by Walter Pater
It was on such an occasion, then, — on a Whitsunday afternoon, amid the gaudy red hues of the season, that Gaston listened to one, who, as if with some intentional new version of the sacred event then commemorated, had a great deal to say concerning the Spirit; above all, of the freedom, the indifference, of its operations; and who would give a strangely altered colour, for a long time to come, to the thoughts, to the very words, associated with the celebration of Pentecost. The speaker, though understood to be a brother of the Order of Saint Dominic, had not been present at the mass — the daily University red mass, De Spiritu Sancto, but said to-day according to the proper course of the season in the chapel of the Sorbonne, with much pomp, by the Italian Bishop of Paris. It was the reign of the Italians just then, a doubly refined, somewhat morbid, somewhat ash- coloured, Italy in France, more Italian still. What our Elisabethan poets imagined about Italian culture — forcing all they knew of Italy to an ideal of dainty sin such as had never actually existed there, — that the court of Henry, so far as in it lay, realised in fact. Men of Italian birth, “to the great suspicion of simple people,” swarmed in Paris, already “flightier, less constant, than the girouettes on its steeples”; and it was love for Italian fashions that had brought king and courtiers here this afternoon, with great éclat, as they said, frizzed and starched, in the beautiful, minutely considered, dress of the moment, pressing the learned University itself into the background; for the promised speaker, about whom tongues had been busy, not only in the Latin quarter, had come from Italy. In an age in which all things about which Parisians much cared must be Italian, there might be a hearing for Italian philosophy. Courtiers at least would understand Italian; and this speaker was rumoured to possess in perfection all the curious arts of his native language. And of all the kingly qualities of Henry’s youth, the single one which had held by him was that gift of eloquence he was able also to value in others; an inherited gift perhaps, for amid all contemporary and subsequent historic gossip about his mother, the two things certain are, that the hands credited with so much mysterious ill- doing were fine ones, and that she was an admirable speaker.
Bruno himself tells us, long after he had withdrawn himself from it, that the monastic life promotes the freedom of the intellect by its silence and self-concentration. The prospect of such freedom sufficiently explains why a young man who, however well-found in worldly and personal advantages, was above all conscious of great intellectual possessions, and of fastidious spirit also, with a remarkable distaste for the vulgar, should have espoused poverty, chastity, and obedience, in a Dominican cloister. What liberty of mind may really come to, in such places, what daring new departures it may suggest even to the strictly monastic temper, is exemplified by the dubious and dangerous mysticism of men like John of Parma and Joachim of Flora, the reputed author of a new “Everlasting Gospel”; strange dreamers, in a world of sanctified rhetoric, of that later dispensation of the Spirit, in which all law will have passed away; or again by a recognised tendency, in the great rival Order of Saint Francis, in the so-called “spiritual” Franciscans, to understand the dogmatic words of faith, with a difference.
The three convents in which successively Bruno had lived, at Naples, at Cittŕ di Campagna, and finally the Minerva at Rome, developed freely, we may suppose, all the mystic qualities of a genius, in which, from the first, a heady southern imagination took the lead. But it was from beyond monastic bounds that he would look for the sustenance, the fuel, of an ardour born or bred within them. Amid such artificial religious stillness the air itself becomes generous in undertones. The vain young monk (vain, of course) would feed his vanity by puzzling the good, sleepy heads of the average sons of Dominic with his neology, putting new wine into old bottles, teaching them their own business, the new, higher, truer sense of the most familiar terms, of the chapters they read, the hymns they sang; above all, as it happened, every word that referred to the Spirit, the reign of the Spirit, and its excellent freedom. He would soon pass beyond the utmost possible limits of his brethren’s sympathy, beyond the largest and freest interpretation such words would bear, to words and thoughts on an altogether different plane, of which the full scope was only to be felt in certain old pagan writers, — pagan, though approached, perhaps, at first, as having a kind of natural, preparatory, kinship with Scripture itself. The Dominicans would seem to have had well-stocked, and liberally-selected, libraries; and this curious youth, in that age of restored letters, read eagerly, easily, and very soon came to the kernel of a difficult old author, Plotinus or Plato, — to the real purpose of thinkers older still, surviving by glimpses only in the books of others, Empedocles, for instance, and Pythagoras, who had been nearer the original sense of things; Parmenides, above all, that most ancient assertor of God’s identity with the world. The affinities, the unity, of the visible and the invisible, of earth and heaven, of all things whatever, with one another, through the consciousness, the person, of God the Spirit, who was at every moment of infinite time, in every atom of matter, at every point of infinite space; aye! was everything, in turn: that doctrine — l’antica filosofia Italiana — was in all its vigour there, like some hardy growth out of the very heart of nature, interpreting itself to congenial minds with all the fulness of primitive utterance. A big thought! yet suggesting, perhaps, from the first, in still, small, immediately practical, voice, a freer way of taking, a possible modification of, certain moral precepts. A primitive morality, — call it! congruous with those larger primitive ideas, with that larger survey, with the earlier and more liberal air.
Returning to this ancient “pantheism,” after the long reign of a seemingly opposite faith, Bruno unfalteringly asserts “the vision of all things in God” to be the aim of all metaphysical speculation, as of all enquiry into nature. The Spirit of God, in countless variety of forms, neither above, nor in any way without, but intimately within, all things, is really present, with equal integrity and fulness, in the sunbeam ninety millions of miles long, and the wandering drop of water as it evaporates therein. The divine consciousness has the same relation to the production of things as the human intelligence to the production of true thoughts concerning them. Nay! those thoughts are themselves actually God in man: a loan to man also of His assisting Spirit, who, in truth, is the Creator of things, in and by His contemplation of them. For Him, as for man in proportion as man thinks truly, thought and being are identical, and things existent only in so far as they are known. Delighting in itself, in the sense of its own energy, this sleepless, capacious, fiery intelligence, evokes all the orders of nature, all the revolutions of history, cycle upon cycle, in ever new types. And God the Spirit, the soul of the world, being therefore really identical with the soul of Bruno also, as the universe shapes itself to Bruno’s reason, to his imagination, ever more and more articulately, he too becomes a sharer of the divine joy in that process of the formation of true ideas, which is really parallel to the process of creation, to the evolution of things. In a certain mystic sense, which some in every age of the world have understood, he, too, is the creator; himself actually a participator in the creative function. And by such a philosophy, Bruno assures us, it was his experience that the soul is greatly expanded: con questa filosofia l’anima mi s’aggrandisce: mi se magnifica l’intelletto!
For, with characteristic largeness of mind, Bruno accepted this theory in the whole range of its consequences. Its more immediate corollary was the famous axiom of “indifference,” of “the coincidence of contraries.” To the eye of God, to the philosophic vision through which God sees in man, nothing is really alien from Him. The differences of things, those distinctions, above all, which schoolmen and priests, old or new, Roman or Reformed, had invented for themselves, would be lost in the length and breadth of the philosophic survey: nothing, in itself, being really either great or small; and matter certainly, in all its various forms, not evil but divine. Dare one choose or reject this or that? If God the Spirit had made, nay! was, all things indifferently, then, m
atter and spirit, the spirit and the flesh, heaven and earth, freedom and necessity, the first and the last, good and evil, would be superficial rather than substantial differences. Only, were joy and sorrow also, together with another distinction, always of emphatic reality to Gaston, for instance, to be added to the list of phenomena really “coincident,” or “indifferent,” as some intellectual kinsmen of Bruno have claimed they should?
The Dominican brother was at no distant day to break far enough away from the election, the seeming “vocation,” of his youth, yet would remain always, and under all circumstances, unmistakably a monk in some predominant qualities of temper. At first it was only by way of thought that he asserted his liberty — delightful, late-found, privilege! — traversing, in strictly mental journeys, that spacious circuit, as it broke away before him at every moment upon ever-new horizons. Kindling thought and imagination at once, the prospect draws from him cries of joy, of a kind of religious joy, as in some new “canticle of the creatures,” some new hymnal, or antiphonary. “Nature” becomes for him a sacred term.— “Conform thyself to Nature! “with what sincerity, what enthusiasm, what religious fervour, he enounces that precept, to others, to himself! Recovering, as he fancies, a certain primeval sense of Deity broadcast on things, a sense in which Pythagoras and other “inspired” theorists of early Greece had abounded, in his hands philosophy becomes a poem, a sacred poem, as it had been with them. That Bruno himself, in “the enthusiasm of the idea,” drew from his axiom of the “indifference of contraries” the practical consequence which is in very deed latent there, that he was ready to sacrifice to the antinomianism, which is certainly a part of its rigid logic, the austerities, the purity of his own youth, for instance, there is no proof. The service, the sacrifice, he is ready to bring to the great light that has dawned for him, occupying his entire conscience with the sense of his responsibilities to it, is the sacrifice of days and nights spent in eager study, of plenary, disinterested utterance of the thoughts that arise in him, at any hazard, at the price, say! of martyrdom. The work of the divine Spirit, as he conceives it, exalts, inebriates him, till the scientific apprehension seems to take the place of prayer, oblation, communion. It would be a mistake, he holds, to attribute to the human soul capacities merely passive or receptive. She, too, possesses initiatory power as truly as the divine soul of the world, to which she responds with the free gift of a light and heat that seem her own.
Yet a nature so opulently endowed can hardly have been lacking in purely physical or sensuous ardours. His pantheistic belief that the Spirit of God is in all things, was not inconsistent with, nay! might encourage, a keen and restless eye for the dramatic details of life and character however minute, for humanity in all its visible attractiveness, since there too, in truth, divinity lurks. From those first fair days of early Greek speculation, love had occupied a large place in the conception of philosophy; and in after days Bruno was fond of developing, like Plato, like the Christian Platonists, combining something of the peculiar temper of each, the analogy between the flights of intellectual enthusiasm and those of physical love, with an animation which shows clearly enough the reality of his experience in the latter. The Eroici Furori, his book of books, dedicated to Philip Sidney, who would be no stranger to such thoughts, presents a singular blending of verse and prose, after the manner of Dante’s Vita Nuova. The supervening philosophic comment reconsiders those earlier, physically erotic, impulses which had prompted the sonnet in voluble Italian, entirely to the advantage of their abstract, incorporeal, theoretic, equivalents. Yet if it is after all but a prose comment, it betrays no lack of the natural stuff out of which such mystic transferences must be made. That there is no single name of preference, no Beatrice, or Laura, by no means proves the young man’s earlier desires to have been merely Platonic; and if the colours of love inevitably lose a little of their force and propriety by such deflexion from their earlier purpose, their later intellectual purpose as certainly finds its opportunity thereby, in the matter of borrowed fire and wings. A kind of old scholastic pedantry creeping back over the ardent youth who had thrown it off so defiantly (as if love himself went in now for a University degree), Bruno developes, under the mask of amorous verse, all the various stages of abstraction, by which, as the last step of a long ladder, the mind attains actual “union.” For, as with the purely religious mystics, “union,” the mystic union of souls with one another and their Lord, nothing less than union between the contemplator and the contemplated — the reality, or the sense, or at least the name of such union — was always at hand. Whence that instinctive tendency towards union if not from the Creator of things Himself, who has doubtless prompted it in the physical universe, as in man? How familiar the thought that the whole creation, not less than the soul of man, longs for God, “as the hart for the water- brooks”! To unite oneself to the infinite by largeness and lucidity of intellect, to enter, by that admirable faculty, into eternal life- -this was the true vocation of the spouse, of the rightly amorous soul. A filosofia č necessario amore. There would be degrees of progress therein, as of course also of relapse: joys and sorrows, therefore. And, in interpreting these, the philosopher, whose intellectual ardours have superseded religion and physical love, is still a lover and a monk. All the influences of the convent, the sweet, heady incense, the pleading sounds, the sophisticated light and air, the grotesque humours of old gothic carvers, the thick stratum of pagan sentiment beneath all this, — Santa Maria sopra Minervam! — are indelible in him. Tears, sympathies, tender inspirations, attraction, repulsion, zeal, dryness, recollection, desire: — he finds a place for them all: knows them all well in their unaffected simplicity, while he seeks the secret and secondary, or, as he fancies, the primary, form and purport of each.
Whether as a light on actual life, or as a mere barren scholastic subtlety, never before had the pantheistic doctrine been developed with such completeness, never before connected with so large a sense of nature, so large a promise of the knowledge of it as it really is. The eyes that had not been wanting to visible humanity turned now with equal liveliness on the natural world, in that region of his birth, where all the colour and force of nature are at least two- fold. Nature is not only a thought or meditation in the divine mind; it is also the perpetual energy of that mind, which, ever identical with itself, puts forth and absorbs in turn all the successive forms of life, of thought, of language even. What seemed like striking transformations of matter were in truth only a chapter, a clause, in the great volume of the transformations of the divine Spirit. The mystic recognition that all is indeed divine had accompanied a realisation of the largeness of the field of concrete knowledge, the infinite extent of all there was actually to know. Winged, fortified, by that central philosophic faith, the student proceeds to the detailed reading of nature, led on from point to point by manifold lights, which will surely strike on him by the way, from the divine intelligence in it, speaking directly, sympathetically, to a like intelligence in him. The earth’s wonderful animation, as divined by one who anticipates by a whole generation the Baconian “philosophy of experience”: in that, those bold, flighty, pantheistic speculations become tangible matter of fact. Here was the needful book for man to read; the full revelation, the story in detail, of that one universal mind, struggling, emerging, through shadow, substance, manifest spirit, in various orders of being, — the veritable history of God. And nature, together with the true pedigree and evolution of man also, his gradual issue from it, was still all to learn. The delightful tangle of things! — it would be the delightful task of man’s thoughts to disentangle that. Already Bruno had measured the space which Bacon would fill, with room, perhaps, for Darwin also. That Deity is everywhere, like all such abstract propositions, is a two-edged force, depending for its practical effect on the mind which admits it on the peculiar perspective of that mind. To Dutch Spinosa, in the next century, faint, consumptive, with a naturally faint hold on external things, the theorem that God was in all things whateve
r, annihilating their differences, suggested a somewhat chilly withdrawal from the contact of all alike. But in Bruno, eager and impassioned, an Italian of the Italians, it awoke a constant, inextinguishable appetite for every form of experience, — a fear, as of the one sin possible, of limiting, for one’s self or another, the great stream flowing for thirsty souls, that wide pasture set ready for the hungry heart.
Considered from the point of view of a minute observation of nature, the Infinite might figure as “the infinitely little”; no blade of grass being like another, as there was no limit to the complexities of an atom of earth, — cell, sphere, within sphere. And the earth itself, hitherto seemingly the privileged centre of a very limited universe, was, after all, but an atom in an infinite world of starry space, then lately divined by candid intelligence, which the telescope was one day to present to bodily eyes. For if Bruno must needs look forward to the future, to Bacon, for adequate knowledge of the earth, the infinitely little, he could look backwards also gratefully to another daring mind which had already put that earth into its modest place, and opened the full view of the heavens. If God is eternal, then, the universe is infinite and worlds innumerable. Yes! one might well have divined what reason now demonstrated, indicating those endless spaces which a real sidereal science would gradually occupy.