Giordano Bruno

by Ingrid D. Rowland

  The ten cardinals who made up the Roman Inquisition lacked Schoppe’s certainty about what they were doing. Bruno’s execution gave public proof that they had failed in their mission, which was not to terrify but to “admonish and persuade.” The guiding spirit of the Inquisition’s endgame, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, may have enjoyed an earthly reputation as the greatest living theologian, but he had not been able to wield Mother Church’s theology with enough skill to persuade Bruno—himself a trained inquisitor—to change his mind. Neither could Bellarmine claim to have carried out the basic mission of his own order, the Society of Jesus, to “comfort souls.” Instead, the cruelties to which the cardinal (and future saint) had subjected his victims, Bruno included, would haunt him to the grave. So, perhaps, would the narrowness of his own Christian vision; Bellarmine, no less than Bruno, had been fascinated as a young man by the stars and the new astronomy, but he could not imagine those stars, as Bruno did, set within a heaven of infinite vastness, governed by a God who, as Bruno insisted, would one day pardon every creature. Yet somehow the heretic’s ideas moved the inquisitor, so that when Galileo Galilei began to interest the Inquisition in 1616, Bellarmine used all his authority to warn Galileo away from the conflict.

  Even today, Bruno’s death still haunts the Catholic Church, which has long since accepted his infinite universe but not his challenge to its own authority. It is not only a matter of Bruno’s own conduct and John Paul II’s refusal to condone it in the year 2000. To make matters still more complicated, Bruno’s inquisitor Cardinal Bellarmine was canonized in 1930; how could an inquiry have gone wrong if guided by a saint? Yet as Robert Bellarmine sensed himself, by proceeding against Giordano Bruno with scrupulous correctness, the Inquisition had made him a martyr.

  A martyr to what? That was, and is, the question.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Nolan Philosopher

  NOLA, KINGDOM OF NAPLES, 1548–1562

  Bruno never made any secret of his profession; from beginning to end, with unfailing consistency, he called himself a philosopher. Sometimes, more specifically, he described himself as il Nolano, “the Nolan,” and his philosophy as “the Nolan philosophy,” after the small city east of Naples where he spent the first fourteen years of his life.

  Bruno’s home in fact lay outside the city walls of Nola, in a minuscule settlement beneath the hill that he and his neighbors, with affectionate exaggeration, called Monte Cicala—“Cicada Mountain”—perhaps because its wooded slopes buzzed with the whirr of these insects in the summertime. The hamlet is gone now, although present-day Nolani will point out a ruined farmhouse where they boast that Giovanni Bruno and his wife, Fraulissa Savolino, once lived among other members of her family, a clan given to extravagant names: Preziosa, Mercurio, Morgana, Laudomia. Oddest of all was the name Fraulissa; Nola’s census takers usually recorded her as “Flaulisa,” the only one of her kind.

  Giovanni Bruno earned his living as a soldier serving the Spanish crown, for the Kingdom of Naples, since 1503, had been a possession of Spain, ruled by a series of viceroys. Both the Spanish lords and the local nobility competed to exploit the region’s agricultural riches, with the help of mercenary soldiers who fought for Spain or the local “barons,” or, most often, subdued rebellious peasants (it was to protect against these constant pressures that Spanish-dominated Sicily developed its Mafia and Naples its Camorra). In addition to their salaries, these hired soldiers lived by what they could take from local populations; theirs was not a popular profession, but it paid relatively well. In addition, Giovanni Bruno’s position in the military enabled him, if only barely, to claim status as a gentleman. This slight social advantage would prove crucial for his son’s future.

  When their only child was born in 1548, Giovanni Bruno and Fraulissa Savolino named the boy Filippo, perhaps to honor Bruno’s commander in chief, His Most Catholic Majesty Philip II, king of Spain and Naples (Giordano was the younger Bruno’s religious name, assumed when he was seventeen). Giovanni Bruno also provided the future Nolan philosopher with his first glimpse of philosophy, at least if we are to credit an anecdote reported by the mature Giordano Bruno in 1585. Here, in a philosophical dialogue, two personalities from Bruno’s Nolan childhood, the poet Luigi Tansillo and the soldier Odoardo Cicala, discuss how to live wisely:

  TANSILLO: When a certain neighbor of ours said one evening after dinner: “I was never as merry as I am tonight,” Giovanni Bruno, the father of the Nolan, replied, “Then you were never as crazy as you are at this moment.”

  CICALA: Then you mean to say that a gloomy man is a wise man, and a gloomier man is wiser still?

  TAN: No, in fact I think that the first one is crazy, and the other one is worse.

  CIC: Who, then, would be wise, if the happy man is crazy and the gloomy one is crazy as well?

  TAN: The one who is neither happy nor sad.

  CIC: Who is that? The one who’s asleep? The one who’s unconscious? The one who’s dead?

  TAN: No, rather it’s the one who is alive, who sees and understands, and who, taking good and evil into consideration, regards each of them as variable … Therefore he neither despairs nor puffs up his spirit, and becomes restrained in his inclinations and temperate in his pleasures—for him pleasure is no pleasure, because its goal is in the present. Likewise, pain for him is no pain, because by force of reasoning he is mindful of its end. Thus … I will declare that the wisest man of all is the one who is sometimes able to declare the opposite of what that man said: “I was never less merry than now,” or “I was never less unhappy than now.”

  Bruno never quite managed his father’s philosophical detachment. He would remember his youth as melancholy; physically small and mentally swift, with an absent father and a lonely mother, he seems to have spent his time, like many a misfit child, watching, reading, and thinking things over. Almost thirty years after he had left Nola forever, he wrote of Monte Cicala as if the mountain had been his confidante:

  Once, when I was a boy, dear hospitable Monte Cicala,

  And in your genial lap you fostered my early affections—

  How you were wreathed around in ivy and branches of olive,

  Branches of cornel and bay, of myrtle, and boughs of rosemary!

  You were girded in chestnut, and oak, poplar, elm, in a happy

  Coupling with grape-bearing vines; it was almost as if you extended

  Your leafy hand, full of grapes, to my tender hand.

  Filippo Bruno was also precocious. When a snake crawled into his cradle, at least so he said, he called for help in complete sentences, the first words he ever spoke. A few years later, he could still recall the incident with a clarity that unnerved his parents. The story may have been a family anecdote, embellished over time, but the adult Bruno would become famous for his feats of memory. His first experience of school only gave him a lifelong contempt for schoolmasters. Like soldiers, grammar-school teachers clung to meager salaries and the slight social advantage that came with their education. Students traditionally lampooned them as dull, brutal, and raging with lust, but Bruno gave the caricature a bitter insistence that suggests genuine experience.

  Before he left Nola at fourteen, he seems to have fallen in love with one of his Savolino cousins—perhaps this was one of the “early affections” he mentioned in verse. He also nurtured an abiding passion for his native city and its little mountain. In 1585, twenty-three years after he had left Nola, he described it as if he were still there:

  MERCURY: [Jove has] ordered that today at noon two of the melons in Father Franzino’s melon patch will be perfectly ripe, but that they won’t be picked until three days from now, when they will no longer be considered good to eat. He requests that at the same moment, on the jujube tree at the base of Monte Cicala in the house of Giovanni Bruno, thirty perfect jujubes will be picked, and he says that seven shall fall to earth still green, and that fifteen shall be eaten by worms. That Vasta, wife of Albenzio Savolino, when she means to curl the hair at
her temples, shall burn fifty-seven hairs for having let the curling iron get too hot, but she won’t burn her scalp and hence shall not swear when she smells the stench, but shall endure it patiently. That from the dung of her ox fifty-two dung beetles shall be born, of which fourteen shall be trampled and killed by Albenzio’s foot, twenty-six shall die upside down, twenty-two shall live in a hole, eighty shall make a pilgrim’s progress around the yard, forty-two shall retire to live under the stone by the door, sixteen shall roll their ball of dung wherever they please, and the rest shall scurry around at random. Laurenza, when she combs her hair, shall lose seventeen hairs and break thirteen, and of these, ten shall grow back within three days and seven shall never grow back at all. Antonio Savolino’s bitch shall conceive five puppies, of which three shall live out their natural lifespan and two shall be thrown away, and of these three the first shall resemble its mother, the second shall be mongrel, and the third shall partly resemble the father and partly resemble Polidoro’s dog. In that moment a cuckoo shall be heard from La Starza, cuckooing twelve times, no more and no fewer, whereupon it shall leave and fly to the ruins of Castel Cicala for eleven minutes, and then shall fly off to Scarvaita, and as for what happens next, we’ll see to it later. That the skirt Mastro Danese is cutting on his board shall come out crooked. That twelve bedbugs shall leave the slats of Costantino’s bed and head toward the pillow: seven large ones, four smaller, and one middle-sized, and as for the one who shall survive until this evening’s candlelight, we’ll see to it. That fifteen minutes thereafter, because of the movement of her tongue, which she has passed over her palate four times, the old lady of Fiurulo shall lose the third right molar in her lower jaw, and it shall fall without blood and without pain, because that molar has been loose for seventeen months. That Ambrogio on the one hundred twelfth thrust shall finally have driven home his business with his wife, but shall not impregnate her this time, but rather another, using the sperm into which the cooked leek that he has just eaten with millet and wine sauce shall have been converted. Martinello’s son is beginning to grow hair on his chest, and his voice is beginning to crack. That Paulino, when he bends over to pick up a broken needle, shall snap the red drawstring of his underpants, and if he should blaspheme for that reason, I mean for him to be punished thus: tonight his soup shall be too salty and taste of smoke, he shall fall and break his wine flask, and should he swear on that occasion, we’ll see to it later. That of seven moles who set out four days ago from deep within the earth, taking different paths toward the open air, two shall reach the surface at the same time, one at high noon, and the other fifteen minutes, nineteen seconds later, and one shall emerge three yards, one foot, and half an inch from the other in Anton Favaro’s garden. As for the time and place for the other two, we’ll see to it later.

  Quickly, however, Nola proved too small for Filippo Bruno’s talents and Giovanni Bruno’s ambitions. Naples lay only thirty miles away, with its universities and the great religious houses where even a struggling gentleman could afford to educate a son superbly. And yet, as Bruno moved in later years from Naples to Paris to London to the Protestant cities of northern Germany, he faithfully called himself “the Nolan” and peopled his writings with characters from Nola. His cousins Laudomia and Giulia Savolino would reappear magically in London as nymphs on the banks of the river Thames; the memory of Luigi Tansillo would guide him toward the life of a heroic poet; and when Giordano Bruno finally embarked on an epic poem about the infinite size of the universe, On the Immense and the Numberless, he anchored his transcendent vision by remembering the days when he thought that Nola was the center of the world, and Mount Vesuvius marked its edge.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Napoli è tutto il mondo”

  NAPLES, 1562–1565

  Napoli è tutto il mondo.

  Naples is the whole world.

  —Giulio Cesare Capaccio, Il forastiero (1634)

  If Nola somehow anchored the Nolan philosopher’s sense of himself, Naples provided his first, indelible glimpse of the rest of the world. Thirty years after the fact, he remembered his journey toward the city in the fall of 1562, a model for all the other journeys he would make to unknown places. He captured the effects of that trip on a boy of fourteen by describing how it transformed his idea of Mount Vesuvius. He had always thought that the volcano marked the end of the world, looming over Nola’s southern horizon. Vesuvius had been lying dormant since 1500, but every Nolan knew its history: the burial of Pompeii in ancient Roman times, the airborne columns of ash and pebbles that had branched out like an umbrella pine before molten lava charged down the mountainside like rivers of fire. We can see Vesuvius through the young Bruno’s eyes in his poem On the Immense and the Numberless, where he is sent off to Naples not by his parents but by his rocky confidante, Monte Cicala:

  … It was almost as if you extended

  Your leafy hand, full of grapes, to my tender hand, and you pointed

  With your finger to say to me, “Now take a look southward;

  Look at Vesuvius there, in that direction, my brother—

  My brother mountain who loves you as well as I: Do you hear me?

  Tell me, should I send you off to him? Would you go? For you’ll stay there

  Ever after with him.” Then turning my crystalline eyes, and

  Gazing upon that formless form, scrutinizing the figure

  Of that amorphous heap, I said, “Who, the crookbacked

  One? Who, the one with the sawtooth hunchback who splits the

  Seamless sky? Who stands back from the whole world isolated,

  Smutty with shadowing smoke, ungenerous in his bounty,

  Not a grape to his name, nor any fruit worth the mention?

  No sweet figs for him; he boasts not one arbor or garden,

  Gloomy, obscure, dour, glowering, miserly, grudging.”

  Then you said with a smile, “And yet he’s my very own brother,

  Always loving to me; he loves you too. Therefore go now.

  Without scorning his kindness, I know that he shall do nothing

  That might offend you; indeed, you’ll only return most unwilling.”

  And yet, as Bruno then observes, the dreadful mountain became less dreadful as he came closer, and thus, his poem suggests, the strangest things in the world will seem less strange the better we come to know them. Just as he learned to acclimate himself to Mount Vesuvius, and then to Naples, and then to the world, he implicitly urges his readers to dare to acclimate themselves to something as strange as an infinite universe by focusing on its familiar aspects: the sun and stars, and the unfailing presence of God.

  Thus, as he discovered, the lower slopes of Vesuvius were covered with grapevines just like those of Monte Cicala, producers of a wine no less famous than Nola’s asprinio: Lacrima Christi, “Christ’s Tears.” As in Nola, the volcanic ash that made up the soil of Naples sprouted not only grapevines but lemon, almond, orange, and peach trees, a riot of flowers in the spring and of fruit in the summer. By the time he reached the coast and the flawless curve of the Bay of Naples, Bruno could see that Naples was one of the most beautiful places on earth, basking under what he would one day call a “benigno cielo,” using a word, cielo, that meant both “sky” and “heaven.”

  Beneath that benign heaven, however, Bruno found one of the largest cities in the world, 250,000 souls crammed into walls designed to protect an ancient Greek colony with one-tenth of Naples’s sixteenth-century population. To make matters worse, huge tracts of land within the crowded city belonged only to the rich: the gardens, courtyards, and cloisters reserved for a privileged few. We know almost nothing of Bruno’s first years in Naples, but his later portraits of Neapolitan street life suggest that he spent them in crowded student quarters, a solitary teenager plunged suddenly into urban chaos. Surprisingly, rather than leading him to reject his father’s Stoic philosophy of life, his experience of Naples only confirmed it.

  In 1562, when Bruno arrived in Naples, o
nly Constantinople, Cairo, Tabriz, and Paris had more inhabitants, and they all lacked the panoramas offered by the long, straight streets, first laid out by the Greeks who settled ancient Neapolis, “the new city,” six centuries before the Christian era. From the hill of Saint Elmo down to the port, one endless street split the city in half; its modern nickname, in fact, is Spaccanapoli, “Split Naples.” In Bruno’s day it was called the Strada del Seggio di Nilo (or Nido), named after the neighborhood (Seggio, or “Seat”) where he would eventually make his home.

  In the mid-sixteenth century, these ancient streets were lined by high convent walls and the lofty, close-packed palazzi of the nobles, both local barons and transplanted Spanish grandees, who lived in fabulous opulence off the feudal lands they exploited with legendary rapacity. For years the Spanish overlords of Naples had forbidden construction outside the old city walls, and as a result the city’s sheer density of buildings and people was almost unparalleled in the rest of Europe. The palazzi in turn were dwarfed by the soaring walls, all fashioned in golden stone, of the city’s Gothic churches, at least one for each of the great monastic orders, many of them resting on the ruins of ancient Greek and Roman temples. In the church of San Lorenzo, set atop the agora of ancient Neapolis, the ribald Boccaccio had met his ladylove Fiammetta, and Petrarch had come to worship. San Paolo Maggiore, just across the street, engulfed the ancient temple of Castor and Pollux. A few ancient blocks away, Santa Chiara claimed the tombs of the French kings who had ruled Naples for several centuries before their replacement by kings from Spain. Most powerful of all, San Domenico Maggiore lorded it above the baronial palazzi of the Seggio di Nilo, a huge Gothic barn with a crucifix whose image of Jesus (it was said) had once spoken to Thomas Aquinas.