Giordano Bruno (1548-1600)
One of Bruno's notorious ideas was that
the universe is infinite, but it is not clear if this
was one of the ideas for which he was tried.
Bruno was attracted to the works of Plato and Hermes Trismegistus,
both resurrected in Florence by Marsilio Ficino
in the late fifteenth century. Hermes Trismegistus was thought to be a
gentile prophet who was a contemporary of Moses. The works attributed to
him in fact date from the turn of the
Christian era.
Because of his heterodox tendencies, Bruno came to the attention of the Inquisition in Naples and in 1576 he left the city to escape prosecution. When the same happened in Rome, he fled again, this time abandoning his Dominican habit. For the next seven years he lived in France, lecturing on various subjects and attracting the attention of powerful patrons. He began by formulating a new memory system, echoing and extending the work of the medieval Catalan, Ramon Llull. His first work to be published was De umbris idearum (Paris, 1582), ?on the shadows of ideas?.
Bruno extended the Lullist system by using circular memory wheels with 30 sectors, as opposed to 9 divisions in Llull?s memory system. As in Plato and the Neoplatonists, the ?ideas? had their source in the spiritual world, and the human mind sits under the shadow of these ideas, sensing their forms. Bruno believed that he had uncovered the inner structure to this world of ideas and that by contemplating the world through his memory system one would become aware of the deeper underlying spiritual unity behind human thought. Here he drew upon his reading of Hermes, that that which lived below in our human thinking, was as that which was above in the thoughts of the spiritual world. In the opening section of the work, Bruno shows that the human mind reflects thoughts from the Divine intellect, just as we perceive shadows cast by the Sun, and he further believed that there was a thirty-fold system underlying the forms of ideas.
The figure above shows one of Bruno?s memory wheels, divided into 30 segments, and 7 concentric rings. In each of these sectors an image was to be imagined, and these were carefully chosen to link and associate together symbolically. This memory system thus used complex layers of archetypal symbolism, charged with hermetic, mythological and spiritual meanings. This was not merely a technique for aiding memory, as in the classical memory systems, but a method for structuring one?s thoughts in a hermetic manner. [See the book by Frances Yates, The Art of Memory.]
From 1583 to 1585, Bruno lived at the house of the French ambassador in London. John Bossy has recently published a book which argues that he was acting as a spy and informer at this time. During this period he published Cena de le Ceneri ("The Ash Wednesday Supper") and De l'Infinito, Universo e Mondi ("On the Infinite Universe and Worlds"), both published in 1584.
In Cena de le Ceneri, Bruno defended the heliocentric
theory of Copernicus. It appears that he did not understand astronomy very
well, for his theory is confused on several points. Bruno saw that there
was no need to cling to the traditional earth-centred cosmology and that
a spiritual philosophy could quite easily incorporate the new ideas on
the structure of the cosmos. Indeed, in De l'Infinito, Universo e Mondi,
he argued that the universe was infinite, that it contained an infinite
number of worlds, and that
these are all inhabited by intelligent beings. He found
no conflict with the traditional hermetic view that the Earth and humanity
stood at the centre of the cosmos. Robert Fludd, the later English hermeticist,
found it impossible to follow this course, and held to the Earth-centred
view.
Wherever he went, Bruno's passionate utterings led to opposition. During his English period he outraged the Oxford faculty in a lecture at the university; upon his return to France, in 1585, he got into a violent quarrel about a scientific instrument. He fled Paris for Germany in 1586, where he lived in Wittenberg, Prague, Helmstedt, and Frankfurt. As he had in France and England, he lived off the munificence of patrons, whom after some time he invariably outraged. In 1591 he accepted an invitation to live in Venice. Here he was arrested by the Inquisition and tried. After he had recanted, Bruno was sent to Rome, in 1592, for another trial. For eight years he was kept imprisoned and interrogated periodically. When, in the end, he refused to recant, he was declared a heretic and burned at the stake. We do not know the exact grounds on which he was declared a heretic because his file is missing from the records.
Note that the following works were actually published
in London, rather than Venice or Paris, as stated on the titlepages:
1. De la causa, principio, et uno, Venetia [ie London:
John Charlewood] 1584 [1585]
2. De l?infinito universo et mondi, Venetia [ie London:
John Charlewood] 1584 [1585]
3. De gl?heroici furori, Parigi: appresso Antonio Baio
[ie London: John Charlewood] 1585
4. Cabala del cauallo Pegaseo, Parigi: appresso Antonio
Baio [ie London: John Charlewood] 1585
These four works and two others were all published during or immediately following Bruno?s visit to Oxford University. They were obviously the backlog of works which he had accumulated during his years of wandering and exile. A fictitious foreign imprint helped the sales in England of a book in a foreign language. Charlewood obviously hoped that this stratagem would provide easier and increased sales for these books, which would allow the printing of a larger and more profitable edition. His hopes were not realised: none of them were reprinted in Italian in Great Britain until modern times.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary texts
The Ash Wednesday Supper, tr. Stanley L. Jaki
(The Hague: Mouton, 1975); The Ash Wednesday Supper, trans. Edward
A. Gosselin and Lawrence S. Lerner (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1977)
Sidney Greenberg, The Infinite in Giordano Bruno,
with a Translation of his Dialogue Concerning the Cause, Principle, and
One (New York: King's Crown Press, 1950);
Jack Lindsay, Cause, Principle, and Unity; Five Dialogues
(New York: International Publishers, 1964)
Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, trans. Arthur
D. Imerti (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers U.P., 1964)
Secondary works
Dorothea Waley Singer, Giordano Bruno, his Life and
Thought. With Annotated Translation of his Work, On the Infinite Universe
and Worlds (New York: Schuman)
Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
(Chicago:
University of Chicago Press,
1964)
Walter Pagel, "Giordano Bruno: The Philosophy of Circles
and the Circular Movement of the Blood,"
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
6 (1951)): 116-125;
Angus Armitage, "The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno, Annals
of Science 6 (1948):24-31.
Nuccio Ordine, Giordano Bruno and the Philosophy of
the Ass, trans. Henryk Baranski with Arielle Saiber (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1996)
John Bossy, Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair.
(New Haven, 1991)
Hilary Gatti, "Giordano
Bruno and the Stuart Court Masques", Renaissance Quarterly,
48 (1995) 809-842.
Hilary Gatti, The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge:
Giordano Bruno in England (London, 1989)
D.P.Walker, "General
Theory of Natural Magic", from his Spiritual and Demonic Magic.
Miguel Angel Granada, El debate cosmológico
en 1588. Bruno, Brahe, Rothmann, Ursus, Röslin (Naples, 1996)
General works on the plurality of worlds
Paolo Rossi, "Nobility of Man and Plurality of Worlds,"
in Science, Medicine, and Society in the Renaissance, ed. Allan
Debus (New York: Science History Publications, 1972), pp. 131-162
Steven J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of
the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (Cambridge/New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1982)
