Copyright © 2002 by R. Blade All Rights Reserved
rblade@sbcglobal.net
Bruno was a fugitive priest, philosopher, prolific writer, and martyr. He was accused of heresy by the brutal Pope Clement 8 who condemned Bruno to be burned to death at the stake.
Contents
Acknowledgment
Prelog
Odyssey
Trial
Martyrdom
Postlog
Attributions
This book contains two fictional dialogs, Odyssey and Trial. Odyssey is the dialog between a living Host and Giordano Bruno (1548-1604); it covers Bruno's life including cursory reviews of his major writings. Trial is the dialog between a Papal Tribunal and Bruno; it covers the Roman Inquisition's examination of Bruno's alleged heresies. Supporting information also provides background and encloses the dialogs, which
include selected passages from Bruno's writings and official documents pertinent to his life. The selected passages were excerpted from books written by the following Brunian scholars:Boulting W.
Frith I.
Singer D.W.
Yates F.A.
Selected passages are noted in the dialogs and their authors identified in Attributions at the end of this book. Because I did not research or translate any of Bruno's original writings, I hereby acknowledge my reliance on the above scholars, and certain of their books, for the events of Bruno's life and his writings.
Also I thank the Instituto Italiano Di Cultura and Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany for help with background information.
R. Blade
During Giordano Bruno's life (1548-1600) Austria, France, Spain, and popes fought for control of Italy. Their battles parceled Italy into duchies, kingdoms, republics, and the Papal State of Rome. Spain ruled southern Italy and Naples was the seat of the Spanish Viceroy who ruled the Kingdom of Naples. Every European nation trembled before the power of Spain, a nation that persecuted and massacred thousands in the name of God. Italy was mostly Roman Catholic but northern Italy was influenced by the Protestantism of Switzerland and Germany. England became Protestant under King Henry 8th. When he died his daughter Elizabeth succeeded to the throne as Queen Elizabeth 1st in 1588. A stalwart Protestant her reign was challenged by Ireland, Scotland, Spain and Rome where lived many Catholics. France was allied with Rome and Scotland. Then in 1588 Queen Elizabeth's fleet of swift and massively gunned galleons defeated King Philip 2nd and his Spanish Armada. Spain never recovered making England the most powerful nation in Europe and London one of its greatest cities.
European medieval knowledge was compounded of magic, mythology, metaphysics, and theology all melded to rank speculation. Then the Italian Renaissance 1300-1600 had transitioned Europe from medieval to modern and scientific thought. During that time Italy was the star of the civilized world but its celebrity was tarnished by the theology and religious intolerance of the Roman Catholic Church. Those few Catholics who challenged its authority were forced to leave the Church. Giordano Bruno was a Dominican priest who challenged its theology and satirized its intolerance. Bruno was making the bold transition from theological speculation to philosophical truths and cosmological theory. Any learned person who could expound on esoteric subjects, thereby providing answers to some of life's mysteries, could usually find a sympathetic audience and supporting patron. This was the ethos of Bruno's world. Empirical data resulting from scientific proofs were far off in the future.
Giordano Bruno was born in 1548 in Nola, Italy a small town about 20 miles east-northeast of Naples. Nola is one of oldest Neapolitan towns with noticeable traces of Greek culture. During his youth he was well educated. He continued his education in the Dominican Order and was ordained a priest, a friar preacher of the order. Bruno's natural hatred of authority and his unorthodox views got him into trouble with his father superiors who charged him with heresy. He fled from the Dominican convent abandoning his order. On a lifetime quest for truth in knowledge, Bruno wandered around Europe for 16 years looking for a retreat in which he could teach and write. In Bruno's time there was little freedom of movement or of the press. A traveler normally had to get permission for permanent residence and authors had to get permission to publish. These restrictions helped ruling authorities remain in power because they usually aligned themselves with the local church. An iconoclast, he constantly attacked authority of any kind. He frequently attacked university pedants, religion, and ignorant society. His zealousness in trying to reform obsolete contemporary thinking and fallible theology got him into deep trouble wherever he went. Bruno's unorthodox view of medieval cosmology challenged the accepted theories of university professors and shook the solid rock foundation of the Roman Catholic Church by questioning its authority and doctrines. His awkward personal relationships and intransigent behavior set him on the road to his tragic end. His hectic odyssey ended with 7 years of imprisonment in the dungeons of Rome's Holy Office and eventual martyrdom in 1600.
In Bruno's time the papacy had twofold sovereign power, religious authority over Roman Catholics and secular authority over the Papal State of Rome. At that time it was the most powerful organization in the world. To a lesser degree, Catholic and Protestant countries also commingled religion and government. Bruno was caught between these competing authorities sometimes in Catholic countries, sometimes in Protestant countries. The overlapping and compounding of these authorities produced societal problems then, as now, because religion is based on myth, government on reality. Today the problems of countries governed by religious leaders are obvious especially in the Near East. Religion with its omnipotent God and divine fiat superimposes itself on government. The two cannot equally and concurrently coexist. The genius of America's founders is that, knowing of religion's intolerant and persecutory history, they separated it from government.
Bruno appears shabbily dressed. He has a medium frame and height, a thin man with full head of chestnut hair, a Roman nose coping a mustache, and deep set dark eyes. He walks about gingerly looking around. He speaks rapidly in an agitated manner attended by gestured flourishes.
HOST Giordano Bruno welcome to my home.
BRUNO I'm told you're interested in my philosophy.
HOST Yes, I'm trying to understand it.
BRUNO Are you offering me your patronage?
HOST Only for the duration of our conversation.
BRUNO Another gentleman who invites me into his house to benefit from my vast knowledge, only to evict me when he disagrees with my innovative views. Sir, I've been humiliated by university pedants, scorned by ignorant men. I've been ...
HOST Yes I know.
BRUNO I've been persecuted by so-called men of God, excommunicated by Catholics, by Protestants, by ...
HOST I know. Please, be seated. I intend to cover all that. My copious notes outline significant events of your life, so let's begin at the beginning. You were born Filippo Bruno in May 1548 in Nola, Italy. Your father Juano Bruno was Italian. Your mother Fraulissa Savolino was Italian and German.
BRUNO Do you know that Nola, in campagna felice (the happy country) is nestled in the fertile foothills of Mount Cicada, whose environs are supervised by the smoldering caldron of Mount Vesuvius overlooking Naples.
HOST Today that area is known for its succulent plum tomatoes.
BRUNO And also in my time, pomodori di Nola.
HOST Your family was considered a gentleman's family because your father was a professional soldier in the service of Spain, which ruled the Kingdom of Naples.
BRUNO Resented by southern Italy, especially by Neapolitans. Heavily influenced by Greek culture, Nola was the chosen retreat of Roman aristocracy, the Emperor Augustus died there. Nola was attacked by Hannibal and St. Peter and St. Thomas Aquinas preached there.
HOST Do you have any childhood memories of Nola?
BRUNO I have an encyclopedic memory and you ask me if I have any childhood memories?
HOST Well, what about your favorite memories.
BRUNO I remember the threatening steeps of imposing Vesuvius looking across as if supervising the fertile lowlands of Nola. Growing up I reconnoitered Nola's woods imagining there were spirits lurking among the stands of chestnut, laurel, and olive. Walking slowly and expectedly among them I hoped I would encounter a beautiful nymph. If a faun or satyr jumped out from behind a bush and confronted me, what would I do or say?
HOST Tell me about the celebrations for the Feast of St. Paulinus.
BRUNO The story told is that vandals from North Africa had captured Nolans and enslaved them. Bishop Paulinus of Nola volunteered to be a slave in place of the son of a Nolan widow. He sold all his possessions to redeem the son. The Vandals were so impressed with his sacrifice and generosity, they released from slavery the son and all Nolans. In the third week of June the return of Nolans is celebrated as the Feast of St. Paulinus.
HOST In preparation of the feast, I understand Nolans built tall towers lavishly decorated.
BRUNO The townsfolk erected tall wooden towers each decorated and painted with angels, paladins, saints, and of course St. Paulinus. On top, mounted on a gold cupola, the finial of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Nola’s young men hoisted the massive tall tower on their shoulders and performed the dance of the guglie (towers) as they paraded through the streets of Nola. Other towns built towers honoring their own saints. Towns competed against each other for the tallest and most lavishly decorated tower. Everyone feasted by eating, drinking, and dancing. Of course, the feast evolved from our Dionysiac revels.
HOST Today on the Feast of St. Paulino…
BRUNO You said Paulino. It’s Paulinus, Latin.
HOST In New York City's Little Italy and in Brooklyn Italians say Paulino. They still build, decorate, and carry those tall towers on their shoulders doing the dance of the gigli.
BRUNO Dance of the lilies, the commemorative flower of St. Paulinus.
HOST Growing up, I understand you were a voracious reader.
BRUNO Books were not plentiful but I read as many as I could. By the way, my father was a friend of of the Nolan poet Luigi Tansillo. He was an occasional dinner guest after which he'd recite some of his poetry. Once he gave me two books of poetry, Ovid and Virgil.
HOST I understand that you were an impetuous and headstrong youth. In fact, you were known as "il Nolano impetuoso", the wild one from Nola.
BRUNO Not so wild, I protested what I considered lies and untruths. The fact is, I didn't accept or believe half of what I was told. Generally, my father either ignored my protests or tolerated them with fatherly advice.
HOST Wasn't that quite liberal for a soldier father accustomed to strict discipline?
BRUNO Perhaps. At 14, because of my diligent interest in learning, he sent me to Naples to be educated by Augustinian monks.
HOST To be educated and perhaps tamed by them.
BRUNO I was privately tutored by the monk de Vairano. He required me to be fluent in Latin and Italian. My studies covered dialectics, philosophy, and religion with a smattering of Greek.
HOST Were you cloistered?
BRUNO No, I lived with my uncle. He further interested me in poetry and also in mathematics. My uncle arranged for a friend of his to tutor me in those disciplines.
HOST After your private tutoring, your father decided your education would be best continued by study for the priesthood.
BRUNO I recall his ambivalence in the selection of a religious order, that of the Spaniard St. Dominic or of the Italian St. Francis, Dominican or Franciscan. Both orders vied for intelligent young men to train as novices. The Roman Catholic Church was wealthy, owning most of the land and educational institutions around Naples. The Dominicans were the richest and most powerful of monastic orders, enjoying the full support of their patron King Philip 2nd of Spain. Dominicans were regarded as educators; they believed in the power of words. On the other hand, Franciscans were humble, believing inner grace more important than words. They were not rich. Getting educated was expensive, so my father decided that I would be best educated by Dominicans. At 17 I entered the Convent of St. Dominic in Naples.
HOST Why would a free spirit like you decide to enter a convent?
BRUNO I really wanted to go to Rome to be educated but I had no choice. My father couldn't turn down a free education in Naples. Furthermore, I wanted to find out for myself the mysteries of God. I had been told God consisted of 3 persons. I doubted that, even then.
HOST You said mysteries of God, mysteries or myths?
BRUNO I decided to determine for myself the truth about God and the Church, whether mysteries or myths.
HOST Church being the Roman Catholic Church.
BRUNO Of course. On my first day in the convent, I received my first ecclesiastic lesson. Without my father's permission, or my permission, the prior replaced my baptismal name Filippo with the monastic name Giordano. From that time on, I was Giordano Bruno. I was made aware St. Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican who lived, taught, and was buried at that convent.
HOST What was your novitiate like?
BRUNO I was forced to submit to the brutally stern discipline of my father superiors. In my free time, I busied myself mostly with Greek and Roman philosophers. But I was interested also in Arabic and Hebrew scholars. I became especially impressed with the philosophy of Averroës and Ramón Lull.
HOST As I understand it, they were both Spanish Moslem philosophers who got into trouble with their Moslem authorities. Averroës, a pantheist, tried to resolve religious conflicts between Christians and Moslems by refuting the erroneous teachings of what he called fallible theologians. About 1195 he was indicted for attacking the fallibility of Moslem theologians. Accused of irreligion, he was exiled from Spain to Morocco where he died. What was your particular interest in him?
BRUNO I was interested in his pantheistic view of God in nature. He was wrongly accused of irreligion because of his unorthodox views on creation and resurrection. He believed a created universe means it's not finite but continually changing. Upon death, he believed our body decays but in resurrection we not only receive a new body with a new soul but our individual intellect is absorbed by the one universal intellect.
HOST Do you believe that?
BRUNO I interpret his universal intellect as God's immanent will. He was wrongly accused of the theory of double truths, scientific truth versus revealed scriptural truth. He tried to reconcile philosophy, science, and scripture declaring that truth bears witness to truth, thereby disproving the unjust claim against him.
HOST Ramòn Lull was another Spanish Moslem philosopher. He acquired knowledge of Arabic and was strongly influenced by Sufi mysticism. In 1263 he had visions of Christ on the cross and thereafter followed a religious life. He was at first attracted to Dominicans but then became a Franciscan. His life's mission was to find commonality among Christians, Jews, and Moslems. He encouraged Christians to study Arabic to help eliminate religious conflicts. For his great knowledge and insights he was known as "Doctor Illuminatus".
BRUNO He thought Christians and Moslems had much in common because they both believed in virgin birth. I was interested in his mission to reveal the mysteries of the Incarnation and Trinity. Lull's greatest achievement is his invention and development of Lullian art, which he envisioned in deep trances. In his trances he saw divine attributes designated by Arabic and Hebrew letters revolving on concentric wheels supported by the geometric logic of circles, squares, triangles. His Lullian art is a method of representing abstract ideas using graphics and mechanical devices. He used his art to represent the mystery of the Trinity and it intrigued me.
HOST On one of his missionary trips to North Africa, he revealed he was against Moslem polygamy and paradise of the hereafter with its purported solicitations by a bevies of virgins.
BRUNO That got him into trouble with Moslem authorities. He was arrested and imprisoned. Some reported he was stoned to death.
HOST In your desire for knowledge you read forbidden books, which kept getting you in trouble.
BRUNO I complained about their restraint of my freedom and intellectual pursuits, which conflicted with their rigid monastic authority. My questioning of Catholic precepts and Church doctrine brought me much unwanted attention. I was rebuked for reading Erasmus' forbidden commentaries. He tried to exposed Church corruption.
HOST The very writing forbidden to you in Naples. You mentioned Church corruption, such as?
BRUNO The Church's struggle for land and political power, its greedy pursuit of money selling indulgences, the buying of the papacy compensated for by selling bishoprics and cardinalates, devising faulty doctrines merely to expand Church authority, and for monetary offerings the annulment of marriages repeatedly consummated by children. Priests will not celebrate a Mass for the dead or a wedding without due payment.
HOST It's often remarked, hate the sin but not the sinner. Hate corruption but not the Church.
BRUNO That's absurd! Hierarchy and authority create the sin and corruption the Church practices. Erasmus, the "prince of humanists", was a priest and leading scholar of his day. He wrote extensively on the lives of saints. Although he remained Catholic, his writings exposed Church corruption that eventually incited the Reformation.
HOST You earned a reputation for your scholarship and encyclopedic memory.
BRUNO Thanks to Lull I developed a system of mnemonics for associating letters and symbols with information, thereby able to quickly retrieve it from memory. Hearing of my mnemonic system, Pope Pius 5th summoned me to Rome to display my talent for memorizing information. I recited some of the teachings of Catholic scholars, Augustine and Aquinas. When the pope asked if I knew any psalms, I gave him my rendition of psalm 86.
HOST Your recitation or rendition?
BRUNO In Hebrew I recited parts 1 and 2. When the pope leaned over intent on my Hebrew recitation, I chanted part 3 in the manner of "a son of Korah". He solemnly and graciously approved of my rendition.
HOST Why did you recite the psalm in Hebrew?
BRUNO I studied Hebrew to enhance my Lullian art. I realized I could use its letters as symbols or numbers for my mnemonic system. But nothing came of my audition. The pope didn't invite me to continue my novitiate in Rome, so I returned to the convent in Naples.
HOST Your unorthodox opinions kept getting you in trouble. You were considered an intransigent nuisance, constantly questioning your father superiors. With all your doubts about Dominicans, or any order, why did you persist in your novitiate?
BRUNO I didn't want to disappoint my own padre.
HOST Weren't you being a bit hypocritical? What motivated you?
BRUNO I was stubborn in my determination to find the truth behind the Church's authority. My father superiors considered me an impertinent novice. Most of my fellow novices thought I was obnoxious on purpose to antagonize my superiors.
HOST Still, you became a priest.
BRUNO At 24, in spite of all the misgivings by my father superiors, I was ordained a Dominican priest. I celebrated my first Mass at the Convent of San Bartolomeo near Salerno. Returning to my Neapolitan convent, I was dispatched to different parishes to celebrate mass under the supervision of my superiors.
HOST While a priest in good standing you wrote the satiric allegory Noah's Ark, in which society is represented by animals ruled by an ass.
BRUNO The ass is chosen by mythological gods who seat him high on the poop deck as lord of the ark. I populate the ark with all sorts of creatures symbolic of virtue or folly. They struggle, as does the clergy, for the seat of honor nearest God. In the end, God grants the seat of honor to the ass. I dedicated Noah's Ark to Pope Pius 5th, a fellow Dominican, with an epistle praising his Holiness. I had the book printed and sent him a copy hoping he'd offer me a position in Rome.
HOST You dedicated to the pope a brutal satire of Church authority and then gifted him with a copy? You sent the pope a copy?
BRUNO He accepted it, but again didn't offer me a position in Rome.
HOST Perhaps it's just as well. As I understand it, Pope Pius 5th was an inquisitor, rigid in his orthodoxy, intolerant of the opinions of those who didn't agree with him. He excommunicated Queen Elizabeth. You were lucky he didn't defrock and excommunicate you. There are those who claim his death in 1572 brought on the massacre of Protestants in Paris.
BRUNO The war between Catholics and Protestants was brewing everywhere and about to erupt like Vesuvius. The eruption happened to be in Paris.
HOST At the convent your tempestuous personality kept getting you in trouble.
BRUNO I spoke openly of philosophy and religion. I became more annoyed at the inflexibility and orthodoxy of the Church. Sometimes I got noticeably irritated at the unfounded claims evolving from its theology. My consistent complaints about the intellectual restraints of monastic life were ignored. The rigors of monasticism disagreed with my pursuit of the truth. My superiors forced their coercive beliefs on me. I escaped by befriending the Muses and philosophy. I withdrew to seek solace in learning and writing. Doing so, I engendered contempt for those who would hide the truth, such as Aristotle and the Church.
HOST As priest, your fellow brethren priests were no longer tolerant of your heretical opinions.
BRUNO My fellow brethren twice suspected I was a budding heretic. Once because I discarded the images of St. Anthony and St. Catherine. Another time for advising a fellow novice to put aside the Seven Joys of the Madonna and read instead the Lives of Holy Fathers. Suspecting me of despising saints and denying the divinity of the Madonna, the fathers tried twice to rehabilitate me but their efforts were unsuccessful. Thereafter, the authorities twice proceeded against me in the preparation of trials for excommunication.
HOST As I understand it you were studying heretical material, such as the Arian Heresy.
BRUNO The doctrine of the Alexandrian priest Arius asserts the principle and primacy of the Father over the Son. Arius pleaded for the dissimilarity among the Father and Son, and by inference the Holy Ghost. This was a radical interpretation of the Trinity as defined in the Creed. In the convent, I discussed these openly which astounded my fellow priests. I also questioned the Incarnation, the Immaculate Conception, and the Eucharist with its transubstantiation. I was searching for the truth. They tried to suppress my philosophical curiosity but I refused to accept their theological explanations.
HOST Your obstinate refusal to accept orthodoxy caused your superiors to charge you with heresy.
BRUNO I was charged with multiple heresies: despising saints, denying the divinity of the Modonna, denying the 2nd and 3rd persons of the Trinity. The head of the order Fra Domenico Vita prepared excommunication proceedings against me. I defended myself claiming my arguments were based on knowledge through reason. At first my brother Dominicans, sitting in judgement, appeared favorably impressed. But then fearing they were being tricked by clever dialectics, they turned against me and found me guilty.
HOST Were you arrested and imprisoned?
BRUNO No, but Fra Domenico Vita convinced me I'd be excommunicated because he ordered me to give up my habit, to unfrock.
BRUNO Several days later I secretly escaped, fleeing to the Convent of Minerva in Rome. To give up my habit was equivalent to being officially defrocked, that is excommunicated. The heretical charges against me in Naples were known in Rome. There the abbot questioned me about my belief in the Trinity. I told him I doubted the 3 in 1 mystery since I was 18. He then informed me that certain prohibited books by Saints Chrysostom, Jerome, and Erasmus were found hidden in the convent in Naples and that I was blamed for hiding them.
HOST Did you?
BRUNO Yes.
HOST You told me Erasmus' writings were forbidden but why were those of Chrysostom and Jerome?
BRUNO The same, they tried to reform the Church. Their writings were controversial. Those in authority exiled Chrysostom forcing him to travel on foot in the wilderness. He died of exposure to inclement weather. Jerome exiled himself, founded a monastery in Jerusalem, and advocated asceticism.
HOST Did Rome charge you with reading those forbidden books?
BRUNO That would have been a clement charge indeed. Next day, I was shocked to stupor by what the abbot told me. It appears the abbot received word that the body of a Neapolitan informer against me was found floating in the Tiber. The abbot then proceeded against me with all the charges from Naples, plus the charge of murdering the informer.
HOST What?
BRUNO I didn't know the purported deceased informer. He was never identified. I never saw the body. I never harmed anyone and I certainly never murdered anyone. Moreover, I was under the strict obedience of the abbot and never left the convent. I spent all my time fretting about the probability of excommunication.
HOST But how could they charge you with murder without any evidence?
BRUNO I was accused of murdering him to prevent him from witnessing against me. The abbot claimed he had a signed affidavit by the person who saw me throw the man into the Tiber.
HOST Did you see the affidavit?
BRUNO No.
HOST How could they accuse you without any evidence?
BRUNO How? He represented the Church, the imperial all-powerful authority not answerable or responsible to anyone or any state but the Church of Rome.
HOST What happened?
BRUNO I was questioned by the abbot and several other fathers. After several days my fears were realized. My Roman superiors informed me they were proceeding against me in order to prepare for a trial of excommunication. Several weeks later, my trial was held. My inquisitors were ignorant men who didn't understand my philosophical explanations of Church theology. They didn't understand that philosophical reasoning is different from theological reasoning. Unjustly accused of multiple heresies including murder, and intuiting a decision against me, I feared arrest and imprisonment. It was then I abandoned my order, my habit, and fled from the Convent of Minerva in Rome.
HOST You were batting 1,000.
BRUNO What?
HOST In your short life as priest you were twice threatened with excommunication. Having abandoned your order and habit, had you excommunicated yourself?
BRUNO When one abandons his habit he abandons his order. But only the Church reserves to itself the power of excommunication; otherwise, many priests would walk away upon every conceivable provocation by the Church.
HOST What happened after you fled Rome?
BRUNO I made my way to the nearest seaport. Wearing my scapular, which I retained and wore as a friar preacher in distress, I begged my passage onto a boat headed for Genoa.
HOST At age 28, after 11 years of cloistered life, you found yourself homeless and on the road.
BRUNO I arrived in Genoa, the more liberal and independent part of Italy. Although monks require devotees to give offerings, I was shocked at what I saw. There were monks exhibiting a tail covered with a veil. They declared it was the tail of the ass that bore Jesus from Mt. Olivet to Jerusalem. Catholics were encouraged to kiss the ass' tail and give alms for the privilege. Of course, even ¼ of a silver shekel will do. I despise that sort of fraud, that mercenary indulgence. The venality of those monks shamed me into almost discarding my scapular but I kept it as a memento. With the few pennies I had, I bought some of the common dress of the laity.
HOST How did you survive in Genoa? Did you find employment?
BRUNO I didn't linger long in Genoa. I was disgusted by what I saw so I continued to Noli, whose name reminded me of my birthplace Nola. I hoped that Noli, a town mentioned in Dante's Purgatory, would welcome me. I was fortunate to find certain gentlemen anxious to learn about the sphere. I therefore prepared a series of lectures on the sphere.
HOST Our earthly sphere?
BRUNO No, Aristotle's sphere. I expounded on his heavenly spheres to interested gentlemen and taught grammar to their sons. My lectures and teachings in return for their food, lodging, and a few dollars. The arrangement afforded me time to write but it wasn't long before we argued over Church doctrines. They denounced me, so after 4 months in Noli, I moved on to Savonna.
HOST It appears your disputatious temperament never ignored an opportunity for argument. Why did you let yourself get into an argument with gentlemen who were supporting you?
BRUNO My integrity is more important than my welfare. Besides, I can't tolerate ignoramuses. I lingered in Savonna for several weeks then continued to Turin. The more northerly I traveled the more liberal it got. I found nothing in Turin to hold me. With my few dollars I boarded a boat and rode the Po to Venice. There at the Dominican convent, the Dominican humanist Remigio Nannini opened the gates for me. He gave me permission to publish my book on philosophy,
On the Signs of the Times
which earned me some much needed money.
HOST You still needed to get permission to publish?
BRUNO As a Dominican, I needed his nihil obstat because I wasn't officially excommunicated.
HOST So you got his imprimatur signifying that nothing hinders you from publishing.
BRUNO His understanding of my predicament helped me get the book printed.
HOST In Venice I understand you also lodged in a private home near St. Mark's square?
BRUNO Even though my friend Nannini intervened on my behalf, the abbot advised me it was time for me to move on. I was fortunate to lodge in the home of a gentleman who purchased my book. He requested further instruction on my innovative philosophy. When my welcome there waned, I departed Venice for Padua.
HOST The first of your two visits to that university city.
BRUNO Wearing my scapular I went directly to the Dominican convent. My scapular recognized I was admitted.
HOST In spite of your alleged heresies, you were still able to find refuge in Catholic monasteries?
BRUNO It was common for cloistered monks to replace their sedentary lifestyles by visiting convents. Their journeys had double advantages; their minds were enlarged by the interchange of ideas and their health improved by walking in the open country.
HOST You must have been in great physical shape to do all that walking.
BRUNO My effort to find a retreat stimulated my walking. There in Padua my fellow Dominicans persuaded me to again don the monks habit. But after several days, fearing reprisal from Rome, I was not encouraged to remain at the convent. The next morning after breakfast, I set out for Brescia. While on the road I had a most unusual experience. I encountered a hermit who invited me into his hovel for a repast of hard bread and broth, mostly water. He related to me his unusual and unfortunate experience with the Church. The hermit had the magical ability to control bleeding when slightly impaled. He showed me heuristic scars on his arms. The townsfolk fearing he had evil power reported him to the Church. Priests conducting their exorcist rituals, pricked him with the tips of knives and needles. Their shallow incisions yielded only clear sticky liquid, no blood. Some exorcists judged it to be water from the side of Jesus; they suggested sainthood. Other exorcists claimed his unearthly power the work of Satan, black magic. They prevailed and the Church excommunicated him.
HOST Did you believe him?
BRUNO Yes, there are mysteries about which we know nothing. He offered me a straw mat and burlap covering for the night. There in a hovel by the side of a country road, we two nightmared in the uneasy sleep of excommunication.
HOST By the way, just what does it mean to be excommunicated?
BRUNO It means the excommunicate is divorced from the Church. Having been found delinquent and contumacious by the Church, it separates the excommunicate to the class of penitents "ordo penitentium". The excommunicate is deprived of the right to celebrate Mass, receive sacraments, or get a Christian burial.
HOST Sacraments such as?
BRUNO Sacraments reveal and involve the mysteries of the Church. They serve as divine acts for man's salvation. Notably the ones all Christians are familiar with, baptism and the Paschal mystery. The Pasch of Christ, the passing over from death to resurrection and glory in heaven.
HOST Easter?
BRUNO Yes, also the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, body and blood of Jesus Christ.
HOST Did you ever celebrate Mass after Naples?
BRUNO Mass celebrates the Holy Eucharist. Recall that St. Francis of Assisi was ostracized because he preferred God over the riches of his family and the power of society. He celebrated Mass before the congregation of souls of the woods, his animals and birds. When I felt compulsed to celebrate Mass, I did so as his devotee. In solitude I'd pretend I was celebrating my Low Missa Romanum under the shadows of the pines of Rome, under Lombardy poplars, or beside the ancient ubiquitous stone roads of Imperial Rome.
HOST A pariah priest.
BRUNO Those who follow their inner voices of dissent should be prepared to be ostracized and even punished by a conforming authority or majority. But my inner voices helped me build a bridge from reasoned knowledge to the Mass.
HOST After the hermit, where did you go?
BRUNO The next morning I began my journey to Bergamo. Having arrived there and approving of my Paduan brothers concern for my dress, I decided to again wear my habit. With the money I'd earned from my book, I bought some inexpensive material and had a habit made over which I donned my scapular, still intact. Wearing a monk's habit I increased my opportunities for lodging at a convent and even a night's stayover with the laity. However, I was proved wrong. When I got to the Dominican convent in Bergamo I was politely received but the abbot, who knew of my difficulties with Rome, encouraged me not to linger. Evicted, I thought I'd try Milan. After spending a night at the Milanese convent, the abbot told me to move on because I had no friends there. Being in the foothills of the Alps, they being in full view, I decided to exile myself and cross over to join reformist Italians in the city of Geneva.
HOST You departed Italy for self exile in Geneva?
BRUNO Recall that Dante was exiled from Florence because of his political views. I exiled myself because of my combined religious and philosophical views. I refused to submit to a religion based on fallible dogma.
HOST You went from one intolerable religion to another. Calvin himself, one of the founders of the Reformation, had to flee Catholic France for his heretical views. You became an Italian refugee in Geneva, the center of Calvinism?
BRUNO Not only that, I was an Italian refugee wearing a monk's habit. Geneva was a refuge for dissenting Catholics, especially for Italians drifting toward Protestantism. On my arrival, I added my name to the list of Italian refugees. I was fortunate to be hosted by the Italian nobleman Marchese de Vito of Naples who, by the way, abandoned in Italy his family and religion to embrace Calvinism in Geneva.
HOST Naples again, the place where your odyssey began. Without a Dominican monastery in Geneva, how did you survive?
BRUNO de Vito knew of my difficulties. In order for me to find employment, he convinced me to throw off my monk's habit and dress in the Genevan fashion. He was charitable and presented me with new attire, so I got rid of the monk's habit but, as in the past, I kept my scapular. Geneva, famous for printing Bibles, I eventually earned my living proofreading Biblical texts in Italian or Latin. de Vito then suggested I join his discussion group. We discussed Calvinism in detail and also Erasmus' writings on Church corruption. Months later, on 20May1579, I was encouraged to sign the Calvinist Rector's Book at Geneva University.
HOST You remember that date?
BRUNO It was the first time I directly cooperated with Protestants.
HOST You became a Calvinist?
BRUNO No, no. I don't believe in predestination, that God determines before birth whether you'll spend your next life in heaven or hell. I can envision an infant dying at birth doomed to eternal fires of hell. I don't believe in original sin; it's preposterous. I certainly don't believe in the authority of scripture written by story tellers and travelling beggars 70 years after Jesus died. I do believe that all is under the purview of God, that's not the same as Calvinism. Besides, I was somewhat indifferent to quarrels between Catholics and Protestants. They respected Aristotle to the extent that those against him were against their religions. I didn't agree with most of Aristotle, but I continued to participate in the discussion group to satisfy certain important gentlemen who were kind to me. I desired to remain in Geneva to live in peace and liberty, to concentrate on my writing.
HOST But your irascibility got you in trouble again, this time with the rector of Geneva University.
BRUNO The university rector invited me to attend a lecture by his friend Antoine de la Faye, a Biblical scholar and distinguished professor at the university. He too was a refugee in Geneva, having taken his degree in medicine at Padua University. Noting at least 20 errors in his lecture, I wrote a paper citing each error.
HOST Some claimed your paper a polemic, an unjustified and vituperative personal attack on de la Faye. You bestowed the epithet pedants on university professors and ministers of the Church of Geneva. I thought you wanted to live in peace and liberty?
BRUNO I wanted to live in peace but I couldn't tolerate pedagogic fools. My paper was not an ad hominem attack against de la Faye. It ridiculed the professed scholarship of a pedant who pretended to be a Biblical scholar. When I had my paper printed, the printer and I were arrested. The printer claimed I led him astray. He was released and let off with a fine. I was arrested and jailed. They prepared excommunication proceedings against me and the Church of Geneva deprived me from participating in its services.
HOST Had you converted to Calvinism?
BRUNO No.
HOST This is very confusing. When you inscribed your name in the Rector's Book, did it make you eligible to attend services? Otherwise, how could the Church of Geneva excommunicate a non-Calvinist?
BRUNO I never became a Calvinist and never attended any of their religious services. In my case, it amounted to civil excommunication. They had the authority to excommunicate me from their religious services, university disputations, and residence in Geneva.
HOST Everywhere you went, you were being excommunicated because of your tempestuous and intolerant temperament. It appears you maintained an active vendetta against authority whether ecclesiastic or secular, and especially against those you considered university pedants.
BRUNO Being in a foreign land I retracted my paper against de la Faye and apologized. Still, I was indicted. At my trial I argued my paper was not an attack against Calvinism; it merely clarified philosophical points in de la Faye's faulty lecture. I recanted certain points, and on those points they found me innocent. In return, they demanded I submit to the rehabilitation of my views and that I become a Calvinist in order to continue residence in Geneva. Refusing to change my views or become a Calvinist, I was no longer welcome in Geneva. I prepared to cross over to nearby France.
HOST A refugee once again, on the road.
BRUNO I had in mind to go to Lyons, the center of book publishing in southeastern France. On my way I passed through Chambéry to nearby Grenoble. I stopped there at the great hermitage of Chartreuse the center of the Carthusian Order, founded by my namesake St. Bruno.
HOST One of your relatives?
BRUNO Fortunately no, I could never keep a vow of silence or spend my life in a cell in solitary contemplation. You have to be an eastern mystic to do that, to fantasize God and thereby submit in austerity to those excursions of mind that affirm one's faith and sanity. Their stricture of my complaining tongue was made tolerable by the spiritual emollient of their marvelous liqueur distilled with the spirit of the Holy Ghost. They bake hearty crusty bread toasted for dipping into their morning cafe latte blessed with their liqueur. After a week or so, I continued to Lyons where there was a sizeable Italian colony. Lyons was known for its publishing business and I thought I could find employment there as I had in Geneva. But after a month of finding no employment, I boarded barges on the Isère and Rhône to Port St. Louis. Finding no employment there I considered crossing the bay back to Italy. Then I learned that Toulouse had a large university of 10,000 students. I then barged across the bay to Agde and immediately set out across the country for Toulouse.
HOST I understand Toulouse was also a bulwark of Catholic orthodoxy. Its Inquisition frequently examined alleged heretics, even those arrested under false pretenses. Lull taught there at its Dominican monastery, which claims Aquinas' bones are buried there.
BRUNO Not true, Aquinas is buried in Naples.
HOST Perhaps Aquinas is the Catholic colossus bestriding Naples and Toulouse.
BRUNO Toulouse also had a considerable Protestant population. But most interesting and unusual is that students at Toulouse University chose their professors. My rebellious character having preceded me, I anticipated the probability of teaching there.
HOST It appears your reputation was known on both sides of the Alps.
BRUNO Fortuna smiling at me, there was an opening for a lecturer. I applied for the position because I would not be obliged to attend Catholic services or participate in the Mass. Students quickly chose me their teacher of philosophy and the university honored me with a doctorate of philosophy. I lectured on the sphere and on Aristotle's Anima, which I called my De Anima lectures. To improve the poor memory of my students, I lectured on Lullian art and mnemonics
HOST You were, at last, living the very lifestyle you wanted.
BRUNO Except that professors there did not welcome me as one of their own. Nevertheless, taking advantage of my university position, I went to confession for the first time in 6 years, since I left Naples. Hoping for absolution, I petitioned the local Catholic fathers but they refused me. I then tried for absolution from the Jesuits but they too refused me. After more than a year lecturing at the university, the religious wars of Paris migrated south. With the lack of spirited disputations and coming Gallic tumults, I departed provincial life in Toulouse for the cosmopolitan society of Paris.
HOST You abandoned a peaceful provincial life for Paris, the hotbed of fighting between Catholics and Protestants?
BRUNO It's true that Catholics and Huguenots were killing each other but Paris was the center of book publishing. I had written a new book,
Shadows of Ideas
and wanted to get it printed. Provincial peace is desirable but stimulating debate and disputation are better.
HOST You arrived in Paris in 1581 when you were 33.
BRUNO I called upon my brethren at the Dominican monastery. I convinced them to give me lodging because I was planning a series of lectures on Aquinas at the Sorbonne, Paris University. The abbot agreed and I gave 30 lectures on Aquinas' 30 divine attributes. The faculty at the Sorbonne, favorably impressed, offered me a lectureship. Unfortunately, I was obliged to refuse.
HOST You refused a lectureship at the Sorbonne?
BRUNO The Sorbonne, complying with the prejudices of ecclesiastics, required me to attend Mass. Threatened with excommunication, I could not in good conscience accept the lectureship.
HOST Ending your hopes of a lectureship in Paris?
BRUNO No. I learned King Henry 3rd was fond of magic and men of letters, so I arranged a series of lectures on Hermes Trismegistus.
HOST The Egyptian mystic and priest?
BRUNO Yes, the thrice greatest, the most important figure of Renaissance magic. He's the alleged author of Corpus Hermeticum which expounds on alchemy, images, planets, talismans. He was called the gentile Moses because he led us out of paganism to Christianity. In fact, he's sometimes shown with his two sibyls holding their prophecies of Christianity. When news of my teaching reached King Henry 3rd, an avid believer in magic, he summoned me to his court.
HOST A court dominated by Catholics tolerant of the Protestant Henry of Bourbon, King of Navarre and the heir apparent to the throne of France.
BRUNO At court the king wanted to know whether my encyclopedic knowledge was obtained naturally or through magic. He patronized me for my secrets. I assured him my powers of memory resulted from my system of mnemonics based on Lullian art, enabling me to quickly retrieve information from memory. Some at court accused me of using black magic, yet I was privileged in meeting influential gentlemen whose religious views were compatible with mine.
HOST There were those who ridiculed you as the wandering Italian magician, a Renaissance magus. Was your belief in magic your connection to Trismegistus?
BRUNO Perhaps. Favored at court, but forbidden by ecclesiastics to lecture at the Sorbonne, the king appointed me a royal lecturer with salary at the College of Cambrai. I accepted because I wasn't required to attend Mass. It was a modern thinking school more liberal than the ignorant Sorbonne.
HOST Your college position must have given you a sense of accomplishment and freedom to express yourself because you wrote a number of books having to do with truth, memory, and mnemonics.
BRUNO I dedicated my new books to the king in appreciation of my court privileges and to certain kind indulgent gentlemen of his court.
HOST To your Shadows of Ideas you added another book,
Art of Memory
you had them printed together in one book. We think of a book of what's between two covers. Some of your books append other of your books in the same volume, very confusing.
BRUNO Not at all. When I find a printer, I merely print what I have ready. It's cheaper to print two works in a single volume rather than separately.
HOST What about the first work, Shadows of Ideas.
BRUNO I speak of shadows because truth absolute is unknowable. You see, ideas are the intellect at work. Human phenomena as realities are but shadows of ideas. We are shadows manifested by God, whose intellect reaches us as light mixed with darkness. Ideas are a mixture of knowledge and shadows of truth. Shadows posturing as truths will disappear with the free exercise of intellect. The more we understand the less mysterious and more fleeting are shadows, reality and truth endure.
HOST Your shadows take on philosophic postulates and then human virtues.
BRUNO The more to separate philosophy from theology and Church authority. Consider actors who make their living by pretense; they are the shadows of characters they portray. Nature's mysteries teach us we are but living shadows of sense perception, shadows of truth.
HOST What about the Art of Memory?
BRUNO It's my organon of Lullian art intended to help the king improve his memory.
HOST Today that book would be classified an aid to artificial memory.
BRUNO Roman orators used mnemonics to memorize parts of speeches by associating phrases with visual cues. The lectern may bring to mind a certain phrase, a statue another phrase. I developed my own system of mnemonics as did Magnus and Aquinas. Recall that Magnus was teacher of Aquinas. I admire the scholastic efforts of Augustine, Magnus, and Aquinas but they merely incensed the altar of reality because their scholarly works are based on faith, not on nature. The king was so pleased with my presentation of the Art of Memory, I decided to add to his appreciation by writing two more books.
HOST You wrote the books,
Compendium of Lullian Art
Incantation of Circe
BRUNO In Compendium I expand on Lullian art with accessories for improving memory. I associate an image, talisman, or place with information. Mnemonics, useful symbolic logic, are the shortest route to memory. We can economize thought using mnemonics which are the shadows of memory. I relate philosophic reasoning with the architecture of the mind. Different thoughts relate to different parts of the brain. Philosophy is made acceptable through reasoning but Christianity is made acceptable only through faith and revelation.
HOST What about the Incantation of Circe?
BRUNO In that book I regard the nature of memory and its recalling as a fascinating incantation. With her sorcerer's stone, songs, and magic Circe transforms men into beasts. I have her transform human vices to beasts. She dialogs with her handmaiden about the human vice each beast represents. Each vice and its beast can be memorized mnemonically. I also relate the birthplace of these vices and beasts to certain parts of the brain.
HOST In your burst of literary output you also wrote a play,
The Candlebearer
a vernacular comedy. In it you protest the moral corruption of Neapolitans and expound on your enmities of monastic life. Did you consider yourself a candlebearer throwing light upon the evils of society and monasticism?
BRUNO Perhaps, I'm certainly against the ignorance of the mob and the magisterial attitude of Church fathers.
HOST Its full title is ironically telling - The Candlebearer by Bruno the Nolan, Graduate of No Academy, Called the Nuisance. On its frontispiece you inserted a phrase declaring there's sadness in gaiety and in gaiety sadness. It appears that humor was not one of your attributes.
BRUNO Merely a philosophic observation. I felt compelled to write about the low morals, the seamy side of Neapolitans, and the miseries of abominable monastic life.
HOST There are those who claim that The Candlebearer influenced Shakespeare's Love's Labors Lost.
BRUNO I know nothing of that.
HOST Before the play's dialog, you inserted the prefatory sordid tale of monks in Genoa begging for alms using the tail of the ass they claim Jesus rode.
BRUNO Genoa or Naples makes no difference. When it comes to begging for alms, monks use proven methods.
HOST You ridiculed laggard lovers, niggardly misers, and foolish pedants.
BRUNO Pedants are puffed up with the sinful pride of their imagined importance. Unfortunately, those pedants are supported by an ignorant public.
HOST While busy lecturing, writing, and printing your works you suddenly left Paris. It was reported the king declared that you had a great talent for discord, that your disputations were no longer welcome at court. It appears the king, rather than retain your services, was happy to recommend you to others.
BRUNO You should understand the king was very whimsical, of vacillating temperament. What he'd confirm one day he'd deny the next. Yet, you can imagine my surprise when the king handed me royal letters of recommendation to Michel de Castelnau, Marquis de Mauvissière his ambassador in London.
HOST Your sudden departure aroused much gossip and speculation. Was it true that the king sent you on a sub rosa mission to London? There you were to use your mental gymnastics to lure back to Catholicism the heretic Protestant Queen Elizabeth.
BRUNO I was never informed of that cabal. I didn't know what was in the king's mind and I never had the effrontery to open his sealed letters. What matters is that I had royal letters of recommendation from the king to his ambassador in London. My clavis magna in London.
HOST When the British Ambassador in Paris heard of your intention to cross the channel to England, he wrote:
"Dr. Jordano Bruno Nolano, a professor in philosophy, intendeth to pass into England whose religion I cannot commend". 1
BRUNO In the spring of 1583, after two years in Paris, I crossed from Calias to Dover then up the Thames to London. I was 35 and privileged to present my royal letters of recommendation to Castelnau, the French ambassador, who graciously ensconced me in his manorial household.
HOST I understand it the ambassador and his wife were kind to you.
BRUNO I was fortunate indeed to have my own room in their residence, truly luxurious when contrasted to my usual lodgings. I ate nutritious meals for the first time since I was a boy in Nola. Reciprocating their kindness, I tutored their two little girls one of whom was goddaughter of Mary Queen of Scots. Castelnau was interested in literature and supported me in my work. Aware of my problems with the Church, he even excused me from attending Mass in his manorial chapel. One day the ambassador requested I accompany him to the court of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth and introduced me to her. Because of Castelnau's prestige, I was welcomed at her court.
HOST At Elizabeth’s court, the fiery and feminine man-queen.
BRUNO Italians were welcomed at her court because she loved to speak Italian. She surprised me with her fluency in Italian, affording me the sporadic opportunity of conversing with her. Attending her court, the ambassador introduced me to certain influential courtiers. I was fortunate to have joined an elite circle of prominent courtiers such as the Earl of Leicester, his nephew Sir Philip Sidney, both patrons of Italians in London, Sir Walter Raleigh, Lord Burghley the queen's factotum, and others. I counted them as my friends and sometimes patrons.
HOST At that time London was a haven for European refugees such as Dutch, Flemings, Huguenots, Italians. Some of those refugees lived in the mansions of English noblemen who protected them. It was reported you were a star in London's Anglo-Italian clique.
BRUNO At court Sidney and his elite clientele canvassed me for my scientific and philosophic views. My religious beliefs compared favorably with theirs and also with the dissatisfied Catholic intelligentsia who hated the papacy and Spain.
HOST Touring Italy was an indispensable finishing school for English courtiers. Were you aware that Sidney was touring northern Italy at the same time you were?
BRUNO No, but he made me aware of his tour of Italy.
HOST Did you ever meet Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford a court luminary and England's greatest poet and playwright?
BRUNO No, but I often heard Oxford's name mentioned. He was the subject of mean gossip. It appeared that he was in disrepute, exiled from court by the queen for having impregnated one of her maids of honor.
HOST I mention Oxford because there are those who say that certain conventions of his comedies are based on your comedy The Candlebearer.
BRUNO I regret not having met him.
HOST Were you aware that Oxford was touring southern Italy and Sicily while you were being charged with heresy, fleeing from Naples and Rome?
BRUNO How could I be aware of that? You're being irrational. I was cloistered, charged with heresies, fleeing for my life. But if I'd encountered him, I'd have begged for transport in his carriage. Those living cloistered have little use for the goings-on and vicissitudes of secular life.
HOST Were you aware that Sidney and Oxford were enemies?
BRUNO In that case, it would have been imprudent for Sidney to have introduced me to Oxford.
HOST Sidney was a popular poet and stalwart Protestant. Oxford was suspected of sympathizing with Catholics. They were courtly, religious, literary, even jousting enemies. Oxford dressed in the Italian style and was pursued by the ladies. Courtiers envied him and mocked him as the Italianate Englishman. He was fluent in several languages and conversed in Italian with the queen.
BRUNO In that case, I truly regret not having met him.
HOST Perhaps you would have been disappointed, the two of you having similar personalities - hot tempered, impetuous, intellectually intolerant. Even so, hidden underneath, both of you were endowed with a generous love of learning and knowledge. Oxford had great social skills, which is why you differ from him. Did you ever meet the popular poet and playwright Shakespeare?
BRUNO Never heard of him.
HOST There were a few in London who knew that Oxford was the pseudonymous Shakespeare.
BRUNO I know nothing of that.
HOST I'm anxious to hear about your version of the infamous incident at Oxford University. As I understand the preliminaries the Italian John Florio, was a confidant of the queen, poet, lexicographer, tutor to one of Castelnau's daughters, and sometime fellow lodger in his ambassadorial residence. Florio was instrumental in arranging the disputation at Oxford.
BRUNO Florio's friend and fellow Italian, Albericus Gentilis lived in the city of Oxford. Also a confidant of the queen, he was called "grandfather of international law" and lectured at the university. Sir Fulke Greville and Mathew Gwynne were also Florio's friends. Together, they were among those who made disputations at the university. They invited me to join them to discourse at Oxford. My friend the Earl of Leicester, Chancellor of Oxford, heartily approved.
HOST What caused the infamous incident?
BRUNO We expounded on medieval and Aristotelian philosophy. The disputation degenerated into a bitter quarrel with Oxford doctors, professors who were in love with Aristotle. The dispute became a philosophical brawl in which Oxford professors repudiated my presentation.
HOST Why?
BRUNO When expounding on planetary spheres, Oxford professors made circular gestures with their hands or drew simple and stark Protestant diagrams writing the name of each sphere. I became impatient with their tentative presentations. My presentation was quick. My diagrams heavily endowed and embellished with art and mnemonics.
HOST Such as?
BRUNO MVEM - Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and JSUN - Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. They repudiated my presentation. They claimed I was trying to open the cosmological door with my mystical key. They objected to my use of mnemonics. I responded it was silly and a waste of time to repeat the full names of planets all the time. Why repeat full names when mnemonic codes identify them. They also repudiated my admiration for Averroës, Lull, and Aquinas. To those charges, I expressed contempt for their fashionable attendance to grammar and style.
HOST Of English?
BRUNO No, no, Latin of course. They dismissed my arguments as yarn unwound from Aristotle's universe adorned with convolutions of quasi-mathematics and mnemonics.
HOST It was reported that, because you were constantly moving from town to town, several Oxford professors pejoratively referred to you as "gypsy philosopher" and "Italian magus".
BRUNO Of course, their fat bottoms were stuck to their comfortable chairs. Their complacency feared new ideas or new interpretations of old theories. I don't believe the problem was my interpretation of Aristotle. It seemed to me that I did not present my views with the pedagogy and punctilios required of the authoritative manner of Oxford professors. I disputed with philosophical reasoning. They disputed with the pomposity of their tenured sinecures.
HOST They reported you didn't know how to integrate your vast knowledge with university protocols and social responsibility. You could not play the social game. You were a brilliant thinker but socially inept because of your lack of tact. You aggrandized satire to polemic and made ad hominem attacks against professors. Their rebuff added yet another to your serial disappointments.
BRUNO I know, I'm just an incorrigible philosopher whose ragged dark robes were loomed by the goddess Ate. We were two planets in apposition. I knew little English and apparently less of English schoolmen. At Oxford a doctorate was easily purchased. It's no wonder its professors parroted Aristotle's defective teachings. If any professor dared diverge from prescribed teaching, he was fined 5 shillings for each offense.
HOST Clearly, it's a gross understatement to say Oxford University was not for you.
BRUNO They claimed their Anglican religion trumped Catholicism but in its intolerance of Catholics, Oxford became none other than Anglican Rome. Those pedants are typical of the intolerance of new knowledge. They're like children who haven't gone beyond elementary logic to the deep insights of virile intuition, which requires a greater mental capacity, a higher sense of perception. Their language was flat, lacking the incantatory power and magic of liturgy. They worship Aristotle because he too had a pedant's mind which couldn't grasp the profound insights of intuition.
HOST In spite of your unfortunate experience, your fellow writers Florio, Sidney, and Greville were especially kind to you, encouraging you to respond in writing to your humiliation.
BRUNO I was fortunate to call them friends and have Castelnau protect me from poverty and Oxford pedants. When I returned to the friendly atmosphere of his retreat, I immediately dashed off my impressions of the unfortunate incident.
"They spoke Latin well, were proper men ... of good reputation ... fairly competent in learning but mediocre in education, courtesy and breeding ... well furnished with titles ... for 'tis yes my master; yes my father, or my mistress; yes sir forsooth ... elect indeed with their long academic robes, clad in velvet. One wore two shining gold chains about his neck while the other, by God, whose precious hand bore twelve rings on two fingers, had rather the appearance of a rich jeweler who would wrench eyes and heart from the amorous beholder ... Did they know aught of Greek? Aye and also of beer ... One was the herald of the idol of Obscurity and the other bailiff of the goddess of Presumption." 2
They required gold rings and chains to atone for their lack of knowledge. I had no rings or gold of any kind and my coat was lacking in its full complement of buttons. I criticized the puffed up pedantry of Oxford professors, who spoke like the stuffed heads of puppets.
HOST I have another of your tirades (reads):
"Search where you will in England to-day you shall find everybody a Doctor in Grammar; so that the happy country is ruled by a constellation of pedants who exhibit obstinacy, ignorance and presumption, mixed up with such boorish rudeness that it might provoke the patience of Job. Should you doubt, go to Oxford and let them tell you about what happened to the Nolan when he disputed publicly with these Doctors of theology before the Prince Laski the pole and certain English nobles. Learn how they replied to his argument and how, on that great occasion, a wretched doctor got stuck, like a chicken in stubble, fifteen times in the fifteen syllogisms he pronounced as Coryphaeus of the University. Hear tell how vulgar and violent the pig was, and how patient and forebearing was the other, who shewed his Neapolitan breeding and rearing under a kindly sky. Ask how they put a stop to his public lectures, both on the Immortality of the Soul on the Quintuple Sphere." 3
BRUNO They cited me as that loud, excitable, and gesticulating Nolan foreigner. They failed to realize I had the fire of Vesuvius in me.
HOST It appears they cooled your Neapolitan fire and impaired your self esteem.
BRUNO They chided me for speaking too quickly in an agitated mode, leading them through the complicated labyrinth of my memory and then leaving them there scattered in disparate areas therein. My words were unintelligible to them because they knew only the words pedants learn by rote.
HOST They must have thought you a wild Pan with hot head and thin skin.
BRUNO A goat with menacing horns, a hard head, and big mouth ready for sacrifice:
"I am rough-hewn by nature, unlearned in smoothing the hair, coloring the cheek, crowning the head with fragrant hyacinth, unbending to the dance, or turning harsh accents to a ditty, or stoop to play the woman or the boy." 4
HOST At least they didn't excommunicate you.
BRUNO And for that, I declared Oxford an Aristotelian institution, an excellent university marked by the pomp of dignified ceremonies, and for narcistic status the first in Europe. Thereafter, I completed several works expounding on Lullian art, elaborating on mnemonic principles for improving memory in the arts and sciences. I added a treatise on metaphysics and enriched my writings with artful drawings and diagrams. I collated the whole in the following:
Opening of the 30 Seals
Seal of Seals
I had the two works printed as one book. I dedicated them to my generous and beneficent patron Castelnau. I also gave public lectures to awaken the moroseness of Oxford doctors.
HOST The Opening of the 30 Seals includes a prefatory epistle, a satiric and defiant effusion titled the Awakener, whose purpose was to awaken the faculty at Oxford University (reads):
"Philotheus Jordanus Brunus of Nola, a doctor in perfected theology; a professor of pure and blameless wisdom; a philosopher known, approved, and honorifically acknowledged by the foremost academies of Europe; to none a stranger, save barbarians and the vulgar; a waker of slumbering souls; a breaker of presumptuous and stubborn ignorance; who, in all his dealings, professes love to all men, love to the Italian and to the Briton, to man and woman, to the mitre and to the crown, to him wearing the toga and to the warrior, to the frocked and to the unfrocked, but who is inclined chiefly to him whose way is peaceable, enlightened, true, and fruitful; who looks not to the anointed head nor to the circumcised, but thither where man's true countenance is to be found, towards his soul, and the perfection of his spirit; whom dispensers of foolishness and hypocrites abhor; whom upright and sincere men love; whom noble souls receive with acclamation, - To the honored and noble Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford and to his fellows greeting." 5
BRUNO Later, I applied for an Oxford lectureship, which they forthrightly rejected.
HOST You mean after all the enmities on both sides, your discrediting impressions, and your satiric epistle you actually applied for a university position? Didn't you understand their deep antagonism and combative discrimination against you? You flagellated them with incisive vituperation totally devoid of compassion, not very conducive to their friendship. How did you expect to retain, or even obtain, a teaching position with such attacks on those who could employ you?
BRUNO My innovative philosophy was accepted by European universities but Oxford, in great need of new blood and new ideas, rejected me.
HOST Your resentment is certainly exemplified in your writings. In 1584-85, ages 36-37, you had your two most productive literary years. It appears your many years of learning came to fruition in London.
BRUNO My vicissitudes coupled with my resentment of the Oxford incident fueled a frenzy of writing wherein my pen hardly kept pace with my thoughts. I imposed upon Castelnau to hire a copyist.
HOST I understand you had several copyists, each in turn becoming confused and agitated at your manner of working.
BRUNO When I write, my thoughts race ahead of my hand. While penning one dialog, I'd be dictating another to my copyist.
HOST Is that possible?
BRUNO It is when I write in Italian.
HOST You wrote in Italian 6 books, 3 cosmological and 3 ethical. Why didn't you write in the normally accepted Latin?
BRUNO Italian suited my tumultuous mental flourishes better than Latin.
HOST Why dialogs and not treatises?
BRUNO Dialogs are an ancient literary format suited to philosophical dramas. For meaningful debate, dialogs are best for representing several voices each with a different opinion. A treatise has only the voice of the writer, unless he alludes to or quotes other writers. In my case, I like to quote myself.
HOST The makeup of your books consisted of prefatory dedications and epistles before the dialogs.
BRUNO Dedications are a common practice for dependent writers to thank their friends and patrons.
HOST I've read English translations of your books. Now while the titles are different, their contents have much in common.
BRUNO Your English translations have not the subtleties of Italian. Commonality has value; it feeds the senses which discriminate truths thereby eventually accumulating to ideas and conclusions.
HOST Even so I found your writings confusing and difficult to comprehend.
BRUNO It's no wonder. English is a language which, like a resentful bastard son, protests the subtleties of its roots and lineages. Recall that Latin roots crawled up the boot from Rome to Europe.
HOST Is that because you're not fluent in English?
BRUNO English? I'm fluent in French, Italian, Latin, Spanish. I have a working knowledge of Greek and Hebrew. Except for your premier poet, Oxford, what's written in English that I should assiduously apply myself to its learning? English is spoken only on the small island of England.
HOST Your cosmology and philosophy are interleaved, convoluted, layered upon each other, and sometimes contradictory. Cosmology and philosophy are two distinct disciplines but in your writings they're mixed up and melded like hamburger.
BRUNO Hamburger?
HOST Ground up meat like sausage.
BRUNO Oh, carne macinata. My cosmology is my philosophy of the heavens, which separates me from the pack of university pedants. That's why, after my repulse at Oxford, I gave public lectures to awaken the intelligentsia informing them of the difference. I awakened constellations of pedants from grammar and the dead hand of Aristotle. Pedants understand Aristotle least but admire him most. I wrote a series of books expounding on my cosmology and phillosophy.
HOST In your cosmological trilogy are:
Supper of Ashes
On Cause, Origin, and One
On the Infinite Universe and Worlds
It appears to me that your dialogs proceed as did Aquinas in his Summa, stating premises followed by arguments for and against. Also, in these dialogs you refer to yourself as Philotheus, lover of God.
BRUNO I thought about using the name Panamo but I'm not a lover of all. I discriminate for truth in knowledge.
HOST I'd like your summary of each book to better understand them. Let's begin with Supper of Ashes, one of your most important books. First of all, what's the significance of that unusual title?
BRUNO The supper of ashes alludes and is preliminary to the next day, Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. The supper is the practice of consuming all the food forbidden during Lent. If one is poor, scraps are consumed. If one is rich, it's a feast. I thought it an apt title for discoursing on a variety of subjects, a rhetorical potpourri. I compare it to a banquet in which each dish is designed to stimulate the palate for the next, suggestive of a symposium. We met at the home of Fulke Greville to discuss cosmology, mathematics, and philosophy.
HOST We?
BRUNO Greville, Sidney and circle of friends.
HOST Before the Supper dialogs, you inserted several epistles. In one epistle you complained bitterly about ordinary Londoners, venting your wrath on their bad manners. In particular, the rude behavior of London commoners who discriminated against foreigners.
BRUNO In fact, on a London street, a large woman bumped into me almost knocking me down. An insensitive boorish woman, uncouth and garrulous, bellowing invectives. I protested her uncivil manner.
HOST In English?
BRUNO In Italian punctuated with enough English to vent my wrath. We got into a violent argument. I was arrested and imprisoned but Castelnau intervened. I was released and the charges dropped. Even with its boorish manners, London was more peaceful than most cities on the continent.
HOST But in another epistle, you praise English women as nymphs of the Thames. You especially praise the queen, bestowing flattering bouquets upon her.
BRUNO I wrote kind words in appreciation of my court privileges and her hospitality.
"Of Elizabeth I speak, who by her title and royal dignity is inferior to no other monarch in the world; who for her wisdom and skill in sound government is second to none of those who holds the royal scepter ... If earthy territory were a true reflection of the width and grandeur of her spirit, this great Amphitrite would bring far horizons within her girdle and enlarge the circumference of her dominion to include not only Britain and Ireland but some new world, as vast as the universal frame, where her all-powerful hand should have full scope to raise a united monarchy." 6
HOST You foresaw British rule over the new world called America for the eponymous Amerigo Vespucci?
BRUNO Whatever the new world name, I foresaw an expanded united monarchy under her rule.
HOST But England was threatened by plots from Spain and the pope. How could the queen expand her rule against those powerful forces?
BRUNO I don't know, I had the vision. Spain not only threatened England but ruled over the Kingdom of Naples land of my birth, so I had sympathy for the queen's predicament.
HOST You called her Amphitrite, goddess of the sea.
BRUNO Ruler of the seas of her expanded monarchy. Keep in mind we are integrated in nature. Do we not live as fish in the womb of Amphitrite, our mother sea, until she expels us upon the shore?
HOST You dedicated Supper of Ashes to Castelnau, expressing appreciation for your patron's generosity (reads):
"the most illustrious and most generous soul of Seigneur de Mauvissière, under whose auspices so much solemn philosophy has seen the day, that there may perchance be found some sufficient means by which the stars and the powers on high should guide the Nolan to a spot remote from outrage." 7
BRUNO The ambassador offered me a retreat from Oxford pedants, the Londoner mob, and the Church.
HOST Now, to the main argument of your Supper.
BRUNO I was compulsed to explain the systematic reasoning of my philosophy for the benefit of Londoners, especially those university pedants who had rejected me.
HOST What about Copernicus? He challenged the Church by placing the sun in the center of the universe, which began the ideological conflict between theology and science.
BRUNO I refute Aristotle's astronomy and accept Copernicus' theory. Firstly, using Aristotle's heliocentric model, Ptolemy compiled tables predicting astronomical movements. Those tables were grossly inaccurate. Secondly Copernicus, making corrections to Ptolemy's tables, placed the sun at the center of the universe with earth a planet orbiting the sun. He figured the earth turns on its axis while the sun appears to move east to west. The earth's motion gives us day and night. Moreover, earth's solar revolution gives us the phenomena of four seasons.
HOST Aristotle's cosmology dominated European thought. Your writings criticize him.
BRUNO Aristotle's cosmology keeps the world in bondage as does Church authority. His finite universe is terracentric, a central motionless earth, surrounded by concentric spheres of decreasing elemental density - water, air, fire, ether except that we see lightning penetrate them. Those spheres are then surrounded by a sublunary sphere, itself surrounded by the moon and other concentric planetary spheres including our earth and sun. Beyond all those is the sphere of fixed stars and beyond that the sphere of Primum Mobile itself immobile but which moves all other spheres by its divine power. I reject Aristotle's fixed earth, with its series of fixed spheres. Aristotle declares each planet, attached to its sphere, is moved by other concentric spheres.
HOST Spheres and more spheres?
BRUNO He estimated there are 49-55 spheres. I don't believe in his alignment of concentric spheres. No one has ever observed in one instance all planets aligned.
HOST What do his spheres have to do with your frequent attacks on him?
BRUNO His spheres declare the heavens finite. We are fortunate indeed that God made the heavens infinite to accommodate all of Aristotle's spheres. God does not lack will power; his omnipotence cannot be finite. God's power cannot be confined to the convexity of spheres. Mathematically, it appears that between two points a straight line may be deformed by the attraction or repulsion of planets.
HOST What about Aristotle's divine Primum Mobile?
BRUNO He claimed his Primum Mobile is the divine external force, the wind of God creating motion in the universe. I've seen his theory parodied in pictures of angels turning cranks to power his Primum Mobile.
HOST You accept Copernicus yet slight his theory.
BRUNO I reaffirm Copernicus' heliocentric theory but reject his belief in Aristotle's finite universe and sphere of fixed stars. It seems to me that principles observed on earth are the same throughout the universe. The earth's atmosphere moves with it causing changes on land and sea. All life has motion and the earth moves because it's living. It belches, cracks, floods, and grows food. All over earth are signs of life. The same may apply to other planets. One must transcend Copernicus' mathematics to understand the full application of his theory, which he did not. He was a mathematician not a philosopher. His new scheme was only part of the astronomical puzzle. There's life on earth so there may be life on other planets. We already had the discoveries of Columbo, Vespucci, Caboto. If Columbo was the first to cross the ocean to the new world, what about the first who crosses the astronomical skies to the infinite universe?
HOST So you also reject Copernicus?
BRUNO I accept his theory but slight his limited application of it.
HOST In that respect you anticipated your countryman Galileo.
BRUNO Galileo? never heard of him.
HOST Before we go on to other of your writings, can you summarize your philosophy so I can better understand it?
BRUNO We need to understand how we know what we know. All that we know comes from sense perception, so we must begin with the role of sensory perception in human reasoning. Knowledge is limited to our senses. We may know the result of perception but not the cause. We may know the statue but not the sculptor. A single sense perception may not yield the truth. Illusions are resolved by comparing the result of one perception with another. To arrive at the truth, one requires multiple sense perceptions, each interpreted by reason. From diverse sources the inconstancy of our senses means that truth must be inferred from serial perceptions. Our senses perceive an endless series of objects, each one contained by another. Our senses do not preclude or oppose infinity. We may posit infinity because our senses perceive infinity in nature and in the night sky. The art of reasoning suggests infinity of thought, of knowledge, of an infinite universe. Our sense perceptions need not assign limits.
HOST How do you integrate God in your infinite universe?
BRUNO God is not definable. God's primal substance is unknowable, a mystery. If you do not see God in nature, in the night sky, no one can explain God to you. God 's power is inherent in sense perception. His acts can be seen on earth, in the innumerable celestial bodies, and in other worlds endowed with living creatures.
HOST Are you saying there are living beings on other planets, other worlds?
BRUNO Yes. God's omnipotence is not confined to our finite world. Philosophers distinguish the learning of reason over the learning of theologians, who unwittingly impute to God a decrescendo power for their finite universe. I claim Aristotle's dimensioned finite world is incompatible with God's omnipotence. God's will and power are not finite. God's power should not be otiose. You see, mine is an infinite universe in which man is a reflection of God. Although we cannot see an infinite universe, we can conceive of such.
HOST What about the soul?
BRUNO All living creatures are endowed with soul, God's anima. Bodies move because of their anima, God's manifest energy. It's an internal motor force, self generating. Our souls are filled with God's transcendent anima, as is the soul of the infinite universe. All bodies on earth and in the heavens are endowed with anima, the life of the soul. Its inherent energy gives power to motion, which moves the parts of the infinite universe.
HOST What about On Cause, Origin, and One? Its prefatory epistle is again dedicated to the most Castelnau. In it you again express your appreciation of his patronage.
BRUNO I praised the illustrious Castelnau for his protection after the humiliation I suffered because of heinous crimes perpetrated against me by the barbarous and the strident lamentations of hypocrites and sophists whom I castigated. He protected me from the malicious censure by the mercenary servants of universities, the furious zeal of the vulgar, the horrible exposure to a stupid society and ignorant mob.
HOST You put yourself on the side of philosophers?
BRUNO I descry the opinions of those who are against scientific progress because they do not think for themselves. They merely accept whatever any authority hands them by repeating its defective teaching whether by parent, teacher, or priest. They are incapable of absorbing, analyzing, and concluding. I detest those who parrot the defects of their heroes.
HOST But you consider yourself as a teacher.
BRUNO I don't lecture on platitudes. I expound on philosophical truth.
HOST In another prefatory epistle you give gratuitous praise to the queen (reads):
"Where will you find one of the masculine gender who is superior, or the equal, of the divine Elizabeth who reigns in England and whom Heaven has so endowed and favoured, so firmly maintained in her seat, that others strive in vain to displace her with their words and actions? None in all her realm is more worthy than this lady herself; amongst the nobles, none is more heroic than she, amongst doctors none more learned, amongst counsellors none have a wiser head." 8
HOST Were you part of the Elizabeth cult?
BRUNO Her court exulted in her cult.
HOST About your book, it's another attack on Aristotle.
BRUNO Here's my summa. I begin with a brief apology for my censure of Londoners in Supper of Ashes, then I expound on my philosophy.
HOST I found it be the most confusing of all your works cause, origin, matter, form, the One.
BRUNO Cause is likened to the immanent will of the infinite universe. Inherent in cause are origin, matter, and form. Cause is the ideal reason in the artist's mind without which he cannot work. Cause is conserved because it's necessary to the production of origin.
Origin is internal wherein potential exists. Origin may be equated with that which yields matter. All there is evolves from origin, the root system manifesting matter. Origin determines matter.
Matter is the common substance in nature and the infinite universe. Matter retains its integrity even though it creates diverse forms. That which is common in matter is peculiar in form. Matter receives nothing from form but preserves it.
Form is external and depends on matter. Form undergoes constant change in its diversity but never loses its matter. When heated the matter in wax molds a variety of forms. Water, ice, snow have the same matter but different forms. Separated from matter, form loses its being.
HOST Cause, origin, matter, form, internal, external, all nested within each other?
BRUNO No, no, not within each other but different states of being. Consider mud. Together the form of water and the form of earth are a continuum but the matter in water and earth remain independent.
HOST What about the One?
BRUNO The One God, One will, One power. God is the creator of cause that yields origin, matter, and form. The One is the one universal God, allied more to nature than to our individual souls. God is the One and unifier of all. The soul is inherent in the body as matter is to form. The One is infinite; it adds or subtracts nothing because it's eternal.
HOST Most people believe God created the universe as it now exists.
BRUNO Most people are ignorant and believe what they're told. Only the learned can think philosophically, can think about cause, origin, matter, and form.
HOST What about will, free will?
BRUNO God infused form with will. Only form is particular, so only form has will. Will is in the intellect, whether in man, beast, or thing. Free will is limited by our temperament, to pursue or not, to choose or not. Will as intellect cannot alter physicals; it cannot change the color of our eyes, the length of arms or legs because those are forms created concomitant with origin. The physicals of form triumph over and determine will.
HOST There are those who claim your dialogs were heavily influenced by the philosophy of the Catholic priest Nicholas of Cusa, known as Cusanus. As I understand it Cusanus the priest had to choose between reforming the corrupt Church or supporting it. He chose the Church becoming a bishop then cardinal. Failing at reformation he devoted himself to mathematics, science, and philosophy. What I don't understand is that he tried to prove theological premises with scientific experiments, those are contrary endeavors.
BRUNO Indeed, he's an example of his own coincidence of contraries. He transcended commonplace attainments to remain in harmonious balance under God. Cusanus claimed all things are imperfect by their inherent contraries, which are greatest at their extreme points. The least contrary being the center, the middle ground, where they form unity. Most people are in the middle ground of good and evil, of truths and lies. In expounding my philosophy, for example, my hosts warmly greet me which makes me gravitate towards their centers. But after several disputations, we each move to the contraries of our greatest extremities, whence I'm asked to depart.
HOST You expounded on universal contraries.
BRUNO Cusanus envisioned an infinite universe animated by power emanating from the Godhead. He believed other planets were inhabited, perhaps by those more noble than we. I was influenced by his theory of the coincidence of contraries, the infinitely small coincident with the infinitely great, the atom coincident with the cosmos.
HOST You suggest that God may consist of contraries. How can God be contrary?
BRUNO God consists of contrary factors, which keep the infinite universe in balance. All things are in and evolve from the one God, who creates and unites contraries. Each contrary has a beginning, middle, and end. In the beginning is one extreme, the middle is neutral, the end is the opposite extreme. When two persons with different viewpoints come to the same conclusions, they meet in the common ground of the middle. God created contraries in the heavens and planets; they librate in the infinite universe keeping it in balance. Contraries are applicable to nature, to man and woman, joy and sadness, the altruist and the selfish, good and evil, health and disease, body and soul, life and decay, death and resurrection, circle and square.
HOST What about On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, again dedicated to your beneficent host Castelnau to whom you reveal yourself saying (reads):
"If thy heart is stirred by love of glory, my letters will give thee greater glory than all those things which are honored by thee, in which thou seekest honor." 9
HOST That sounds like you knew that you’d be famous. Did you know you'd be famous?
BRUNO I knew my philosophy was different and truer than any other of my age.
HOST That's where you and the Earl of Oxford, the pseudonymous Shakespeare, share a common trait. His sonnets proclaim that he too knew he'd be famous. Now on to your infinite universe.
BRUNO The infinite universe is the manifestation of God's will. Our earth is central only to its surrounding space. But in immensity there are suns and worlds without end. In infinity there's no imaginable number, no proportion, no measure. There are countless numbers of planets circling around their suns just as our earth circles our sun. Immensity is related to infinity, therefore Aristotle's finite universe is not immense. There are innumerable populated worlds, their number immeasurable, celestial bodies, matter within matter, all coalescing into one interrelated infinite universe.
HOST What about motion?
BRUNO Planets and stars move in the heavens as fluids circulating in our bodies. All stars have motion, even fixed stars such as our sun. Thus all bodies are always in motion, giving the lie to Aristotle's claim that earth is immobile. Why deny movement to earth? He also claims heavy bodies descend, light bodies ascend. But wouldn't light bodies ascending from earth appear to be falling from the moon?
HOST You carry your arguments of motion to position.
BRUNO Motion and position are relative to each other. Aristotle claims absolute positions in space but a body's position is relative to that of others. He proclaims absolute movements of bodies up or down, left or right, but movement is relative to attraction or repulsion. From any point of comparison position, space, and time are relative to each other. For this reson there must also be relativity of knowledge, one thought leading to another, leading to the magic of intuition leading to theory.
HOST Today we have our own theory of relativity.
HOST What about time?
BRUNO Time is eternal, an integral part of the infinite universe. Time is related to the movements of celestial bodies; they move, space and time do not. There's no time past, present, or future. As in the Godhead, the 3 times are symbolic of the 3 persons of the Trinity.
HOST Can you give me your definition of time?
BRUNO I just did. If you want to probe the depth of my knowledge, you must pay attention. Again, time is related to celestial bodies, to form. Time exhibits itself in form. When form ceases the space it occupies and time cease. When living creatures die, their times die. Time reposes in space in its infinite continuum until required by form.
HOST You also expounded on illumination.
BRUNO As for light, suns illuminate the heavens. The sun shines as do stars. But what illuminates the sun and stars? The power of God's anima burns in the sun and stars, they speak to us in their brilliance. Their luminosity is the light of knowledge. A luminous body sheds light on other bodies, just as philosophy sheds light on ignorance. The sun shines on plants that grow to give us our daily bread. The sun illumines the moon that illumines the sea. If we were confined to a spot on the sea, we would see no illumination except for celestial bodies whose light is reflected from water.
HOST But isn't there light from other sources?
BRUNO In the infinite universe there are surely other suns whose lights we cannot see because of their great distances. Stars shine because they're suns but Venus shines because she reflects our sunlight. Comets do not differ from other planets but for their apparent differences of position. Their light is reflected as from a slanting mirror. All these things were discovered by me and confirmed by the learned Dane Tycho Brahe. Keep in mind Aristotle was not an astronomer or mathematician.
HOST Neither are you.
BRUNO Aristotle linked all to his finite universe but God cannot be associated with boundaries, whether convex or other. His finite world accuses God of limited power. There's no hierarchy in infinity, no higher or lower, no left or right, no center or circumference. I believe the finite intellect, constrained by hierarchy, cannot attain ultimate truth. Moreover, I postulate that the universe is made up of innumerable worlds substantially the same as our solar system. The worlds therein are innumerable and immeasurable, not fixed spheres.
HOST The Church, and most theologians, defended Aristotle.
BRUNO Philosophers understand better than theologians the concept of an infinite universe. There are discrete theologians who support philosophy provided it doesn't conflict with Church authority.
HOST Is that why your cosmology is held in disrepute by the Church?
BRUNO Aristotle's model accorded with the Church's terracentric finite universe. In the universe's hierarchy are worlds, stars, suns, planets, and comets being planets in their death fall to earth. In God's heavenly hierarchy are seraphim, thrones, cherubim, archangels, angels, man. The Church, emulating the heavenly hierarchy established its own of pope, cardinals, bishops, priests, nuns, deacons. The finite universe being stable resists change to faithfully support Church hierarchy. Although Catholics may reform, Church authority does not. Beware the priest who preaches that true religion is contingent upon Church authority. I further state the Bible should be followed only for its moral teachings, not for its cosmological implications.
HOST You further complicate your writing with dialogs by questioning the truth of reality.
BRUNO The vastness of the universe is in the mind, which is distributed throughout the body as celestial bodies are distributed in heaven. What's external must be first perceived by the mind. The intellect evolves upward ascending to perfection. Our perceptions change when our position changes. What we see one day, we may not see on another. Our perception must be integrated and interpreted by logic and reason.
HOST Surely, Aristotle had logic and reason.
BRUNO He did but his finite universe with its spheres, heavenly bodies, and motion are illusions created by faulty perceptions. Continuing with my own perceptions, art is the highest and nearest to nature because its motivated by the magic of intuition. In the deep trances of perception and contemplation, some thinkers perceive a reality others do not. These perceptions may be opaqued by the fallacies of scripture, meaning that princes of the Church cannot think clearly. When one is drowning in a sea of conflicting thoughts, how does one proceed from one thought to another? How does one save himself in that sea except by the magic of intuition? In life, pedants are maintainers; intuitors are creators.
HOST Are you inferring the Bible is deliberately false?
BRUNO Scripture is an allegory filling the emotional and social needs of the ignorant, entrapping them with promises of heaven. The Church promotes suffering so priests may save poor wretches living under threats of purgatory and hell. Priests spread these plagues to ignorant devotees.
HOST Do you believe in Biblical miracles?
BRUNO No, nor in those of saints, nor Church doctrine based on miracles. Heaven, earth, and man represent the mystery of a cosmological trinity. The Church has the virtuous trinity of faith, hope, and love. Where's the pope who'll pen the Bull proclaiming ex cathedra the quadrity of virtues to be art, love, magic, and mathesis.
HOST Mathesis?
BRUNO Mathematics combined with science and the magic of intuition for revealing the true nature of things.
HOST How can science be combined with magic?
BRUNO The magic of intuition makes great leaps over pedants and moves forward to truth. We have religion because our sense perceptions perceive the mysteries of an omnipotent God.
HOST Aren't the Church's arguments based on theological reasoning?
BRUNO The Church relies on faith in mystery for its theological authority. The Church cannot hold men's hearts and souls based on consensus mysteries separating man from God.
HOST Well, so much for all that. Now on to your ethical trilogy:
Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast
Cabal of the Horse Pegasus
On Heroic Furies
The first book has another long satiric title (reads):
"Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, Proposed by Jove, Effected by the Council, Revealed by Mercury, Reported by Wisdom, Overheard by Saulino, and Registered by the Nolan, Dedicated to the Most Illustrious and Excellent Knight Sir Philip Sidney". 10
In it you expound on your moral philosophy using mythological figures and constellations to symbolize beasts and human qualities. Your dialog is generally a satiric allegory on Christian ethics.
BRUNO In heaven Jove rules over beasts such as ambition, cruelty, foolish metaphors, loquacity, pedants, grammarians. Jove expulses these beasts from heaven replacing them with virtues such as courage, faith, pity, tolerance. There are earthly beasts; they use cruelty, deceit, and imposture for their own exalted reasons. For example, pedants do no work and speak evil of those who do good works. Those pedants propose high rewards for themselves while administering punishment for others, all the while living off the good works of others. While celestial images are closer to divine intellect than earthly images, Christian doctrines enslaving the mind should be replaced by ethics benefiting society. Ethics are relative to the society that created them; they are like cuisines, differing by territory and people. My idea of reforming the heavens is applicable to reforming society and especially the Church.
HOST All creatures god or evil are created by God.
BRUNO God created celestial creatures, terrestrial creatures, human creatures, and creatures that live in humans such as angelic or satanic, virtuous or beastly.
HOST Such as deadly bacteria or viruses.
BRUNO What?
HOST They live in humans.
BRUNO Never heard of them but if they live in humans God made them. Now creatures of the sun, because of their illumination, have unerring intellect and do good works. Creatures of the shadows, such as pedants, have fallacious intellect and are banished from the heavens.
HOST Your utter contempt of pedants again.
BRUNO Pedants are robbers and occupiers of others' hereditary goods. They despise the good works of Egyptians by plundering their art and even their tombs. I censure Christians for abusing Egyptians and exploiting their artifacts.
HOST On the other hand, it enables museums to display the renown of Egypt. Your dialog continuing it equates celestial bodies to human qualities.
BRUNO Very popular in my time. Jove reforms the heavens by purging it of beasts. Beastly constellations are replaced by virtuous ones. Constellations are reformed to protect the poor, benefit society, control pedants and tyrants. Libra descends to earth to settle injustices, to rebuild the destruction of our edifices. A certain planet might reveal the mysteries of divine will, good or evil, virtue or cowardice, magic or mundanity. On earth beastly men and their vices are replaced by virtuous men, thereby reforming society.
HOST Some claimed your beasts to be corrupt popes expulsed from heaven, exiled to earth, and there made virtuous to reform the Church.
BRUNO Men must first expulse their vices and beasts to purify their souls. Only then will the Church purify itself of corruption. The expulsion of beasts from heaven or earth and their virtuous replacement is an example of my spiritual metabolism. The soul constantly strives upward toward perfection of God.
HOST A metabolism that reforms society?
BRUNO The innate forces of nature are manifested in phenomena of growth and change in the universe. Our bodies undergo spiritual metabolism for perpetual transmutation. Through love of virtue, the soul purifies itself of beasts to pass to virtue, to reveal God in the transmigration of souls. These changes may reform society. Keep in mind there are beasts who, with hypocritical smiles, invite you enter their homes and when you do they pounce upon and denounce you.
HOST Should I infer that societal moral conduct will replace religious conformity to the Church?
BRUNO Religion is a mystery which my philosophy makes irrelevant. There's no need for altars, icons, statues. They are likened to those beasts expulsed from heaven. Christianity should be based on human behavior not on doctrinal authority. I value Christianity above all other religions because it proclaims the doctrine of love, healing the sick, self-sacrifice for the good of others, raising the dead. But in some respects, I find paganism superior in its celebrations of nature's diversity and toleration of human behavior. God is revealed in nature.
HOST Isn't that pantheism?
BRUNO Pantheism is inclusive of human behavior. Christianity is exclusive; don't do this or that. Its failures are to be healed by returning to the laws of human nature.
HOST Do you prefer pantheism over Christianity?
BRUNO The heavens radiate with animal constellations before the divine altar of God. I leave that divine constellation altar in heaven because where there's an altar there must be a priest, even though he needn't be Christian.
HOST One could make the case that your animal constellations are representative of Egyptian animal worship.
BRUNO We do not worship animals for themselves but for the divine life in them. Beasts triumph in becoming virtues. Egyptian bulls worship crosses. Those bulls also worship virgins without raping them. Egyptians understood the mysteries of the magic and religion that preceded Greeks, Jews, and Christians. I'd like to see Egyptianity developed within Christianity. Both are founded on magic and mystery.
HOST Do you want to syncretize magic, mystery, and philosophy to reform Christianity?
BRUNO Religious rituals are meaningful only to those who participate in them. Yet there are Christians who promote themselves as superior to pagans and try to convert them, imposing Christian rituals on paganism. Moreover, decrees from the Papal State impose Catholic doctrines on the lawful statutes of a country to the point of theocracy.
HOST It appears the struggle for religious power continues even today. There's Zionism in Israel. Why was your Expulsion so popular in England?
BRUNO English Protestants interpreted my book as eviscerating Catholic authority. It parodies the unnatural lives and moral depravity of Catholic monks and parish priests. Certain Church fathers are worse than satyrs and even worse than the crocodiles of the Nile. There were those in England who thought my Expulsion a catalyst supporting their Reformation.
HOST How did the Reformation affect you, not only a Catholic but an excommunicated priest?
BRUNO As a Catholic, even an excommunicate, I see reformers and their new doctrines struggling to make themselves acceptable to God. Each reformer has his own catechism he thinks better than all others, such as Calvin better than Luther. Each reformer expects to be blindly followed by new converts dissatisfied with Catholicism, but most Catholics have stayed the course by ignoring this or that Protestant cult leader.
HOST The next book in your ethical trilogy has an unusually long and satiric title:
Cabal of the Horse Pegasus Appended by
the Ass of Cyllene as Described by the Nolan
Not satisfied with that taunting title, you whimsically dedicated it to the fictitious Bishop of Casamarciano.
BRUNO It's cabala not cabal.
HOST Cabala in Italian, cabal in English.
BRUNO No, cabala as in the esoteric interpretation of Jewish scripture, of rabbinic mystical theology. My cabala is combined with the Averroan transmigration of the soul. My cabala is that of the mystery of the ass' soul being the same substance as the soul of Pegasus. Your English cabal is uninspiring; it has no mystery, no soul. Perhaps there's English cabal in your cabala.
HOST You devoted the entire book to an ass?
BRUNO Only to the casual observer. It's an allegory in which the soul of the ass transmigrates to that of the horse Pegasus. Recall that Saul would rather spend his time looking for his father's 3 lost asses rather than be anointed king.
HOST You're hinting that asses are more important to kings than their crowns?
BRUNO Kings need asses around them to keep them on their thrones.
HOST In Noah's Ark you gave the ass the seat of honor. In Supper of Ashes you make use of asses. In The Candlebearer, you relate the tale of monks begging for alms using an ass' tail. In this your Cabala, you devote the entire book to an ass. You actually engraved two woodcuts of asses. Why such consistent use of asses?
BRUNO I need asses to do some of my heavy work.
HOST Your Cabala is interspersed with sonnets. You introduce the ass in one of your ribald sonnets (reads):
"Oh, holy donkeydom, holy ignorance, holy foolishness and pious devotion, who alone can so perfect the heart that human capacity and study may not improve it! Thou dost not employ the weary painstaking of any art or discovery, or of study of the skies, where thou hast built thy home. Of what worth is study to us, O prying folk, to desire knowledge of the works of Nature, or if the stars are indeed earth, fire, and sea? Holy donkeydom does not concern itself with such matters, but with folded hand and on bended knee, awaits what God shall send. Nothing endures, save the fruit of eternal repose, which God only gives when we are buried." 11
BRUNO The ass implores Jove to give him the gift of speech so that it can become a member of a college, a professor, a pedant for which the ass is well equipped. Should we not give the ass an honorary degree or make a greedy parish priest a pope? The Church in setting scripture above science becomes prey to the ignorance of the ass. I ask you which is more worthy, a man transmuted to ass or an ass transmuted to man? We are reminded that Jove himself transmigrated through diverse forms.
HOST You have the cabalistic ass expound on sacred writings, certain to antagonize the Church.
BRUNO The asses of the world are those who establish ceremonial processions for pedants wearing their red velvet robes even unto death. They are the ones who leave scholarship between the covers of books. They are secure in their tenured positions and permanent residences because they make preposterous claims to academic excellence. They are never harassed because their views are those of their masters. Assinity is found everywhere: in the Church, in the law courts, in universities, and even in philosophers. True philosophy must not be confused with the foolishness of the ass or its supine ignorance.
HOST Here's another passage from your Cabala (reads):
"The fools in the world are those who have established religions, ceremonies, laws, faith, rule of life. The greatest asses of the world are those who, lacking all understanding and instruction, and void of all civil life and custom, rot in perpetual pedantry; those who by the grace of heaven would reform obscure and corrupted faith, salve the cruelties of perverted religion and remove abuse of superstitions, mending the vents in their vestures. ... in order that the poor soul may be saved, that an edifice may be raised in heaven, that treasure may be laid up in that blessed land, caring naught for fame, profit or glory in this frail and uncertain life, but only for that other most certain and eternal life. ... Pray, O pray to God, dear friends, if you are not already asses - that he will cause you to become asses." 12
Stumbling upon a vespiary your ass gets stung, bolts forward, and galloping away falls from a precipice into a deep ravine. He breaks his neck and dies.
BRUNO His rotting body becomes a feast for many scavengers who feed upon the helpless and unfortunate, as does the Church upon ignorant devotees. All asses die when they venture out on their own, as does the ass of inspiration proclaimed by pedants. But the ass' soul lives on in my spiritual metabolism, transmigrating to the body of Pegasus, the acclaimed noble horse of the Muses.
HOST You combined religion and mythology?
BRUNO No combination required, they're one and the same. As you know Pegasus, the noblest of all horses, sprang from the severed bloody head of the monster Medusa. The soul of a monster may become the soul of a hero through transmigration.
HOST Your merciless satire is punctuated by serious reflections on the soul.
BRUNO The reincarnation of the ass' soul alludes to the Averroan doctrine of the souls' transmigration. Recall that the soul of the prophet Elijah was reincarnated in the body of St. John the Baptist. Rest assured that the soul of an ass was in Aristotle who often expounded on metaphysicals of which he knew naught.
HOST Are you implying that the same substance is in all souls whether man or beast?
BRUNO If a creature has a mind it has a soul. The soul is in the mind which is in the body. Soul is the body's inner light and is responsible to itself, not to any external body such as the Church which claims to direct the soul after death. We don't need Church authority to interpose itself between the soul and God. The heroic soul constantly seeks truth in knowledge whose progress eventually leads to God. Because university pedants are soulless, I admire philosophers with heroic souls.
HOST You also lash out at religion.
BRUNO There's no knowledge or truth in superstition or in those who refuse to think for themselves whether they be illiterates, educated pedants, or asses. Religion uses ignorance to justify scripture such as the Trinity and virgin birth. Jesus rode an ass into Jerusalem but religion confuses the presumption of divinity with divinity itself. There are times I believe that the return of Egyptianism will end the intolerance, persecutions, and was between Catholics and Protestants.
HOST How do you reconcile your love of God with your challenges to the Church?
BRUNO The Church is a religious organization just as the senate is a political one. In order to survive each organization needs to retain power. I make the distinction between the power of God and that of the Church. We do not need a religious organization to come between an individual and God. Christianity requires belief in ignorance and superstition. No thinking person would believe in religion's mysteries, miracles, and pretensions to truth.
HOST Now to the third book of your ethical trilogy, On Heroic Furies. It's a discursive work punctuated with sonnets. It describes how platonic philosophy and love of wisdom triumph over conflict, pain, and suffering. You dedicated this work also to Sidney, your friend and favorite courtier. He expressed fondness for Italians and things Italian. You refer to him as an excellent and educated man, a poet, and generous patron.
BRUNO I constructed the book around the heroic passions of love, truth, wisdom. It describes the human soul's ascent for union with God. It exhorts man to live virtuously, to attain truth. It exalts love of learning and philosophy above love of woman.
HOST Didn't that antagonize your friend Sidney?
BRUNO Why should it?
HOST Because of his obsessive and prurient love for the pubescent nymphal girl Penelope Devereux.
BRUNO All the more reason for pursuing the higher form of love, that of the intellect. In higher love, rays of knowledge penetrate the intellect and soul. In vulgar love, arrows from the eyes of ladies deceive men and wound their hearts. One must love a thing as a creation of God, for the divinity in it, devoid of base sexual desire.
HOST Sounds like Plato to me. In your epistle you praise English women as nymphs and compare Queen Elizabeth to the moon goddess Diana. Were you part of the Elizabeth cult?
BRUNO The queen is second to no other woman in beauty nor to any monarch in leadership and wisdom.
HOST Do you have an opinion of ladies?
BRUNO Ladies please me, especially those young women of the Thames. We are all men of nature and on occasion succumb to weakness.
HOST Doesn't that mean you broke your religious vows?
BRUNO I abandoned my order, not my religion. A venial sin at most, forgivable. But such matters are vulgar and normally spoken of in the company of inconsiderate men.
HOST Do you believe in what St. Paul said about marrying?
BRUNO Do you mean between men and women?
HOST Of course, isn't that what marriage means?
BRUNO Not necessarily. Nuns marry a statuesque Jesus Christ in a religious ceremony.
HOST I mean normal sexual marriage between men and women.
BRUNO Which is why nature, for its own ends, made men and women mutually attractive. Aware of that, when I burn with sexual desire my wisdom rescues me.
HOST You exalt platonic love?
BRUNO Wisdom resolves conflicts and pacifies sexual desire, abolishes suffering, and in the contemplation of God leads to perfect peace. As we cycle through our spiritual metabolism, the soul ascends to its highest unity by attaining peace in the contemplation of the divine. God integrates our individual souls in the continuum of the infinite universe.
HOST Here's what you say about the soul and God (reads):
"The soul is not in the body locally, but as its intrinsic form and extrinsic mould, as that which make the members and shapes the whole within and without. The body then is in the soul, the soul in the mind; the intelligence either is God or is in God, so as by its essence it is in God, who is its life, in the same manner by intellectual operation and the will consequent on such operation it is related to its light and its object". 13
"The soul drinks of the divine nectar, and at the font of eternal life…The light is beyond the circumference of the horizon...The soul which has tested those eternal streams burns with an ardour of love which the ocean could not quench, and which the rigour of the arctic circle could not temper." 14
BRUNO The difficulties of our daily lives may cause us to change but the soul never changes. The soul being immortal does not pass from body to body but returns to the continuum of the infinite universe. Death is a change of matter and form but not of soul. The soul absorbs its quality from its heroic enthusiast in which it resides, not from an external authority such as religion. The soul, with its heroic fury against authority, rises above the vicissitudes of the flesh transporting it to the ultimate ecstasy of wisdom.
HOST So the soul thrives on wisdom?
BRUNO Food for the body is tangible - bread, fish, vegetables. Food for the soul is intangible - beauty, truth, and wisdom. In Lullian art grotesqueries are embellished with graphics, light, and shadow to represent the soul's passage as it transmigrates from death to heaven, purgatory, or hell. In mathematics those passages are represented by +, 0, and - .
HOST But what does all you claim have to do with the Church?
BRUNO The relationship between philosophy and religion should be likened to philosophers governing the ignorant mass of people. Philosophy is the discipline for those able to think for themselves. Christians believe whatever they're told. I was compulsed to examine the truth. My writings, reflecting that effort, were circulated to men of learning, gentlemen and philosophers, not commoners.
HOST An elitist view.
BRUNO I despise the mob because it speaks without thinking, whether that mob be the vulgar in the streets or pedants. The bulk of them are dolts who accost and assault me, bite and devour me. I attack the supine ignorance of those, whether mob or individual, whose dogmatic learning deforms truth through grotesque interpretations of profane or religious doctrines.
HOST Profane as in secular?
BRUNO Of course. Understanding those doctrines is possible only to those of philosophical dominance.
HOST Sounds elitist again.
BRUNO The common man is naively ignorant believing whatever is presented to him by the quasi learned in authority. Their minds repose without agitation for inquiry. If you find one who's curious, he doesn't pursue it to a reasoned conclusion. In our temporal lives the only authority is knowledge through reason. Beauty, truth, and wisdom are the trinity of those who participate in knowledge.
HOST Your views constantly conflicted with those of your contemporaries, especially those in authority.
BRUNO My eversible emotions flagged authority with my adversarial placard raised high over the fallible defenses of those ignorant pedants degreed as doctors. During our lives on earth we suffer because we are separated from God. I therefore developed my vision of heroic furies, the love of God through suffering.
HOST Is heroic suffering the reason you became a priest?
BRUNO I was looking for God in ecclesia dei. But I found God in the knowledge of nature, not in the Church. We hunger for the love of truth in knowledge, as the soul hungers for truth in God. When intellectual love is aroused nothing else will satisfy the mind. Love of knowledge should be pursued just as the musician pursues Apollo's art. Expressed in language, philosophy is the music of the mind.
HOST All humans express themselves using language. Are they to be considered philosophers?
BRUNO Ignorant persons may suddenly become inspired to do good works without knowing why; they are maintainers. Others may be inspired by intellect and contemplation; they are creators. Moreover, there are two kinds of ecstasy to which the heroic enthusiast may aspire. Those to whom ardor enters as into an empty room, they are asses carrying knowledge. Those few learned in whom intellectual ardor resides, they are the permanent receptacles of knowledge.
HOST In your writings you pile outrage upon outrage on your favorite literary beast, the ass. You even called Aristotle a lazy ass.
BRUNO Asses carry authority and are devoted to it.
HOST Your London sojourn ended in October 1585. King Henry 3rd recalled Castelnau because of the religious tumults in Paris.
BRUNO For more than two years, London gave me the opportunity for establishing most of my cosmological and philosophical themes. My greatest regret in London was not that I was rejected by Oxford University's pompous intelligentsia, trying in vain to catch up to our Renaissance, but that I never had the pleasure of meeting England's premier poet and playwright the Earl of Oxford, the pseudonymous Shakespeare. No matter, Castelnau graciously invited me to accompany him. I was fortunate indeed to accept the invitation from my generous patron. But in the crossing from Dover our ship was attacked by pirates. We were robbed of all our possessions. Fortunately, the illiterates ignored my notes and writings. That December I arrived in Calais nearly destitute. Unfortunately Castelnau, my generous patron, couldn't help me. He had become a moneylender to Mary Queen of Scots who never repaid him. Not in a position to include me in his household, I was obliged to find my own lodging. I was fortunate to be the guest of several gentlemen of the court whom I'd previously met in Paris. They lived near the College of Cambrai. For our mutual benefit, I expounded on my philosophy and tutored their children in return for meals, lodging, a few coins and inclusion in their circle of friends.
HOST Were you ever invited to attend the king's court?
BRUNO Unfortunately no. My return to Paris found the court's religious tolerance changed. Pope Sixtus 5th proclaimed that the Protestant heretic prince Henry of Bourbon could not succeed the Catholic King Henry 3rd to the throne of France. Encouraged by Spain, the king not only abrogated the edict of pacification with Protestants and excommunicated his heir apparent, the heretic prince Henry of Bourbon.
HOST Had you ever befriended the prince?
BRUNO No, but I would like to have been invited to his court.
HOST As I understand the mood in Paris, there were those Catholics who thought that if the prince did ascended to the throne, he might turn Catholic and end all the fighting and Gallic tumults.
BRUNO Trying to reconcile my past, I took advantage of the religious turmoil by going to confession for the first time in 9 years.
HOST How would going to confession take advantage of the Parisian turmoil?
BRUNO In order to retain its delinquent authority, the Church was compromising with dissatisfied Catholics and absolving those who had neglected their obligations. From local Church fathers I requested absolution from the charges of heresy. They examined me several times, each time suggesting I return to my order. They decided my philosophical views were not in accordance with Catholicism, thereby sustaining my alleged apostasies. They suggested the pope would never consider absolution unless I returned to the Dominican Order. I refused, determined not to be yoked again.
HOST Obviously their refusal had little affect on your literary output. You wrote the:
Figure of Aristotelian Physical Teaching
BRUNO Which explains the application of my mnemonic system for memorizing the 8 books of Aristotle's Physica.
HOST In Paris you met a fellow Italian and friend from Salerno, the mathematician Fabrizio Mordente, a favorite of the king's court. He got your attention because he invented a new 8-point compass.
BRUNO A compass for the exact practice of cosmic measurement. Paris ignored his mathematical work on the compass. He didn't get the recognition he deserved, so I agreed to write in Latin 2 books expounding on his invention and mathematics:
Dialogs of Fabrizio Mordente
Dream
The dialogs concern Mordente's practice of cosmic measurement. To that I appended my exposition, Dream, for identifying the location of heavenly bodies. I embellished the books with my own mathematics and Egyptian hieroglyphics, then had the two works printed in a single volume.
HOST Your beginning dialogs praise Mordente but you did to him what you had done to Aristotle and Copernicus. As the consummate dissenter, you faulted Mordente for his lack of vision in seeing the full application of his compass. Using your famous derogatory metaphor, you likened him to an ass carrying the sacraments. Were you attacking Mordente because you were jealous of his popularity at court?
BRUNO I faulted his lack of vision in the expansive use of his compass.
HOST Certain influential gentlemen accused you of a violent and unprovoked attack against the mild mannered and much loved Mordente.
BRUNO My dialogs are philosophical dramas full of emotion certain to antagonize some. I was aware that certain gentlemen would disavow my arguments. Keep in mind that to this work I appended my Dream, in which I described my own triangular instrument for determining degree of latitude. My new instrument could be used for determining the positions and motions of heavenly bodies.
HOST Thereby depreciating Mordents's new compass. What's important is that his 8-point compass was the forerunner of Galileo's proportional compass.
BRUNO Him again?
HOST To your credit, your Dream instrument was a vision of one invented years later. Now, at that time, you had become friendly with Guillaume Cotin the librarian of the Abbey of St. Victor in Paris. In his diary he informs us that he was fascinated by your exuberant gestures in the explanation of your philosophy. He observed that you were assertive, confident, full of braggadocio, and vain. You confided in him your heretical thoughts, your disdain of pedants, your doubts about Church doctrines.
BRUNO I confided in him some of my private views on the Church.
HOST Such as?
BRUNO My scorn for most preachers, especially Jesuits who preach with solemnity talking of the Church's great mysteries. In the end they explain nothing by retreating to God's dark mysterious tabernacle. I told him St. Paul and St. Peter knew only "this is my body" not the subtlety of its physical transubstantiation.
HOST You must have told Cotin about your troubles in Geneva, your excommunication from that city because he includes that event in his diary. He remarked that even though you believed in God, you had no identifiable religion and that you were irreligious. He further notes you were lucky he didn't report you to Church authorities.
BRUNO Cotin was a gentle man with a deprecatory manner. Our talks became strained, confrontational. We argued. Eventually, my visits to the library ceased.
HOST Others in Paris described you as an atheist, idealist, materialist, pantheist.
BRUNO Yes, yes I’m a man of many -ists.
HOST Your writings continued to get you in deep trouble. Rather than tread cautiously in the Parisian political and religious quagmire, you plunged headfirst into it by writing and printing your controversial book:
120 Articles on Nature and the World Against Peripatetics
in which you detailed in writing Aristotle's errors in physics. Not satisfied with that, you dared publicly attack him in the auditorium of the College of Cambrai which embraced his teachings. By the way, didn't you apply for a lectureship at that college?
BRUNO I did and was forthrightly rejected without the consideration due a man of my ability and learning.
HOST Is that why you wrote the 120 Articles because they rejected your application?
BRUNO No, no. I'd been working on that book for some time. I dedicated it to King Henry 3rd hoping to attract his attention and an invitation to his court. I had it printed and arranged for John Hannequin, my degree candidate, to expound on the 120 Articles to the faculty and students of Cambrai.
HOST Cotin's diary records the following events of that presentation. At first Hannequin's presentation of your articles went unchallenged by any student or professor. Emboldened by their silence, you boldly and wildly issued a challenge to anyone to defend Aristotle. Then in the gloom of silence, a student called out that there was no challenge because your articles and teaching of atheism and pantheism weren't worthy of a reply. The student demanded you justify each calumny against Aristotle. His challenge generated an acrimonious and massive student reaction. They demanded that you, the author, respond to defend your degree candidate's presentation and each of your calumnies against Aristotle.
BRUNO They complained I had the temerity to criticize Aristotle in the auditorium of Cambrai. I defended Hannequin's presentation, and my articles, over the din of the student body now roused to revenge against the two of us. Fearing bodily harm I quickly departed the auditorium and Hannequin followed. Next day the student body marched against me demanding I recant. Thereafter, I was soundly denounced by certain gentlemen. They rejected my articles and ostracized me from their discussions.
HOST You were rejected in Naples, Rome, and Geneva. You were rejected by universities in Oxford and now in Paris. You certainly were a polarizing and reactionary person, denounced wherever you went.
BRUNO I feared bodily attack by students and others, the king never invited me to his court, and Paris was afflicted with religious turmoil. All those indicators were against me. On 1June1586 I fled Paris for the more liberal environs of Germany, a nation more tolerant of men of letters.
HOST You remember that date?
BRUNO My life was threatened.
HOST So you were on the road again?
BRUNO Not by choice. I passed through many small towns none large enough to find employment. When I got to Mainz, I rested to recover from my arduous journey.
HOST Mainz is about 450 miles from Paris. A true odyssey. How did you manage that distance?
BRUNO Mostly on foot. Sometimes I'd beg my way onto a farmer's wagon or a river barge. There were others traveling on foot, mostly those driven by wanderlust or on pilgrimages. The problem was that it wasn't safe being on the road. There were wayside thieves and even murderers, greedy landlords, disease. I usually had to share a vermin infested bed with disagreeable and foul smelling boors, illiterates. At the table they'd fight for a few choice morsels by plunging their squalid hands in the food platter. Good manners do not require education, only some respect for others and obedience to civility.
HOST Did you find any employment in Mainz?
BRUNO No, so after resting for two weeks, I departed Mainz. On the way I happened upon a shoemaker. My tourist shoes falling apart I offered to teach his illiterate son to read in exchange for shoe repair. He not only cobbled my shoes but his wife gave me a pair of socks, mine shredded to curls of yarn. I expressed my deep gratitude for their help and departed for Wiesbaden. With no means of sustenance there, I went on to the fiercely Protestant town of Marburg. On 25July1586 I applied for a teaching position at Marburg University, registering as Doctor of Roman Theology.
HOST By the way, you always reference date by day month year. We date by month day year.
BRUNO Your dating is wrong. There are not months in days there are days in months, another example of finding truth in knowledge. I trust your religion and society are not as confused as your dates.
HOST You applied for a teaching position in Roman Theology, in Catholicism, at a fiercely Protestant university?
BRUNO I was desperate, without money. I explained my philosophy but the university faculty refused to listen or consider my qualifications. I even offered to give pro bono lectures but was quickly rejected for no good cause.
HOST Obviously, their cause was antipathy towards Rome and you for being Catholic and a fugitive priest. In rejecting your application, the university rector responded in writing (reads):
"When the right publicly to teach philosophy was denied him (Bruno) by me for good cause and with the assent of the Philosophical Faculty, he burnt with rage, and impudently reviled me in my own house as though I had acted in defiance of the law of nations, against the custom of all German universities and contrary to all schools of the humanities. Wherefore he declared that he had no wish to remain a member of the Academy. So his fee was readily returned to him, and he was discharged from the register of the university." 15
BRUNO When the rector returned my registration fee I raged that I would not remain in Marburg, that its university did not deserve my knowledge. The rector informed me that the philosophy faculty rejected me for two outstanding reasons. Firstly, they did not agree with my interpretation of the Copernican theory and with my innovative philosophy. Secondly, they were fiercely against the new and innovative calendar, devised by Pope Gregory 13th, merely to comply with Catholic practices. I accepted the Gregorian calendar but nearly all leading Protestants, such as those at Marburg, rejected it. The faculty was also angered by the pope's continued pro forma selling of indulgences and at his approval of the selling of medals and pictures commemorating the St. Valentine's Day massacre of French Protestants
HOST What happened after you raged at the rector?
BRUNO I heard word that my countryman Alberico Gentile, whom I'd met in London, was lecturing at liberal modern Wittenberg University. I immediately gathered my few personal items and departed for Wittenberg.
HOST On the road again.
BRUNO My anger at being rebuffed compulsed me forward. I was penniless and starving, and for the first time, I had to don my scapular for the purpose of begging along the way. Fortunately, I had several pamphlets on Lully and managed to sell several to gentlemen I encountered along the way. Several days later I managed to board a barge on the Elbe destined for Wittenberg.
HOST Another long distance of some 300 miles. It must have taken you months to cover such distances.
BRUNO But this time worth my effort. Gentile helped me obtain a much needed teaching position at Wittenberg University, which I found much wiser than of those in England or France. Because of my wretched poverty, the university permitted me to also privately tutor some of their students. The white mountainous country of Wittenberg was more welcoming and cordial than Marburg.
HOST It's possible that the Danish prince Hamlet attended lectures at Wittenberg. Do you recall a student named Hamlet attending any of your lectures?
BRUNO I had many students and remember only those whom I considered disciples of my philosophy.
HOST This particular student is the protagonist in Shakespeare's greatest drama, Hamlet. There are those who say some of your ideas are in Hamlet.
BRUNO I'm unaware of any of that. I'm not fluent in English and refuse to read anything in that language.
HOST You must have felt free to write and publish because you continued your voluminous output by publishing 2 more books:
Synthetic Lullian Lamp
On the Advance and Enlightening Hunt for Logic
In the Synthetic Lullian Lamp you include a prefatory letter describing your heartfelt thanks to the rector and senate of Wittenberg University for hiring you (reads):
"I was a stranger to you, a person of no name, fame or value among you, supported by no prince's praise, not distinguished by any royal commendation, bearing no ensigns of honor, distinguished by no outward trappings such as the vulgar are wont to admire. I was a fugitive from a Gallic college with all its tumults; nor was I examined or interrogated on your religious dogma, with that custom of harsh discipline of perfididous barbarians, violators of the laws of nations, to whom should be closed that heaven and earth which they either entirely deny as a common and social possession ordained by nature for all men, or concede them only with impious and deadly calculation. But finding in me no hostile spirit, you received me gladly, deeming my name to stand in the book of your academy, and to be counted among the most noble and learned of your people, that I might acknowledge as my own, not any private school, nor ordinary assemblage, but the German Athens, which is this great university. You have received and supported me; you have dealt kindly with me up to this day." 16
BRUNO Lullian art was highly favored by Germans who were interested in abstract thinking and magic. In the book I introduce it and artificial memory to Wittenberg. I expound on my mnemonic system using geometric figures, concentric circles, and mathematics. The book enables readers to acquire knowledge and retain it in memory.
HOST Sounds like our commercials for speed reading and for photographic memory in 10 easy lessons.
BRUNO No one but a fool would make the exaggerated claim of perfect achievement of memory and knowledge. Even Aristotle admits that the ultimate natures and differences of things transcend our faculties to understand them. Speaking of Aristotle, I dealt with the logical treatises of his Topica in my Advance and Enlightening Hunt for Logic.
HOST You recruited as copyist Jerome Besler, a student at the university and one of your disciple. Was it true you even argued with him?
BRUNO Not argue, he'd become frustrated and complained about my rapid dictation. He called me "macchina scrittura" (writing machine). Frustrated he once remarked that so great was the power of my mind and so rapidly did my mind concatenate thoughts, his pen trailed along like a lady following her lord. On several occasions, I’d be penning one book while dictating another to Besler.
HOST You wrote several treatises including:
Aristotle's Physics
Lamp of 30 Statues
light from statues?
BRUNO Philosophic light. All things are evolutionary accidents of one substance from which all things proceed and wherein they coincide. Thanks to God I found the art of enlightenment by means of 30 statues, each one a discovery in nature.
HOST It was reported at Wittenberg you founded a sect for a new world religion called Giordanismo, its devotees called Giordanisti.
BRUNO Because of the continuing religious wars I contemplated the possibility of a new world religion based on my new philosophy. I led a discussion group exploring the possibility of one God for a new world religion to be called New Philosophy. But there was never a sect known as Giordanismo, and certainly no Giordanisti. When ignorant mobs become learned they'll realize there's only one God and one catechism, that of nature. I believe in one monarchic God, the creator and mover of the infinite universe.
HOST One Christian God?
BRUNO Have I been addressing Solomon's stone wall? Not a Christian, Jewish, or Moslem God but the one God of creation, the God of nature.
HOST I mentioned the Christian God because Calvinists and Lutherans were feuding, even at the university. Calvinists were infringing upon Lutherans. It was reported that you preferred Lutherans to Calvinists.
BRUNO The university faculty was mostly Lutheran, they hired me. But after two years of peaceful and productive coexistence, a dramatic change shattered my serenity. The chancellor of the university decreed Lutherans were forbidden to respond in kind to Calvinist protagonists. My position was deranged when power shifted from Lutherans to Calvinists. Over the years I wandered from one university town to another trying to secure a position where I could unmolestedly teach and write. Finally secure in a position at Wittenberg, I was forced out by persecutory Calvinists. They were not enamored of me because of my dispute with them in Geneva. They excommunicated me remember? They also claimed I was without scholarly standing or permanent residence. Once more I was shown the door and put out on the road to nowhere.
HOST In March 1588, before you departed, you were allowed to deliver a farewell address, your valedictory oration. It's a long discursive allegory that exhorts mythologic and historic personages in veiled praise of the wisdom you experienced at Wittenberg University.
BRUNO In my pilgrimage to find a retreat in which I could freely devote my talents, I found Wittenberg. Without conditions, they accepted the Nolan. They gave me refuge from all those who had humiliated me, forced me to suffer the adversities of exile. Under protection of their tutelary courtesy, they tolerated my innovative philosophy, affording me liberty to teach for almost two years. To Wittenberg and to Jove, I declared my deepest gratitude. When informed of my intention to depart, their academics and even their students responded in great numbers to hear and honor me. Contrary to those arrogant professors at Toulouse, Paris, and London the professors at Wittenberg showed me much courtesy. After delivering my oration, I gathered my things and set out for Prague.
HOST Why Prague, any particular reason?
BRUNO I wanted to get away from Protestants. Prague was mostly Catholic, part of the Hapsburg Empire, ruled by the Catholic King Rudolph 2nd. Once again, I was a wandering exile in wretched poverty and thought of Dante roaming, exiled from his beloved Florence. Continuing to Prague, I arrived in the spring of 1588.
HOST There in June you published:
A Scrutiny of Lullian Categories
dedicating it to the Spanish Abassador to the king's court. Why him?
BRUNO I learned the Spanish ambassador was interested in Lullian art and hoped he would mention my book to the king. Apparently he did not because I was never invited to the king's court.
HOST You continued your controversial writing with a treatise on:
160 Articles on Mathematics and Philosophers
BRUNO Each article against the works of a contemporary philosopher or mathematician, including Mordente. I inserted my own articles on religion being peaceful coexistence based on mutual understanding and freedom of speech.
HOST Thereafter, you set to work on another book:
Principles and Elements of Geometry
and dedicated it to the king.
BRUNO It expands on Euclid's propositions and includes exercises for solving mathematical problems. I illustrated my treatise with a series of diagrams containing geometrical patterns embellished with florals and esoteric patterns, including Hebrew script and by inference numerology. My treatise included descriptions of how Lullian art may be applied to the sciences and to the study of medicine. King Rudolph accepted my book rewarding me with $300, a generous amount most welcome and needed at that time. However, he did not employ or invite me to his court. By the way, I encountered Fabrizio Mordente whom the king had appointed imperial astronomer. We had a curt but civil exchange.
HOST Perhaps your good fortune in view of your polemic against him in Paris. By the way that summer of 1588, while you were trying to survive in Prague, England defeated the Spanish Armada becoming the most powerful nation in Europe. Queen Elizabeth defeated King Philip who, with the pope and for many years, had threatened her.
BRUNO I still had friends in London and certainly would have been invited to join in their justly deserved celebration. About Mordente, I told him I had failed to find a suitable position in Prague. He suggested there might be an opening for me at Helmstedt University. I forthwith prepared to leave Prague.
HOST Had you no idea he wanted to be rid of you?
BRUNO No, he was a fellow Italian. After 6 months in Prague without employment, I found myself on the road to Helmstedt.
HOST From Prague to Helmstedt, about 200 miles.
BRUNO For most of the way, I traveled the Elbe River by barge past Wittenberg, where with fond memories I had spent two peaceful and productive years. Debarking I traveled on foot cross-country to Helmstedt. There I came upon the newly built Helmstedt University. It immediately satisfied my vision of what a university should look like.
HOST As I understand it, the liberal Lutheran Duke Julius of Brunswick was the major contributor in building the new university. In his honor, it was called Julia Academy.
BRUNO I had the feeling I found my destined retreat, a niche on the Elysian field. Duke Julius declared that, in order to protect Lutheran youth from the papacy and Calvinists, the university would not be ruled by theologians. The university had about 5,000 students and 50 professors. The duke insisted that professors maintain peace and dignity among themselves so as not to give occasion for discord.
HOST At Helmstedt you did what you had done at other universities. You applied for a job.
BRUNO Being in agreement with the duke's philosophy, I was hopeful of obtaining a position. Matriculating at the university, I applied for a lectureship. Again I was summarily rejected by the philosophy faculty. However, the duke kindly allowed me to privately tutor students and I was thereby able to sustain myself. I managed to write a treatise on:
Lullian Medicine
HOST But then in May the beneficent duke died and you, among others, was allowed to deliver a funeral oration.
BRUNO I was permitted to deliver my Oratio Consolatoria in the presence of the duke's son, the rector of the university, and those few professors who had befriended me. I compared the peace in Helmstedt with the greed and tyranny of the vile priesthood in Italy and Spain. The Church was destroying the natural connection between man and God, and that for truth's sake I had been forced into exile where I suffered from the ravenous jaws of the Roman wolf. The son paid me $80.
HOST I have one of many translations of your funeral oration (reads):
"Remember, O Nolan! remember that when torn from thy country, thy labors, and thy friends, thou wast an exile for love of truth, this country received thee as a citizen. There thou wert exposed to the fang of the
Roman wolf; here thou art a free man. There thou wert a bondsman of a vain and superstitious worship; here thou art encouraged to follow the rites of a reformed religion. There thou wert dead under tyranny; here thou art alive under the rule of a gentle and humane prince, and loaded with favor and with honors. To him as to thy true sovereign, thy protector and thy benefactor, thou shalt fulfill the obligations imposed on thee by thy gratitude. Here the Muses whose freedom is ensured by the law of Nature, by the right of nations, and by the just demands of civilisation, dwell in peace and liberty under the safeguard of a high-minded prince; while in Italy and Spain they are trodden under foot by a vile disorderly priesthood" 17
BRUNO I had my Consolatory Oration published but then got into a violent argument with a professor Hoffman. At Helmstedt, as in Oxford, most professors were more interested in ceremony and grammar than in philosophy. My innovative and subversive views of Aristotle's geocentric theory got me into a violent argument with the Lutheran zealot Hoffman, a professor of religion. I openly declared my scorn for him and he for me. He reported me to the pastor of Helmstedt's Evangelic Church, who then confronted me and we argued. The next Sunday, while sermonizing from his pulpit, the pastor denounced and excommunicated me. I was allowed to defend myself and did so by letter.
HOST I have a translation of that letter (reads):
"Most Illustrious and most Reverend Master Pro-Rector, Jordanus Brunus the Nolan, excommunicated by the chief pastor and superintendent of the Church of Helmstedt (who constituted himself judge in his own cause, and did himself execute his own sentence delivered against an adversary who was not permitted to respond in his own defence), humbly protests before your magnificence, and before the potent and reverend members of your senate, against the public execution of this private and most iniquitous judgement. He demands to be heard, that he may judge whether the attack made upon his person and reputation is just; for in the words of Seneca "He who delivers judgement, and hears but one side, though he judge justly, is not just". Therefore he entreats your Excellence to summon the reverend pastor, and to examine and see whether (if it please God) he can establish his cause, and prove that in invoking the thunders of the Church he had regard not to any private malice, but to his duty as a shepherd and to the welfare of his flock. Helmstedt 6October1589, written in the hand of Jordanus Brunus." 18
BRUNO That letter did not obtain for me the hearing I requested and my excommunication was sustained. My entreaty rejected I was furious, reacting as fiery Nolan, when I wrote my retaliatory epistle:
"of fools hated, of the mean slighted, reviled by rascals, followed by sheepish souls, beloved by the wise, admired by the learned, esteemed by the great, treasured by the mighty, favored by God. ... freed men's minds and knowledge, cleared the air, penetrated the skies, wandered among the stars, stridden over the edges of the world, demolished the fantastic ramparts of the spheres, illuminated the blind, given speech to the dumb, and made manifest ... the myriad bodies in heaven which assist in the ministry and contemplation of the first, universal, infinite, and Eternal Efficient." 19
HOST You must have been aware that you were socially awkward, didn't know how to interact with those who differed from you. Your personality, discourses, and writings constantly bit the hands that fed you. So after all the lecturing, writing, disseminating of your knowledge in universities, in the courts of kings and queens, you still didn't learn how to play the game for getting along with others. You were still a fugitive priest, homeless, and unemployed. You had been excommunicated by Catholics in Naples and Rome, by Calvinists in Geneva and Wittenberg, and by Lutherans in Helmstedt. Everywhere you expounded on your philosophy, you were excommunicated.
BRUNO Their reprisals became disheartening because they demanded I leave Helmstedt. Everywhere I discussed my philosophy, I was excommunicated by so-called men of God. Priests and pedants may banish my body and make chaos of my life but they shall not obscure my vision or shackle my soul. While my enemies rejoice at my exile, I'll continue to pursue my way irrespective of place or position and if not in this life then in the next. I denounce the ignorant laity constantly begging greedy priests and alchemists for Christ’s miracle power that always fails. Yet, they persist in wanting to hear the empty prayers and promises of the clergy greedy for revenues. Their avarice should be terminated because they befoul the earth. They are pastoral asses carrying the sacraments. That I was excommunicated by those unworthy of understanding my philosophy was of no importance to me.
HOST But you wrote several books in Helmstedt.
BRUNO As a matter of collegial tolerance, I was allowed to remain in Helmstedt to complete my writings. In November Jerome Besler matriculated at the university. Persuading him to resume as my copyist, I dictated several new books including:
On Mathematical Magic
On Principles, Elements, and Causes of Things
BRUNO I dedicated On Mathematical Magic to Besler. In that book I describe man's efficient causes are his intellect and soul above which are the absolute origins of mind and truth whose essences and power are infinite. It treats mathematics as occult operations of the mind and nature. All actions may be reduced to coincidental and contrary origins such as love and hate, attraction and repulsion. I explain the exotic and the natural but recondite wonders of nature, those not explainable by religion, for which religion has no answers.
HOST In your other book Principles, Elements, and Causes of Things you expound on your cosmic philosophy. You declare contempt for those pretenders to science who still engage in superstition, conjuration, and incantation. You declare that Fortuna, ecclesiastic authority, astrology, and superstition are constantly assailing philosophical reasoning.
BRUNO With no prospects for making a living in Helmstedt, I decided to get my books printed in Frankfurt. I spent a good part of my life on the road, walking from town to town occasionally getting a ride. A fugitive priest out of habit, I was made peripatetic as those philosophers with whom I disagreed. Recall there was another wanderer, an unemployed rabbi who preached by parables. I was still searching for a place where I wouldn't be harassed, arrested, imprisoned, or excommunicated.
HOST Was Frankfurt known for its publishing trade?
BRUNO Of course. When I arrived in Frankfurt Wechel, my printer, offered me free lodging at his house. I therefore applied to the Burgomaster for permission to reside in Wechel's house. My application was summarily rejected.
HOST Why?
BRUNO My excommunication in Helmstedt was probably known in Frankfurt. However, Wechel persuaded the Frankfurt Senate to give me permission to dwell at the Carmelite monastery. He gave me a few dollars, an advance on my books. Cloistered, I had the quiet almost soporific luxury of writing and preparing several books for printing.
HOST It appears you had another burst of literary output, writing in Latin your 3 great books combining again cosmology and philosophy:
On the Threefold Minimum and Measure
On the Monad, Number, and Figure
On the Immeasurable and Innumerable
As I understand it, these books add prose to mostly verse in expanding on the dialogs you wrote in Italian in London.
BRUNO In the first book, On the Threefold Minimum and Measure, I expand my cosmology. God's creative power is in the minima that builds up to the maxima, dying only to create again the finite and infinite. Using Lullian art, I include mathematics, geometry, axioms, and theorems. My definitions declare there are no measurements for either the minima or maxima, no measurements for space and time in the continuum of the infinite universe.
HOST What about On the Monad, Number, and Figure?
BRUNO That book expounds on my theory of my monad. It's God's building block. It's contains the anima God uses to create all things. The monad makes up the substance of all bodies. The monad is not a compound substance, it's singular and indestructible. The world is made up of monads, the particles of matter. Recall that Aristotle's IT is in individual things. My IT is my monad.
HOST Is a monad an atom?
BRUNO My monads are the philosophical equivalents of atoms, similar but not the same. Think of my monad as a monad incorporating soul and will. In my material monad soul is anima or energy, will is intelligence. In that respect it images the Godhead Trinity.
HOST Do you accept Lucretius' theory of atoms as minimal physical particles?
BRUNO Atoms are best suited to mathematics and science. My monads are best suited to philosophy. Niether the monad nor atom is suited to faith. But mathematical and scientific postulates support either atoms or my monads. I propose that all things are built of monads, which are in perpetual motion wandering in ethereal regions changing shape, position, and disposition. Monads create the human and celestial bodies constantly being transmuted, dispersed, and reassembled in the eternal cycle of the infinite universe. From time to time, nature renews itself but it does not die. As old monads leave us we receive a fresh flow of new ones. Monads do not die; they are recycled in space and time, their time is eternal. With the God-monad, God created all there is in this and other worlds, all there is in the infinite universe. To these postulates I developed my own theory of cosmic metabolism in which monads flow in and out of us but the soul persists as in a continuum.
HOST Do you also compare your monad to Democritus' atom?
BRUNO To his atom or Lucretius' atom or anyone's atom whose name ends in -us.
HOST You're like a homing pigeon whose destination is sarcasm.
BRUNO I just explained it to you. The monad never dies, it's eternal. Its essence is the same in each living thing but its capacity depends on form whether man, dog, frog, or flower. One's intelligence depends upon the capacity of the monads inhabiting his body. Thus, we become what we are.
HOST Today we refer to your monad as DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid).
BRUNO A mnemonic?
HOST Sort of, a macromolecule made up of your monads. You know, science.
BRUNO Science, you prove me right. In this case the Father is my God-monad, the Son is your macromolecule, and the Holy Ghost the catalyst.
HOST What about the third book, On the Immeasurable and Innumerable?
BRUNO My spirit soars when I think of an infinite universe, immeasurable with its innumerable worlds populated with God's creatures, without center or circumference, beyond which space and time do not exist. True perfection exists only in the immeasurable and innumerable expressed with literacy.
HOST About your innumerable worlds, Aristotle claimed there's no difference between earth and celestial bodies.
BRUNO Not true. It may be that earth is not the heaviest planet. We should consider there may be planets of different matters and forms or even invisible planets revolving around other suns. In planetary life sidereal systems derive from a sun whose heat must be produced by its volcanic core, otherwise its vast circumference would cool off.
HOST Frankfurt was famous for its spring and fall book fairs. These fairs were well attended by Italian book sellers who sold and exchanged books. At the spring book fair of 1590 there was a fateful encounter between you and the Venetian bookseller Jacob Britano. On his trips to Frankfurt book fairs, Britano stayed at the same Carmelite monastery
BRUNO It was common for monasteries to open their gates to faithful Catholics pilgrims or travelers, especially those who could afford offerings. When the prior told him that I was lodging there, he asked to meet me. He let it be known he was anxious to discuss my books and we did so for several days. However, I got the impression he was more interested in my person than in my books.
HOST That year at the fall book fair you met another Venetian bookseller, Giambattista Ciotto.
BRUNO As was his custom, he too stayed at the Carmelite monastery. He too wanted to meet me. For several days we engaged in pleasant conversations. After that our discussions became heated arguments and ended in violent disagreements over Church doctrines.
HOST Then the next winter, 1591, you suddenly departed for Zurich.
BRUNO While at the monastery I received an offer from John Hainzell in Zurich which had a large community of Italian refugees. Hainzell wanted me to instruct him in the Lullian art of memory and my organon of mnemonics. He was a distinguished Protestant who supported the arts and had a reputatuon for being very generous to men of letters. Meanwhile, the Frankfurt Senate enforced its ban on my residency at the monastery. They compelled me to leave Frankfurt, so I accepted Hainzell's offer and departed for Zurich.
HOST Some of your critics, and you had many, claimed you spent too much of your life on Lullian art. They claimed you were drawn in by graphics, secret notations, magic, and mnemonics. You were too much attracted to abstract thinking.
BRUNO One does not progress by living only in the past but by combining past knowledge with current knowledge. For extraordinary results, the intellect must use knowledge in its observations and sense perceptions in order to make the leap from one's intuition to the power of intuition. Pedants cannot make that leap. Only the disorder of the constantly curious mind can make that leap.
HOST Are you claiming that an ordinary person cannot make that leap?
BRUNO I am, whether Hainzell or pedant. Keep in mind pedants cannot be creative because they espouse and teach only what they've learned from others. They don't have the daring mental capacity to be intuitive.
HOST In Zurich you continued your prolific writing.
BRUNO Hainzell asked me to write a book on the philosophical implications of memory. I wrote two books:
On the Composition of Images, Signs, and Ideas
On Images, Signs, and Ideas
dedicating the first one to him. These books evolved from a magic memory system based on 150 Egyptian talismanic images or signs, which reflect the will of God. The images or signs may be constructed logically, mathematically, or by sense perception. Love is a sign of humans just as nature is a sign of God's will. Ideas evolve from sense perceptions and in memory require matter to take form. Images and signs represent attributes or power of nature just as a coin represents buying power.
HOST Here's a sample of your work translated (reads):
"Idea, imagination, analogy, figure, arrangement, notation - this is the universe of God, the work of nature and of reason, and is possessed also by the analogy thereof, so that nature may admirably reflect divine action, and human talent may thereupon rival the operation of nature and almost reach yet more exalted things. Who doth not see with how few elements nature maketh so many things. ... And by immortal God what can be easier to man than the use of number? ... Why is that which is present to us even over the whole heaven yet believed by us to be remote? Because the eye seeth other things, but it seeth not itself. And what is this eye which thus seeth other things that it may see itself? ... Then would it be possible to understand all things, nor would it be hard to accomplish all things." 20
BRUNO During my brief stay in Zurich, I encountered
another of my pupils Raphael Eglin and was fortunate to recruit him as copyist for my new book:
Survey of Metaphysical Terms
It’s my treatise for defining standard terms such as motion, space, time. A philosophical lexicon if you will. For example space is not in heaven, heaven is in space; space is not generated, it's immeasurable expanding to the infinite; bodies limit space, space does not limit bodies; space in the Bible means time; motion measures time, time does not measure motion. Terms must mean the same things if we are to have intelligent discussions. I dedicated the book to Eglin.
HOST It was reported he complained that his pen couldn't keep pace with the power and mental gymnastics of your mind.
BRUNO My copyists always complained. In order for me to resume the printing of my books, including the one dictated to Eglin, I had to return to Frankfurt. After several months in Zurich I departed for Frankfurt. I had my books printed and again applied for residency. But whether resulting from my books or other cause, the Frankfurt senate again rejected my application. I thought Frankfurt was liberal enough for me but it proved me wrong.
HOST Your intolerant impetuous love of knowledge, and total rejection of authority, condemned you in every place you visited.
BRUNO I was forced to again take up residence at the Carmelite monastery. I lectured to gentlemen, mostly Protestants, and acquired a reputation as a universal man of letters.
HOST It happened that a Venetian nobleman, Giovanni Mocenigo, had purchased some of your books from Ciotto. They discussed your writings. Mocenigo inquired about your appearance. When Mocenigo found out that Ciotto had known you personally, he wrote you a letter and had Ciotto deliver it to you at the monastery.
BRUNO Mocenigo wanted to learn the secrets of my mnemonics and encyclopedic knowledge. He wanted me to tutor him and invited me to sojourn with him at his mansion in Venice. Meantime, I had applied again for permanent residence in Frankfurt and again its senate rejected me. Thereafter, I responded to Mocenigo informing him that I would consider his offer.
HOST You were actually thinking of returning to Italy, the country that thought you a heretic, prepared trials against you for excommunication, and forced you into exile?
BRUNO I was thinking of Italy. My heart was always in Nola, its rich fertile mother earth, its hot father sun, its cool vineyards in the shadow of Mount Cicada, the coastline of the Bay of Naples, the Mediterranean scintillating under the bright southern Italian sun.
HOST But you were a fugitive priest wanted by the papacy in Rome.
BRUNO The Republic of Venice was independent, removed from the authority of Rome and Naples. Also, I had in mind applying for a position at nearby Padua University, the vanguard of scientific inquiry, free from ecclesiastical authority. Moreover, I thought Mocenigo could offer me security, food, lodging, and pocket money.
HOST Since 1576 when you fled the Dominican Convent in Naples to 1591 when you decided to leave Frankfurt for Venice, you had wandered around Europe for 16 years.
BRUNO I was searching for truth in knowledge, for those with open minds for new theories, for a suitable place where I could teach and write without being denounced, rejected, or excommunicated. My nostalgia for Italy was reinforced by my hope for reconciliation with the Church. I believed I could convince the Church of my genuine Catholicism.
HOST After all the rejections, evictions, and excommunications of your wanderings you thought you could persuade an intransigent Church to your philosophy? That was the fantasy.
BRUNO I hoped that Mocenigo would afford me the peace and protection I longed for to continue teaching and writing in my homeland.
HOST But despite your misgivings and after all that happened, you actually decided to return to Italy.
BRUNO I longed to be once again among my fellow Italians. After some misgivings I set out for Venice in the autumn of 1591. Keep in mind the forces of the Protestant Henry of Bourbon, King of Navarre had defeated the Catholic League. He succeeded to the throne of France as King Henry 4. There was talk among the intelligentsia that the king would convert to Catholicism. If the pope was liberal and considerate enough to convert the king who defeated the Catholic League, he might even agree to absolve me of my alleged heresies.
HOST On your return to Italy there were those in Venice and elsewhere who marveled at your temerity, some said your stupidity.
BRUNO When I arrived in Venice I encountered certain gentlemen whom I'd previously met in England and Germany. They thought it incredulous that I was in Italy and warned me to leave at once. Impressed by their concern for my welfare, I dismissed their dire warnings as emotional outbursts. Arriving in Venice, I didn't go directly to Mocenigo's mansion. I took up temporary residence near the Bridge of Sighs over the Grand Canal.
HOST What about Mocenigo?
BRUNO We met and I told him of my immediate plan to go to Padua. From there, I could deal with Mocenigo. I had always secretly dreamed of a position at Padua University, a meeting place for gentlemen of learning from all over Europe. I thought of nearby Padua as a retreat for lecturing and writing.
HOST After all your academic disappointments, you were still dreaming of a university position?
BRUNO I had a plan for lecturing, writing, and reconciling with the Church, so I departed for nearby Padua. At the university I tried to schedule disputations in cosmology they refused me. However, the university permitted me to privately tutor German students. I was also privileged to give a series of private lectures to students and a group of interested gentlemen.
HOST Were you part of the faculty?
BRUNO No, which freed me from university schedules giving me time to write. At the university, I was fortunate to encounter again my German copyist Jerome Besler. I put him to work copying several new books:
Lectures on Geometry
Art of Deformation
On Links in General
Links expounds on the fastenings between attractions and repulsions in nature such as love and hate. Living in Padua and having gotten my foot in the university door, I applied for the chair of mathematics and was summarily rejected. The mathematics chair was given to Galileo.
HOST Galileo again?
BRUNO Yes, him again.
HOST It's said that you and Galileo suffered because professors and theologians at the university favored Aristotle.
BRUNO Having been given the chair Galileo apparently didn't suffer. For about three months, having failed in my application, I occasionally traveled between Padua and Venice to tutor the impatient Mocenigo. After 3 months in Padua I returned to Venice in March 1592.
HOST From 1576-1592, ages 28-44, you spent most of your life wandering over Europe searching for a university where you could live in peace, teach, and write.
BRUNO During my wandering I must confess my favorite foreign cities were London and Wittenberg.
HOST It was extraordinary that during those years, in spite of your homelessness and wretched poverty, you were the most prolific author of your time and possibly the most important.
BRUNO I was compulsed to expound my views.
HOST And now in the Republic of Venice the patrician Giovanni Mocenigo opened his mansion to you.
BRUNO I was convinced of his eagerness to learn, so I moved in. My tutoring did not go well because he was a devoted Catholic. We engaged in lively and sometimes bellicose discussions. He was more interested in sorcery and his own personal power over his fellow man than in my philosophy. I told him he had not the capacity for understanding philosophy or mnemonics. Disappointed at my private tutoring, he denounced me for my heretical theories and controversial writings, which he claimed assaulted his conventional belief in Catholicism.
HOST What did he expect?
BRUNO We had nothing in common. It got to the point that he distrusted me and I him.
HOST I understand he hired Ciotto to investigate you.
BRUNO He couldn't understand my mnemonic system and thought I was deceiving him. I was told he protested to Ciotto, "I've kept this man Bruno in my house at great expense feeding him, giving him money and clothes, and he hasn't taught me any of his secrets". He sent Ciotto to Frankfurt to make inquiries of me. Meanwhile, I had met several Neapolitan members of the Dominican Order, particularly one Fra Domenico da Nocera. I appealed to him to intervene on my behalf for absolution from excommunication. Several weeks later, he reported to me that he had failed in obtaining a pardon for me.
HOST What did you expect?
BRUNO In his effort on my behalf, he informed me that Pope Clement 8 was intelligent, conciliatory, and fond of philosophers. I needed no further motivation and immediately began writing the book:
Seven Liberal Arts
It's my foundation for a secular education. I hoped it would be an acceptable alliance between philosophy and religion. I dedicated it to the pope, hoping he'd engage me in a literary discussion so that I could display my mental powers. I'd present myself at the feet of His Beatitude and explain my case for absolution. I'd even agree to live in clerical habit but without returning to any religious order. Perhaps he'd even offer me a lectureship in Rome!
HOST Were you insane? You topped the pope's 10 most wanted list. Your euphoria and sense of mission, your schizoid scheme of agreeing to live in clerical habit but not as a cleric bordered on madness. You wanted to dress as a cleric but live as one of the laity? It's incomprehensible! Did you think you were Jesus about to perform the miracle of converting the pope to your antagonistic philosophy for reforming the Church?
BRUNO No one ever bested me in a head-to-head disputation. I was confident I could persuade the pope of my Catholicism. I had my book, Seven Liberal Arts, printed and sent him a copy. My peace offering elicited no response from Rome. Disappointed, I thought about having more of my books printed in Frankfurt. When I informed Mocenigo about my plan to return to Frankfurt he became furious. He bitterly complained I failed to reveal my secrets to him, that I had instead revealed them to Protestants in Frankfurt. I told Mocenigo he didn't have the capacity to understand Lullian art and mnemonics. He then asked me to teach him the secrets of sorcery. I rebelled shouting that there's no truth in the black art of sorcery.
HOST Meanwhile, Ciotto returned from Frankfurt and reported to Mocenigo that those who dealt with you were dissatisfied and that you were hated by most who knew you. Ciotto described you as a small thin man of medium frame, about 40 years old, destitute, of no estate.
BRUNO Mocenigo accosted me with malice and charged me with fraudulent teaching and lying. He threw a fit, yelling that I was an imposter, that I had deliberately cheated him. We argued and in our heated interchange, I told him I refused to be bullied by him or remain in his mansion. We continued to argue and I let slip that I was once a member of the Dominican Order. At first he was taken by surprise but then, assuming the airs his privileged position, he threatened to expose me as a heretic. I told him I had faced excommunication before and didn't fear trial. I was accustomed to such threats, having endured all those years under threat of excommunication. I ignored his threat to turn me over to the Venetian Holy Office. I returned to my room planning to leave the next morning. Unfortunately, that was a mistake. In the middle of the night Mocenigo's men seized me in my bed and locked me in the garret.
HOST Your escape thwarted, you became his prisoner?
BRUNO Next day Mocenigo said he'd free me if I'd only reveal my secrets to him. If I didn't, he was determined to get revenge by turning me over to Church authorities. My sense of intellectual freedom, attacked and outraged by this ignoramus, I refused to engage him in any further conversation. On the second day of my custody, Mocenigo collected my personal property mostly manuscripts, some clothes, and a few coins. Accompanied by 6 of his men, they seized me and rushed me to the prison of the Venetian Holy Office. Mocenigo handed over my property and the list of his heretical charges against me. Next day I was charged with teaching and disseminating heresy.
HOST The prevalent rumor was that Mocenigo had planned to trap you from the outset. He lured you to Venice under the pretext of learning your secrets, only to denounce you a heretic and turn you over to Church authorities.
BRUNO When Jesus remained silent before Pontius Pilate, the Romans crucified him. When I freely spoke my mind to Mocenigo he betrayed me. Can one avoid one's destiny? Our destinies, if we could interpret them, are probably written in the heavens.
HOST A truly evil man, Mocenigo believed the old charge that you were guilty of murder in Rome and wanted you incarcerated until that charge was resolved.
BRUNO On 26May1592 I was taken and presented to the Venetian Inquisition, the tribunal of the Venetian Holy Office. It charged me with 34 articles of heresy. They questioned me on Mocenigo's charges. As you know, I had been many times threatened by inquisitors. I was quite prepared to defend myself. But then on 29MAY1592 the villain Mocenigo had Britano and Ciotto brought in to testify against me. Britano told the tribunal that the Carmelite prior in Frankfurt told him that I had a great intellect and encyclopedic knowledge but was wasting it occupying myself in writing and devising foolish cosmological theories, that I was always talking about God but was totally without religion, that I claimed I knew more than the apostles, that the world should have only one religion because there's only one God, and that I was lecturing to Protestants and heretics but not to Catholics. During their interrogation, Britano and Ciotto reluctantly reviewed our conversations but they never called me a heretic. After they testified, inquisitors demanded details from me, so I related my 44-year history. They were astounded that I could retrieve from memory such details by date, event, and place.
HOST Not satisfied with your answers, you were again presented to the tribunal. They questioned you about your discussion with one of their own.
BRUNO The inquisitors called Fra Domenico da Nocera to testify. He related what I told him - that I had traveled in many countries, attended many royal courts, lectured at many universities, written many books, that I had always conducted myself a Catholic, that I arrived in Venice to live in peace and write a book for the pope. Thereby hoping to obtain absolution, perhaps even to live, lecture, and write in Rome. They pressed me on my interpretation of the Arian Heresy and Trinity. I responded that in my writings references to the Trinity were merely philosophical expressions and did not defy Church doctrine.
HOST You were questioned about your extravagant praise of the heretic Queen Elizabeth. A confirmed Protestant who beheaded many Catholics.
BRUNO It was customary for me to praise monarchs who invited me to their courts, offering me food and lodging. Perhaps I was unwise in praising her.
HOST During the summer you were asked repeatedly to renounce and detest your errors.
BRUNO I defended myself explaining my views were based on philosophy. Philosophy requires reason, theology requires faith and the voices of revelation. Theology is concerned with the Word, it fetters the mind with high walls of religious maze, a labyrinth from which there's no exit except submission to faith. Philosophy concerns the intellect and its adventure for truth. While some of my views might have been objectionable, I never intended to impugn the Church and I never abandoned Catholicism by becoming a Protestant.
HOST But in the end you did recant.
BRUNO I confessed that I detested any error I may have committed against the Church. I hoped they would show me mercy, admitting me again into the arms of the Church. I fell to my knees and begged forgiveness. I begged for absolution so that I might live freely but not under religious vows, not among monks. The judges appeared to be favorably impressed. I was encouraged by some of their remarks and thought I was going to be released.
HOST That autumn the Venetian Inquisition turned you over to the Venetian secular procurator. He remarked that you were very intelligent, a quick wit, possessing great learning and memory, but that you had committed acts of heresy. This is what he reported to the Venice Holy Office (reads):
"That this friar was a foreigner and no subject, and was not therefore, entitled to the protection of Venice; that he was first accused and detained in Naples for a grievous transgression in heresy; that having escaped and fled to Rome, he was there tried and imprisoned for the same and other offenses: and that his trial having begun in Naples and in Rome seventeen years earlier, ought in justice to be brought to a termination in those dominions." 21
BRUNO Secluded in their prison, I became suspicious of their delaying tactics. However, I had the opportunity to speak to a brother friar preacher. I told him that if I could get an audience with his Holiness the Pope I would discuss my new book, Seven Liberal Arts, and implore him to give me permission to live in Rome lecturing and writing as a scholar.
HOST 16 years ago, you escaped from Rome to avoid trial there. Why would you beg to return to Rome, to your certain punishment?
BRUNO I thought I could convince Rome, the font of authority, of my philosophy and meritorious writings.
HOST I'd say your logic was fatally flawed.
BRUNO The Venetian Holy Office administered justice independently of Rome. If Venice absolved me why would Rome want me? Then on 22December1592 the papal nuncio in Venice informed Church authorities that I was the Neapolitan against whom proceedings were begun in Naples in 1576, those same proceedings continuing in Rome whence I escaped. The papal nuncio convinced Venice I was no ordinary case and should be turned over to Rome. I hadn't planned on being pursued by Rome's Holy Office.
HOST Didn't you understand Rome was hunting you down from place to place, waiting to apprehend and try you?
BRUNO I was informed that according to Church law ...
HOST You said law, did you mean decree?
BRUNO No law, cannon law of the Papal State. According to canon law, only Rome could make the decision leading to dispensation. The Venetian Senate and Doge's Council voted to hand me over, but I still had confidence I could explain my philosophy and writings. Once understood, Rome would accept them and might even honor me for my life's work. It would be the end of my poverty and I'd enjoy the riches of Rome.
HOST An optimism detached from reality, insanely impractical. You had sealed and your fate didn't even know it.
BRUNO That autumn the papal nuncio in Venice requested authority to consign me to Rome. The next year 27January1593, the not so independent Republic of Venice agreed. I was promptly extradited by the pope's Praetorian Guard, conducted under great security to Rome, and there imprisoned in the dark damp dungeons of Rome's Holy Office. Humiliated, I was restrained in irons without a blanket or pillow.
HOST Your 16 year odyssey cycled from Naples to Rome through Europe and back to Rome. As I understand it, for the next 7 years, you were repeatedly examined by the fathers of the Holy Office. Each time they advised you to recant your heresies and each time you refused.
BRUNO You mean my alleged heresies. Against my will, I tried recanting in Venice and they consigned me to Rome. I was determined to be true to myself. Sadly, my philosophic defenses did not persuade them to my views. I languished without regular daily rations of food or water. I suffered from cacoethus scribendi (itch to write). I begged for paper, pen, and ink to relieve my gnawing itch to write in my own defense. They refused. When I begged for drawing instruments, they withheld those instruments for fear I would embellish my writing with Lullian art which they considered satanic. They added I would never get any writing instruments, especially a divider.
HOST Why?
BRUNO They feared I might use its sharp points to mortally impale myself, depriving them of my sacrifice. After all my trials did they think I would be imprisoned in their dungeon only to commit suicide? During 7 years of imprisonment, they forbid me to write anything on my own to protect me, they claimed, from adding to my heresies. But several times they gave me ink, paper, and pen for my written responses to their questions. Reading from my written responses they would then further dissect my philosophical views. I got the feeling they were probing my views only to add more charges against me.
HOST For a prolific writer to be denied his passion was a deliberate deprivation of your needs and certainly an added punishment, if that were possible.
BRUNO After 7 solitary years in their stinking dungeon, I had no fear of hell because I had met the devil and had no fear of him. I wrote an epistle to Pope Clement 8 begging for an audience with His Holiness. I got no response. I remained imprisoned and isolated in their dungeon, kept in irons, a captive of the Church. No one helped me. There was no outside power great enough to rescue me from the powerful Church of Rome.
The Holy Office usually dispensed quickly with its prisoners. In Bruno's case and without precedent the Holy Office kept him imprisoned 7 years (1593-1599) hoping he would recant his heresies. During the year 1599 Giordano Bruno was brought before the Papal Tribunal of the Roman Inquisition, whose congregation consisted of 9 cardinals, 6 bishops, and a notary. In the following dialog INQUISITOR means any cardinal or bishop of the tribunal.
INQUISITOR We, the papal tribunal of the Roman Holy Office, are here convened by order of Pope Clement 8th permitting, ex officio, the searching out and examining one Giordano Bruno of Nola, friar preacher and apostate of the Dominican Order. During the long term assigned to you to prepare your defense you've failed to clear yourself of any of the 130 charges of heresy against you. It is, therefore, necessary for this papal tribunal to expose the truth through its vigorous examination of the most serious of these charges. Giordano Bruno, before this congregation of Roman Inquisitors, do you now admit, confess, and recant with penitent demeanor all heresies charged against you?
BRUNO During the 7 years you've kept me imprisoned, I've repeatedly answered all your inquiries.
INQUISITOR We're aware of your previous answers. What is your response today before this papal tribunal?
BRUNO In Venice I confessed all my alleged theological mistakes.
INQUISITOR Venice? alleged? this is Rome! Venice has no authority to relax canon law, or suspend the obligations of the Roman Catholic Church. Only his Holiness the Pope has the authority to promulgate dispensation.
INQUISITOR If you confessed your heresies in Venice, are you prepared to do the same before this papal tribunal? Are you now remorseful, penitent, and ready to recant, to absolve yourself of your heresies? You now have the opportunity to cleanse your memory of any false responses you may have given in the past. You may begin anew and with conspicuous penitence, review those events of your life that today bring you here to face this papal tribunal.
INQUISITOR Giordano Bruno, in 1576 you fled your Dominican Order in Naples fearing trial for heresy. Since then you've engaged in heretical behavior and written heretical words.
BRUNO My dear brethren your sartorial robes are cut from the Church's whole cloth, whereas my ragged coverings are those of a homeless and imprisoned philosophical dissenter.
INQUISITOR Your dilapidated dress is of your own choosing. Charged with multiple heresies 23 years ago, you discarded your monk's habit when you fled Rome, thereby divorcing yourself from the beneficence, bosom, and patronage of the Church.
BRUNO I kept my scapular to retain a connection with the Church.
INQUISITOR And in that connection are you now ready to recant your transgressions against the Church?
BRUNO Reposing in your prison I've been forced to reflect upon my past actions and, doing so, find no heresy in them. I've endured your punishment for 7 agonizing years. During that time you have on occasion asked me to recant. I always responded truthfully, that I had nothing to recant. What you call heresies I call philosophical differences. Appearing here before this papal tribunal, this distinguished congregation, temporarily removes me from my purgatorial cell. You've let your triumphant beast out of his cage and for that I thank you.
INQUISITOR We're all aware of your sarcasm. Be warned that sarcasm merely puts this tribunal on guard against your trickery; it shall not mitigate or reduce the multiple heresies charged against you.
BRUNO Honored brethren, my philosophical endeavors are merely searches for truths to be added to my knowledge. You should understand that my philosophical excursions are not deliberate attacks against the Church. I am a philosopher, not a theologian. As for my heresies, I don't consider them as such. Therefore, the recantation you demand of me is not appropriate.
INQUISITOR We've heard all your pretensions of innocence, that you know not what to renounce, that you've nothing to recant. Our examination will expose your misdirected opinions so they'll be made manifest.
BRUNO Your representatives have questioned me repeatedly only to use my answers to elicit more charges against me. You've denied me books and writing materials. You've provided pen and paper only on those occasions when you demanded my written responses to your queries. You denied me the use of my books in order for me to respond properly. I had to respond solely from memory.
INQUISITOR No doubt from your encyclopedic memory. It appears your past devotion was for Mnemosyne, not the Virgin Mary.
BRUNO I haven't seen the night's sky in 7 years. Yet, when I retrieve it from memory my mind vibrates with God's spirit.
INQUISITOR Giordano Bruno, this papal tribunal charges you with 130 heresies, including denial of the divinity of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the Trinity, the Holy Eucharist
INQUISITOR Giordano Bruno, do you believe in God?
BRUNO Of course! I'm insulted you should ask me such a question.
INQUISITOR Do you believe in our Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God.
BRUNO Of course.
INQUISITOR And in the Holy Ghost?
BRUNO Yes.
INQUISITOR Do you believe in the mystery and equality of the Holy Trinity?
BRUNO Yes.
INQUISITOR Hypocrite! You disseminated the fallible Arian Heresy. How can you believe in both the Holy Trinity and in the Arian Heresy?
INQUISITOR Giordano Bruno, you are charged with expounding on the heretical doctrine of the Christian priest Arius of Alexander. Even during your novitiate in Naples, you freely discussed with your fellow novices the heretical doctrine of Arius. What is your response?
BRUNO It's true I doubted Church interpretation of the Trinity since I was 18, since I was a novice. I believe the Church misunderstood Arius and I discussed his doctrines with my fellow novices.
INQUISITOR The Church did not misunderstand Arius, it was Arius who misunderstood the Holy Trinity.
BRUNO Philosophically I believe Arius' claim that the Father has primacy over the Son, and that the Son is not consubstantial with the Father. His doctrine settled the doubts and confusion arising from the early church, from inchoate Catholicism.
INQUISITOR Not true. There's no primacy between the Father and Son. The Father begot the Son. The Son is of the same substance as the Father.
INQUISITOR Arius' doctrine settled nothing; it merely antagonized the claims of Trinity. We're aware of the problems of the early Church. Those theological controversies were resolved by the Council of Nicaea.
BRUNO Convened by Constantine in his beloved Eastern Empire, the same Constantine who abandoned Rome moving the seat of power to Byzantium, which he then renamed for himself.
INQUISITOR We are not examining Constantine.
BRUNO But as you know he convened a council consisting of several hundred Asian and African bishops who established Catholicism as an eastern religion, not a European religion. There were only a hand full of bishops from Rome and Europe.
INQUISITOR What's the import? They were all Catholic bishops of the early Church.
BRUNO The import is that those Asian and African bishops were strongly influenced by eastern mysticism. They blended polytheism and monotheism for proclaiming their Creed, the mystery of their 3 in 1 Trinity, 3 persons in 1 God.
INQUISITOR Under the leadership of Anthanasius, bishop of Alexandria, the votes were 300 in favor of the creed and only 3 against. Anthanasius stood contra mundum but in the end won for the full deity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ.
BRUNO Anthanasius was another eastern bishop, not European. The 3 bishops who disagreed were Europeans. They never would have divided God into 3 persons.
INQUISITOR Are you claiming the Trinity is polytheistic?
BRUNO I repeat to you in the Creed's own words: Firstly, I believe in one God, the Father Almighty; secondly, and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God; thirdly, and the Holy Ghost, the Lord and giver of life. In typical eastern mysticism the bishops created the Father Almighty, and 2 Lords each considered a part of God. Christianity could not exist without Trinity. While accepted as theology, that concept strains philosophical credulity.
INQUISITOR God is one substance differentiated to three distinct and equal modes of eternal existence.
BRUNO Three abstract aspects of God?
INQUISITOR Not abstract, real as defined in the Creed.
BRUNO That being the case, there must be a Godhead consisting of God's divine attributes, his essences. Persons are humans; they have neither divine attributes nor essences and cannot be parts of God. A person cannot be God and man at the same time. That's why Arius declared the Creed fallible theology.
INQUISITOR The Creed reaffirms the absolute unity and equality of three persons in one God. Not three humans, three divine persons in one God.
BRUNO Even Augustine claimed the Son is not of the same substance as the Father.
INQUISITOR Augustine also claimed the Son proceeds from the Father.
BRUNO If the three persons are equal parts of the Godhead and either the Son or Holy Ghost is sent to earth, Trinity is destroyed.
INQUISITOR God's omnipotence preserves Holy Trinity.
INQUISITOR Are we now reverting to catechumens, to novitiate days? Have you forgotten that God is love which manifests personality, a person loved and loving. Therefore, Christianity is a personal religion and its God is a personal God. In the Holy Trinity are three loving personalities: (1) God the Father absolute and infinite, (2) Jesus Christ the mediator between God and man; the only begotten Son of the Father, and (3) the Holy Ghost, the mystical personality through which Christians enter into personal communication with God. BRUNO As for the Incarnation, the mystery of the second person being God-man, remains not only a theological mystery but a philosophical impossibility. Augustine remarked that when speaking of divine matters he uttered the word person with dread and used it only because he was obliged to do so by Church dogma. Augustine linked the word Word, not person, to the Son of God. Aquinas systematized that link.
INQUISITOR Aquinas systemized Catholicism in his Summa to assist missionaries in answering the erroneous views of Jews and Moslems.
BRUNO Augustine also claimed the mystery of the Trinity harbors knowledge of the divine veiled from the masses, from the ignorant and profane, accessible only to authorized interpreters of Church doctrine. His remark infers only priests understand the mystery of the Trinity. As a priest, I do not and believe that the Trinitarian doctrine is untenable.
INQUISITOR Trinity has been accepted theology for over 1,500 years.
INQUISITOR Have you forgotten that St. Augustine explained Trinity?
BRUNO Augustine also postulated several other trinities such as the trinity of useful, hurtful, and superfluous animals. The truth is that those eastern bishops at Nicaea, in order to apportion divine power, followed the model of Rome's Triumvirate - Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey.
INQUISITOR Blasphemy! They were human. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are divine. Rome's triumvirate were secular, Trinity is divine.
INQUISITOR We have heard your views, your philosophical arguments, but do you believe in God the Father Almighty?
BRUNO The words Father Almighty relate to the Godhead. I believe in God but facts are more persuasive than faith.
INQUISITOR The word Godhead is not in the Creed.
BRUNO Because the bishops would have been faced with having to define a fourth term, Godhead. The word Father connotes the procreator of the Son and Holy Ghost.
INQUISITOR No, begetter of the Son but creator of the Holy Ghost.
BRUNO Creator of the Son and the Holy Ghost.
INQUISITOR No, the Son begotten by the Father.
BRUNO To beget is to create, to make.
INQUISITOR No, begotten as defined in the Creed means to issue from.
BRUNO The word Creed is not in the Old Testament and not in the gospels.
INQUISITOR The Creed is Christian not Judaic.
BRUNO The gospel according to St. John says "All things were made by Him, and without Him was made nothing that was made". The significant word is made, not begotten.
INQUISITOR If you were a practicing priest you'd know John's gospel declared that Christ was the Word made flesh, "et verbum caro factum est" (and the Word was made flesh); the source of life on earth, the light in the darkness. Jesus Christ has two natures, divine and human.
BRUNO But Servetus wrote that the Word was limited to Jesus as human on earth.
INQUISITOR We are not here in congregation to listen to the gospel according to Bruno.
BRUNO The word Trinity is not in the Old Testament and not in the gospels. Servetus also declared the Trinitarian doctrine to be unbiblical.
INQUISITOR First you attempted to direct our inquiries from you to Arius. Now you're attempting to do the same with Servetus, neither of whom are on trial here.
BRUNO I mentioned Servetus merely to emphasize that my anti-Trinitarian view has its own long theological history; it's not new.
INQUISITOR Neither is heresy. Servetus' anti-Trinitarian doctrine got him burned to death by Protestants in Geneva.
INQUISITOR Trinity is implicit in Mathew who said, "Baptize them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost".
BRUNO Mathew also said Jesus declared his mission on earth was not peace but division. That prediction came to fruition in the religious wars in Belgium, France, and Netherlands.
INQUISITOR In 2 Corinthians St. Paul reflects on "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost".
BRUNO St. Paul’s words were written many years after the death of Jesus and he never mentioned Trinity.
INQUISITOR Are you claiming that after the resurrection time evacuated truth?
INQUISITOR Are you denying God's words in scripture?
BRUNO Let me put it this way. The prophet Moses had his tablets but never wrote anything. Jesus had his cross and never wrote anything. Only the prophet Mohammed, submitting to the will of God, recited and wrote about his visionary revelations, the Koran.
INQUISITOR More of your irrelevant dialectics?
BRUNO You know and I know that God the Father, the Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost never wrote anything.
INQUISITOR Enough! Giordano Bruno, you are charged with denying the divinity of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ the Son of God. What is your response?
BRUNO I believe in the divinity of the Son of God but not in the divinity of Jesus who was begotten by woman. When the contrary is proved, I'll believe it.
INQUISITOR The son of God and Jesus Christ are the same being.
BRUNO Divinity cannot be resident in a human.
INQUISITOR Et incarnatus est de spiritu sancto ex Maria Virgine et homo factus est. (And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary and was made man). Why can't you understand that simple theological premise?
BRUNO That being so Jesus, the Son of God, born of woman on earth grew from infant to man confirming his mutability and mortality. Therefore, the Son cannot be consubstantial with the Father who is immutable and eternal. Jesus cannot be divine and human at the same time even though the Mass represents his two natures, divine and human, as wine and water.
INQUISITOR God is all powerful and all knowing. You're confusing the Son of God in heaven with Jesus the Son of God on earth. The Son of God in heaven is immortal and eternal. Jesus the Son of God on earth was mortal.
BRUNO By its very nature immortality cannot be metamorphosed to mortality. Consider the following postulate. If the two Sons of God are in heaven and earth at the same time, their concurrency adds to Trinity for Quadrity. If the Son of God was sent from heaven to earth, consecution subtracts from Trinity for Duality.
INQUISITOR Blasphemy!
INQUISITOR Your occult mathematics does not fool this tribunal. The Father deliberately sent to earth his only begotten Son to die for our sins.
BRUNO How could Jesus die for mankind's sins? Most of mankind wasn't alive at that time. I wasn't alive then.
INQUISITOR His death and resurrection is symbolic of everlasting life and that includes you.
INQUISITOR God is omniscient and omnipotent. The Father sent the Son as intermediary between God and a sinful world, the instrument of divine salvation, to deliver the world from sin.
BRUNO What's sin in Christianity may not be sin in other religions.
INQUISITOR In John 4:26 Jesus admits he's the Messiah. Jesus died for our sins, even yours.
BRUNO In that case, would not the Father also send his Son to die for sins in other distant unseen worlds of the infinite universe?
INQUISITOR Do you deny Christus Pantocrator teacher, savior, redeemer who said, "I am the light of the world"? Do you deny that Christ, through the Holy Ghost, makes himself felt in our daily lives? Giordano Bruno do you deny Christ's divinity?
BRUNO Recall in Mark the high priest asked Jesus. "Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One"? Jesus answered "I am, and you will soon see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power and coming with the clouds of heaven". I cite that as an example of scriptural confusion between the human and divine.
INQUISITOR You irreligious fool! The Son of Man is the Son of God.
INQUISITOR Scripture supports the coming of the Son of Man as Luke said "men will see the Son of Man coming on a cloud with great power and glory" (Luke 21:27).
BRUNO True but the Lord repeatedly called Ezekiel the Son of Man.
INQUISITOR To differentiate the human son Ezekiel from the divine Son of God.
BRUNO There at Wittenberg by the river Elbe I had the vision of my New Philosophy world religion. Like Ezekiel I prophesied a new covenant. I saw the Lord God in white robes descend from a white cloud gleaming with electrum
INQUISITOR Blasphemy! Are you comparing yourself to the great prophet Ezekiel? You dare compare your New Philosophy religion to Ezekiel's new covenant through salvation of sin? I say to you in your own words, you are the ass posturing as the horse Pegasus.
INQUISITOR Jesus the Son of God died for your sins, even as you stand before us mouthing heresy and denying his divinity.
BRUNO I believe that Jesus is exalted above all others and deserves to be worshipped but he is not divine.
INQUISITOR Unholy priest!
BRUNO It was the Father who sent the Son; the Son did not send the Father; hence the primacy of the Father over the Son. The Son being subordinate cannot be consubstantial with the Father. In trying to disprove the Arian Heresy, the Creed proves the Father has primacy over the Son. In fact, the Trinity is the commingling of disparate parts.
INQUISITOR You declared the Son is not of the same substance as the Father. There can't be any distinction in the two persons, otherwise divinity would be imperfect.
BRUNO You have said it.
INQUISITOR The Creed clearly states that the Lord Jesus Christ is the only begotten Son born of the Father and consubstantial with the Father. The Son is begotten of the same but not similar substance. The Son is begotten not made, not created.
BRUNO Begotten means created.
INQUISITION If the bishops at Nicaea meant created, they'd have said so.
BRUNO Which would have denied begotten, the premise of Trinity. That's why I say the Son's substance is not the same as that of the Father.
INQUISITOR You say? Are you comparing yourself to those bishops, Christianity's founding fathers?
INQUISITION The Father's divinity is passed to his Son.
BRUNO Are you inferring their relationship to be the archetype of divine Pater Familias?
INQUISITOR Blasphemy!
BRUNO Jesus the Son of God was mutable and mortal disqualifying him as 1/3 of Trinity. The bishops should have edited out "and in one Lord Jesus Christ" which conflicts with the phrase "Son of God". In celebrating the Last Supper Jesus offered his body and blood only to God the Father 1/3 of Trinity. Jesus did not offer his body to God the Father and the Holy Ghost, the 2/3 of Trinity in heaven waiting for the son.
INQUISITOR Blasphemy!
BRUNO Did the divine Jesus Christ, Son of God, spring from the Father's head as did Minerva from the head of Jove?
INQUISITOR Blasphemy!
BRUNO I concede that the Son of God in heaven was divine, immutable, and eternal. But in descending to earth Jesus the son of woman became human, mutable, and mortal.
INQUISITOR You concede, you! Who are you to concede divinity or humanity?
BRUNO I meant philosophically.
INQUISITOR Jesus Christ Son of God descended from heaven, born of Mary Ever Virgin was crucified, was resurrected, and then ascended to glory in heaven with full integrity as the Son of God.
BRUNO Those bishops at Nicaea should have remained true to their eastern mysticism by replacing Trinity with one of their avatars, which would have avoided the 3 in 1 mystery. To bypass the concept of Trinity, the Son of God should have descended from heaven as avatar to preach, perform miracles, die for the world's sins, and upon death return to his eternal home in heaven.
INQUISITOR Are you trying to turn this solemn examination into a fiasco?
INQUISITOR Are you now trying to camouflage your apostasy, excusing it by resorting to Hindu mythology?
BRUNO I believe we're arguing Catholic mythology.
INQUISITOR Priest, have you forgotten your training in Naples? Have you lost all faith in God?
INQUISITOR When you abandoned your order in Naples, you fled to Rome. It was there you were accused of throwing an informer in the Tiber. What is your response?
BRUNO Absolutely false. I fled to the Convent of Minerva and was confined there until my hearing. Perhaps what my accuser saw was Peter baptizing a Jew in the Tiber converting him to Christianity.
INQUISITOR Blasphemy!
BRUNO I don't know where to begin here. You have presented your starving centurion's servant with a banquet.
INQUISITOR You dare mock this papal tribunal?
BRUNO My dear brethren I begin, a priori, with a small offering. We are all agreed that God alone is unique, self-existent, unbegotten, immutable, and eternal. The Son and Holy Ghost were created, were called into existence so they had the beginning that portends an end. Therefore, they must be dissimilar, not the same as the Father. It follows that Trinity, based upon philosophical reasoning, is merely symbolic of the Godhead. If European bishops had established early Christianity, they simply would have had a prophet named Jesus. They would have avoided the embarrassments of the Son of God, Virgin Mary, and Holy Ghost.
INQUISITOR You claim Son of God, Virgin Mary, and Holy Ghost are embarrassments?
INQUISITOR You are not worthy to enter under the Lord's roof?
BRUNO If we compare the human Jesus with the divine one, who sitteth at the right hand of the Father, what are the contrasting anatomical features? Does the divine Jesus have a beard, a navel? How could a virgin have born a son? Was she ever virgin because she was seeded by the Holy Ghost and then Jesus delivered in the manner of Julius Caesar? The human Jesus was the first son, but she had many children after him. How can she be worshipped as ever virgin? As a Catholic I believe Jesus was incarnated by the Paraclete born of the Virgin Mary but that concept is contrary to philosophic truth. The Paraclete is assumed divine; the Virgin Mary was human. Even Aquinas doubted the Marian doctrine.
INQUISITOR At first, Aquinas doubted as did the apostle Thomas. But through faith Aquinas accepted and was committed to the Marian doctrine.
INQUISITOR How is the Holy Ghost an embarrassment?
BRUNO Communication with God is in the mind. The Holy Ghost is the medium through which the Church proclaims we communicate with the Father or Jesus Christ, or vice versa. Communication with God is through prayer. We're all aware that when we pray, our physical self communicates with our spiritual self.
INQUISITOR Do you believe in the Holy Ghost?
BRUNO I believe the Holy Ghost to be the creation of Nicaea, whose Creed admits it proceeds from the Father and the Son. It cannot be of the same substance as either the Father or the Son.
INQUISITOR Have you forgotten the Mass' Preface? "not in the oneness of a single Person, but in the Trinity of one substance" one hypostasis.
INQUISITOR Recall that John baptized apostles with water but Jesus baptized them through the Holy Ghost.
BRUNO It appears to me those eastern bishops contrived the Holy Ghost solely to impose the Immaculate Conception upon the Virgin Mary to incarnate Jesus. Virgin birth is a standard convention of eastern mysticism. Eventually Jesus was renamed Christ without whom there would be no Christianity. He didn't become Christ until years after his death.
INQUISITOR Are you inferring that you believe in the mystery of the Trinity but not in the Church's interpretation? How can you reconcile your conflicting views?
BRUNO My views are philosophic. The Father is will power; the Son is universal intellect; the Holy Ghost is universal soul. The three are indistinguishable aspects of the one absolute Godhead. My philosophical doctrine eliminates the conflicts between essence and substance, primary and secondary, begotten and created.
INQUISITOR You're using philosophical dialectics to facilitate an exuberant and wild imagination.
BRUNO While Jesus, Virgin Mary, and Holy Ghost are theologically true they're not philosophically true. That is, philosophical truth versus theological faith.
INQUISITOR You call your radical dissent philosophical truth? We believe in theological truth. In your stubborn impertinence do you make philosophy superior to theology?
BRUNO Averroës asserted that truth supports truth. Theological truth cannot differ from philosophical truth. We can approach but never find absolute truth.
INQUISITOR You're doing it again. Now it's Averroës. He's not on trial here.
BRUNO There cannot be double truths. Only those who attain ultimate truth are filiated to God. But I must admit there are exceptions to double truths, dreaming for example. In dreaming with eyes closed we see as we do awake with eyes open. Perhaps somewhere in the immeasurable infinite universe there are double truths.
INQUISITOR What is your version of truth?
BRUNO There are different kinds of truth but under any condition one can only approach absolute truth. That which is true is the same whether through the senses, reality, or practical experience.
INQUISITOR I'm convinced that, despite your attempts at rational responses, you're divorced from the truth as we see it.
BRUNO Very well consider the following. Those eastern bishops could have included the Daughter of God. The inclusion of woman would have established parity between Ascension and Assumption.
INQUISITOR Irreligious fool! Jesus is the Son of God. Mary is the Immaculate Mother of Jesus. There is no parity between them and none was ever envisioned by the bishops at Nicaea or the Church.
BRUNO There's parity between Ascension and Assumption because both Jesus and Mary were received body and soul into heavenly glory. What we don't know is whether they retained their physicals. Philosophically I ask you, is heavenly glory the same as heaven? In the Bible we constantly encounter the problem of scriptural grammar.
INQUISITOR Obviously, scripture is open to different interpretation because of the translational problems of ancient languages.
INQUISITOR The Church concerns itself with faith in God, not in human physicals.
BRUNO Here's mathematical truth for you. The infinite multiplication of a triangle can approach but never become a perfect circle. Furthermore, 3 is a prime number indivisible by another number without remainder. Theologically however Trinity is divisible by either Father, Son, or Holy Ghost with remainder in heaven or on earth. This is an example of my spiritual metabolism.
INQUISITOR Enough of your sarcasm. You are like the ostracized Saracen made mad by the burning sun.
BRUNO In Judaism, as you're well aware, male and female are consummated in their Godhead. A human being is the image of male and female elements in their Godhead. Philosophically, even though women are societal subordinates to men, perhaps number 4 would have been a better choice than 3, Quadrity not Trinity. Moreover the number 4, although a deficient number for bishops, is coincident with the 4 points of the cross, themselves mnemonic pointers to the Tetragrammaton.
INQUISITOR Enough of this!
INQUISITOR You're deliberately antagonizing this papal tribunal with your imagined revelations and nonsensical occult mathematics.
BRUNO My dear brethren, in that case I ask you to consider the following Aristotelian syllogism, Aristotle being one of your favorites:
If the Son is equal to the Father
And the Holy Ghost is equal to the Son
The Holy Ghost is equal to the Father
Therefore, when Jesus dying on the cross called out, "My God, my God why have you forsaken me"? Who responded, the Father or Holy Ghost or both?
INQUISITOR Blasphemy! Enough of this.
INQUISITOR We're not impressed with the obfuscations of your professed mathematics.
INQUISITOR Your ridicule of this papal tribunal confirms the Church's suspicion of your views. We know all about your clever dialectics that tricked our brethren in Venice. You fooled our Venetian brothers but you didn't fool the pope and you're not fooling us.
INQUISITOR We cannot rationalize God's will. God's will is all-powerful, inscrutable, and cannot be known to man.
BRUNO That being so, why did the Church bother to convene the Council of Nicaea in order to explain the unexplainable? Moreover, to satisfy its theological contingencies, the Church from time to time alters its doctrines.
INQUISITOR The Church is not arrogant. If it encounters minor theological errors, it makes the required changes. The Church has never attempted to explain the unexplainable.
BRUNO Perhaps the Church can be succored by the mathematical theorem that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are sides of an equilateral triangle whose area is the Godhead.
INQUISITOR More occult mathematics?
BRUNO Not occult, proved by Pythagoras. Logically, Trinity is a perfect circle divided into 3 parts: the Father consisting of 2 quadrants, the Son and Holy Ghost 1 quadrant each, aptly demonstrated by Lullian art. The circle helps me understand the Godhead.
INQUISITOR We are aware of Ramón Lull, "Doctor Illuminatus", and his Lullian Art. We know all about his Hebrew letters, concentric wheels, and geometrical logic contrived to explain the Trinity.
INQUISITOR There's a big difference between you and the Franciscan Lull. He spent most of his life trying to convert Moslems to Christianity. You're spending your life attacking the Church. Moslems imprisoned him for his evangelism and eventually stoned him to death. Are you following in his footsteps?
BRUNO I'm not a proselytizer. I simply question theology not sustained by knowledge or reason. I merely mentioned his name because he demonstrated the correlation of the circle and three powers of Trinity.
INQUISITOR What has that to do with your circle?
BRUNO Geometric logic includes the circle which comports with our own circles, our eyes. Triangles may be also used to explain phenomena. Consider that our artists like to paint a woman whose mouth, edge to edge, is 1.68 times broader than the base of her nose triangle.
INQUISITOR Any deceptive man can devise a system for obtaining expected results. Notably your mentor Lull, on whom I understand you wasted your talents and are now wasting ours.
BRUNO Lull demonstrated that physical processes can move heaven and earth.
INQUISITOR We all know that in the Ascension and Assumption the Holy Ghost escorted Jesus and Blessed Virgin Mary to glory in heaven. The Holy ghost moved earth to heaven. Lull's feeble attempts only graphicked those miraculous moves.
BRUNO The words ascension and assumption are not in the Bible.
INQUISITOR Are you back to that again?
INQUISITOR Their acts are described in scripture. Elijah ascended in a whirlwind. We have the assumption of Moses and in her dormition the Virgin Mary was bodily assumed into heaven.
BRUNO In transubstantiation, the sacramental taste test, the Holy Ghost escorts bread and wine to the mind.
INQUISITOR Irreligious fool! You know well that faith dwells in the mind.
BRUNO In that case, with closed mouth and immobile tongue, why not kneel and silently pray during the imaginary and sacred paschal meal for the experience of communion with God.
INQUISITOR What is religion without ritual?
BRUNO There's another trans-, Transfiguration. Before Peter, James, and John the Holy Ghost transfigures Jesus to an invisible supernatural being enveloped in a brilliant white cloud, and then magically returns him to his visible human form before their very eyes.
INQUISITOR Another example of God's divine power in the name of the Holy Ghost.
BRUNO Catholic Renaissance artists, inspired by the power of the Holy Ghost to transmute brilliant white clouds to dark human forms, used its example to invent chiaroscuro painting.
INQUISITOR Blasphemy!
INQUISITOR You've dwelt in many heretic lands living among Protestants. You consorted with them, lectured at their universities, you attended their services.
INQUISITOR Giordano Bruno did you ever become a Protestant?
BRUNO I never became a Protestant. To this day, I remain Catholic. During the years I lived among them and lectured at their universities, we discussed philosophy and religion. I never sat at their communion table and never thought of becoming a Protestant. Why do you make such a charge against me?
INQUISITOR Because you dwelt in many heretic countries and had dealings with many heretics. You should not be agitated at our questions. We're trying to find the truth.
BRUNO I tried to adhere to the Catholic calendar. Out of curiosity I attended Protestant services but never broke bread with any of them.
INQUISITOR Protestants deemed you a man without religion or religious observances. They did to you what we began several times. They excommunicated you.
BRUNO There are many Catholics who neglect their religious observances, yet they're not charged with heresy or excommunicated.
INQUISITOR You continued to be a religious apostate. You once said that "No religion pleases me", that includes Catholicism. In Wittenberg it was reported you were applying yourself to the divination of a new sect called Giordanismo.
BRUNO Catholics and Protestants were killing each other, so I suggested that a single world religion might be more appropriate than Christianity. I suggested a New Philosophy religion based on humanity.
INQUISITOR There are ends to wars and there will be an end to these wars.
INQUISITOR What is your view of God in your New Philosophy religion?
BRUNO A God that gives us intelligence for our determined use. God would be the cause creating intellect, will, matter, and form. God would not be not a personal God but a God of the infinite universe.
INQUISITOR A God without personality, without humanity? Pantheism!
INQUISITOR God in things only? God localized to numina?
BRUNO In nature's scheme persons beget persons.
INQUISITOR Once again you're speaking of earthly persons. We speak of divine persons. God has personality; He enters our lives. The God of your world religion is merely an impersonal God of nature.
BRUNO There's only one God, the God of creation. The God that created all there is in this and other worlds, all there is in the infinite universe.
INQUISITOR When the librarian of the Abbey of St. Victor declared you have no religion, he was right. You have only your own God devised from your mechanistic world religion.
INQUISITOR What about baptism, fall, resurrection, and redemption?
BRUNO We all know that infants are born covered in blood and slime, but innocent of sin. Baptism would not be required because there would be no original sin, no proselytizing, or acquisition of religious law. Even Servetus rejected the doctrine of infant baptism. As for the fall, humans acting like humans need not be sinners. Their behaviors are determined by nature to which they're committed and from which they cannot fall. How can one escape what one is. Without a fall there would be no estrangement from the God. If there's any trinity of religion it's God with immanent will and universal soul.
INQUISITOR And resurrection?
BRUNO In the New Philosophy religion God never dies. Human death would be a change of matter and form in the infinite universe. Resurrection originates in scripture for returning the Son of God to heaven to renew perfect trinity. The scriptured resurrection of Jesus became the seed of Christianity.
INQUISITOR Ascension was real; it was scriptured as memorial. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was resurrected for Ascension to heaven body and soul.
BRUNO But no one witnessed either the resurrection or Ascension. The gospels merely tell us Peter and others viewed the living Jesus after resurrection, but no one actually witnessed resurrection, the transformation from human to divinity.
INQUISITOR Of course not, it was a divine act. God works in many ways we do not comprehend. The divine act of resurrection is the defeat of death leading to redemption.
INQUISITOR And what is your view of redemption?
BRUNO God's deliverance of mankind from sin? God's restoration of man to the state of grace by act of merciful love and divine power? Redemption would be irrelevant. A world religion would not require a Messiah to redeem its devotees from slavery or a God to deliver them from sin. Eliminating the fall and redemption, a world religion would reconcile human behavior with nature. Nature's diversity would replace monolithic Catholicism with its contrived truths.
INQUISITOR Contrived truths, such as?
BRUNO The Blessed Sacrament.
INQUISITOR You dare blaspheme the Blessed Sacrament?
BRUNO In that rite Jesus Christ descends from heaven to bestow his benediction upon all those attending Mass and then, completing his round trip, ascends to heaven. On Sundays there are thousands of simultaneous Masses in which Jesus Christ is present for the Blessed Sacrament. We all know his presence in all those masses would be impossible.
INQUISITOR You fool, you irreligious priest, it's symbolic. God is omnipresent.
BRUNO Yes, theologically true, philosophically false.
INQUISITOR What else, what other contrived truth has the Church perpetrated?
BRUNO The Church turned the celebration of the Holy Eucharist into a cannibalistic ritual through Mysterium Fidei: Hoc est enim Corpus Meum, Hic est enum Calix Sanguinis Mei. (Mystery of Faith: For this is my body, For this is the chalice of my blood.)
INQUISITOR It’s symbolic!
BRUNO But I’m not symbolic; I’m real.
INQUISITION You’re symbolic of God’s power in heaven..
BRUNO But the Church decrees I should accept theological symbols over philosophical truths.
INQUISITOR Jesus never made the claim that wine is converted to his blood. "I tell you, from now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the coming of the reign of God".
BRUNO He said of bread "For this is my body".
INQUISITOR Yes, but Jesus did not say "For I convert bread to my body".
INQUISITOR Your mendicant wanderings appear to have diminished your encyclopedic memory. Consecration celebrates the two natures of Jesus Christ, divine and human. Wine the divine and water from the side of the human crucified Jesus. Consecration is the ritual offering bread and wine to symbolize the body and blood of Christ, God's beloved Son, in remembrance of his sacrifice.
BRUNO Theologically, ritual and incantation can do that. Philosophically, it's the fallacious reasoning required to perpetuate that ritual.
INQUISITOR You were taught and should know it's ritual symbolism.
BRUNO Not all communicants celebrate by taking wine. I've known priests who withhold wine so they themselves can partake of heavy drafts.
INQUISITOR "This is my body to be given for you. Do this as a remembrance of me".
INQUISITOR "Come to Me all you who labor and are heavily burdened, and I will refresh you".
BRUNO Yes, yes, words from gospels. What are your own words?
INQUISITOR Blasphemy!
BRUNO The Church indoctrinated Christians to commune with God by consuming a saltless flour and water wafer, the host of communion. It's pasta on the communicant's tongue.
INQUISITOR Incorrigible priest!
INQUISITOR You are not worthy to enter under god's roof.
BRUNO If a church mouse eats a host, how is it punished? Should it be condemned to hell, killed, or perhaps worshipped as communicant?
INQUISITOR It's true. You're mad!
INQUISITOR Are you claiming the Church should eliminate the Blessed Sacrament and the Holy Eucharist? If so, you yourself are the cannibal consuming the heart of the Mass.
INQUISITOR You're not a Dominican. You're not a priest. You're not even a Catholic. In your deposition to this tribunal, you admit to having gone to confession only twice in 16 years of wandering, once in Toulouse and once in Paris. Both times because you thought it would help you obtain absolution.
BRUNO I retained my attachment to Catholicism even though I differed philosophically with canon law. Recall the words of Paul to Romans. "For ye are not under the law, but under grace; ye are become dead to the law".
INQUISITOR You have the audacity to quote Paul to this congregation? Paul meant dead to Judaic law, not canon law. You dare condescend to this tribunal.
INQUISITOR Does your world religion have a soul?
BRUNO Every learned person knows only the soul is resurrected, not the body. The soul inhabits all things alive or inanimate; it does not exist without the body. The soul is like a captain of a ship, in it but not of it. As a Catholic I believe in the immortality of the soul. Upon death it passes to heaven, purgatory, or hell. However, as a philosopher I believe the soul passes from an individual to the continuum of the infinite universe.
INQUISITOR Psalm 19 says "The law of the Lord is perfect, refreshing the soul;"
INQUISITOR Do the devotees of your New Philosophy religion celebrate God by making offerings and sacrifices, do they commune with God?
BRUNO Devotees would communicate individually and spiritually and would not make offerings.
INQUISITOR No Holy Eucharist?
BRUNO None would be required.
INQUISITOR No Offertory of the Mass?
BRUNO No Mass at all. The New Philosophy religion would not develop from the Jesse root, or follow Judaic or Catholic rituals. Jews offer an unblemished lamb to atone for their sins. Catholics offer Jesus Christ, the heavenly lamb, to take away their sins. Moreover, Christianity is a deviation of Judaism, the Jesse root sprouting at Passover became the Last Supper and then serotine Holy Eucharist.
INQUISITOR Not true, your reputed encyclopedic memory errs, requiring the following reparation. Bread and wine as body and blood are anathema to Jewish dietary laws. The Holy Eucharist is strictly Catholic.
INQUISITOR Deprived of your clever philosophical arguments, perhaps you could enlighten this congregation. Tell us, do you deny the theology of the Blessed Sacrament and Holy Eucharist?
BRUNO I support their intent but not their rituals.
INQUISITOR No outward display of our love of God, no Mass, no rituals?
INQUISITOR Are you against the congregation of the Mass, the coming together of Catholics?
BRUNO No but rituals are not required, especially those religious processions reminiscent of Caesar's triumphal entrance into Rome. God is best worshipped individually.
INQUISITOR You want individuals to worship God while working, eating, urinating?
BRUNO While observing a pink dawn, the noon sun, a field of flowers, a full moon, the night sky, in solitude.
INQUISITOR In your cosmology you claimed the sun is the giver of our daily bread. Do you replace the Father of our Pater Noster with the sun?
BRUNO My claim is philosophical not religious.
INQUISITOR Are you against the congregation of the Mass?
BRUNO I don't believe organized devotion, with its imposed hierarchy, is required to commune with God.
INQUISITOR That hierarchy you detest enables the Church to spread the gospels throughout the world.
BRUNO Think about what Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, did to the practice of Catholicism?
INQUISITOR What's the possible linkage between Church hierarchy and St. Ignatius?
BRUNO Ignatius removed religion from the home and organized it for the Church. He was another of those eastern bishops who established the doctrines leading to Catholic hierarchy and orthodoxy. The Passover meal was presided over by women. In the beginning homes served as early Christian meeting places, so it was natural for women to preside over Eucharist rituals. Women lost that responsibility when Ignatius incorporated Catholicism based on the authority of the Roman model of law. You see, Rome again.
INQUISITOR Not true. It was Peter who initiated Christian services in the home of Cornelius, the Roman centurion.
BRUNO But without having sinned or been indoctrinated by orthodoxy, women were replaced by priests. Ignatius placed Catholic hierarchical authority of the Church under papal administration.
INQUISITOR Faith does not void law; faith establishes law. The canon law of orthodoxy helps Catholics comply with their faith.
BRUNO There are orthodoxies of Anglicans, Calvinists, Lutherans, and others. Furthermore, Eastern orthodoxy challenges Catholicism. Which one is the true one, all or none? It's obvious to me that in the graduation of dawn to light, there's only the one God of creation, the God of the infinite universe.
INQUISITOR John said "Let him who has ears heed the Spirit's words to the churches". It appears his revelation falls on your deaf ears because the seat of Catholicism is here in Rome.
BRUNO But as you're all aware, in John's Revelation all the named churches are in the east, in Asia, none in Europe. Recall that Paul spread the Word journeying through Asia not Europe.
INQUISITOR Would the devotees of your New Philosophy religion ever join in the congregation to express their love of God?
BRUNO They would but not by fiat, only by their own free choice. Devotees of the New Philosophy religion would individually commune in their own way with the God of the infinite universe. God is smaller than a monad, greater than the infinite universe. We are children of the sun, servants of earth, and to die is to be recycled in the infinite universe.
INQUISITOR About your individual devotees, who would atone for their sins?
BRUNO Devotees would not be born in sin or threatened by it. They would live moral lives to create, maintain, and end life. Morality would be not defined in terms of sin. On the other hand Catholicism is based on sin, on fall from scriptured grace.
INQUISITOR A religion without sin? Impossible.
BRUNO Devotees would communicate with God in their own manner. There would be no Mass in a New Philosophy religion, thereby avoiding its dismissive manner.
INQUISITOR You call the apostolic authority of the Mass dismissive?
BRUNO The strategy of the Mass invites a congregation to celebrate only for quick dismissal after service.
INQUISITOR What are you suggesting, that the home replace the Church? You criticize Catholics and now you dare criticize their most sacred celebration the Mass?
BRUNO Sinners entering a Church may remit their sins merely by crossing themselves with holy water from the font.
INQUISITOR Only the remission of venial sins. The Church is forgiving.
BRUNO In the Confiteor the sinner confesses to God, Mary, saints, and the apostles but not to Jesus Christ.
INQUISITOR The sinner is beseeching their help.
BRUNO Why don't sinners beseech the help of Jesus Christ, the one who sacrificed himself for them?
INQUISITOR They are free to do so.
BRUNO But the Gloria praises the Trinity and Jesus Christ.
INQUISITOR What's the point of your juxtaposing those two prayers? Prayers are specific, making your argument antilagous.
BRUNO There should be no inaudible Secret Prayer by the priest on behalf of man.
INQUISITOR But through religious training, vows, and dedication to God priests act on behalf of man.
BRUNO Every man has a direct connection to God without the intervention of a priest.
INQUISITOR What about Christianity?
BRUNO Christianity is not the Catholicon for sinful man. In time I believe Christianity will fall of its own fallible theology.
INQUISITOR So what do we have without it, a religion without sin? without Trinity or Eucharist? without resurrection or redemption? What have we here? Moses from Mt. Sinai with tablets and now Bruno from Mt. Vesuvius with Giordanismo his New Philosophy religion? It appears we have cosmology, philosophy, theology, and now Brunology.
BRUNO There's no proof God endorses Christianity or any other religion. One need only abstain from evil and hurting people to live a good life. The Catholic religion pleases me above all others but it needs great reformation to eliminate those practices that keep it in the dark cave of corruption.
INQUISITOR Dark cave of corruption? In Plato's cave, seeing shadows and not the light of God?
BRUNO The Church is a powerful theocracy protected by Praetorian Guard, a greedy clergy, a religious faculty for maintaining fallacious doctrines changed by whimsical serial popes. My dear brethren, we all know the Church continues to sell indulgences. It promises redemption to the very rich, to those financing the construction and adornment of Churches by the genius and sweat of artists living in poverty. Why hasn't the Church beatified them, the ones who glorify Catholicism?
INQUISITOR Blasphemy! Our College of Cardinals considers all ideas for peaceful changes benefiting the Church and individual Catholics.
INQUISITOR Architects, builders, and artists do not freely offer their services to build and adorn churches. How are we to build our edifices to honor God? Jesus himself told Peter that he was the rock upon which the Church would be built. Peter himself built that Church in Rome. Peter is first; he is the rock.
BRUNO A Church built upon Asian rock strata from Nicaea to Numidia, not through Europe. The papacy converted that humble rock strata to the power of precious stones - diamonds, emeralds, pearls, and rubies not bread and wine.
INQUISITOR Hypocrite! How can you claim to be a Catholic and at the same time believe in your imagined New Philosophy religion?
BRUNO Christians are killing each other. I only postulate a new more reasonable religion to eliminate the killing based on the protests of Christians and their new catechisms. I'm a Catholic and will remain so until a more reasonable, less sinful, and less vengeful religion comes along.
INQUISITOR Thereby establishing your own new orthodoxy which merely replaces our orthodoxy. Are you suggesting religious anarchy?
BRUNO No but a new orthodoxy would be established on nature and philosophical truths. We’re aware that Catholic orthodoxy was extended by another, Ignatius of Loyola.
INQUISITOR You're doing it again, trying to detour our examination? What has he to do with you?
BRUNO His Jesuit Order established standards for celibacy and obedience. He enforced them with military authority.
INQUISITOR Ignatius of Loyola required celibacy to avoid the distractions of women, for complete devotion to God. We sacrifice ourselves to God for the benefit of mankind. We do not scramble like eggs clergy and laity. We are devoted to God. We sacrifice ourselves to his service and that of our parishioners.
BRUNO My dear brethren this is a delicate matter, the rubbing against a predilection of human nature. We all know Loyola was a soldier wounded in battle. His wounds left him impotent. He therefore demanded Jesuits suffer his disability.
INQUISITOR Jesus suffered. To understand his sacrifice we must also suffer.
INQUISITOR Are you now going to attack Loyola? Have you never read about the lives of saints? Was that one of the books you discarded in the privy in Naples?
BRUNO The vow of chastity being unnatural the Church tolerates sins of the flesh to retain its congregation of priests.
INQUISITOR We devote our lives to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who never knew woman, and we follow in his footsteps. You not only abandoned your order and religion but broke your vows by having relations with women.
BRUNO My order rejected and exiled me.
INQUISITOR No, you exiled yourself from Rome while you were being investigated for heresy.
BRUNO My order rejected and abandoned me so I no longer wore its habit. Besides, my relationships with the ladies were normal.
INQUISITOR But in your case normal is forbidden.
BRUNO I mean what normally occurs between a man and woman, contrasted with what happens to novices in seminaries, their superiors assiduously engaged in the performance of their odurous devotions.
INQUISITOR I warn you, you're tottering on the edge of an abyss from which there's no recovery.
INQUISITOR Did you ever declare that Jesus worked miracles using black magic.
BRUNO I never thought such a thing.
INQUISITOR Did you ever claim Jesus' miracles were illusions accepted by his apostles and simple ignorant people.
BRUNO You impute such a thing to me? Why are you asking me such questions? If you can prove I claimed that, I'll submit to your punishment.
INQUISITOR In your lectures you inferred that Jesus deceived his disciples.
BRUNO In recruiting his disciples Jesus never told them he was the Son of God and that he would be crucified. He led them to believe he would always be there for them. During his life, Jesus was an unemployed wandering rabbi who persuaded simple ignorant men to follow him. He merely called out to them and they responded, leaving their banal and mundane lives behind. He was a peripatetic preacher who promised his apostles eternal spiritual fulfillment in heaven. He encouraged their fidelity through faith, parables, and as rabbi his charismatic interpretations of Judaic law.
INQUISITOR Jesus never deceived anyone. He spoke and lived the truth. Disciples believed his words and actions. They had faith in him. In the end, they knew he was the messiah, the Son of God sent by the Father to redeem sinful man.
INQUISITOR Giordano Bruno you are charged with heretical writings in which you denounced the pope and praised heretics. What is your response?
BRUNO Look through my writings, you'll never find any trace of that.
INQUISITOR We did and found multiple heresies. While still a priest in good standing, you wrote the allegory Noah's Ark in which the seat of honor next to God was given to an ass. You inferred the pope was that ass.
INQUISITOR Is that why you called the clergy asses and Catholic doctrines assinine?
BRUNO I was thinking of foolish and prideful monarchs.
INQUISITOR Be assured this tribunal will advise the Church to closely monitor seminaries to identify those incorrigible and contumacious novices, such as you from being ordained priests.
INQUISITOR You consorted with heretics all over Europe and then in your writings you claimed them virtuous.
BRUNO I praised them but not as heretics. I praised them solely for their moral virtues. I never praised heretics as being religious or pious, nor used such religious epithets to honor them. I don't recall ever saying or writing such things.
INQUISITION Not true, you did. We have the evidence in your own words. In your valedictory oration at Wittenberg University, you praised the tyrant and heretic priest Luther (reads):
"Luther the mighty hero who resisted the voracious monster, half-fox, half-lion; that vicar of the princes of Hell who polluted the world by craft and force and cajoled men into superstitious and uncouth worship under the guise of divine knowledge and the simplicity which is acceptable to God ... Thou hast seen the light, O Luther, thou hast regarded it; thou hast heard the awakening spirit of the Lord and hast obeyed it; thou hast confronted and overcome the adversary girt about with power, and thou hast despoiled him." 22
You called Luther a mighty hero while referring to His Holiness the pope as a voracious monster, a vicar of the princes of hell. You called the pope an uncouth worshiper under the guise of divine knowledge.
INQUISITOR Blasphemy!
INQUISITOR Heresy!
BRUNO Naturally I praised Germans. It was my farewell oration to Germans. I included him in the rhetoric of the oration merely because in earlier times he was a professor and taught at the university. I also praised other Germans including Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus, a scholar and founding father of Catholicism.
INQUISITOR When in England, were you part of the Elizabeth cult?
BRUNO I frequently accompanied Castelnau, the French ambassador, to the queen's court. She was anxious to speak Italian, and with Italians she would speak only Italian. We had many short but pleasant conversations.
INQUISITOR You referred to the heretic Queen as "her most serene majesty", serene majesty? Because her cousin the duke sympathized with Catholics, she beheaded him even though he was the only remaining duke in England. She beheaded her own cousin Mary Stewart, the crowned queen of Scots, because she was Catholic. She hung hundreds of Catholics, mostly Irish and Scots. To enrich her treasury she dispatched Drake and other pirates, including women pirates, to plunder Catholic ships of their cargo and gold, impoverishing Spain and the papacy while enriching England.
BRUNO If I wrote anything directly against the Church, I'd admit and openly confess it. You may think my books profane, but I never deliberately indicted the Catholic religion. The Church banned certain books of their own priests and even those of the humanist scholar Erasmus. It banned the books of others including those of Luther and Calvin.
INQUISITOR We have evidence in your writings that your books should be banned.
BRUNO If I've written heretical words, why hasn't the Church banned my books?
INQUISITOR In your book On Cause, Origin, and One you called the heretic Queen Elizabeth divine. You tagged her "diva Elizabetta", a goddess. I have your own words (reads):
"I have praised many heretics and also heretic princes; but I have not praised them as heretics, but solely for the moral virtues which they had, neither have I ever praised them as religious and pious, nor used such kind of religious epithets. And in particular in my book On Cause, Origin, and One I praise the Queen of England and called her "diva", not as a religious attribute, but as that kind of epithet which the ancients used to give to princes. And in England where I then was and where I composed this book, the title of "diva" was given to the Queen. And I was the more induced to name her thus because she knew me, for I was continually going with the ambassador to court. And I know that I erred in praising this lady, she being a heretic, and above all in attributing to her the name of "diva". 23
INQUISITOR You say you erred but you continued to participate in the cult of Elizabetta. In another of your books, On Heroic Furies, you declared the heretic queen to be an English nymph, you called her divine Diana. You coupled divinity with the pagan moon goddess and heretic queen?
BRUNO She was adored by her subjects.
INQUISITOR You dared impute to her the triumphant adoration of the Madonna? Elizabetta Gloriana! It was your hand that wrote those heretic words.
BRUNO When living in foreign lands it's de rigueur to praise heretic princes to retain their favor. I assure you any mention of divinity in the precinct of the heretic queen and Church was purely unintentional.
INQUISITOR Do you consider yourself a Catholic.
BRUNO Of course! Why do you continue to persecute me with such questions?
INQUISITOR Because for 16 years you lived in the heretic countries of Switzerland, England, and Germany. You lectured to Protestants and wrote heresies.
BRUNO Lecturing and writing philosophy and cosmology.
INQUISITOR Why didn't you do that here in your homeland?
BRUNO I was under threat of excommunication.
INQUISITOR So you finally admit your heresies?
BRUNO No, that threat was handed down by my father superiors because they didn't understand my philosophy. I'm a writer of philosophy, not of theology.
INQUISITOR Your writings alone condemn you. In your Oratio Consolatoria, you accused the pope of being the hungry Roman wolf.
BRUNO I was merely comparing the intellectual freedom in Helmstedt with the censorship in Rome.
HOST In your Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast you allude to the Church as a scavenger feeding on the souls of poor ignorant Catholics.
BRUNO I employed the metaphors and conventions common to philosophic arguments. I meant no disrespect to the Church.
INQUISITOR Your intentions do not support your words. You claimed the Church interposes itself between man and God. The Church protects errant souls from the evils of a secular world; it rescues them from the fires of hell.
INQUISITOR Again in your Expulsion you declared the Church should cleanse itself of corruption by ridding itself of papal vices and beasts.
BRUNO It's an allegory.
INQUISITOR It's heresy!
BRUNO Not true. For example recall that Sigismondo Malatesta, an illegitimate son of the migrained Pandolfo Malatesta, was legitimized by a generous contribution to Pope Martin 5th. It appears to me that for generous sums of money, popes have the unfettered power.for doing or undoing anything.
INQUISITOR Popes act with divine guidance.
INQUISITOR You’re trying to obscure the mission of this tribunal. We here are not inquiring into the lives of popes. Now in Paris your degree candidate and you were accused of preaching pantheism and atheism based on your 120 Articles.
BRUNO My candidate and I did not preach pantheism and certainly not atheism:
"I have never taught anything against the Catholic Christian religion, though I was judged to have done so indirectly in Paris; where, however, I was allowed to treat of certain dispositions under the title of A Hundred and Twenty Articles against the Peripatetics and other vulgar philosophers, printed with the permission of the superiors, as it was allowable to treat of these according to the way of natural principles, not prejudicial to the truth according to the light of faith. In this way one can read and treat the works of Aristotle and Plato , which are also indirectly contrary to the faith, and much more contrary to it than the articles philosophically propounded and defended by me." 24
INQUISITOR Then why did your words infuriate Catholics who rebelled against you.
BRUNO I've written innumerable words in many books while journeying throughout Europe. In those journeys I spread words of cosmology and philosophy, not words of religion.
INQUISITOR Journeying and spreading your words, are you now mocking St. Paul? You dare compare yourself to Paul? His journeys were inspired by spreading the Word of God, teaching and converting Jews and Gentiles. You wandered aimlessly throughout heretic lands.
BRUNO As Saul he not only killed Christians but concurred in the stoning to death of St. Stephen. I never hurt anyone and certainly never killed anyone. Recall that Jews stoned Stephen to death because he spoke blasphemies against them. Am I being persecuted because of my speech, because of the words I write? The Church does not proceed with love as claimed by the apostles. Today those wishing to reform Catholicism must endure pain and punishment.
INQUISITOR In doing God's work, Paul never uttered heresy.
INQUISITOR As I understand it, you wandered solely for sustenance. Everywhere you wandered you were expelled because of your attacks on the Church, on professors, on those who tried to help you, on authority of any kind. You were a foolish mortal stumbling all over Europe, yourself becoming the famous ass of your metaphors.
BRUNO Paul knew nothing of the subtleties of the Trinitarian mystery and magic of transubstantiation. Those doctrines were proclaimed later.
INQUISITOR Are you claiming Paul was ignorant, that he didn't transubstantiation?
BRUNO I mean philosophically and realistically, not theologically.
INQUISITOR You told the Carmelite prior in Frankfurt that you knew more than the apostles. Are you saying again that you know more than Paul?
BRUNO I told the Carmelite prior that with philosophical reasoning I could best any apostle or theologian, and that they would not be able to respond logically. Paul was a wayward rabbi suddenly converted to spreading the Word. He believed as I do, that the Word was the Son of God as prophesied by Trismegistus.
INQUISITOR No, the Word as revealed by God.
INQUISITOR Your Egyptian priest Trismegistus was also the patron of writing, wanderers, and vagabonds. These attributes make you his disciple. Is that why you favor him?
BRUNO I read his Corpus Hermeticum.
INQUISITOR We're all aware of his purported Corpus Hermeticum, an esoteric work on alchemy, astrology, magic, and other supernatural powers.
BRUNO As you know, he and his sibyls prophesied Christianity.
INQUISITOR What has he to do with you or this examination?
INQUISITOR He wanted Christians to be circumcised. It was Peter who dissented, no circumcision or such mutilation for Christians.
BRUNO He and Egyptians used the cross long before we did.
INQUISITOR Are you claiming the cross on our altars was stolen from Egyptians?
BRUNO It was sculpted on the breast of Isis. Egyptians used magic better than mystic rabbis with their cabala and better than the revelations of Christians. After all, religion is magic and mystery expressed in ritual and language. Hieroglyphs are the language of Egyptian magic. Bible words are the language of grammarian pedants.
INQUISITOR Hieroglyphs are the sacred language meaningful only to Egyptian priests and a few others, whereas Latin is available to all Christians.
BRUNO Latin was the language of Rome's Western Empire and Greek of its Eastern Empire. Oral history and early Christian writings were translated and retranslated over and over in many languages including Greek and Latin. Those words are now the magic and mystery of scripture.
INQUISITOR You keep using the words magic and mystery. In your mind what's the difference?
BRUNO There's mystery in the Trinity. There's magic in transubstantiation and in the Mass' incantatory words and chants.
INQUISITOR Do you believe in Egyptianism, a religion for priests and royals over Catholicism a religion for the masses. Do you believe in magic over theology?
BRUNO Egypt gave us the mysteries of religion, those mysteries confirmed by the eastern bishops who gave us the Creed and Catholicism.
INQUISITOR Irreligous fool! it was Augustine, Magnus, Aquinas.
BRUNO Augustine was born in Numidia. He was not a European. As bishop of Hippo Regius he was another of those eastern bishops.
INQUISITOR You have no religion. You have only your distorted doctrines profaned by excommunication, hermetism, Lullism, magic, and mnemonics. You’re a wild Egyptian bull with the head of man running through our Churches trying to destroy our Mass, our rituals, and our shrines.
INQUISITOR Giordano Bruno, you are charged with denying God's purpose in creating the heavens and earth. What is your response?
BRUNO Not true. I do not deny God's creations.
INQUISITOR You are charged with teaching and disseminating the Copernican heliocentric theory, a direct contradiction of scripture.
BRUNO No, a different interpretation of cosmogany.
INQUISITOR Aristotle put the earth at the center, as did God. The great Dante claimed Aristotle the master of all who know. Are you declaring you know more than Dante or Aristotle?
BRUNO Aristotle and theologians depended on scripture, the same lacking sufficient cosmological reasoning. I agree with Copernicus who modified Ptolemy's tables to mathematically prove the earth orbits the sun. I agree with Lucretius who denied the validity of metaphysical or theological thinking applicable to cosmology. I'm in agreement with Pythagoras who believed the universe can be described as mathematical functions. Science coupled with mathematics proves that earth orbits the sun.
INQUISITOR Your dissent ejects earth from its God given central position, proved daily by simple observation. Any observant person sees the sun traversing the sky.
BRUNO Conversely earth, turning on its axis, we see the sun rising and setting on opposite horizons.
INQUISITOR Not true. Everyone knows the sun rises in the east, traverses the sky, and sets in the west. Every farmer, every fisherman, even the uneducated know that the sun moves, the earth does not.
BRUNO Turning on its axis, our hemisphere faces the sun creating day and continuing to turn away from the sun that face gives us night. From any position on earth, anyone looking at the sun is standing directly in front of it. Is the observer or the observed moving?
INQUISITOR More of your cosmological trickery?
BRUNO God created the heavens first which means the sun has primacy over earth, just as the Father has primacy over the Son. The earth was sent from the sun and will return to it when it dies. It follows that subordinate earth orbits the sun, which comprehends all but is not comprehended by all.
INQUISITOR Scripture tells us with creatures and man God inhabited earth, not the sun. Life cannot survive in fire.
INQUISITOR Scripture tells us that "God made the two great lights, the greater one to govern the day, and the lesser one to govern the night, and he made the stars".
BRUNO God set stars in the dome of the sky to shed light upon earth. In like manner, cosmology sheds the light of knowledge upon earth.
INQUISITOR Scripture does not support that.
BRUNO But the new science does. Science proves that the sun is only one of innumerable stars. Moreover there may be other worlds orbiting other stars even though we cannot see them.
INQUISITOR Your other worlds reside only in your undisciplined imagination.
INQUISITOR God made the heavens and earth, not earths. The word earths is not in scripture.
BRUNO Heavens suggest earths; they are interrelated. The two contraries exist mutually in the infinite universe, our earth is in the neutral middle. Therefore Aristotle's logical ladder of nature was constructed from ignorance.
INQUISITOR Is there any point on which you agree with Aristotle?
BRUNO Yes, his argument that reason and philosophy are superior to faith or the knowledge derived from faith. When the eyes perceive what they do not see, that's magic. When the mind accepts what it does not understand, that's faith.
INQUISITOR You denied God's intention for man and earth. You declared we are not the only creatures to comprehend God, that earth is but one of many earths in the infinite universe, and that it's time to dethrone earth.
BRUNO You take my cosmological views out of context.
INQUISITOR You claimed the sun rules over earth, that earth obeys the sun by following a solar orbit. Are you saying that if it were not for the sun our earth would escape from its God-given position?
BRUNO If it were not for the sun, earth escaping from its solar orbit would spin out into space because of its centrifugal force.
INQUISITOR Impossible. God created the earth in its central position. The sun cannot determine the fate of the earth or superimpose itself over the will of God.
INQUISITOR In your Latin writings you expounded on space and time. Tell me, is there space and time in your infinite universe?
BRUNO Of course.
INQUISITOR And is your infinite universe eternal.
BRUNO Of course, it was created by God.
INQUISITOR It follows does it not that space and time relate only to Aristotle's finite universe, eternity not requiring either space or time.
BRUNO Space, time, universe are all interrelated. Therefore, time is resident in space. God inhabits the corposant space of infinite universe.
INQUISITOR As Christians we reject the infinity of space and time. God did not create the heavens and earth for the benefit of your cosmology. There's no evidence of space and time in scripture. Quite to the contrary, time is referred to as space; time is space.
BRUNO No, space is time, the interval between points A and B.
INQUISITOR Scripture declares that space is time, the space of a month, the space of a year.
INQUISITOR The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
BRUNO Infinite heavens surround infinite worlds. Our earth is only one of many worlds in the infinite universe.
INQUISITOR Infinite heavens with infinite worlds each with its own God? Pantheism?
BRUNO Infinite heavens and worlds created and powered by one God. There even may be worlds populated by those more noble than we.
INQUISITOR God created man in alien worlds? The Son of God redeeming aliens?
BRUNO They may have a totally different view of God. Philosophically, I cannot be more precise because God is inaccessible to reason, his will is a mystery.
INQUISITOR Not true, the Creed describes God.
BRUNO The Creed only describes God as the Father Almighty. The Church has never defined God and certainly has never attempted to specify God's provable attributes. Science not only defines the heavens but specifies its attributes through mathematics.
INQUISITOR God is the creator of all there was, is, and shall be.
BRUNO To say God is the creator is to carry brine to the Mediterranean.
INQUISITOR St. Clement said "We cannot discern what God is so much as what he is not".
BRUNO Precisely! St. Clement addresses the "what" of God not the "who" of God. The inference is that God is not a person as defined in the Trinity.
INQUISITOR By your own admission God is beyond reason. Do you expect the Church to specify attributes of God using your own black magic?
BRUNO It cannot, but has built a religious empire around its authority to do so. There's no conflict between God and science. Scientific empiric results are provable, theologic results are not. If religion didn't have magic and mystery it would be philosophy, and if philosophy could be proved it would be science.
INQUISITOR Do you still insist your philosophy replaces Church theology?
BRUNO Not replaces, searches for truth in theology.
INQUISITOR In your previous responses to our questions you said there's only philosophical truth.
BRUNO I said there can't be double truths. What is true for philosophy must also be true for theology. I will not temper my beliefs to meld with those who parrot the unacceptable, those who speak softly una corda. When the Church demands exclusive rights to doctrines it cannot prove, it stands against free thought and speech. That which is rational must be real and provable.
INQUISITOR Your diatribes against the Church condemn you. You have found yourself guilty!
BRUNO Because of my serial protests against oppressive authority, my life has been one persecution after another. You tried to suffocate me but I penetrated your miasma to God's infinite universe, which has kept my spirit alive. Solitary in your dungeon, mortifying myself with the chrism of your persecution, I endured in my heroic love by inaudible dialogs with the God of the infinite universe.
INQUISITOR We're not asking you for one of Erasmus' scholarly treatises. We merely ask for your confessional words and repentance in recanting your heresies.
INQUISITOR Your adamantine resistance to our succor makes you an incorrigible heretic.
INQUISITOR Be remorseful, confess your heresies. Save yourself, save your soul.
BRUNO I'm at a loss to know what I'm supposed to retract. I may have made some theological mistakes and for those I apologize and ask your forgiveness.
INQUISITOR Speak up. Have your heresies humiliated and humbled you to sotto voce?
BRUNO Imprisoned in your dungeon, there's little opportunity for me to speak. I'm not accustomed to speaking for any length of time. Defending myself before you has given me a sore throat, my grating hoarseness pains me, made more so by the lack of nourishment. Even Carthusians eat and drink.
INQUISITOR You dare compare yourself to that devoted and contemplative order? Do you expect the Church to offer you a feast of meats accompanied by bread and wine?
BRUNO A caged beast, I triumph by celebrating the virtues of solitude. Sequestered in my cell, I have visions of Moses, Jesus, Aquinas and others. In solitary contemplation I'm awake but suspended immobile in the throes of God's will. If in contemplation one sees more by shutting his eyes, and if God is more honored by silence than words, then I in my solitude experience divinity more than do theologians.
INQUISITOR Giordano Bruno this papal tribunal has diligently examined the principal charges of heresy against you. Our examination completed, it finds those heretical charges valid. You obstinately maintained your heresies without any show of remedial sorrow or penitence. Moreover, your self-righteousness, tactless arrogance, and intransigent defense preclude any mitigation of those charges or comfort from this papal tribunal.
BRUNO "I esteem all fame and all victory displeasing to God, and most vile and worthless if there is no truth in them; and for the love of true wisdom and learning I am full of weariness; I am crucified and tormented". 25
INQUISITOR Recently ministers of the Holy Office questioned you, requesting that you recant, and you again informed them you knew not what to recant. After that meeting, you wrote a letter to the pope requesting an audience with him.
BRUNO In a last resort invoking the help of St. Jude, "saint of impossible missions", I wrote an epistle to the pope. I declared his ministers had continually misinterpreted my philosophical views, that I was innocent of heresy. I begged the pope for an audience pleading, "Why do you give audiences revealing yourself to the world but not to me"?
INQUISITOR In your epistle to His Holiness our Lord the Pope, you pertinaciously maintained your erroneous positions even though you were given ample opportunity to recognize and recant your heresies. Giordano Bruno your case has been diligently examined and after due consideration this papal tribunal is resolved on the following sentence:
"Having invoked the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and of his most Glorious Mother Mary ever Virgin in the cause and aforesaid causes ... the accused Giordano Bruno the Nolan, examined, was brought to trial and found guilty, impertinent, obstinate and pertinacious; in this our final sentence determined by the counsel and opinion of our asdvisers the Reverend Fathers, Masters in Sacred Theology and Doctors in both Laws ... We hereby, in these documents, publish, announce, pronounce, sentence and declare the the aforesaid Brother Giordano Bruno to be an impertinent and pertinacious heretic, and therefore to have incurred all the ecclesiastical censures and pains of the Holy Canon ... Wherefore as such we verbally degrade thee and declare that thou must be degraded, and we hereby ordain and command that thou shall be actually degraded from all thine ecclesiastical orders both major and minor in which thou hast been ordained, according to the Sacred Canon Law: and that thou must be driven forth, and we do drive thee forth from our ecclesiastical forum and from our holy and immaculate Church of whose mercy thou art become unworthy. And we ordain and command that thou must be delivered to the Secular Court - wherefore we hereby deliver thee to the court of the governor of Rome here present - that hou mayest be punished with the punishment deserved, though we earnestly pray that he will mitigate the rigour of the laws concerning the pains of thy person, that thou mayest not be in danger of death or of mutilation of thy members. Furthermore, we condemn, we reprobate and we prohibit all thine aforesaid and thy other books and writings as heretical and erroneous, containing many heresies and errors, and we ordain that all of them which have come or may in future come into the hands of the Holy Office shall be publicly destroyed and burned in the Square of St. Peter before the steps and they shall be placed upon the Index of Forbidden Books, and as we have commanded, so shall it be done. And thus we say, pronounce, sentence, declare, degrade, command and ordain, we chase forth and we deliver and we pray in this and in every other better method and form that we reasonably can and should. Thus pronounce we, the undermentioned Inquisitors, and Cardinal General." 26
BRUNO "Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it." 27
"Vast power was needed to reunite that which is divine in me with that which is divine in the infinite universe". 28
INQUISITOR Our sentence proclaimed the mission of this papal tribunal is concluded.
BRUNO Judica me, Deus, et discerne causam meam de gente non sancta; ab homine iniquo, et doloso erue me. (Judge me, O God, and distinguish my cause from the nation that is not holy; deliver me from the unjust and deceitful man.)
INQUISITOR May our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ have mercy on you.
INQUISITOR May our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ redeem you from your heresies.
BRUNO Am I now removed from the Book of Life?
INQUISITOR May the grace of God and love of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.
INQUISITOR May the Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on you.
BRUNO "The wise soul feareth not death; rather she sometimes striveth for death, she goeth beyond to meet her. Yet eternity maintaineth her substance throughout time, immensity throughout space, universal form throughout motion." 29
INQUISITOR Lord forgive the sins of our brother and grant him eternal rest.
INQUISITOR Go in the peace of Christ the Savior. May Christ, who called you, take you to himself.
BRUNO Death does not terrify me because my soul will live on. Can quick death be more horrible that the long lingering fear of it languishing in your prison. When the Nolan is carried to his grave, his body will be accompanied by candlebearers lighting the way. Morituri te salutamus (we about to die salute you).
"Touch me, O God, and I shall be as it were a flame of fire." 30
Punishment
Unable to break Bruno's spirit Pope Clement 8th, furious at Bruno's refusal to recant, condemned him as an obstinate, impertinent, and pertinacious heretic. The Holy Father of Catholics worldwide, the Pastoral Lamb and Surrogate of Christ on earth, His Holiness and Lord the pope ordered Bruno's death proclaiming ex cathedra the ultimate atrocity of its favorite punishment, the auto-da-fé. The pope ordered the obdurate heretic be delivered for punishment by the secular power, the Governor of Rome. Doing this, the Church absolved itself from killing Bruno.
9February1600
Minerva, the goddess of all things Italian, was obviously not the wise daughter of quadrity who sprang fully acknowledged from Bruno's head. The congregation of the papal tribunal was assembled at the Convent of Minerva. The Governor of Rome presided, representing Rome's secular body. Bruno was brought into the great Hall of the Inquisition and with ritual tubilustrium was forced down on his knees. The Cardinal General representing the papal tribunal read aloud the principal heresies against him. The bishop chosen to mortify and degrade Bruno did so by defrocking and excommunicating him, then handed him over to the governor. That bishop received $27 for mortifying and degrading Bruno. After that, the Cardinal General addressed the governor:
"Take him (Bruno) under your jurisdiction, subject to your decision, so as to be punished with due chastisement; beseeching you, however, as we do earnestly beseech you, so to mitigate the severity of your sentence with respect to his body that there may be no danger of death or of the shedding of blood. So we, Cardinals, Inquisitors, and General, whose names are written beneath decree." 31
The pro forma infamy of these words veiled the Church's brutality and hypocrisy. The papal tribunal being unanimously agreed turned Bruno over for sentencing by the secular government of Rome.
17February1600
That morning Giordano Bruno, age 52, was removed from the Nona Tower of Rome's city prison. The treacherous heretic Bruno was covered by a pale yellow scapulary whose corners were emblazoned with the red cancellation crosses (X) of St. Andrew. Splattered here and there on the scapulary were painted red devils and flames. A priest thrust a crucifix to the lips of Bruno who turned away his head. Another priest did the same. Averting his face, he refused their offers to kiss the crucifix.
Chained by the neck, mouth gagged so he could no longer utter heresies, hands bound so he could no longer write words of heresy, and with bare feet he was dragged by the Servants of Justice along the via dolorosa to the venue of old Roman human sacrifices, the Campo dei Fiori (Field of Flowers). The party of doom was accompanied by a procession of the Company of Mercy and Pity comprised of priests who exhorted him to repent and recant. A priest thrust to his gagged mouth, a brass crucifix heated to red hot glowing to remind him of his impending fate. On the way to the pyre Bruno was jeered by some wandering spectators while others wept with sympathy at his imminent doom. There in the "skull place" he was stripped naked and lashed to the Church's pillar of oak ascending from the pyre, whose kindling was then torched by the executioner.
During the burning it was rumored that the 9 cardinals and 6 bishops fell to their knees and made the sign of the cross 52 times:
In nomine patris, et filii, et spiritus sancti.
(In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.)
The 52 crossings doubly emblematic: (1) in the Mass for Jesus' bloody sacrifice and (2) for each year of Bruno's life.
The living Bruno was burned to ashes, thereby satisfying the immolation ordered by Pope Clement 8, who literally returned Bruno to the ashes whence he came:
Memento, homo, quia cinis es; in cinerem reverteris. (Remember man, from dust you were born; in dust you shall return.)
Bruno's martyrdom was the Church's expression of its criminal insanity. Under protection and authority of the Christian cross, "hoc signo vinces", the pope with impunity had Bruno murdered in a ritual of public sacrifice, proving that human power trumps divinity. It's clear that Pope Clement 8's punishing will was greater than God's perceived love for man. The corollary irony is that he was incinerated in the Field of Flowers, flowers reminiscent of a Christian burial denied him by excommunication.
The next day news of Bruno's martyrdom was posted throughout Rome.
"Thursday was burned alive in the Field of Flowers that Dominican Brother from Nola, a pertinacious heretic, with a gag on his tongue because of the vile words he spoke without wishing to listen to the comforters of others. He has been twelve years in the prisons of the Holy Office, from which he was liberated on another occasion." 32
"Yesterday morning in the Field of Flowers was burned alive that wicked Dominican Brother of Nola, of whom we have given news before; a most obstinate heretic who, in his whims, concocted diverse dogmas against Holy Faith, and particularly against the Most Holy Virgin and the Saints. The vile man obstinately made up his mind to perish in these. He said that he died willingly and was a martyr, and that his soul would ascend in the smoke to Paradise. To-day he knoweth if he spake the truth". 33
Today the barbarity of holocaust is the practiced insanity of some African leaders. In 1994 Rwandan Hutus with machetes, charms, and fetishes invoked the satanic revenant auto-da-fé for roasting Tutu enemies over open pit fires.
Commemoration
During Bruno's hectic life he was despised by the pseudo learned. No honors were ever bestowed upon him. On 9June1889 about 30,000 Bruno enthusiasts from all over the world gathered in the Field of Flowers to honor and memorialize him with speeches and monument. Orations commemorating his life and works heaped belated deserved honors upon him. Celebrants feasted in Roman style going from one banquet to another. After feasting they hurried to the monument to illuminate it and hear a chronicler recite the memorial poem Martyrdom:
Martyrdom
The gagged and hand bound heretic in procession
Is led to the ominous funereal pyre
His body lashed to the deep-set timber tower
Naked feet nailed to its protruding pedestal
Father sacrificing son, mother killing infant
Martyr on paten at sacrificial altar
Under him 52 bundles of Church fasces
The grotesquery exorcised with sprays of palms
Swarming locusts now destroy the Field of Flowers
Converting it to bivouac crematory
As white doves fly away, stilted flamingos
Expose their coverts displaying fiery feathers
Tindery glowing coals, the pyre rages to blaze
Serpentine black smoke ascends assuming the roast
Rites of fire convert mercy to cruelty and
Looking skyward he invokes the 11th plague
While blood's eversible water fills vesicles
Large diaphanous blisters fill to ballooning
Then bursting spray his precious water in vain on
Scorched flesh the offal hanging from sinew and bone
Flames leap headlong to campanile heights ringing with
Muffled shrieks erupting from smoked-seared bronchioles
The stench of roasted flesh converted to vomit
Mummified body shrink-wrapped by the fires of hell
Look!
The heretic in the garden of agony
Consumed by votive offerings of Church passion
Dehydrates to skeletal articulation
His body desiccating to black residue
Voyeurs experience saint's ecstasy of death
Father Almighty show him a sign from heaven
Responding much too late with global insentience
Cumulus clouds weep on holocaustal ashes.
Vicarious winds scattered Bruno's ashes about the Field of Flowers onto the tombs of martyrs. Hushed voices were heard intoning "from these ashes the departed soul of the martyr continues transmigrated to the continuum of his infinite universe".
Defying the commemoration Pope Leo 13th fasted and prostrated himself at the feet of the stoned St. Peter begging it for the divine intervention to thwart the heretic's celebration. Next day he prepared a homily denouncing Bruno. Addressed to the Curia, the pope ordered his homily to be read in all churches:
"Bruno, a man of impure and abandoned life; a double renegade, a heretic formally condemned, whose obstinacy against the Church endured unbroken even to his last breath. He possessed no remarkable scientific knowledge, for his own writings condemn him of a degraded materialism and show that he was entangled in commonplace errors. He had no splendid adornments of virtue, for as evidence against his moral character there stand those extravagancies of wickedness and corruption into which all men are driven by passions unresisted. He was the hero of no famous exploits and did no signal service to the state; his familiar accomplishments were insincerity, lying and perfect selfishness, intolerance of all who disagreed with him, abject meanness and perverted ingenuity in adulation." 34
With odious obscenity, this homily proclaimed the Church's position against the heretic Bruno. The Church, champion of corrupt popes and forgiver of genociders and murderers, could not forgive its heretic priest because he dared challenge its authority and fallible theology. Among many others it had hung and immolated by fire Savonarola for his obstinate and persistent preaching of heresy. To a lesser degree, Protestants did the same. They burned to death Servetus for his unorthodox views of the Trinity and Incarnation. The Church built on rock, through authority from God, had gotten into the odious practice of auto-da-fé.
Personality
Giordano Bruno was a Dominican priest, prolific author, poet, cosmologist, philosopher, and martyr. He had an offensive personality which irritated most others. His brilliant mind was flawed with great deficiency for coping with social interaction. Arrogant, impetuous, a maverick, and the Church's enfant terrible Bruno was probably miserable. Anyone constantly arguing defending his views couldn't have been all that happy. A supreme agitator and iconoclast, he led the vanguard of advocates for free thinking and free speech. A doubting Thomas he was repeatedly charged with heresy and excommunication. Despite Bruno's disobedient and belligerent personality, and his pugnacious attacks against ecclesiastics and pedants, he counted aristocrats and royals among his acquaintances. Bruno lived in accordance with his beliefs. He was not a hypocrite. Throughout his life he desperately sought a university position. Yet when the prestigious Sorbonne offered him a lectureship, he refused because he was under threat of excommunication and could not in good conscience attend Mass. Today Bruno might be considered a philosophy nerd. In spite of his social awkwardness he is admired for his genius and lifelong pursuit of knowledge.
Peripatetic Odyssey
Bruno's 16-year odyssey took him through parts of 6 countries. Traveling thousands of miles, mostly on foot, he visited and probably lived in 34 towns/cities. These do not include hundreds of overnighters or stopovers such as Calais and Dover when he crossed the channel.
Italy 1. Nola
2. Naples
3. Rome
4. Noli
5. Savonna
6. Genoa
7. Turin
8. Venice
9. Padua
10 . Brescia
11. Bergamo
Switzerland 12. Geneva
France 13. Chambéry
14. Grenoble
15. Lyons
16. Port St. Louis
17. Agde
18. Toulouse
19. Paris
England 20. London
France 21. Paris
Germany 22. Mainz
23. Weisbaden
24. Marburg
25. Wittenberg
Bohemia* 26. Prague
Germany 27. Helmstedt
28. Frankfurt
Switzerland 29. Zurich
Germany 30. Frankfurt
Italy 31. Venice
32. Padua
33. Venice
34. Rome
* Now Czech Republic
The Church
The dominance of the Roman Catholic Church (Church) was eroded by Protestants in England, Germany, and the Netherlands. While Catholics dissatisfied with the papacy were rebelling, the Church was trying to reaffirm its authority. The Church did not tolerate Catholics or others who questioned its authority. Catholics who openly challenged the Church were candidates for excommunication. Heretics were treated very harshly. Subject to inquisition, they were frequently condemned to death. Bruno's unorthodox philosophy was yet another challenge to the authority and intolerance of the powerful Church. He was the whistle-blower of Catholicism. In the end, even though he knew aristocrats and royals, the Church being most powerful, they dared not interfere with the pope's decision to execute Bruno. Because he dared question Church authority, Europeans questioned their own religious, social, and political customs. His religion killed him but his philosophy memorialized him. At that time, and for some time after, there were Catholics who denied there was a priest named Bruno or that he was ever burned to death. Today as well, there are those who deny the Nazi Holocaust.
Cosmology
Copernicus had his sun, Galileo his telescope, Kepler his laws of planetary motion but Bruno went beyond them to the infinite universe of relativity. He filled it with multiple worlds, perhaps populated, interrelated with motion, space, and time. History credits as it should Copernicus and Galileo but it omits Bruno the important link, the transfer agent of thought from medieval to scientific. Bruno not only anticipated Galileo and Kepler but surpassed them in his cosmological vision of innumerable star and solar systems in an infinite universe. In his vision of the infinite universe under God, Bruno anticipated the relativity of matter, motion, space, and time. He opened the door to modern science. His cosmological theories anticipated fundamental aspects of modern cosmology. His big problem was that he inserted God into the conceptions of his visionary infinite universe. Bruno was the first to realize that scientists need to use standard terms in their writings, so that a word means the same thing each time it's used. That advice was not only true then but is required today for the dictionary maintenance of standard scientific terms. In predicting creatures living in other worlds, Bruno was light years ahead of Jules Verne and those today who believe in aliens. Bruno would be interested to know that SETI, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has been probing space for more than 40 years without answering the Fermi Paradox - if there are aliens out there, where are they? Bruno would be interested in astronomers using high powered space telescopes looking for stars whose light wobbles because of nearby orbiting planets (which might be populated).
Literary Works
A prolific author Bruno wrote and published at least 65 known works about 12 of which were lost. Taking every opportunity to get his writing printed, he occasionally ganged two or more works in a single book or volume. His ability to write and get published was unmatched by any other writer of his generation. His thoughts ran helter-skelter ahead of his pen making him incapable of writing exclusively on a single subject. Most of his writing is the outpouring of a brilliant unfettered mind spewing cosmology, philosophy, mysticism, graphics, and mathematical logic all scrambled with God. His writings were verbose, repetitive, and sometimes contradictory. Never popular during his life, his writings were posthumously placed 7August1603 on the Church's Index of banned books.
Influence
Giordano Bruno remains one of the most important figures of western philosophy, a precursor of modern thought. A seeker of truth in knowledge his genius soared to the heavens of an infinite universe. Bruno is considered the greatest Renaissance philosopher. Because of his intellectual prowess, accomplishments, and integrity men of learning feared and despised him because he challenged their accepted and sometimes ancient and erroneous knowledge. It was commonly reported that no contemporary ever bested him in a head-to-head argument. There are Brunian scholars, such as D.W. Singer, who believe Bruno influenced the Elizebethan Golden Age of literature. There's no doubt that Bruno influenced subsequent thinkers:
Cosmology - Tycho Brahe, Galileo Galilei, Edmund Halley, Christian Huygens, Johannes Kepler
Literature - Cyrano de Bergerac, Samuel Coleridge, Johann Goethe, Molière (pseudonym), Jonathan Swift
Philosophy - Johann Herder, Gottfried Liebnitz, Benedict Spinoza, Immanuel Kant.
Brunology
Everything about Bruno is controversial. Scholars do not agree on the events of his life, nor the dates, nor the titles, interpretations, and translations of his literary works. They don't even agree on the name of the place where he was martyred: Campo dei Fiori, Campo di Flora, Piazza dei Fiori or the date 17January1600, 18Jnuary1600. Obviously there are many such examples, each scholar having an independent rendition of Bruno's writings. Following are translations by two Brunian scholars of the same Bruno letter:
"A person of no name, fame or value among you, supported by no prince's praise, distinguished by no outward trappings such as the vulgar are wont to admire, a fugitive from the Gallic tumults; nor was I examined or interrogated on your religious dogma, with that custom of harsh discipline of perfidious barbarians, violators of the laws of nations, to whom should be closed that heaven and earth which they either entirely deny as a common and social possession ordained by nature for all men, or concede them only with impious and deadly calculation" 16a
"You have received and supported me; you have dealt kindly with me up to this day. I was a stranger to you, a fugitive from the tumults of Gaul, not distinguished by any royal commendation, bearing no ensigns of honor, not proved or questioned in your religion; but finding in me no hostile spirit, you received me gladly, deeming my name to stand in the book of your academy, and to be counted among the most noble and learned of your people, that I might acknowledge as my own, not any private school, nor ordinary assemblage, but the German Athens, which is this great university." 16b
There are several versions of Bruno's trial by the Roman Inquisition trial. One version is perhaps the fault of Napoleon, naming himself King of Italy in the early 1800's. About 1805 he ordered the official proceedings of the inquisition to be moved from Rome to Paris. Those archives were mistakenly sold to a paper factory where they were converted to pulp for cardboard, the final degradation of a life searching for truth in knowledge. His ethical ideals still appeal to modern liberal thinkers.
Today, for example, most people believe the Church doctrine that God creates embryos in utero to make babies. Bruno would scorn such outdated and otiose thinking. Instead, he would be expounding on the possibility that embryos could be cultured in petri dishes. If asked to comment on the Church's belief that stem cells represent God's creative process of human life, Bruno would probably respond arrogantly "Nonsense, stem cells consist of monads well suited to scientific experiment".
Coda
Italy was torn by the class struggles of commoners against the feudalism of foreign rulers, which was fading to inchoate materialism. Giordano Bruno's challenges to Church authority and societal mores belatedly inspired the Résorgimento in Italy for national political unity. Italian patriots, especially the popular Giuseppe Garibaldi and his red shirts, led sporadic revolutionary outbursts for that unity. The most successful revolutionary leader, Garibaldi's generalship was requested by several nations including France, Brazil, and America. Abraham Lincoln invited him to lead a union army against the south. Italy's socio-political situation endured until Garibaldi's red shirts captured Rome disposing of Pope Pius 9th. Eventually in 1870 the disparate Italian states were united creating the Kingdom of Italy.
Boulting W., Giordano Bruno: His Life, Thought, and Martyrdom
Frith I., Life of Giordano Bruno the Nolan
Singer D. W., Giordano Bruno His Life and Thought
Yates F. A., Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
Number and Author, Page
1 Singer, p 25
2 Singer, p 33
3 Boulting, pp 86-87
4 Frith, p 141
5 Frith, pp 118-119
6 Yates, p 289
7 Frith, p 115
8 Yates, p 288
9 Frith, p 114
10 Singer, p 116
11 Boulting, p 168
12 Singer, pp 122-123
13 Frith, p 123
14 Frith, p 125
15 Singer, p 139
16 see below
17 Frith, pp 197-198
18 Frith, pp 199-200
19 Frith, p 115
20 Singer, pp 151-152
21 Frith, p 286
22 Boulting, p 208
23 Yates, p 288
24 Yates, p 300
25 Frith, p 306
26 Singer, pp 176-177
27 Singer, p 179
28 Boulting, pp 303-304
29 Singer, p 201
30 Frith, p 284
31 Boulting, p 300
32 Boulting, p 303
33 Boulting, p 303
34 Boulting, p 307
Note 16 references the letter R. Blade created using the translations of Singer and Frith. Their original letters, Singer page 141 and Frith page169, are shown in this book in the Postlog under Brunology; see 16a Singer and 16b Frith.
End of Book