partly by their bold, personal efforts to uphold the humanist culture
of dialogue and tolerance in a period when both parts of Europe,
the Catholic and the Protestant, were becoming rigidly dogmatic
and intolerant.
If I may compare the Copernican Revolution to a large marble
sculpture, the issues to be discussed can be compared to thin, deep
stains that cut through the marble, at some points emerging in its
surface as a fracture. This analogy should serve as a reminder of the
approach taken: tracing inconspicuous connections between ancient
notions and Copernican developments. I stress the importance of
this analogy because this is not a reinterpretation of the Copernican
Revolution. Instead I expose a neglected chain of events within
it. It is not an account of the rise of the theory that the Earth
moves; it is a supplement to such discussions. I will set the works
and concerns of Copernican astronomers in the context of forgotten
pagan heresies.
27
burned alive
The Moving Earth and the Fugitive Friar
The one admirer of Copernicus who most earnestly held Pythagorean
beliefs was the Italian philosopher and Catholic friar Giordano
Bruno. Famously, Giordano Bruno was a martyr for the freedom of
expression. Despite being imprisoned and interrogated by Catholic
Inquisitors for almost eight years, Bruno refused to recant his eccentric opinions. In February 1600 the Roman Inquisition declared him guilty of heresies. The Roman city officers gagged him, took him
to a public square where a crowd watched, tied him to a post and
burned him alive.
Countless books and articles have been written about Bruno.
Let us discuss a neglected but important dimension: how did his
beliefs about the cosmos relate to his trials and execution? To trace
the Pythagorean thread in his life, consider first his education.
Bruno was born in 1548 in the village of Nola, Italy, at the foot
of the ancient volcano Vesuvius. At an early age, in 1565, he entered
the Dominican monastery in Naples, like Thomas Aquinas, to lead
a life of devotion and prayer. As a novice, however, Bruno once discouraged another novice from reading a book on Marian devotion.
Someone also saw Bruno discard some images of saints and reported
him. For such reasons young Bruno was denounced to the Neapolitan
Inquisition, but he was not processed. Having completed his courses
in theology, focused on the doctrines of Thomas Aquinas, Bruno was
ordained priest in 1573.32
However, Bruno cultivated objections against Aristotle’s philosophy, the doctrine of the Trinity and other points of theology.
He thought that some heretics had proposed interesting ideas that
were not necessarily wrong. Bruno also secretly managed to read
some forbidden books. Hence in 1576 he was again denounced to
the Inquisition for doubting the Trinity, rejecting the cult of saints
and sympathizing with Arian heretics.
To avoid the confrontation, at the age of 28 Bruno fled from the
monastery and travelled to Rome. Meanwhile, his superiors found
that he had hidden prohibited books in the latrine of his cell. 33 The
books included texts by saints Jerome and John Chrysostom that
had been edited by Erasmus of Rotterdam, the Catholic priest who
had become a social critic and humanist, and whose works had been
banned by the Index of Forbidden Books.
28
The Crimes of Giordano Bruno
Erasmus sought wisdom from many sources and he discussed
many ancient ideas and sayings. Discussing philosophers, he
sometimes referred to Pythagoras. Like others, Erasmus praised
Pythagoras as a sage who voiced insightful pronouncements about
life. Apparently Pythagoras had argued that friends should share all
their possessions as common property. He described life as a solemn
gathering in which some people fought, others did business, while
others were spectators (philosophers who peacefully contemplate
people and nature).34 Erasmus portrayed Pythagoras as an admirable role model. He claimed that the apparent ‘superstitions’ that were taught by Pythagoras were just meant to train youths in ways
that would facilitate learning. As examples, Erasmus mentioned
the prohibition against eating meat, the praise of vegetables, the
fiveyear restriction of silence and the oracular precepts. He argued:
‘Our modern monks, who are monks in name only, seem to have
imitated some of this man’s teachings, and those who control their
bellies and their tongues are the ones who sin least.’ So according to
this one priest, Pythagoras was above most, ‘for no one among the
pagan philosophers is more saintly than this man. ’35 Erasmus asked Christians to carry out Pythagoras’ advice to review one’s actions
and duties before going to sleep every night.
Of course, Erasmus also discussed the Pythagorean idea of the
transmigration of souls: in Praise of Folly, for example, Erasmus
referred to Lucian’s The Dream, or the Rooster, in which a rooster
spoke and identified himself as having formerly been Pythagoras.
Erasmus celebrated
that neversufficientlytobepraised Pythagorean rooster,
who in his own person had occupied many shapes, as a
philosopher, a man, a woman, a king, a lowly subject, a fish,
a horse, a frog, even I think a sponge – after which he concluded that no animal was more wretched than man because all others were content with the limits imposed by nature.36
Furthermore, in other writings Erasmus said that Pythagoras construed the mind or the soul as being imprisoned in the body.37 He also discussed the precept against eating flesh. Erasmus discussed
what the Pythagoreans viewed as the ‘monstrous’ crime that had
become very common:
29
burned alive
taking the carcasses of slain animals for food, to tear dead
flesh with their teeth, to drink the blood and suck the gore,
to ‘stuff their entrails with other entrails’ as Ovid says. That
crime, however monstrous it might seem to gentler minds,
was nevertheless sanctioned by usage and convenience. It
has even become a pleasure to see, among the luxuries of
the table, the semblance of a corpse. Meats are covered
under crusts like buried corpses, they are embalmed with
scents.38
Erasmus did not focus his discussions on Pythagoras or his followers,
but these passages just illustrate his willingness to engage unusual
intellectual perspectives, slight departures from Catholic doctrines.
Since his fel ow monks knew that Bruno had read some of
Erasmus’s forbidden works, plus he had committed other questionable acts, it seemed that Bruno should be required to meet with an Inquisitor. But Bruno had fled in 1576, so the proceedings could not
be carried out.
Impressed by the theory that the Earth moves around the Sun,
Bruno studied ancient texts on astronomy, including the Placita
allegedly by Plutarch, in which the author or authors discussed
‘Pythagorean’ ideas that greatly impressed Bruno: that stars are
worlds, the universe is infinite, and there exist other worlds similar
to Earth. Bruno al
so continued to study texts that had been prohibited by the Congregation of the Index. Following the Pythagoreans, he pondered their major religious belief: that human souls are
reborn, even in animals. He also pondered unorthodox ideas about
Jesus Christ, such as whether others could perform similar feats.
Moreover, in his writings Bruno argued as if knowledge by reason
is superior to knowledge by faith.
At the time numerous writers discussed magic and divination.
Some of them cited references to Pythagoras and his legendary
powers. For example, in 1558 Christofo de Cattan had published a
popular book, Geomancy, with the Wheel of Pythagoras, in Italian. 39
The ‘Pythagorean Wheel’ was commonly cal ed the Wheel of
Fortune, which included, along its circumference, rows of numbers and the alphabet, and sometimes signs for the Sun, the Moon and the planets, all to divine a person’s future arithmetically. Cattan
said the Wheel could be used to detect lies, to predict who will die
30
The Crimes of Giordano Bruno
first, to predict the sex of a child, whether a prisoner will be freed,
whether a disease will kill and so on.
Reputedly, Pythagoras was a master of divination: numer ology,
hydromancy, geomancy and onomancy (deciphering the future on
the basis of numbers, water, bits of dirt, or words, respectively). In
another work, On the Trickery of Demons, another author, Johan
Weyer, described how magicians colluded with demons to effect
seemingly impossible tricks, for example, that Pythagoras appeared
in two distant cities at once, and that Apollonius travelled instantly
from one city to another. Pythagoras appeared as someone who
had travelled to many distant lands in search of arcane knowledge.
Echoing Philostratus, Apollonius was described as a magician
who allegedly once resurrected a young bride in Rome, and who
summoned the soul of Achilles the warrior, from Hell, back into
his body. 40 By the 1590s the Vatican launched an attack on magic and the occult arts. Apollonius was viewed as a demonic magician
and great enemy of the Church, who conspired with the Devil to
overthrow Christianity.
Meanwhile, a few Christian writers defended the theory of
Copernicus. In 1576 Thomas Digges argued that Copernicus correctly said that the Earth circles the Sun. He echoed Copernicus in writing that ‘[Hermes] Trismegistus called him [the Sun] the visible god. Thus doth the Sun like a king sitting in his throne govern his courts of inferior powers.’ But while Copernicus imagined a
bounded sphere of stars surrounding the planets, Digges argued
that the Suncentred universe is infinite, with infinitely many stars
throughout it. He repeatedly described the sphere of the stars as ‘that
Orbe immoveable garnished with lights innumerable’, and again,
‘that fixed Orbe garnished with lights innumerable and reaching
up in Sphærical altitude without ende’. But at one point he backed
down a bit, echoing Copernicus: ‘But whether the worlde have its
boundes or bee in deed infinite and without boundes, let us leave
that to the Philosophers. ’41
On the first page of his account Digges included an image
of this Suncentred universe, and he titled it ‘A perfect description of the Celestial Orbs, according to the most ancient doctrine of the Pythagoreans.’ He asked that this ‘so ancient doctrine’ that
Copernicus had ‘revived’, should be investigated further, ‘and not
rashly condemned for phantasicall’. 42 Digges was one of the leading 31
burned alive
Statue of Giordano
Bruno at the
Campo de’ Fiori in
Rome. Sculpted by
Ettore Ferrari, 1889.
mathematicians and scientists in England at the time, so his book
was reprinted multiple times, helping to blend the Copernican and
Pythagorean notions.
In 1579 Giordano Bruno travelled to Geneva, seeking to live in
freedom and safety from Catholic persecution. He later said that he
had not gone to Geneva to adopt the religion of Calvin, yet he often
listened to preachers and read works by Calvin and other Protestants.
Soon Bruno became embroiled in an argument against a local evangelical pastor, Antoine de la Faye, and was detained. The Calvinists felt antagonized by Bruno. The Consistory admonished him for calumnies, demanded that he repent and forbade him from taking the sacrament of communion. Apparently Bruno then appealed that they
undo their judgement, but he soon departed from Geneva. In 1583 he
travelled to England, where, incidentally, the ‘Pythagorean’ account
32
The Crimes of Giordano Bruno
by Digges had been published. That year Bruno published a book
titled The Seal of Seals, in which he listed the greatest men ever, the
best ‘inventors, teachers, leaders, and pastors of their people’, starting
with Pythagoras, then Moses, followed by Jesus. 43
In 1584 Bruno published The Ash Wednesday Supper, a post
Copernican dialogue about the structure of the universe. In it Bruno
described himself in the third person as ‘the Nolan’, and he used
a character named Theophil, a philosopher, to convey his views.
Through his mouthpiece Bruno argued that there exist innumerable worlds, similar to Earth, and that the Earth is actually a kind of animal. Like Thomas Digges, Bruno argued that the universe is
infinite. He even bragged about this finding, as it gave evidence of
the majesty of God’s infinite power: ‘Thus we shall advance to the
discovery of the infinite effect of the infinite cause, the true and living
evidence of the infinite vigour.’ And he added that ‘it consists of an
infinite ethereal region’ , the same claim that Aristotle had attributed
to the Pythagoreans.
There is no clear evidence that Bruno read Digges. However,
both of them read Marcello Palingenio Stellato’s Zodiacus vitae
(1543), which argued the universe is infinite but has a hierarchical structure: life and misery exist only on the Earth, while the unchangeable heavens are illuminated by spiritual and immaterial
lights, unlike the Sun.44
In the Timaeus, Plato had asserted that the sensible world must
be finite and spherical. Similarly, Aristotle insisted that the universe
was finite. Hence Copernicus too portrayed the universe as finite
and spherical. According to Digges, however, the sphere of stars
extended infinitely outward and was the Celestial Court inhabited
by God and the chosen ones. For Digges, the Sun was not a star,
and only the Sun was surrounded by planets. In contradistinction,
according to Bruno the universe was infinite and homogeneous, such
that the Sun was not the centre, and countless other stars were also
suns, surrounded by planets. For Bruno the universe was not spherical or hierarchical. He argued that our Sun, Moon, planets and Earth were actually different kinds of ‘stars’, what astronomers now
call heavenly bodies. Unlike Digges, Bruno construed God to be
equally present in all regions of the universe.
Moreover, Bruno rejected the common notion that life and death
exist only on Earth. Bruno made explicit references to having read
33
burned alive
the True Story, in which Lucian of Samosata had described a voyage
<
br /> to the Moon as an inhabited world. We might well point out that
in Lucian’s account Pythagoras appeared as having lived in that
region of space, in some of the ‘islands in the air’, as his soul transmigrated through different bodies. But Bruno griped that Lucian sought merely to mock the philosophers, and hence suffered from
blind ignorance of the truth of such matters. Bruno insisted that the
stars and the Earth are living things, which give life to other living
beings. He added that each of the heavenly bodies has a soul, which
is the cause of its motions, and that such souls are both sensitive
and very intelligent. Bruno further argued that although the Earth
has flesh, bones, blood, veins, nerves, organs and even senses, all are
somewhat different to those of humans.
Bruno repeatedly opposed Aristotle. He criticized Aristotle
for using overly refined abstractions and abstruse logic. Bruno also
scorned Ptolemy’s astronomy. He attacked Aristotle’s physics, he
criticized the notion of a finite universe and he claimed that circular
motions do not really exist.45
Bruno further developed his theory of many worlds in another
book of 1584, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, apparently printed
in Venice. Bruno gave reasons why the universe is infinite, and he
quoted passages from Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things ( c. 50 bce), in which the author elaborated the views of Democritus and Epicurus.
Like them, Lucretius had remarked that ‘it is in the highest degree
unlikely that this Earth and sky is the only one to have been created. ’46 Bruno’s book was a dialogue, and the character that spoke for him voiced this argument about the stars:
the universe being infinite, there must ultimately be more
suns: because it is impossible that the heat and light from a
particular one can spread throughout immensity, as Epicurus
could imagine, if what others report of him is true. Therefore
it necessarily follows that there exist innumerable suns, of
which many are visible as sorts of small bodies: but such an
apparently minor star can be much larger than the one that
seems the greatest.47
Bruno argued that despite their heat, such suns might be inhabited
by some beings or animals. Such beings would ‘vegetate’ by virtue
Burned Alive: Bruno, Galileo and the Inquisition Page 4