Brinton& Davidson -G Bruno Philosopher & Martyr

8/14/2019 Brinton& Davidson -G Bruno Philosopher & Martyr

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The original of tliis book is intine Cornell University Library.

There are no known copyright restrictions inthe United States on the use of the text.

http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028988967


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Cornell University LibraryB783.Z7 B85Giordano Bruno: philosopher and martyr.

olln3 1924 028 988 967


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Giordano Bruno :PHILOSOPHER AND MARTYR.

TWO ADDRESSES.

DANIEL G. BRINTON, M.D.,AND

THOMAS DAVIDSON, M.A.

PHILADELPHIA:DAVID McKAY, PUBLISHER,No. 23 South Ninth Street.

1890.


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As America's jnental courage (the thought comes to me to-day)is so indebted, above all current lands and peoples, to the noblearmy of old-world martyrs past, how incumbent on us that weclear those martyrs' lives and names, and hold them up forreverent admiration as well as beacons. And typical of this,and standingfor it and all perhaps, Giordano Bruno may wellbe put, to-day and to come, in our New World's thankfulestheart and memory. WALT WHITMAN.

February 24ih, l8go.Camden, N. J.


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PREFATORY NOTE.The Contemporary Club, of Philadelphiaan asso-

ciation of men and women formed for the discussionof the leading questions of the dayselected the sub-ject of Giordano Bruno for its meeting on January14, 1890.The heated controversies which had attended the

erection of a statue to Bruno in Rome the year pre-vious, and the numerous articles which had appearedconcerning him in the recent magazines and papers,both European and American, signalized his individu-ality and his thought as manifestly present topics ofinterest to reflective minds. The two addresses printedin this little volume were read before the Club on thedate mentioned, and are presented without alteration.Of course, it will be understood that they exhibit theopinions of the writers, and are not an official expres-sion of the sentiments of the Club as a body.

It appeared the more desirable to print them intheir present form on account of the difficulty of


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VI PREFATORY NOTE.obtaining accurate information about Bruno, or accessto bis works. None of tHese has been translated intoEnglish, and the Italian and Latin originals are ex-tremely, rarely to be found, even in our largestlibraries.Of biographies in English, Frith's " Life of Gior-

dano Bruno," published by Messrs. Triibner & Co.,London, is much the best, and a book to be recom-mended.The lines by Walt Whitman will be appreciated by

all who are in sympathy with his sterling philosophyof life. They were written after reading the first ofthe addresses here published, his infirmities prevent-ing him from attending the meeting of the Club, ofwhich he is an honored member.The engraving on the title page represents the

statue erected to Bruno on the Campo de' Fiori,Rome, and is copied from the medal struck to cele-brate that event.

D. G. BRINTON.Philadelphia,

March, i8go.


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GIORDANO BRUNO:HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY,

BY DANIEL G. BRINTON, M.D.


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GIORDANO BRUNOHIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY.

Mr. President and Fellow Members Soraething more than five-and-twenty yearsago I listened to some lectures at the Sorbonne_on Giordano Bruno, his life and his philosophy.I remember that a fellow student expressed hisopinion that they were a deadly bore ennu-yeuxs a mourir. I hope that whatever otherfault you find with me in treating the same sub-ject I shall not fall under this worst of con-demnations.At that time Bruno was but one of a number

of obscure philosophers of the Renaissance withwhom the lecturer was dealing. Last winterin Italy I found that the name of GiordanoBruno was a war-cry, ringing from Sicily to the

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lO GIORDANO BRUNO:Alpsyes, far beyond the Alps, all over theRoman Catholic world, with distinct echoes inProtestant lands. At the ancient city of Co-logne I stood in an assembly of a thousand men,gathered to celebrate and defend the erectionof Bruno's statue in far off Rome; while theweek before, at a very large meeting of Cath-olics on the upper Rhine, the orator of the day,a distinguished delegate to the Rdchskammer,had called Bruno "a hog and an ass," ein"Schwein und ein Esel,and had been applaudedfor the epithets.When on the epochal ninth ofJune last (1889),

Bruno's statue was unveiled on the spot of hisburning, in full view of the windows of the Vati-can, it is said that Leo Xlllth refused foodand spent hours in an agony of prayer at thefoot of the statue of St. Peter. Never have Iread more bitter denunciations than have beenpoured forth concerning this act from the RomanCatholic pulpit. Many another man was burnedin Rome, and some at Geneva; Savonarola atFlorence, and John Huss at Constance; but I


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HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. IIdoubt if the statue of any one of these wouldhave offended the Catholic church so deeply,would have rankled so venomously, as that ofBruno.Nor was this feeling confined to the church

of Rome. The learned dignitaries of the moreconservative Protestant churches, when theyknew anything about Bruno and his teachings,evidently shared it This was perfectly mani-fest from the editorials in the London Timesand in the official religious press both of Eng-land and North Germany.What was the secret of this? What was it

in Bruno which so peculiarly excited the ire ofthe theologians? And why has he, beyond allothers, been chosen to represent the new lifela. vita nuovaof independent Italy? Theseare the questions I shall endeavor to answerthis evening.And first, who was Bruno ?Fihppo Bruno, known in religion as Gior-

dano Bruno, was born into life at Nola, nearNaples, in 1548, and burned alive at Rome


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12 GIORDANO BRUNO:in 1600. A precocious lad, he assumed thegarb of the Dominicans at fourteen years ofage, and two years later made full profes-sion of vows in the Convent of St. Dominicat Naples. Soon promoted to- holy ordershe exercised the offices of the priesthood inand around the convent until 1576. In thatyear the Provincial of his order accused himof heresy on one hundred and thirty countsWith a just fear of the result of the trial;

Bruno cast aside his frock, renounced hisvows, and fled first to Rome and then toNorthern Italy. For three years he wan-dered from Genoa to Noli, to Turin, to Ven-ice, to Padua, gaining a precarious subsist-ence by teaching and writing. In 1579 wefind him in Geneva, then the stronghold ofthe most uncompromising Calvinism. Thiswas no place for him. In a very few monthshe was thrown into prison for defamatorylibel, and prohibited the sacraments for errorsin doctrine. Escaping from the Calvinists,he made his way to Toulouse, at that time


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HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 1the literary center of southern France. Therehe spent a year, lecturing on Aristotle, untilwearied, as he tells us, by its " clamors andscholastic frenzy," he was glad to move onto Paris.The atmosphere of that great city, then

under Italian influence, suited him better.He obtained the position of professor extra-ordinary in the Sorbonne, where he lecturedon the divine attributes and on the art ofmemorizing. Two years later, that is in 1583,he journeyed to London, apparently at theinvitation of the French ambassador to thecourt of Queen Elizabeth.

In the English capital he passed some threeyears. At that day London was far fromthe imperial city on the Thames of our time.Its streets were filthy, its police a jest, andits inhabitants numbered only twice as manyas those of Camden, on the other side of ourDelaware. But among those inhabitants weresuch glorious stars as Shakespeare and Spen-cer, Francis Bacon and Sir Philip Sidney, and


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HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 1(October, 1 589) ; in Frankfort the authoritiesrefused to permit him even to lodge within thegates ; and so the story goes.

Finally at Zurich he received an invitationfrom a noble Venetian, Zuane Mocenigo, tovisit Venice and teach him the higher and secretlearning. He complied, with unsuspecting con-fidence in his patron.

But Mocenigo was noble in nothing but hisbirth. The two soon quarreled violently, andwith the implacable thirst for vengeance of amediaeval Italian, Mocenigo quietly collectedfrom the works of Bruno and his conversationsa mass of testimony as to his heretical beliefs,and turned them over to the Father Inquisitorin Venice, with a formal' denunciation of theirauthor.

Bruno was promptly arrested.Once in the hands of that merciless tribunal

his fate, though it might be deferred, was cer-tain. Tried and convicted in Venice, he wasdelivered to the Inquisition in Rome. Afterseven years spent in its dungeons, again he was


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I GIORDANO BRUNO:tried and again convicted. Eight charges ofheresy were proved against him, and he wascalled upon to recant.

His reply was firm : " I ought not to recant,and I will not recant ! "

After further delay, the Inquisition pronouncedsentence of death, and, as the custom was, turnedhim over to the secular power for its execution.Bruno heard the fatal words unflinchingly, andin a menacing tone replied, " It may be that youfear more to* deliver this judgment, than I tohear it."Ten days later, on February 1 7th, 1 600, Bruno

was led to the stake on the Campo de' Fiori.He scorned the proffered consolations of thepriests, and met death with the calmness of atruly great mind. His latest words were, " I diea martyr, and willingly." His ashes were castinto the Tiber and his name placed among theaccursed on the rolls of the Church.

Such, in brief, was the history of this lonely,restless man. The descriptions we have ofhim tally with his lifea small, thin man, with


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HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 1a meagre, dark beard, sovereignly scornful of hisattire ; " three buttons off his coat and not aring on his fingers," says one narrative ; " hishose pieced out from his Dominican gown,"says another ; not a presentable man in finesociety, and of uncomfortable habits, writingall day long, or " walking up and down, filledwith fantastic meditations upon new things,reported the Prior of the Carmelite Convent inFrankfort ; quick in temper, bitter in debate,violent in language, impatient with ignorance,full of scorn for prejudices ; not a pleasant,easy-going fellow by any means ; given at timesto vainglorious boasting, and perhaps also tomystifying intimations of secret knowledge inhis reach. Impatient with the pettiness abouthim, embittered by persecution, what wonderthat he fell a long way short of being that pop-ular and affable individual which the commonmind admires?You will wish me to say something about his

personal character.. It has been bitterly at-tacked, not so much, so far as I can find, from

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1 GIORDANO BRUNO:any incidents recorded about his private life, asfrom the coarseness and ribaldry of some of hisdialogues and comedies. This coarseness isundeniable ; it passes sometimes beyond buf-foonery into what to us seems indecency.

But in judging it, we must take into consider-ation the man's epoch and nationality. Youwell know that his great contemporary Shake-speare penned many a scene in his dramas,which not the lowest theatre in this countrywould place unchanged upon its boards.

Far greater was the admitted license of Ital-ian writers. Matteo Bandello was a contem-porary of Bruno's, a Dominican monk, who diedin the odor of sanctity as a Bishop of theChurch of Rome ; yet the Novella, or shortstories, which he wrote, from which Shakespearedrew his plot of Romeo and Juliet, the Tamingof the Shrew and others, is a work of monstrousprofligacy, and the grossest indecency. Wecannot believe that it reflects the character ofthe author, who seems to have been temperate,studious and self-respecting. It does reflect the


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HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 1literary fashion of the time. The whole of Ital-ian sixteenth century literature is licentious, andsome of the finest of it is simply revolting in itssuggestions. No competent critic therefore,least of all an Italian or a Romanist, will con-demn Bruno on such evidence as this.

In spite of his vagabondism Bruno publishedabout twenty-five works in the fifteen years ofhis actual life, and left many others incomplete.Their titles are as eccentric as his own char-acter; such, for instance, as "The Book of theGreat Key;" "The Explanation of the ThirtySeals;" "The Expulsion of the TriumphantBeast;" "The Threefold Minimum ;" "TheComposition of Images;" "The Innumerable,the Immense and the Unfigurable ; " and othersof the same obscurity.

In these productions, some of which areprose, some poetry, some dialogues, some com-edies, he developed his philosophy; and onthem the inquisitors based their charges ofheresy. To them, therefore, we must turn toseek those teachings which on the one hand are


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20 GIORDANO BRUNO:asserted to prove him a venomous social viper,and on the other a glorious martyr to truth.

Several of his publications are devoted tothe Art of Memory. In the thirteenth centurythe Catalan monk, Raymond Lully, composed aremarkable treatise on this subject, maintainingthat by an artificial system of mnemonics thepower of recollection and the methods of inves-tigation can be indefinitely expanded.There is something in his theory, and it lies

at the base of most later schemes of the kindbut Bruno, Cornelius Agrippa, and other schol-ars of the sixteenth century, imagined that itcould be carried far beyond its possible limits,and devoted to it an amount of attention whichit did not merit. Like all artificial methods ofmemorizing, it does not invigorate the memoryas a faculty, but merely supplies it with materialschemes for associating facts. It is a questionwhether, like the use of a crutch, all such plansdo not perpetuate weakness while they seem-ingly aid the powers. As this portion of Bruno'sactivity neither received the condemnation of


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HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 21the Church nor the applause of posterity, wemay pass it by, merely remarking that his pro-longed attention to it indicates how closely hehad studied the rather rationalistic writings ofthe old Catalan.When he was at Frankfort, Bruno registered

himself as a student of natural history philo-sophies naturalis studiosusand well did he de-serve the title. There is something marvelous inthe precocity of his insight into both the methodsand the results of natural science. In physicsthe theories of the center of gravity of theplanets, the orbits of the comets, and the imper-fect sphericity of the earth are due to him. Hewas one of the first to espouse the modern orCopernican theory of astronomy.The doctrine of Evolution, the progressive

development of nature, an idea absolutely un-known to ancient philosophy, was first pro-pounded in his works, not vaguely or partially,but to the full extent of the most advanced evo-lutionist of to-day. "The mind of man," hesays, " differs from that of lower animals and of


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22 GIORDANO BRUNO :plants, not in quality, but only in quantity."" Each individual," he adds, " is the resultant ofinnumerable individuals. Each species is thestarting point for the next." Change is unceas-ing. " No individual is the same to-day as yes-terday." He extended these laws to the inor-ganic as well as the organic world, maintainingthat unbroken line of evolution from matter toman which the severest studies of modernscience are beginning to recognize.

This eternal change, he taught, is not pur-poseless. It is ever toward the elimination ofdefects, and the acquisition of higher powers.Hence, he laid down the doctrine of "optim-ism," which Leibnitz notoriously borrowed fromhim ; and the theory of the perfectibility ofman advanced by Herbert Spencer is but oneof several prominent ideas defended by thatdoctrinaire, which Bruno was the first to express,and did so clearly.

This has been pointed out before ; but thereis a remarkable passage in a work of his called"The Shadows of Ideas," which seems to me to


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24 GIORDANO BRUNOand if you apply to him for the criterion oftruth, his answer comes with no uncertainsound, rather with ceaseless iterationevidence,evidence, observation, observation. Trust toyour own senses; they will not deceive you,though they may not tell you the whole truth.Hold your mind ever open to new truths.Never believe you have attained final certainty.Doubt ever, doubt all things.

" Let us reject," he cries, " antiquity, tradi-tion, faith and authority. The truth is not inthe Past, nor in the Present, but in the Future."" Let us begin by doubt. Let us doubt tillwe know." He frequently admonished hishearers not to yield to the habit of faith, but todoubt what others hold as established truth.

Especially did he apply this to religious dog-mas. He declared that they blind and stuntthe intellect and lower the moral nature be-yond all else. " A hundred warring sects," hewrites, "claim each for itself the exclusive truth,and despise the worship of others. Each for-bids its votaries to question its own dogmatic


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HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY, 25utterances, while arraigning and condemningthose of its rivals." Hence the disastrous ef-fect of such religions on the moral nature.Bruno affirmed that the greatest obstacle to

ethical progress has been the preference givento sectarian belief over the practice of disinter-ested philanthropy. " The God of the philoso-pher," he writes, "is not a jealous God. Heis truth and goodness, he reveals himself in allnature, to all men, and in all religions." Hencethe philosopher, he adds, will study the myths,prayers and hymns of all races and all religionswith equal reverence.

I appeal to you if such an expression is notconsonant with the loftiest moral sense of thisour day ? With that " science of religionwhich Professor Max Miiller in England, Re-ville in France, and many other eminent teach-ers have made us acquainted with ?

This breadth of view he extended to all sub-jects of thought. "I have sworn," he cries," to no philosophy, and I despise no meansof learning. I do despise the ignorant crew

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26 GIORDANO BRUNO:who have gained, their opinions, not by occu-pation with philosophy, but by accepting thewords of others."

Thought, free, clear, earnest thought, heproclaimed, will at last be victorious and willlead to the highest knowledge and the broadestgood. "A time shall come," he exclaims ina moment of rapturous foresight, " a newand desired age, when the Gods shall lie inOrcus, and the dread of everlasting punish-ment shall vanish from the world."

Having reached the pure air of this loftyeminence, he did not rest, but took a yetmore aerial flight.Thought itself, he teaches, is divine, because

it is sealed with the seal of an infinite origin,and is born of the mind's direct relations tothe Infinite. It is forever moving betweenthe inconceivably small and the immeasurablygreat, between the atom and the universe,both illimitable, incomprehensible ; and thatthis was no barren scholastic theorem to him,but a pregnant truth, is shown by a sentence


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HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 27than which I know none grander in the whole ofphilosophy. It occurs in the work he dedicatedto Sir Philip Sidney, appropriately named, " TheHeroic Rapture," and is as follows : " Theintellectual faculty is appeased by compre-hensible truth only when it feels it is therebyadvancing nearer to incomprehensible truth."The intellectual faculty, he continues to argue,

thus forever seeks the unsearchable, passion-ately yearns for the unattainable. But thisvery passion and yearning prove its title tothe noblest destiny. " Love," he cries, " ismore than knowledge, and only the love ofthe Divine can satisfy the infinite nature ofthe soul." He who drinks of this Elysiannectar burns with an ardor that the oceancannot quench, nor the cold of the arctic tem-per. Elsewhere he writes : " Love, if it befinite, is fixed and of a certain measure; butto behold it rising ever and ever higher is toknow that it turns toward the Infinite."

This reasoning led him to the doctrine ofpersonal immortality, which he taught with clear


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28 GIORDANO BRUNO:conviction. To him, this was the final purposeof evolution. "The perfecting of the individualsoul," he writes, "is the aim of all progress."

I would ask you tc* pause and reflect a mo-ment on this surprising sentence. If you con-sider it well, perhaps you will find in it the keyto all history, the hidden secret of nature,the final purpose of the phenomenal world andits countless changes. Perhaps all this endlessconflict of forces is a somehow necessary pro-cess, by which the Individual is set over againstthe All, the Self against the Other, to the endthat each soul shall attain a perfected plenitudeof power, shall acquire infinity without forfeitingindividuality.

This, at any rate, was Bruno's opinion, andhe undertook to support it further by his doc-trine of Form, which is one of the most difficultbranches of his philosophy of nature. Withhim. Form seems to stand for the ultimate lawof the objective universe. " Forms," he writes," are the true objects of knowledge ; " yet headds that matter is not complete in its forms,


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- HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 29because these are constantly changing. Beyondand behind all these changes is the intangibleabstract energy which incites them and directsthem. This, in the individual, is the Soul; inthe universe, it is God. The reality of both heconsidered demonstrated by rigid naturalisticreasoning.Yet this is the man whom some theologians

have called an atheist and a materialist ! Notthat he would have been the less commendablehad he been both. An atheist through con-scientious conviction is a nobler character thana zealot through blind faith; but Bruno doesnot happen to have been an atheist, and it is amisstatement to apply the term to him. Noth-ing but wilful ignorance or dishonest prejudicecould have laid such a charge to his account.

Recognizing everywhere around him themanifestation of the divine in nature, he ex-horted his hearers to turn away from creedsand dogmas, and to study themselves and theworld about them."The truth," he writes, "like the Kingdom of


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32 GIORDANO BRUNO:lighted to dwell on the indestructibility, the eter-nity of matter, and to speak of the soul asmatter under certain forms. This soundedmost materialistic, and we are not surprisedthat, as one writer tells us, " he paralyzed hisaudience at Oxford with astonishment and in-dignation."When we study such elements of Bruno's

philosophy as this, we may find an explanationof some of the critical judgments which havebeen passed upon it by learned historians.When, for instance, Kuno Fischer writes thatBruno's teaching " belonged to the philosophicalRenaissance, not to modern philosophy," we mayaccept such words as the dictum of a metaphy-sician who is not in touch with modern scientificthought, nor acquainted with that conception ofthe Universe which is gradually unfolding itselfto our ken through the irresistible logic of theabstract sciences, a conception which asks noex cathedra deliverance to support it, but comeswith the cogency of evidential proof itself.Neither this philosopher of the Renaissance, nor


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HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 33any philosopher of modern science asks hispupil to believe anything that the enlightenedintellect can help believing. That alone is truewhich can bear constant reinvestigation.As intelligent belief, belief founded upon suf-ficient evidence, is in Bruno's scheme the onlyfaith for the philosopher, so morality, he taught, tobe really such, must also be intelligent, that is,the action must be directed by knowledgetoward a clearly understood purpose, greater,nobler, more enlightening than the action itselfThis, of course, excludes all merely religiousrites and formulas ; to Bruno these were notonly non-moral, but immoral, as they are ob-stacles to ethical advancement, blind the soul toits higher aims, and satisfy its longings withlower standards of excellence, and with me-chanical formalisms.

In many passages he expresses himself se-verely on what he considered this demoralizingeffect of dogmatic teaching. He fully appre-ciated the inevitable conflict between dogmaand evidential truth. There cannot but be con-


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34 GIORDANO BRUNO:flict, and it is as sharply defined now as in hisage. There is not, to-day, a professor in anysectarian college in this free land, who dares toteach the elementary facts of science in theirtheological applications.

Let me illustrate this by two points on whichBruno was emphatic, and modern, science isconclusivethe nature of sin and of death.

Sin, Bruno explains as something wholly

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negative, an incompleteness of good ; just as inthermophysics, cold is regarded merely as thedeficiency of heat. The Christian dogmaticnotion of sin as a positive entity he rejected.In accord with him in this opinion are thenoblest thinkers of our century, those greatsouls who look before and after, the mightybards, Goethe, Browning, Tennyson, Whitman,and many another; in accord with him are a.11ethnologists and scientific students of humandevelopment.

Death he regarded merely as a somewhatgreater change than is taking place every dayin our bodies, and as in nowise a cessation or


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HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 35diminution of liferather an exaltation of it."They are fools," he exclaims, "who dread themenace of death; for this your body is con-stantly passing away and being renewed."Elsewhere he writes, " The wise man fears notdeath; yea, there may be times when he putshimself in its way ; " and that this was no vainboast his own end proved.

Dogmatic Christianity, Roman, Greek andReformed, teaches that " death came into theworld by sin;" that sin is a curse inherited fromAdam, the first man ; and that there is no es-cape from the curse but by believing certaincreeds and performing certain rites. Yet everyschoolboy knows or ought to know that Adamwas not the first man, and that death has beenin the world from the earliest geologic ages.

Fn conflict with the Churches on thesepoints, Bruno was not less so on the dogmaof the Trinity. " From my eighteenth year,"he writes, " I doubted within myself regardingthe Son and the Holy Spirit." Not only did heassert that this, dogma is incompatible with


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2,6 GIORDANO BRUNO :reason, but he pointed out that it is nowherementioned in either the Old or New Testa-ment, and did not belong, therefore, to Apos-tolic Christianity. He urged that as the theoryof Christ suffering for the sin of Adam is no-where intimated in the words of Christ himself,so the theory of the Triune divinity was notacknowledged by his disciples.You will readily understand that a man with

these views in the sixteenth century, when thefires of theological controversy were at whiteheat, was no more welcome to one camp thanto the other. He was burned at Rome ; butdo not imagine that we should pour forthall our reproaches on the Roman Churchfor that act. Swinburne's recent fiery invec-tive is out of place. The Calvinists of Genevawould have burned Bruno just as cheerfullyas they did Servetus only twenty-five yearsbefore Bruno visited their city; the bigotsof England would have hanged him quite asreadily as their descendants hanged the Quak-ers on Boston Common; and he himself be-


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HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 37lieved that it was to save his life that he fledfrom the Lutherans of Marburg and Helm-stedt. The instincts of dogmatic belief areeverywhere the same, and logically force mento the same extremes, in all times and in allclimes.

Flatter not yourselves that the fires of fanati-cism are extinguished. They smoulder and glowin every exclusive dogma, only waiting theirchance to re-illume the torch of the Campo de'Fiori or the pyre of Servetus, and to sweep intoone vast auio da fe the hard-won victories offree thought and untrammelled research, of lib-eral art and secular culture. What Brunocalled "the Wolf of Rome" has merely hadthe greater power and the more frequent op-portunity.Yet there was deliberate purpose in new

Italy in the selection of Bruno as its championin its conflict with the papacy and with the ad-vocates of the temporal power. Not the bitter-est Covenanter ever arraigned the head of theRoman Church in more violent language than


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38 GIORDANO BRUNO:this ex-monk. "Who is he," he exclaims inhis Oration on Luther, "who pretends to bethe vicar of Christ on earth ? He is the vicarof the tyrant of hell, armed with keys andsword, at once fox and lion, steeped in fraudand hypocrisy, triple crowned with cruelty anddeceit," etc.What wonder that Pope Leo wept and the

bishops cursed when this apostate monk andimpenitent philosopher, who had jeered at theChurch and satirized its mysteries, came to bethe chosen ideal of victorious young Italy ?

Startling, indeed, was the admonition, loudwas the warning, thus heralded to the RomanChurch and to every branch of obscurant relig-ion. No half-measures, no temporizing, no com-promises ; the intellect must be free and whollyfree ; the pursuit of truth must be unimpededby any creed ; the individual must answer tohis conscience and not to a priest; no moreeducation which begins with falsities and endswith fanaticism ; these are the mottoes of youngItaly, these the maxims of la vita nuova. The


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HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 39churches have ever cried, " Believe, and ye shallbe saved;" Bruno taught, f" Doubt, and yeshall know ; " \and young Italy along withmodern science has chosen the latter teaching.

But you would err if you suppose that theskepticism inculcated by this philosopher of theRenaissance was the sterile uncertainty of theGreek sophists. He rested his teachings onthe broadest principles. The aim of all phi-losophy, he urged, is to recognize the unity ofcontraries, the form in the matter, the spiritualin the corporeal, the good in the evil, the in-finite in the finite, and vice versa. To accom-plish this, every proposition must be consideredin its contraries, the affirmative and the nega-tive, until the reconciliation of both is discoveredin some higher proposition.You will recognize in this principle the doc-

trine of antitheses uniting in a synthesis, whichis at the basis of the Hegelian logic. ButBruno applied it more practically than did theGerman metaphysician. It appears to me thatthere is no gainsaying it as the law of progres-


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40 GIORDANO BRUNO :sive thought in the sciences. Every investiga-tor must begin by reviewing the evidence forthe facts in his branch, and the more critical,the more skeptical his scrutiny, the more cer-tain is he to turn out good work./ Doubt, notbelief, must be his guide. | ^What is thus true in the sciences is not lessso in religious thought. Every reformer mustbegin by doubting the faith of his fathers.Take the noble army of leaders in ethical pro-gress, Buddha, Socrates, Christ, Paul, Abelard,Arnold of Brescia, John Huss, Martin Luther,George FoxI cannot call the long rolleveryone of them was in his own day accounted asceptic and an infidel ; every one of them re-jected the words of authority, spurned the,beliefof the orthodox, denied the claims of dogmaticdoctrine. What right have we to suppose thatthis unvarying record of history will not holdgood in this last decade of the nineteenthcentury?The mention of George Fox brings to my

mind how strangely similar the religious aspect


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HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 4of Bruno's philosophy is to that of the primi-tive Quakers. They also rejected all dogmasand creeds, all edicts of councils and ancientwritings, finding the sufficient rule of faith inthe heart of every man, be he Christian orJew, Mahometan or heathen. They lookedless for the Christ or the Church without,than for the resurrection and the light withinto these they turned for guidance, not to abook nor a man. All rites and ceremonies,all priests and professed teachers of dogma,they rejected as obstructions in the pursuit oftruth and genuine holiness.From what I have now told you, you will

appreciate the significance of the selection ofGiordano Bruno by new Italy as its represe"hta-tive man. It means an open war on dogmaticbelief of every kind, a declaration of the in-dependence of the intellect, an announcementthat philanthropic working is better than grosslybeheving, aproclamation that truth as attested byevidence and virtue as shown by actions are theonly sacred things and alone merit reverence.D


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The following brief paper was written without my havingseen or heard that of Dr. Brinton. A short synopsis of thelatter had been sent to me, and from this Igleaned that whatlittle was left far m.e to say by way of supplement lay in thedirection which I then followed. Iwas happy to learnfromDr. Brinton that my surmise had not been wrong.


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BRUNO'S THOUGHT.AH conflicts in human history are conflicts

between ideas, of which men are, so to speak,only the instruments or weapons. The sacrificeof a marfyr means the temporary defeat of anidea ; the canonization of that martyr, the tem-porary or, it may be, the permanent triumph ofthe same. This idea is the only thing of realinterest about the martyr, the only fact that giveshim historic significance. All the rest is merepersonal detail, not differing essentially fromnewspaper gossip.With respect to Giordano Bruno, the only

questions that really concern the serious his-torian and philosopher are: (i) What ideawas that which succumbed at his execution in1600, and triumphed at his canonization in1 889 ? (2) How did this idea stand related to

-the current thought of the time? (3) Whence45


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46 Bruno's thought:did Bruno derive the data enabling him to con-ceive such an idea? (4) How has that ideaaffected subsequent thought? (5) What is itspermanent value ?Though every idea may be said to be born at

first in the mind of some one man, yet everynew idea has a long prenatal history in the con-sciousness of the race or some part of it. Wecan, for example, follow with great ease thecourse of every element in Mr. Spencer's Evo-lutionary, Aggregational Agnosticism. Theseelements are Kant's Critical Philosophy, Hartleyand Mill's association theory, and Darwin's evo-lutionism, of all of which it is easy enough totrace the_history.

I. Bruno's idea.Bruno's philosophy is Rational Semi-panthe-

istic Evolutionism. I say " rational " to distin-guish it from agnostic evolutionism. Accordingto him, the universe is the explication (i. e., evo-lution) of a single principle. This principle isintelligent, and includes two perfectly correlated


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ITS SOURCES, CHARACTER AND VALUE. 47elements'an active element capable of doingall things, and a passive or receptive elementcapable of becoming all things. Without thesetwo elements no action could be conceivable.Being intelligent, this first principle draws outfrom its passive element all the endless formswhich that implicitly contains, and, in doing so,evolves or explicates the universe.

Calling the passive element matter, Brunoholds that it is composed of innumerable monads(not atoms), every one of which is necessarilyeternal, and every one capable of manifesting allpossible forms. Each is, therefore, potentially,either a minimum or a maximum. When itsforms are unexplicated, it is a minimum ; whenthey are explicated, it is a maximum. Eachmonad, therefore, has the power of becomingall that the primal monad is, though only insuccession and by a process of evolution ; nay,it may even, by mystic union with this primalmonad, become identical with it.The primal monad Bruno calls the anima

'i, or world-soul, and this he holds to be


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48 Bruno's thought:at all times completely active in animating theworld, and to be the only first principle acces-sible to science or philosophy. If there be anyprinciple transcending thisand Bruno's viewson this subject differed somewhat at differentperiods of his lifeit is not accessible to phi-losophy, but only to faith, a faculty which hedoes not define. Philosophy arrives at theworld-soul by retracing the process of evolutionin the reverse direction. Monads being eternal;and the human soul being one of them (in ahigh state of explication), it is necessarily eter-nal. Its end is the realization of the universein itself.

In order to show Bruno's exact view, we may-quote a few sentences from the Confession ofFaith which he pronounced before the Inqui-sition, and which may, therefore, be regardedas an authentic expression of his latest andripest views.

" I believe," he says, " in an infinite universeas the (necessary) effect of the infinite divinepower. The reason of this is that I have always


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ITS SOURCES, CHARACTER AND VALUE. 49regarded it as something unworthy of the divinepower and goodness, that, being able to produceanother world, nay, infinite other worlds besidesthis one, it should produce only a finite world ;whence I have maintained that there are infiniteparticular worlds, similar to this of the earth,which, in accordance with Pythagoras, I considerto be an orb, similar to the moon, to otherplanets and other stars, which are infinite, andthat all these bodies are worlds, and innumer-able, constituting the infinite universeness, inan infinite space, and this is called infinite uni-verse, in which are innumerable worlds, so thatthere are two sorts of infinity, an infinity ofmagnitude in the universe, and an infinity ofmultitude in the worlds, a belief understood to beindirectly hostile to the truth according to faith.

" Moreover, in this universe I place a universalprovidence, by virtue whereof everything lives,grows, moves and remains in its perfection, andI mean this in two senses, first, in the mode inwhich the soul is present in the body, the wholein the whole, and the whole in each part, and


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ITS SOURCES, CHARACTER AND VALUE. 5Cause, so that I had no objection to the term'creation,' which I beHeve that even Aristotlesignified, when he said that God is that on whichthe world and all nature depend ; whence, ac-cording to the interpretation of St. Thomas,whether the world be eternal or in time, it iswith its whole being dependent on the FirstCause, and nothing is in it independently."

This passage shows what I meant in sayingthat Bruno's system was semi-pantheistic. Godis totally present in the world, but only in one.mode ; in another mode he is totally transcen-dent. This latter mode is ineffable, beyond thereach of knowledge, but not beyond that ofsome higher mode of apprehension possible forhuman nature. It also shows us that Brunohad no objection to calling his evolution crea-tion, since he recognized the absolute depend-ence of the world upon the First Cause. Hediffered with the Church, however, in regardingit as a necessary and eternal correlate of divinepower and goodness, and not a temporal pro-duct. And this brings us to


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ITS SOURCES, CHARACTER AND VALUE. 53Ventura's well-known tract, "The Soul's Pro-gress to God." The appointed channel anddepositary of this grace is the Church. We canthus easily see the reason why the Church shouldat all times have so jealously watched, and so,carefully, ,nay, ruthlessly, condemned, any doc-trine maintaining that God was immanent in,and, therefore, revealed through, the world.Every such doctrine strikes at her very reasonfor being. It is on this account that she hassteadily condemned all forms of Gnosticism,Pantheism, Theosophy, all forms of Mysticismclaiming for the soul any inherent power ofrising to, or comprehending, God, and all thatportion of Aristotle's doctrine which maintainsthe eternity of the world, as the necessary cor-relate of God. The Church is founded uponGod's transcendence and man's incapacity toreach him through any faculty of his own, uponthe entire and essential separation of God andman.The Jesuits, who are most zealous for the

Church's existence, in their efforts to exaggerate


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54 BRUNO s thought:man's incapacity to reach God, have usually-been materialists in philosophy. Only a coupleof years ago they caused the condemnation offorty propositions from the writings of Rosmini,the greatest thinker of the century, becausethey seemed to imply that human reason con-tained a divine element, and that something ofGod was immanent in the world. The insist-ance of the Church upon the doctrines of crea-tion and the transcendence of God is, in myopinion, a pure matter of policy, and has noth-ing whatsoever to do with truth.

III. THE SOURCES OF BRUNO's PHILOSOPHY.Alongside the philosophic agnosticism of the

Church, there existed at all times a species ofgnosticism, regarded as unorthodox, a philoso-'phy which maintained that the human powerswere capable of discovering all divine truth, or, atleast, of comprehending it fully after it was re-vealed ; in other words, that the content offaith could be fully analyzed in terms of reason.This doctrine is due to the Greek element in


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56 Bruno's thought:that he can reach him only by an act of divinegrace, performed through the Church. Thelatter form of mysticism 'the Church has alwaysapproved ; the former it has always condemned.It has had considerable difficulty, however, indistinguishing the two. It is easy enough tosee that the one belongs together with the doc-trine of divine transcendence and creation ; theother with that of divine immanence and evolu-tion. It is clear enough that, if God is immanentin the human soul, a consciousness ofhim may beevolved in it, whereas if he is transcendent, hemust enter, if at all, by an act of grace.The Aristotelian doctrine of the immanence

of God in the world was shared by the Stoics,and by certain sects among the early Chris-tians ; but, so long as the Church doctrines wereunder the influence of Platonism, Aristotledid not exert any very extensive or enduringinfluence. But when, in the twelfth, thirteenthand fourteenth centuries, his philosophy roseinto prominence and became the favorite of theChurch, his doctrine of the eternity of matter


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ITS SOURCES, CHARACTER AND VALUE. 57and of the divine immanence came again intovogue, and natural mysticism in a thousandforms, some good and some evil, began tocrop up. Almost all the heresies which theChurch persecuted in those centuries take thisform, and all naturally tend to make men inde-pendent of the Church. Even some of thegreatest doctors of the Church failed to keepthemselves entirely free from this taint, e. g., St.Bonaventura, the Seraphic Doctor, the greatlight of the Franciscans, and the most attractiveof all the mediaeval saints.

This tendency assumed two forms, owing totwo well-defined causes, infidelity and dogmaticrigor. Among the Latin nations, in which thecurrency of Arab thought had led to a wide-spread infidelity, there sprang up, naturallyenough, a tendency to offer purely rationaldemonstrations of Christian dogmas, and thisnecessarily implied the immanence of God inreason. The chief representative of this ten-dency was Raimondo Lulli, a native of Ma-jorca, a man of strong, fervent character, who


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58 Bruno's thought:led a most romantic life. He was born in 1235and died at the age of 80, in 131 5, being" thuscontemporary with Thomas Aquinas, Bona-ventura, and Dante. He closes the palmyperiod of Scholasticism.Among the Germanic nations, on the contrary,

the cold rigidity and externality ofdogma causeda pioiis reaction of the heart, and this, on thetheoretical side, took the form of an enthusias-tic mysticism, which claimed for man the directvision of God. To this movement belong thespeculative mystics of Germany, Meister Eck-hardt, Suso, and Tauler, and what is familiarlyknown as the " Deutsche Theologie ; " also thepractical mysticism of Ruysbroek, Geert deGroot and Thomas a Kempis, the author of the"Imitation of Christ." The two famous societieswhich did so much for true religious life in thefourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Friendsof God and the Brothers of Common Life, wereboth deeply tainted with natural mysticism.This is the chief reason why such desperateand persistent attempts have been, and still


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ITS SOURCES, CHARACTER AND VALUE. 59are, made to deprive Thomas a Kempis of theauthorship of the Imitation.The German mystical tendency found its

highest philosophical expression in NicholasCusanus, born near Treves in 1401, later a car-dinal of the Roman Church, and a man of greateminence, nobility, liberality and tolerance, inreality, one of the great men of the Church. Itis a curious enough fact that he received his earlyeducation at Deventer, in the house of theBrothers of Common Life, the very house in.which Thomas a Kempis had been educatedbut a few years before. It is a prime articlein the system of this wonderful man that Godis immanent in the world, and can be reachedby the human faculties, of which faith is one.Indeed, the universe is but the explication orevolution of God. But God is not only imma-nent in the world ; he is also transcendent. Byemphasizing this, Nicholas steers clear of Pan-theism, one does not always see clearly how,although the thing is entirely possible. Hecloses the last great period of Scholasticism,


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ITS SOURCES, CHARACTER AND VALUE. 6into monads, and (3) Copernicus, with his helio-centric system of astronomy. Though theselast two never broke openly with the church,they carried on their thinking without regard toher, and arrived at results which she was bound,sooner or later, to condemn.Raimondo Lulli's acute rationalism ; Nicholas

Cusanus' genial, anti-scholastic, natural mysti-cism ; Lucretius' fiery love of the material andhis atomism ; Telesio's devotion to natural ob-servation and his animism ; and Copernicus'heliocentric theory (anticipated, indeed, by Cu-sanus) : take these and add to them Bruno'sfervid, impatient, restless disposition, and it is notdifficult to account for either his system, his lifeor his death. Rationalism, naturalism, mysti-cism, these are the components of his thought.This thought necessarily brought him into con-flict with the Church, whose thought was, andis, founded on dogmatism, supernaturalism, andscholasticism. There is very little that can becalled original in Bruno.

His great importance consists in the fact that


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ITS SOURCES, CHARACTER AND VALUE. 63IV. HOW HAS Bruno's idea affected subsequentTHOUGHT ?When the Church undertakes to destroy an

adversary, she is not content with taking hislife in the most painful, ignominious and publicway ; she generally tries at the same time andlong after to ruin his reputation, both as athinker and as a man.

This was recently exemplified in a most shock-ing way in the papal allocution called forth byimpotent fury over the erection of a statile toBruno, two hundred and eighty-nine years afterhis martyrdom. Such moral barbarities havenow, fortunately, no effect save on the authorof them, his character, and the cause he repre-sents ; but in times past, it was otherwise. Formore than two hundred years, such was Bruno'sreputation for atheism, impiety and misconductthat his writings were completely tabooed, notonly among Catholics, but even among Pro-testants. They were burned or kept secret,like obscenities. Hegel tells us that as late asthe year 1830 they were forbidden to be shown


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64 Bruno's thought:in the public library at Dresden. Many ofthem are lost, or buried in the archives of theInquisition. Of those known to exist no com-plete or reasonably accurate edition has everbeen published. The Italian works were col-lected and edited by a German. In spite ofthis, Bruno's thought has exerted a determininginfluence upon many great minds, upon Des-cartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant and Hegel, andthrough them upon Goethe, Coleridge, Emer-son and the whole body of modern evolutionistsand monists. As we shall see, these last haverisen to but one side of his thought,

V. THE PERMANENT WORTH OF BRUNO'S THOUGHT.In the last resort, man's interest in a thing

is measured by its permanent worth. Whatthen is the worth of Bruno's thought? Tomy thinking, it lies in two things: (i) that itmaintains the universe to be infinite, one, andessentially intelligible, (2) that it makes thefirst principle of the universe transcendent aswell as immanent.


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ITS SOURCES, CHARACTER AND VALUE. 65By the former of these affirmations, it ex-

cludes both the forms of Agnosticism, themediaeval which was eked out with revela-tion, and the modern which is embalmed insentimentality. It is equally the foe of theInscrutable and the Unknowable. It inspiresman with reverence in presence of the uni-verse, and with enthusiasm to study it. Noscientific movement will ever be permanent,or in any true way beneficial, that is notinspired with the conviction that it is on theway to absolute truth.By the latter of its affirmations, Bruno'sthought leaves a place for the future evolution

of mind. If there be any truth in evolution,it is surely the height of absurdity to maintainthat the evolution of mind has ceased, andthat new mental faculties can never be pro-duced, or to set limits to the possibilities of mindin any direction. It would be well for us,before we sit down to construct philosophiesof the universe, to reflect that our minds arein a comparatively low state of development.


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66 Bruno's thought :and that, as Aristotle says, the crown of per-fection does not belong to the imperfect ; but,at the same time, to realize that we, for thisvery reason, can fix no pillars to bound thereach of thought.

While Bruno maintains that human intelli-gence can rise to God only as immanent inthe universe and as animating it, he does notdream of denying that there is in God atranscendent mode, which may be attained byman when he shall have developed a formof consciousness higher than the humanin fact, a God-consciousness, as much higherthan the self-consciousness belonging to manas that is higher than the mere consciousnesswhich belongs to the brutes. And, indeed,what else is faith, about which men, for well-nigh two thousand years, have been disputing,fighting and dying, but the dawning of thenew God-consciousness in man ? What isChristianity in its deepest essence but theembodiment and trainer of this conscious-ness? And for what other reason is Christi-


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ITS SOURCES, CHARACTER AND VALUE. 67anity sinking into disrepute, and making wayfor mere physical science, but because it hasbeen unfaithful to its task of developing theGod-consciousness, and has become a merematter of dogmas; churches and Pharisaicrespectability ?The truth is that, when Bruno broke with the

Church, and with the Christianity of all thechurches, he did so in favor of pure religionand the very essence of Christianity. ThatBruno should have been called an atheist onlyshows to what vile uses human language isliable to be put by the ignorant slaves of creeds.Bruno was, in truth, a god-intoxicated man, inwhom faith was a glowing life of " heroic fury,"not a mere belief maintained by anathemas andthe fear of hell.

To sum up:Bruno's fundamental idea was that of a God-informed, God-governed universe, a universeembodying power, wisdom and love, a universeessentially accessible to the human conscious-ness, partially now and progressively with the


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68 Bruno's thought.progress of that consciousness. This, as op-posed to the notion of a God-bereft universe, indisfavor -vfrith an inscrutable God, was thethought which temporarily succumbed in theCampo de' Fiori in 1 600, and rose again, let ushope, to everlasting triumph on the same spotin 1889. No wonder that this resurrectioncalled forth all the malignant hostility of theChurch. Bruno's thought is of infinite value.Strange, nay fantastic, as its expression maysometimes sound, it is the loftiest yet attained.It is, in truth, the very thing that we need to liftus out of all forms of blind agnosticism, dog-matism and materialism, into true, seeing science,and to pave the way for the development of ahigher consciousness in us, a God-consciousness,which alone can satisfy the human soul.

PRESS OF WM. r. FELL & 00., 1220-24 SANSOM ST., PHILADELPHIA.


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Brinton& Davidson -G Bruno Philosopher & Martyr

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