proper: at the present time the three were Aloysius Fuscari, Sebastian Barbadico, and Tomaso Morosini. On this day the evidence of Ciotto and Bertano, the booksellers who had known Bruno at Frankfort as well as at Venice (Bertano was also at Zürich), was taken; it was in the main favourable, only Bertano recalled the prior of the Carmelite monastery at Frankfort having said of Bruno that he spent most of his time in writing, and went about dreaming dreams and meditating new things, that he had a fine mind and knowledge of letters, and was a universal man, but that he had no religion so far as the prior knew, and he quoted a saying of Bruno’s to the effect that the apostles did not know everything, and that he had the mind, if he wished, to make all the world of one religion; while Ciotto reported the common belief in Frankfort that Bruno was a man of no religion.

First examination of Bruno.The prisoner himself was then brought forward—“A man of ordinary stature, with chestnut-brown beard, of the age and appearance of forty years”; Ciotto, too, described him as a slender man of small stature, with a small dark beard, about forty years of age. Bruno of his own accord, before a question was put, professed his readiness to speak the truth; he had several times had the threat made to him of being brought before the Holy Office (viz. by Mocenigo), but had always treated it as a jest, because he was quite ready to give an account of himself. This he proceeded to do. The biographical part of his account has been embodied in the preceding pages.

Third deposition of Mocenigo.On the 29th Mocenigo made another deposition, the result of further reflections, at the request of the Father Inquisitor, on the utterances of Bruno against the Catholic faith. Bruno had said that the Catholics did not act on the model of the apostles, who taught by example and good deeds, converting through love, not force; that he preferred the Catholic religion to others, but it also stood in great need of reform; that he hoped great things from the King of Navarre; that it was a mistake to allow the friars to remain so rich (in Venice): they should do as in France, where the nobles enjoyed the revenues of the monasteries, the friars living on soup, as befitted such “asses.” This was a powerful stroke of diplomacy on Mocenigo’s part. It was also hinted that Bruno’s life was not pure, that he said the Church erred in making a sin of what was of great service in nature, and of what he (Bruno) regarded as a high merit.

The twofold truth.Next day (Saturday) Bruno continued his account of his life, the first note of defence being struck in an appeal to the famous doctrine of the “twofold truth.” “Some of the works composed by me and printed I do not approve, because I spoke and discoursed too much as a philosopher rather than as an ‘honest’[114] man and good Christian, and in particular I know that in some of these works I taught and believed on philosophic grounds what ought to have been referred to the potency, wisdom, and goodness of God, according to the Christian faith, basing my doctrine on sense and reason, and not upon faith.” Fra Domenico.On Tuesday, June 2, a deposition was read from Fra Domenico da Nocera confirming Bruno’s appeal to him, and his desire for the favour of the Pope and a reconciliation with the Church, so that he might be able to live quietly in Rome. The prisoner was then cross-examined, and submitted a list of his works, published and unpublished. In these he claimed to have spoken always “philosophically, and according to the light of nature, having no special regard to what ought to be believed according to the faith: Philosophical and theological truth.his intention had been not to impugn religion, but only to exalt philosophy, although many impieties might have been uttered on the strength of his natural light. Directly he had taught nothing contrary to the Christian Catholic religion; thus in Paris he had been allowed to vindicate the articles against the Peripatetics and others, by natural principles, without prejudice to the truth according to the light of the faith: indirectly, Aristotle’s and Plato’s works were as contrary, indeed much more contrary, to the faith than the articles philosophically propounded and defended by him.” He proceeded to give an admirable statement of his “philosophical” creed which might have fired the hearts of his judges:Bruno’s creed.—“I believe in an infinite universe, the effect of the infinite divine potency, because it has seemed to me unworthy of the divine goodness and power to create a finite world, when able to produce besides it another and others infinite: so that I have declared that there are endless particular worlds similar to this of the Earth; with Pythagoras I regard it as a star, and similar to it are the moon, the planets, and other stars, which are infinite, and all these bodies are worlds, and without number, constituting the infinite all (università) in an infinite space; while the latter is called the infinite universe, in which are innumerable worlds; so that there are two kinds of infinity, one in the magnitude of the universe, the other in the multitude of worlds, by which indirectly the truth according to the faith may be impugned. In this universe I place a universal providence, in virtue of which everything lives, grows, moves, and comes to and abides in its perfection. It is present in two fashions: the one is that in which the spirit is present in the body, wholly in the whole, and wholly in any part of the whole, and that I call nature, the shadow, the footprint of divinity; the other is the ineffable way in which God by essence, presence and power, is in all and above all, not as part, not as spirit or life, but in an inexplicable way. Then in the divinity, I regard all attributes as being one and the same thing. With theologians and the greatest philosophers I assume three attributes—power, wisdom, and goodness, or mind, understanding, and love; through these, things have, first, existence by reason of mind; then an ordered and distinct existence by reason of understanding; third, concord and symmetry by reason of love. Distinction in divinity is thus posited by way of reason, not of substantial truth.” God in Himself is one; but three aspects of this unity may be distinguished, Mind (Will or Force or Power), Understanding (Knowledge, the Word), and Love or Soul. These three aspects correspond, of course, to the three Persons of the Godhead, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit respectively. Bruno confesses, however, to have doubted, from the philosophic point of view, the becoming flesh of the Understanding or Word of God, although he did not remember giving definite expression to this doubt; and as to the Spirit, he did not think of it as a person, but rather as the soul or life in the universe.[115] “From the Spirit, the life of the universe, springs, in my philosophy, the life and soul of everything that has soul and life; and I regard it as immortal, as also bodies in substance are immortal, death being nothing but division and congregation: as the Preacher says, ‘The thing that hath been it is that which shall be, and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun.’”

Bruno confessed to have doubted the application of the word “persons” to these distinctions within the Godhead, since his eighteenth year; but he had read in St. Augustine that it was not an old term, but new at that time. To none of his doubts as to the distinction of persons or the Incarnation had he ever knowingly given expression, except in quoting others, Arius, Gabellius, and the like.... On the same day, in his prison-house, he was further examined, and repeated that whatever he had written or said contrary to the Catholic faith was not intended as direct impugnment of the faith, but was based on philosophic grounds or on the authority of heretics; he made clearer also his reason for doubting the applicability of the term “persons” to the distinctions in the Godhead, quoting Augustine’s words, “Cum formidine proferimus hoc nomen personae, quando loquimur de divinis, et necessitate coacti utimur.” Especially as to the divinity of Christ he had been unable to understand how there could be any such relation between the infinite, divine substance, and the human, finite, as between any other two things,—soul and body, for example,—which may subsist together as one reality, but he had only hesitated as to the ineffable manner of the Incarnation, and not as to the authority of the Holy Scriptures which says “The Word was made flesh.” Divinity could not be held, theologically speaking, to be along with humanity in any other fashion than by way of assistentia (i.e. temporary influence or presence), but he did not infer anything from this contrary to the divinity of Christ, or of the supposed Divine Being that is called Christ; the miracles of Christ he had always held to be divine, true, and real—not apparent miracles; while the miracles of others were only in virtue of Christ: as to the sacrifice of the Holy Mass and the Transubstantiation of the flesh and blood of Christ he had always held with the Church: he had not attended Mass because of his excommunication, but had been to Vespers and to preachings in the Churches: in his dealings with heretics, he had always treated of matters philosophical, and had never allowed anything to escape him that was contrary to the Catholic Doctrine, and for that reason Calvinists and Lutherans had always thought of him as having no religion, because he did not entangle himself with theirs, and had been in many parts without having communicated, or accepted the religion of any of them. Some of the grosser charges of Mocenigo were read to him, which he strenuously denied,—and “as he spoke,” says the faithful record, “he grew exceedingly sorrowful,” marvelling that such things could be imputed to him. More strenuous grew his assertion of his orthodoxy—as to the person of Christ, the Virgin Motherhood, the Sacrament of Repentance; he spoke of his repeated efforts to obtain absolution, how for his sins he had always asked pardon of God, and would also willingly have confessed himself had he been able, because he had never doubted of this sacrament (or of any of the others), being firmly convinced that impenitent sinners were condemned and that hell was their portion. Heretic theologians,—Melanchthon, Luther, Calvin and others,—he condemned and despised, and had read their books from curiosity merely, although there were others, as those of Raymond Lully, which he had kept by him because they treated of matters philosophical. Aquinas.Saint Thomas Aquinas, on the other hand, he had always esteemed and loved as his own soul; had his writings always by him, read, studied, and pondered over them; and had spoken of Aquinas in one of his works as “The Honour and Light of all the race of theologians, and of Peripatetics among philosophers.”[116] When he had spoken of good works as necessary for salvation, he had in his mind not Catholicism, but the “reformed religion, which is in fact deformed in the extreme.” One by one Mocenigo’s charges were read, and denied, except that as to his contrasting the apostles’ method of spreading the Gospel with that of the Catholic Church,—this charge he evaded. When the grossest of all, however, was read, alleging him to have said the apparent miracles of Christ and the apostles were due to the black art, and that he himself could equally well do them all—he could not restrain himself;—“raising both hands, and crying, ‘What is this? Who has invented these devilries? I never said such a thing, it never entered my imagination; oh God! what is this? I would rather be dead than that such a thing should have been uttered by me!’” His references to women he admitted an error, but they had been spoken in lightness amid company and during talk of things “otiose and mundane.” Threatened with extreme measures if he refused to confess his errors with respect to the Church, Bruno promised to make a greater effort to recall all he had said and done against the Christian and Catholic faith, protested the sincerity of all he said, and was left in peace for a time. This interview took place in the prison of the Inquisition.

On the following day in the same place the examination was continued—his neglect of Holy Days and Fastings in England and Germany; his attendance at heretic preachings (although he emphatically denied that he ever partook of the communion in any Protestant church); his doubts concerning the Incarnation, the Miracles, the Sacraments; his familiarity with magical arts; his praise of heretics and heretic Princes,—these were some of the many points of indictment which he had to face. The Book of Conjurations, and others like it, he professed to have had only out of curiosity, although he despised and discredited sorcery; but he had wished to study the divining art, and especially the divinatory (prophetic) side of astrology, merely out of scientific interest, and therefore had such books by him. Heretics he had praised, only for the moral virtues they had showed, or from convention (as in the case of Queen Elizabeth). The course of his examination was making clear to Bruno at last in how great danger he really stood; and on this day he made, probably in hope of immediate release, a formal and solemn abjuration of all the errors he had ever committed pertaining to the Catholic life and profession, all the heresies he had believed and the doubts he had permitted himself to hold about the Catholic Faith or the decrees of the Church; and prayed that the Holy Tribunal would receive him into the bosom of the Holy Church, provide him with remedies proper to his salvation, and show mercy upon him.

The earlier processes against him at Naples and at Rome were, however, recalled to mind; and on the following day he was again questioned as to his familiarity with the magic arts. Three weeks later Morosini was examined and Ciotto re-examined; in both cases the evidence was wholly in Bruno’s favour. Then a long interval elapsed. July 30.It was not till the 30th of July that the case was again taken up.[117] Bruno had nothing to add to his defence, except his constant desire to enter the Church, if he could only do so without undergoing the bondage of monkhood again. Worn out by anxiety, and possibly by torture, he humbled himself before his judges: kneeling, he asked pardon of God and of his judges for all the errors he had committed, and offered himself as prepared for any penance they might lay upon him. He hoped his chastisement might exceed rather in gravity than in publicity, whereby dishonour might be cast upon the sacred habit of the Order which he had borne; and if by the mercy of God and of “their illustrious lordships,” his life should be granted him, he promised to make amends for the scandal he had created by equally great edification.

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This closed the acts of the process so far as the Venetian tribunal was concerned. The “Sacred Congregation of the Supreme Tribunal of the Holy Office,” at Rome, was eager to secure the distinguished heretic for itself, and on the 12th of September the Cardinal San Severina wrote to this effect; the Venetian tribunal, on the 17th, gave orders that Bruno be sent as soon as possible to the Governor of Ancona, who would see to his further custody to Rome. On the 28th this decision was reported to the Doge and Council of Venice by the Vicar of the Patriarch (the Father Inquisitor and Thomas Morosini being present), with an account of the charges against Bruno, and he added, that they did not wish to act without first informing the College (the Doge and Senators), so that they might give what order they thought fit, and the tribunal would wait to know what reply should be made to Rome; but he begged for expedition, since there was at that very time an opportunity of sending the prisoner in security; to all which the Senate promised to give due consideration. On the same day the Father Inquisitor returned, after dinner, to learn the decision of the Signors, adding that there was a vessel at hand, ready to set out. The State was not so willing, however, to allow the Church to have its way, and it was replied “that the matter being of moment, and deserving consideration, and the occupations of the State being many and weighty, they could not at that time come to a decision, and his Reverence might for the present let the vessel sail.” On the 3rd of October they wrote to their ambassador (Donato) at Rome, that the request had been refused, on the ground that it meant an infringement of the rights of the Venetian tribunal and a menace for the future to their subjects. Nearly three months elapsed before any further steps were taken. Dec. 22.On the 22nd December the Papal Nuncio appeared before the College pressing them to deal with the Friar Giordano Bruno, described as a publicly known Arch-heretic, whom the Pope desired to have at Rome, in order to bring to an end the process that was begun against him in the Holy Inquisition, and their serenities were begged to permit his being carried to Rome, that justice might be done. His Holiness, the Pope, had already, in the interval, impressed his desire upon the minds of the ambassadors at Rome. On the procurator, Donato, who had meanwhile returned from Rome, pressing the unconstitutional nature of the act, the Nuncio pointed out that Bruno was a Neapolitan, not a subject of the Venetian Republic at all; that there were earlier unfinished processes against him both in Naples and in Rome; and that in similar cases the accused had been sent to the chief tribunal at Rome. The Senate agreed to consider the matter, and expressed their desire to give every possible satisfaction to his Holiness.

January 7, 1593.On the 7th of January, their procurator, Contarini, reported on Bruno to the College that “his faults were extremely grave in respect of heresies, although in other respects one of the most excellent and rarest natures, and of exquisite learning and knowledge”; but, since the case was begun at Naples and Rome, was one of extraordinary gravity, and Bruno a stranger, not a subject, he thought it might be convenient to satisfy his Holiness, as had been done before at times in similar cases. He also hinted that Bruno himself, on being informed that his case was to be brought to a speedy conclusion, had said he would send a writing in which he was to ask to be remitted to Rome, but that this might have been intended merely to put off time. His report he desired to have kept secret, both for public and for private reasons.[118] It was successful in its aim, for on the 7th of January it was decided that “to gratify the Pope, the said Giordano Bruno be remitted to the Tribunal of the Inquisition at Rome, being consigned to Monsignor the Nuncio that he may be sent in what custody and by what means his Reverend Lordship thinks best; that the Nuncio be notified of this, and that our ambassador at Rome be also advised thereof to represent it to his Holiness as a mark of the continued readiness of the Republic to do what is pleasing to him.”[119] The ambassador, Paruta, was informed of the decision, and asked to present it to the Pope as proceeding, in the words of the letter, “from our reverend and filial regard for his Holiness, with whom you should condole in our name on his indisposition; and if on the arrival of these presents he is in good health, as with the grace of God we hope, you shall congratulate him thereupon.” His Holiness, on Paruta’s informing him of the decision, was highly gratified, and replied with “courteous and kindly words, saying how greatly he desired to remain always in harmony with the Republic, and how he hoped it might not give him bones that were very hard to gnaw, in case others should cast up to him that he yielded overmuch to the affection he bore it.”[120] Clearly Venice had no desire to quarrel with the Papal Government just at that time, and the unfortunate Bruno was made a political sacrifice. The persistency of the Pope’s representative at Venice in demanding Bruno’s transference to Rome, and the Pope’s evident relief when Venice yielded, show how important the death or complete recantation of Bruno had come to be thought by the Catholic party.

On the 27th of February 1593 Bruno entered the prison of the Inquisition at Rome.[121]

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Bruno’s behaviour before the Venetian tribunal has been regarded as a signal blot upon his character. In the course of his cross-examination he entirely changed his attitude, which was at first one of defiant self-confidence, open confession of his (philosophic) differences from the Church, and of indirect attacks upon the faith in his writings; insistence upon his right to use “the natural light” of sense and reason, so long as the doctrines of the Church were accepted by way of faith. Later he passed from this attitude to one of anxious and angry denial of all charges of heterodoxy, of trafficking with heretics, and the like; and finally to one of almost cringing submission and professed readiness to undergo any punishment for his misdeeds. It is possible that he began by overrating the tolerance of the Venetian Republic. In Morosini’s circle, of which Fra Paolo Sarpi was afterwards a member, he had heard enlightened talk and free criticism of the Church, and especially of Rome. One of the reputed sayings of Morosini, “we were born Venetians before we became Christians,” makes one hesitate to accept as quite honest his evidence before the tribunal. But Bruno’s trial occurred at a time when tolerance had given way to diplomacy. Had Bruno been a Venetian or of another nationality the result would have been different. They had adopted a policy of friendship towards the Papal government, and in consequence dealt during that period much more severely with heretical doctrine than with looseness of life. Bruno may have discovered this in the course of his trial, and changed his position in order to save his life. Sigwart comes to the conclusion that “it is impossible to believe in his entire genuineness and truthfulness; it is clear that he was now trying to save himself and escape condemnation by submission.” Numberless quotations might be made from his writings which give the lie to his denials before the tribunal, and his wonderful memory could not have allowed them to slip from his mind. However, there is this to be said, that Bruno had never regarded himself as anything but a Catholic; that his criticisms of that Church were suggestions of reform from within rather than attacks from without; that he had always retained an instinctive dislike both of Calvinism and of Lutheranism, in spite of his exaggerated but conventional praises of Luther at Wittenberg; that he had never formally compared his philosophy with his traditional faith, but rather laid that faith aside and worked as a philosopher merely: hence his reputation in Germany as a man of no religion. When he first became aware that he was in danger of losing life or at least liberty, and his dream of a quiet retirement with freedom of work in Italy began to fade, he must have lost his centre of judgment, and had difficulty in estimating his own past doings and sayings from the new standpoint. It would be unjust to say there was the smallest element of hypocrisy in his submission, or of deceit in his denial of guilt. And in any case, whatever errors he committed before the Venetian tribunal were amply amended by his behaviour before the Roman.[122] One thing is certain: he never either then or afterwards recanted or in any sense withdrew a single proposition belonging to his philosophical creed.

To Rome there went with him, in all probability, copies of the denunciations and evidence given at Venice, the works which Mocenigo had marked, and lists of all his works, including that given by himself, which would be valuable could it now be found. From January 16, 1593 to January 14, 1599 there is absolute silence concerning Bruno, so far as discovered documents go. In 1849 an opportunity was obtained of studying the archives of the Vatican, but the student did not pass beyond November 1598 (beginning from February 1600), before the opportunity was over.[123] The earliest of these records of Bruno is, as stated above, of January 14, 1599. To the congregation (of the Holy Office) “there were read eight heretical propositions, taken from the works of Fra Giordano Bruno of Nola, apostate of the order of Preaching Friars, imprisoned in the prison of the Holy Office, and from the process against him, by the Reverend Fathers Commissario and Bellarmino. It was decided that selected propositions be read to him, in order to determine whether he was willing to abjure them as heretical. Other heretical propositions are to be looked for in the process and in the books.”

What had happened all these years? Why was Bruno’s life spared so long? This unusual clemency on the part of the Inquisition points to a great difference in their estimate of Bruno’s importance from their view of that of other heretics. In a list of twenty-one prisoners of the Inquisition made on the 5th of April 1599, only one besides Bruno had been for more than a year in their hands; the duration of imprisonment for the others could be counted by months or days. As a general rule they were not slow in striking. Among the reasons that have been suggested is the time required to go over the four processes which had already been drawn up against Bruno, if the documents were extant, and to obtain and read his books and manuscripts. This may be dismissed at once; Bruno’s books could not be scarce then, although they became so later, and it could not require six years to find enough material to condemn him if that were desired. Another suggestion is that Bruno was a Dominican, and the whole order was concerned in procuring his recantation, rather than have the scandal which his death in apostasy would cause. The historians of the order afterwards denied that Bruno, if really put to death, had been one of their order—“Had he been one of us he would have remained with us et convictu et sensibus.”[124] More probable is the idea that Pope Clement had some favour for Bruno, who had intended to dedicate a book to him, and whose skilful pen and biting tongue he hoped to win over to the side of the Church. The book on the Seven Liberal Arts may have been actually completed, and may have presented a modus vivendi between religious authority and philosophic freedom, as Brunnhofer suggests. If the hope of winning him over was really held, it is not likely that they refrained in his case, any more than in Campanella’s, from the use of torture.

Bellarmino, a Jesuit, to whom along with Commissario the study of Bruno’s works and of the processes had been entrusted, was one of the most learned prelates of the day, a keen and ready controversialist, in spite of his reputed love of peace, and a skilful writer of many apologetic and polemical works. Beneath the surface of enlightenment there lay hidden a nature of intense bigotry: it was he who decided that Copernicanism was a heresy; he played a part later in the process against Galilei, and in the attack upon Fra Paolo Sarpi; through his agency the Platonist Patrizzi was induced to retract his heresies, and his works were placed along with those of Telesius, the apostle of Naturalism, upon the index.

February 4, 1599.On the 4th of February the congregation again considered Bruno’s case, he having in the interval made some protest against the eight propositions selected. His Holiness decreed that it should be intimated to him by the Reverend Fathers Bellarmino and Commissario, “that the propositions are heretical, and not only now or lately declared heretical, but according to the most ancient Fathers of the Church and the Apostolic See. If he shall admit them as such, it is well, but if not, a term of forty days shall be set him.” What were the eight propositions? It is of course almost impossible to say, but probably Tocco[125] is right in suggesting that they were neither any of those already withdrawn in Venice (as held “philosophically,” but not theologically), nor any of the charges of Mocenigo which Bruno had so vigorously denied, but actual admissions common to his works and to the confessions he had made at Venice—for example, propositions as to (1) the distinction of persons in God; (2) the Incarnation of the Word; (3) the nature of the Holy Spirit; (4) the Divinity of Christ; (5, 6, and 7) the necessity, eternity, and infinity of Nature; (8) the Transmigration of Souls. It must have been in the last four of these, or some similar propositions, that Bruno stood fast by his new faith.

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December 21, 1599.He was granted more than forty days, however, or the period was renewed, for it was not until the 21st of December of that year that the patience or perseverance of the Inquisition began to be exhausted. On that date—the next on which there is any record of Bruno—the congregation again reopened the case. In a rough copy of the report which has been found Bruno is quoted as saying, “that he neither ought nor will recant, that he has nothing to recant, no matter for recantation, does not know what he ought to recant.” In the fair copy the names of the members of the tribunal are given. At their head was Cardinal Madruzzi, and among them were the fanatical San Severin, embittered by his failure to secure the Papacy (he had gone so far as to choose his name—Clement—when his rival was elected in 1592, and became Clement VIII.), the man who figures in history as having declared St. Bartholomew’s “a glorious day, a day of joy for Catholics”; the ascetic Sfondrati; the intolerant Borghese, afterwards Pope Paul V.; and the learned Bellarmino. After hearing Bruno on his defence, it was decided among them that Hippolyte Maria, general of the Dominican order, and Paul of Mirandula, their vicar, “should deal with Bruno, show him what had to be abjured, that he might confess his errors, amend his ways, and agree to abjure; and should try to bring him to the point as soon as possible.” Bruno, however, as they reported, stood firm, denying that he had made any heretical statements, and insisting that he had been misunderstood by the ministers of the Holy Office, and by his Holiness; and at the same meeting (20th of January 1600) a memorial from Bruno to the Pope, who was present, having been opened but not read, it was decreed “that further measures be proceeded to, servatis servandis, that sentence be passed, and that the said Friar Giordano be handed over to the secular authority.” On the 8th of February this decision was carried into effect, and he was placed in the hands of the Governor of Rome, with the usual recommendation that he be punished “with as great clemency as possible, and without effusion of blood”—the formula for burning at the stake. A witness of the passing of the sentence was Gaspar Schopp, a youthful but none the less fanatical convert from the reformed religion to Catholicism. It was a year of jubilee in Rome. Pope Clement was possessed of great diplomatic gifts, he had gained the submission of Henry IV. of France, had united France again with Spain, and detached it from England, and had quieted or lulled numerous disputes within the Church itself. Rome was therefore crowded with visitors, more so than usual even in a year of jubilee. Of the distinguished foreigners paying their homage to Clement, Gaspar Schopp was one; facile of tongue as of pen, he quickly gained the Pope’s favour, was made a knight of St. Peter, and a count of the Sacred Palace. This adept at coat-turning sent from Rome a letter to Conrad Rittershausen, which was for long the sole authority for Bruno’s death, but was held by Catholic writers on Bruno to be a forgery. In the face of the solid arguments and evidence forthcoming, Catholic reviewers even at the present day deny that Bruno was put to death. It is quite needless at this date to enter into the question of the authenticity of the letter, its assertion of Bruno’s punishment being the sole ground on which that was ever doubted.[126] We learn from it that Bruno was publicly reported in Rome to have been burned as a Lutheran; and one of the aims of Schopp in writing—which he did on the very day of Bruno’s death—was to prove the falsity of this report. He had heard the sentence pronounced, and its damnatory clauses he gives as the following:—(1) Bruno’s early doubts concerning and ultimate denial of the Transubstantiation, and of the virgin conception; (2) the publication in London of the Bestia Trionfanti, which was held to mean the Pope; (3) the “horrible absurdities” taught in his Latin writings, such as the infinite number of worlds, the transmigration of souls, the lawfulness and utility of magic, the Holy Spirit described as merely the soul of the world, the eternity of the world, Moses spoken of as an Egyptian working his miracles by magic—in which he excelled other Egyptians—and as having invented the decalogue, the Holy Scriptures a fable, the salvation of the devil, the Hebrews alone descended from Adam and Eve, other peoples from the men created the previous day; Christ not God, but an illustrious magician, who deceived men, and on that account was properly hanged (impiccato) and not crucified; the prophets and apostles corrupt men, magicians, who were for the most part hanged. “In fine, I should never have done were I to pass in review all the monstrosities he has advanced, whether in his books or by word of mouth. In one word, there is not an error of the pagan philosophers or of our heretics, ancient or modern, that he did not sustain.” The delay at Rome, it is suggested, was due to Bruno’s constant promises to retract, but he was only putting off his judges, and the duration of his imprisonment is given (officially?) at “about two years.” It is clear that on the occasion of the sentence being read the denouncements of Mocenigo, as well as all later evidences dragged from Bruno’s own lips, or picked up from his books, were recited for the benefit, presumably, of the visitors present. When the sentence was pronounced Bruno was degraded, excommunicated, and handed over to the secular magistrates, as we have seen. The whole letter is redeemed by the reply of Bruno to his judges—“Greater perhaps is your fear in pronouncing my sentence than mine in hearing it.” These strong words are almost the last we have of Bruno. At the stake he turned his eyes angrily away from the crucifix held before him. And so, adds Schopp, “he was burned and perished miserably, and is gone to tell, I suppose, in those other worlds of his fancy, how the blasphemous and impious are dealt with by the Romans!” It is pleasant to know that when Lord Digby was English ambassador to Spain he caused Gaspard Schopp to be horse-whipped.[127] For the degradation of Bruno, as we learn from the Register of the Depository-General of the Pontificate, two scudi of gold were paid to the Bishop of Sidonia. The memorable words he uttered at the time were reported by another than Schopp, the Count of Ventimiglia, who was a pupil of Bruno, and present at his death (perhaps at the sentence also)—“You who sentence me are in greater fear than I who am condemned”; and before his death Bruno recommended Ventimiglia “to follow in his glorious footsteps, to avoid prejudices and errors.”[128]

In the Avvisi and Ritorni of Rome, which represented, however meagrely, the newspapers of the time, two references to Bruno appeared, with short garbled accounts of him. In one he was spoken of as a Friar of S. Dominic, of Nola, burnt alive in the Campo di Fiori, an obstinate heretic, with his tongue tied, owing to the brutish words he uttered, refusing to listen to the comforters or others: in another he was reported as saying that he died a martyr, and willingly, and that his soul would ascend with the smoke to Paradise, “but now he knows whether he spoke the truth!” The fullest account, however, of his death, and one which should put to rest all doubts on the subject, is in the reports of the Company of St. John the Beheaded. This company—called also the Company of Mercy or Pity (della misericordia)—was instituted for the purpose of accompanying condemned heretics to the place of death, encouraging them to repent, to die with contrition for their sins. The priests bore tablets painted with images, which were presented to the condemned to kiss, from time to time, till the faggots were lit. Even the executioner was called to their aid occasionally, and the cruellest methods adopted to produce at least the appearance of kissing, and so of repentance. In obstinate cases, on the other hand, the tongue was tied, so that the heretic could not speak to the people. When the sufferers repented before death the Company took note of their last wishes, and they were buried in the tombs of the Cloister donated for that purpose by Innocent VIII., but if they were impenitent no will was allowed, and the ashes were abandoned to the winds of heaven. This must have happened in Bruno’s case, for there is no mention of will or of burial in the report. Its date is Thursday, 16th February (an error for 17th), and it reads thus:[129]—“At the second hour of the night it was intimated to the Company that an impenitent was to be executed in the morning; so at the sixth hour the comforters and the chaplain met at St. Ursula, and went to the prison of the Tower of Nona. After the customary prayers in the chapel there was consigned to them the under-mentioned condemned to death, viz. Giordano, son of the late Giovanni Bruno, an Apostate Friar of Nola in the Kingdom, an impenitent heretic. With all charity our brethren exhorted him to repent, and there were called two Fathers of St. Dominic, two of the Society of Jesus, two of the new Church, and one of St. Jerome, who, with all affection and much learning, showed him his error, but he remained to the end in his accursed obstinacy, his brain and intellect seething with a thousand errors and vanities. So, persevering in his obstinacy, he was led by the servants of justice to the Campo dei Fiori, there stripped, bound to a stake, and burnt alive, attended always by our Company chanting the litanies, the comforters exhorting him up to the last point to abandon his obstinacy, but in it finally he ended his miserable, unhappy life.”

So Bruno passed away; his ashes were scattered, his name almost forgotten. His death was the merest incident amid the great doings of the year of Jubilee. None of the many bishops and cardinals and distinguished visitors in Rome, with the single exception of Gaspard Schopp, makes any mention of the occurrence or of the man; and Schopp did so only because he wished to point a moral from the case. During his seven years’ imprisonment, Bruno had almost passed out of the short-lived memory of his fellowmen. Burnings of heretics were not infrequent spectacles, and required no special notice. Three years later (August 7, 1603) all his works were placed upon the Index, and consequently became rare. They were classed with other dangerous works on the black arts, and Bruno’s name became one to avoid.

This was the death which in happier days he had foreseen for himself should he ever enter Italy:—“Torches, fifty or a hundred, will not fail him, even though the march be at mid-day, should it be his fate to die in Roman Catholic country.” What were the real grounds on which his condemnation and sentence were founded? The alleged grounds we have already seen, but they cannot have formed the actual motive of the Pope and the Inquisition. Neither at Venice nor in Rome can much weight have been laid upon the evidence of the weakling Mocenigo. The Cardinals cannot have imagined that Bruno would ever open his heart or even speak freely to so shallow a nature so utterly different in all things from himself. The mere fact of his having left his order was not enough, nor his refusal to return to it, nor were his heretical opinions—defended as they might be, and as Aristotle’s own teaching had to be defended in the Church, by the subterfuge of the twofold truth. Had his chief fault been, as some have thought, his praises of Elizabeth, Henry III., Henry of Navarre, Luther, Duke Julius, and other enemies, real or supposed, of the Church, he would not so long have occupied the prisons of the Inquisition. Probably his earliest biographer, Bartholmèss, was right in suggesting that Bruno was regarded as a heresiarch—he is several times so described in the documents—the founder of a new sect, the leader of an incipient but dangerous crusade against the Church. It was as the apostle of a new religion, founded on a new intuition, a new conception of the universe, and of its relation to God, that Bruno died. Had he been won over to the side of the Church, his mind conquered and his spirit crushed by the long years of waiting, and possibly the days and nights of physical torture, it would have been a signal triumph for the papacy. But the heart which had trembled at the beginning, when the sudden gulf yawned before it, grew more and more steadfast as its trials increased. We can only re-echo Carrière’s words, that in the soul of such a man, who after eight years’ confinement in the prisons of the Inquisition remained so firm, “the governing motives must have been an eternal and inviolable impulse towards Truth, an unbending sense of right, an irrepressible and free enthusiasm.” That for which he died was not any special cult or any special interpretation of Scripture or history, but a broad freedom of thought with the right of free interpretation of history and of nature, which in his own case was founded upon a philosophy, one of the noblest that has been thought out by man.

The fear of death was no part of this philosophy; what we call death, it teaches, is a mere change of state, of “accidents”—no real substance, such as the human spirit is, can ever die. One of the highest values of his philosophy he thought to be this, that it freed man from the fear of death, “which is worse than death itself.” Strikingly apposite to his own fate is a passage from Ovid[130] that he quotes—

Bruno himself lived within the sphere of which he writes in the Spaccio, “surrounded by the impregnable wall of true philosophic contemplation, where the peacefulness of life stands fortified and on high, where truth is open, where the necessity of the Eternity of all substantial things is clear, where nought is to be feared but to be deprived of human perfection and justice.” His finest epitaph is to be found in his own words, “I have fought: that is much—victory is in the hands of fate. Be that as it may with me, this at least future ages will not deny of me, be the victor who may,—that I did not fear to die, yielded to none of my fellows in constancy, and preferred a spirited death to a cowardly life.”

No end in history is more tragic, when looked at in all its circumstances, than that of Giordano Bruno. First a life of endless, unresting struggle, striving through years of wandering, in many lands, to overcome prejudice and outworn authority, to proclaim and urge on unwilling minds the splendid gospel which inspired himself, and by which for a brief time he may have thought to supplant the old; now admired of kings, and sought after by the highest in the land, at another time a hunted pedlar of literary wares; then eight years in darkness from the world, with shame or death to choose for release. The choice made for the nobler end, the mockeries of religion he had detested and reviled pursued him to the end to—the very stake; and the funeral pyre of this martyr for liberty of thought, for the new light of science, became a spectacle for the gay and thoughtless sight-seers of the Roman Jubilee year, to all of whom, one sad disciple excepted, it was but another “damnable and obstinate heretic” who was on this earth, for that brief spell, foretasting his eternal doom.

XIX

It is not easy to characterise so complex a personality as Bruno undoubtedly was. The fiery passionate blood of the south ran in his veins, the joy of a strong-flowing life was in his heart and brain. A child of Nature, he was almost from the first, “cribbed, cabined, and confined” by the stone walls of the cloister, as his mind was hampered by the laws and dogmas of the Church.[131] From Nature herself he drew his first lessons. While his fellows taught that Nature was a thing of evil, he learnt to love her, and to turn to her rather than to the authority of man for instruction. He believed also, as very few of his age did, in the power of human thought to penetrate the secret nature of things, to reach even to the deepest and highest reality, so far as that can be known by another than itself. Trusting to his own mind, to sense and reason, for his theory of the world, he found himself opposed in all essentials to the general thought of the time.

His purpose from the first was to use his own eyes, to discover truth for himself, and to hold fast whatever seemed to be right, irrespective of the opinions of others. “From the beginning I was convinced of the vanity of the cry which summons us to close or lower the eyes that were given to us open and upward-looking. Seeing I do not pretend not to see, nor fear to profess it openly; and as there is continual war between light and darkness, knowledge and ignorance, everywhere have I met with hatred, abuse, clamour, insult (ay, not without risk to my life) from the brute and stupid multitude; but guided by the hand of truth and the divine light, I have overcome it.” Not that he really formed his theory by induction from sense-data, or by deductive reasoning; it was rather an inspiration, or an intuition, springing from his temperament, to which optimism was as necessary as pessimism repellent; and there were numerous suggestions of it both in Bruno’s immediate predecessors, Copernicus and the rest, and in earlier thinkers. Bruno himself found it, as he thought, in the more ancient pre-Aristotelian philosophies. But, however obtained, this philosophy satisfied even his boundless enthusiasm, and it became the chief motive of his life to convince others of its truth, inspire them with the same enthusiasm, and endow them with the joyous freedom of life of which it seemed to him to be the source. His philosophy, in other words, became his religion, his inward religion,—Catholicism remaining a mere habit, a set of formulae to which he was indifferent, to most of which he was willing to subscribe because he had not questioned them.

Authority.His perfect self-confidence, and belief in the power of human reason (especially his own reason) to penetrate the mysteries of things, was accompanied by contempt for the argument from authority in philosophy, contempt for humility, submission, obedience in the speculative life. To believe with the many because they were many was the mark of a slave. Bruno, before Bacon, before Descartes, insisted on the need of first of all clearing the mind from all prejudices, all traditional beliefs that rested on authority alone, before attempting the pursuit of truth. They were impediments—burdens that delayed or prevented the attainment of the goal. The whole of the Cabala is a satire on the quietistic attitude, the standpoint of ignorant and ignoring faith, which regards sense and reason as alike misleading and unnecessary guides, for which science and philosophy are mere troublings of the still waters of life. “Oh, holy asinity”! one of the sonnets begins, “oh, holy ignorance, holy folly and pious devotion, which alone makest souls so good that human wit and zeal can no further go; strenuous watchfulness, in whatsoever art, or invention, or contemplation of the wise, arrives not to the heaven wherein thou buildest thy mansion. Of what avail is your study, ye curious ones, your desire to know how nature works, whether the stars are earth, or fire or sea? Holy asinity for that cares not, but with folded hands and bended knees awaits from God its fate.”[132]

Having already that touch of vanity in his character which the possession of a quick mind among sluggards or dullards almost inevitably entails, he was thrown, by his attitude towards nature and the Church, more and more back upon himself. At every step he met with a leaden, uncomprehending, but dogged opposition, until he seemed to himself the one seeing man in a world of the blind. At times this belief was expressed only too emphatically; the reader of Bruno must expect to find a passage in almost every work pointing out that that work is the best of its kind, and dispenses with all others on the subject; while his opponents in any theory are bedaubed with epithets to which the amenities of modern party strife are politeness itself.[133] Boundless was his confidence in himself, in his power of discerning truth, and in his ability to overcome all difficulties in the way of its discovery. “Difficulty,” he writes in the Cena, “is ordained to check poltroons. Things ordinary and easy are for the vulgar, for ordinary people. But rare, heroic, divine men pass along this way of difficulty, that necessity may be constrained to yield them the palm of immortality. Although it may not be possible to come so far as to gain the prize, run your race nevertheless, do your hardest in what is of so great importance, strive to your last breath. It is not only he who arrives at the goal that is praised, but also whoever dies no coward’s or poltroon’s death; he casts the fault of his loss and of his death upon the back of fate, and shows the world that he has come to such an end by no defect of himself, but by error of fortune.”[134]

His outward fortunes left Bruno indifferent; it was the opposition to his philosophy that embittered him, and excited the magnificent invectives scattered everywhere through his works. Of his own mission Bruno had the highest conception: “The Nolan has set free the human mind, and its knowledge, that was shut up within the narrow prison-house of the atmosphere (the troubled air), whence it could only with difficulty, as through chinks, see the far distant stars; its wings were clipped, that it might not fly and pass through the veil of clouds, and see that which is really to be found there.... But he in the eye of sense and reason, with the key of unwearied inquiry, has opened those prison-doors of the truth which man might open, laid bare nature that was covered over and veiled from sight, given eyes to the moles, enlightened the blind ... loosened the tongue of the mute, that could not and dared not express their inmost feelings.”[135] It was not to the many that he spoke, however; there was little in his heart of that love for his fellowman that was so charming a trait in Spinoza, with all the latter’s desire for solitude, and under all his persecutions. Bruno, whether a son of the people or not, had never the slightest respect for that body. We have already seen what opinion he formed of the English populace, and he held a similar view of the plebs in general—“Rogatus tumet, Pulsatus rogat, Pugnis concisus adorat,” he quotes (or misquotes)[136] concerning it. Distrust of the natural man he had imbibed along with the teaching of the Church, and doubt as to his capacity for receiving or understanding the truth. Those who have acquired the truth that he has to teach need not, he writes, communicate it to all, “unless they will see what swine can do with pearls, and will gather those fruits of their zeal and labour which usually spring from rash and foolish ignorance, together with presumption and incivility, its constant and trusty companions.”[137] Speaking of the doctrine of the necessity of all human events, as determined and foreseen by God, and its coincidence with true liberty, he shows how theologians and philosophers have held it, but have refrained from communicating it to the vulgar, by whom it could not be understood, who would use it as an excuse for giving rein to their passions. “Faith is required for the instruction of the plebs, that must be governed; demonstration (truth) for the wise, the contemplative, that know how to govern themselves and others.”[138] So speculation as to the future life must be kept from them, for it is “with the greatest difficulty that they can be restrained from vice and impelled to virtuous acts through their faith in eternal punishment: what would become of them if they were persuaded of some lighter condition regulating the rewards of heroic and humane deeds, the punishment of wickedness and sin?”[139] He was an “aristocrat of learning,”—only the wise should have the government of the world; the people were unfit to judge either of truth or of men.

Pedantry.Along with this distrust of the vulgar went a far more intense dislike of the kind of learning they admired, and of the type of scholar, the pedant, that most appealed to them. The minds of the vulgar, it seemed to him, were more readily turned by sophisms, by the appearances on the surface of things, than by the truth that is hidden in their substance, and is indeed their substance itself;[140] and the man—too frequent in the Italian, and generally in the learned world of those days—most apt to veil a real ignorance by a pretended knowledge, by a show of externals, by appeal to authorities with whom he had himself no acquaintance, was the pedant. Bruno himself was not without that touch of vanity which led him, like others, to mass together quotations and phrases from Latin and even from Greek writers; to point an argument by forced analogies from classical mythology; to heap up references, in support of his theories, to the Neoplatonists, to the mystics, to the Cabbalah, to the older Greek philosophers: these adornments were quite in the fashion of his time, and looked at in that light they add to, rather than detract from, the peculiar charm and spirit of his writings. The true pedant—such as Polihimnio in the Causa (who has been thought to have suggested Polonius in Hamlet), Mamphurio in the Candelaio, Prudentio in the Cena—is one that for style loves long words, learned phrases, irrespective of their context; who, under pretence of accuracy, delights in trifling, subtle distinctions, sows broadcast mythological or classical allusions without a hint of relevancy. His favourite hunting-ground is, however, philosophy, and it is to philosophy, according to Bruno, that the pedant has done greatest injury. One of the most vigorous descriptions of him which Bruno gives is in the Causa,[141] where, no doubt, some of the actual writers of the time are satirised. Curiously, Ramus and Patrizzi, both reformers of philosophy, are mentioned as “arch-pedants”; but men have always criticised most bitterly those who stood nearest to themselves.

Bruno regarded words as the servants of his pen, claimed, and indeed exercised almost too freely, the right of inventing new words for new things. Use and wont, he knew, determined the fate of words as of other things; some which had fallen into decay would rise again, others now honoured would lapse from use. For the teaching of the philosophers of old their own old words were the clearest mirror, but for new theories new words might be sought from the readiest source:—“grammarians are the servants of words, words are our servants; it is for them to study the use to which we put our words.”[142]

XX

For such coinage, as for illustrations to his theories, references to old authorities, material for his satire on pedants, as well as for more doubtful purposes,—mystical or magical formulæ, or “proofs,”—his prodigious memory never left Bruno at a loss. But if this memory, in its tenacity, supplied him with powerful and ready arguments against his opponents in their appeal to the authority of antiquity, it was also, in its fertility, the source of the chief defects of his writing, and perhaps also of his speaking. His imagination runs riot in the pursuit of allegories, metaphors, similes from mythology. Tiraboschi, the historian of Italian literature, defies “the most acute intelligence to penetrate into his system, the most patient of men to endure the reading of it.”

So far was this enormous mass of material from blocking up the spring of originality in his mind, however, that the ideas in which he may be said to have “anticipated” modern thought are innumerable. No doubt, in many cases, they came from the earlier Greek philosophers whom he chiefly studied; but Bruno invariably gives them a connection with his own theory, such as precludes us from taking his restoration of them for a happy chance. Such ideas, for example, are those of the evolution or gradual transformation of lower organisms into higher (De Umbris, Int. 7), of the part played by the hand in the evolution of the human race (Cabala, L. 586. 35), of the gradual changes brought about on the surface of the earth, its seas, its islands, the configuration of the land, the climate of different countries, by the constant, if imperceptible, operation of natural causes (Cena, L. 190 ff.): of the true nature of mountains, which are only excrescences as compared with the real mountains, the larger continents that slope upwards from the sea (e.g. France): of the true nature of comets, so far at least as that they are perfectly natural bodies allied to planets[143] (Infinit. L. 372; De Imm. iv. 9. 51); of the identity of the matter of heavenly bodies with that of the earth, the universality of movement (even the fixed stars move, cf. Infinit., L. 350, 351, 400), the possibility (he said rather the certainty) of other worlds than our own being inhabited by beings similar to or more highly developed than ourselves (L. 360. 27). He “anticipated” also the idea of Lessing that myths may contain foreshadowings of truth, and that they should be interpreted not by their letter, as matters of fact, but by their spirit, as indications of higher “truths of reason.” The Bible should be interpreted in the same way: as Spinoza afterwards taught, so Bruno held, that the Scriptures inculcated moral and practical truths, to which their seemingly historical statements were entirely subordinate.

Add to this fermenting thought, power of memory, keenness and sureness of glance, and imaginative force, the fact that Bruno had a deeply poetic nature, fiery, vivid, passionate in defence of what seemed to him true, equally passionate in hatred of what seemed to him false, and the sources of his strength and weakness alike become clear. The Italian writings remain, in spite of their occasional obscurity, the most brilliant of philosophical works in that language, while the Latin works are a monument of learning (too often misapplied or useless), of acute reasoning, and of poetic enthusiasm.

XXI

Religion.Bruno was far from being what we should now call a Rationalist; he felt that cold reason, mere human logic alone, could not fathom the deepest nature of things, which was God, but that this deepest nature of things was apart from conditions of time and space. Whatever occurred under these conditions,—whatever fell within the actual world,—he claimed for sense and reason, i.e. as a subject of natural explanation, as accessible in all its aspects to human knowledge. There are thus two very distinct sides to Bruno’s philosophical character: on the one side he is a forerunner of modern science, in his love of nature as a whole, in his desire to understand it, in his application of purely “empirical” methods to its analysis. To this side belong his rejection of the orthodox dogmas concerning the Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, and the rest, his theory of an evolution of man, his idea of a natural history of religions, his entire rejection of authority however high as an argument for or against a theory or view of nature. His own religious creed was simple, and he believed it to be the essence of what was true in all the jarring sects that had separated man from man, nation from nation, and race from race—“the law of love—which springs not from the evil genius of any one race, but from God the father of all, and is in harmony with universal nature, which teaches a general love of man, that we should love our enemies even, should not remain like brutes or barbarians, but be transformed into the likeness of Him who makes His sun to rise upon the good and the bad, and pours the rain of His mercies upon the just and the unjust. This is the religion above controversy or dispute, which I observe from the belief of my own mind, and from the custom of my fatherland and my race.”[144] On the other side, he had inherited the mysticism of the Neoplatonist school, or at least it called out a responsive echo from his mind so soon as he came under its influence. He was full of enthusiasm, as we shall find, for the divine—in things, in us, in the world, in the universe—a “God-intoxicated man” far more strikingly than the impassive Spinoza. It was because the Copernican theory fitted into his mystical thought of the One, as an identity of the infinitely small, the point, and the infinitely great, the broad, deep, immeasurable universe, that it appeared to him an inspiration of genius. Therefore he defended it, extended it further than its originator dared extend it, and finally died for it and for all that it meant to him. His belief in natural magic belongs again to this side, or rather to the influence of the one side of his nature upon the other; owing to their essential unity in God, natural things have sympathies with one another and with human life, so that a change in one thing—a stone, a tree—may indirectly cause a corresponding change in another, a human being. It was characteristic of him that he sought to give to these beliefs—which, be it remembered, were universal in his time—a rational basis, a connection with his thought-system as a whole.

The two sides or standpoints are never far apart in Bruno: it is often impossible to say to which a given theory or mood should be attributed, but in his earlier life the mystical, in his later the naturalistic, or rationalist standpoint may be said to have predominated. It is with the more metaphysical attitude that a certain vein of optimism in Bruno’s philosophy is connected, the familiar conception of evil, natural or moral, as necessary for the good of the whole, like the discords by which a harmony is heightened. No absolute evil, for the consistent Neoplatonist, can possibly exist in a world which flows from the divine and is an outpouring of His nature. But Bruno had little or nothing of the practical optimist in his own character; whatever he thought to be evil, he fought against with all his might; a victim of intolerance, he had himself no toleration for some points of view—those, namely, which he felt might weaken the bonds of civil society and of human brotherhood. “Such evil teachers,” he writes in the Sigillus (ii. 2. 182), “succeeding time, and a world wise overlate in its own ill condition, will exterminate as the tares, canker-worms, locust plagues of their age—nay, as scorpions and vipers.” Bruno saw only too clearly the evils of the world, and of his age, from the greatest of which—tyranny over the soul, and suppression of mental liberty—he suffered in his own person; and his life, as we have seen, was spent in a ceaseless, and for the time unavailing, struggle against them. But he never lost his faith in the ultimate victory of his own philosophy, based as it was upon his faith in the essential goodness, justice, and truth of the eternal source of things. As all things flow from, so all things tend to return to God. Philosophy goes further than to teach merely that pain and evil are not absolute facts, not grounded in the nature of things; it also frees the believer from the burden they impose:—“the practical test of a perfect philosophy is, when one by the height of his speculation is so far withdrawn from bodily things as hardly to feel pain. And there is greater virtue, as we believe, in one who has come to such a point as not to feel pain at all than in another who feels it but resists. He who is more deeply moved by the thought of some other thing does not feel the pangs of death.”[145]

WORKS OF BRUNO PUBLISHED AFTER 1592[146]

1. Summa terminorum metaphysicorum ad capessendum Logicae et Philosophiae studium, ex Jordani Bruni Nolani Entis descensu manusc. excerpta; nunc primum luci commissa; a Raphaele Eglino Iconio, Tigurino: Zurich, 1595. Reprinted in 1609:—Summa Terminorum Metaphysicorum, Jordani Bruni Nolani. Accessit eiusdem Praxis Descensus seu Multiplicatio Entis ex Manuscripto per Raphaelum Eglinum Iconium Tigurinum in Acad. Marpurg. Profess. Theolog. cum supplemento Rodolphi Goclenii Senioris, Marburg, 1609.[147]

Described by the editor, Eglin, who was with Bruno at Zurich, and afterwards became Professor of Theology at Marburg, as Bruno’s “Metaphysical remains.” It represents the fruit of the lectures given by Bruno at Zurich in 1591,[148] and is one of the earliest philosophical dictionaries extant. It is on the model of the Fifth Book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, now known to have been intended by Aristotle as a separate work, but differs in its choice and arrangement of the terms of philosophy which are discussed. The first part of the work, which was published by itself in Zurich, may best be described as a handbook to philosophy generally, the main reference being to Aristotle’s system, as was natural: with it Bruno writes for the most part in agreement. The second part, however, which was not published until the Marburg Edition (p. 73 ff. of the State Edition), is an “application” of the several terms already defined to the Neoplatonist philosophy: in its first section (De Deo seu Mente) they are applied and illustrated by reference to God as the source of the world, of whom all things are emanations, in a graduated scale of being; in the second (Intellectus seu Idea) to the world of Ideas—God in the world, the soul in all things and in everything; and a third section (Amor seu pulchritudo) should have followed, dealing with God as the end and goal of things, but is awanting.[149] The document on the Predicates of God which Mocenigo presented to the Court at Venice was probably the second part of the Summa, or perhaps only its first section (Brunnhofer, p. 106).

2. Artificium perorandi traditum a Jordano Bruno Nolano Italo, communicatum a Johan. Henrico Alstedio. In gratiam eorum qui eloquentiae vim et rationem cognoscere cupiunt. Frankfort, 1612. (Also in Gfrörer, and State Edition, vol. ii. pt. 3, No. 3).—A summary of, or a commentary on, the spurious Rhetoric of Aristotle (ad Alexandrum), with the addition of a second part by Bruno, on which he himself lays no great stress, on elocution or adornment; he refers his readers, however, to the orators themselves for complete instruction. It contains chiefly lists of heads of arguments and of synonyms for rhetorical use. Apparently the work is printed from notes of Bruno’s lectures in Wittenberg (1587), which came into the hands of the editor, Alsted, in 1610.