Giordano Bruno
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At the same time, Naples, even the Seggio di Nilo, was packed to bursting with houses and hovels for the working poor: the fishermen, seamstresses, vendors, porters, laundresses, carpenters, sausage makers, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and water sellers who went barefoot in the mild climate and lived largely on bread and figs (among the urban poor of Europe, Neapolitans enjoyed an unusually healthy diet). Scruffy neighborhoods linked the port of Naples to its chief marketplace, Piazza del Mercato, an open space crammed with eight and more ranks of shopkeepers’ stalls and the lean-tos that served as housing for the poorest members of the Neapolitan lower class—beggars, day laborers, cutpurses, prostitutes—when they did not simply live on the street. The gallows in the middle of the square, by contrast, was a sturdy permanent structure, one of three the Spanish viceroys maintained in different areas of the city as symbols of their authority.
In the mid-sixteenth century, Naples, finally squeezed to bursting by its prosperity, had expanded along a new boulevard outside the walls, the Via Toledo, named after the touchy little viceroy who had sponsored its construction, Don Pedro de Toledo. Since 1539, the road had swept from the small market square just beyond San Domenico down to the seashore and the viceregal palace. Straight as the ancient streets but several times as broad, the Via Toledo perfectly set off the opulence of the coaches that had become the latest fashion in transportation for royals, nobles, churchmen, and anyone else who wanted to travel in style. Along its course, behind a showy rank of new Renaissance-style palazzi, new neighborhoods were springing up, most importantly the dense little blocks of apartments that housed the Spanish garrison, a whole community of soldiers poised to sweep down the Via Toledo en masse at any sign of trouble.
Trouble there was, and often: Naples resented its Spanish overlords for their arrogance and greed, with good reason. The kingdom handed over its wealth of goods and money to the distant Spanish monarchs and received precious little in return; the Via Toledo project was a grand exception. In 1562, just as Bruno arrived, the Spaniards threatened to introduce the Spanish Inquisition, which permitted arrests on the basis of a single accusation rather than the two witnesses required by Roman law. It was the second time Spain had tried to impose Spanish rules; the first attempt, in 1547, had led to street riots and two thousand deaths.
There were other threats to safety as well: the fall of 1562 brought on a year of strange, clammy fogs and an epidemic of the disease Neapolitans called “the influence,” influenza. On the viceroy’s orders, smudge pots burned in the streets night and day to drive off the dangerous air—while creating noxious fumes of their own. In 1563, a band of Turkish pirates took brief control of the suburban area at the foot of the hill called Posillipo—garbled Greek for “Care’s End”—a brisk walk down the seaside from the Via Toledo. There were reasons that the city wall of Naples extended straight across its splendid shoreline, blocking the view of Sorrento and Capri for everyone in the lower-lying districts.
The view of Naples we have from Bruno himself is pure hindsight, although its source, a play from 1582, is one of his earliest surviving works. Like Plato, who had tried his hand at writing tragedy before turning to philosophy, Bruno first tried to communicate his ideas about philosophy through drama. But unlike Athens, Naples was no place for tragedy; the city had already begun to develop a form of street theater that would eventually be known as commedia dell’arte. Inevitably, perhaps, the Nolan philosopher introduced his philosophy to the world through a huge, riotous comedy, Il candelaio (The Candlemaker), written in a pungent Neapolitan vernacular. Bruno took pride in his plain speech, but it was plain speech Italian style—that is, a triumph of rhetoric:
To whom shall I dedicate my Candlemaker? To whom (O grand destiny!) would you like me to entitle my handsome groomsman, my excellent chorus leader? To whom shall I send what the heavenly influence of Sirius, in these scorching days and torrid hours that we call the dog days, has made the fixed stars precipitate within my brain, the pretty fireflies of the firmament drill into me from on high, the dean of the zodiac blast into my head, and the seven planets whisper in my ears? To whom is it addressed, I say? Toward whom does it look? To His Holiness? No. To His Imperial Majesty? No. To His Serenity? No. To His Highness, His Most Illustrious and Right Reverend Lordship? No, no. By my faith, there is no prince, or cardinal, king, emperor, or pope who will take this candle from my hands in this most solemn offertory.
In keeping with this lowly dedication, the characters of The Candlemaker stand barely clear of poverty: they are grammar-school teachers, students, go-betweens, apothecaries, ruffians, thieves, artists, alchemists, soldiers, and loose women. Yet Bruno wrote his riotous black comedy not for these people but for the French royal court. He used The Candlemaker’s knowing glimpses into Neapolitan low life to tell these sophisticated readers another story altogether about survival, the city, and himself. As the play’s comic figures make their way through the streets of Naples, Bruno’s dedication looks far above their heads to an August star shower, those “pretty fireflies of the firmament” that we call the Perseids (and can no longer see within our light-saturated cities). What inspires him to write, at least so he claims, is a vision of the heavens. However chaotic its streets and variegated its people, then, Naples, perhaps precisely because of its hugeness, its beauty, and its brutality, was the crucible in which this young man from Nola, Filippo Bruno, began to forge the life of a philosopher.
CHAPTER FOUR
“The world is fine as it is”
NAPLES, 1562–1565
Bruno published his Candlemaker twenty years after he arrived in Naples and six years after he had left the city for good, but the play clearly returns to the time when he was a young student scrabbling for a place to live and a place at the university. In other words, he set his philosophical drama in the very time and the very place that had first brought him to philosophy. As he tells his audience, “You should imagine this as the royal city of Naples, somewhere near the Seggio di Nilo,” and like the young Bruno himself, his audience must make its way through the noise, crowds, chaos, and bad government to discover the point of it all. As he announces in the play’s “Proprologue”:
The comedy will have no prologue and it doesn’t matter: its material, its subject, its mode and order and circumstance, I tell you, will appear in proper order, and be put before your eyes in order, which is much better than having them explained to you in order; this is a kind of fabric that has both a warp and a woof; whoever can grasp it, let him grasp it; whoever wants to understand it, let him understand it … Note who comes and goes, what is said and what is done, how to understand it, how it can be understood; for certainly depending on how you take these words and actions … you will have occasion to laugh or weep mightily.
Precisely because of its hugeness and its confusion, Naples turned Giordano Bruno into a thinker. In its noisy, cruel, complicated heart, he learned to read, study, and train his memory with extraordinary discipline. His philosophy, in turn, would reflect its origins in Europe’s most crowded city: he would promise that it fitted citizens for living in the world, even when that world was only a tiny corner of an endless expanse of space.
First, however, Bruno had to find his own way, a slight, ambitious fourteen-year-old confronting the “fabric” of Naples with little more than his wits to help him. That “fabric,” in The Candlemaker, reflects all the caprice and contradiction of Spanish rule: crime is rife despite the oppressive presence of police attached to “the Court,” the dread Spanish tribunal situated in a fortress on the eastern margin of the city. Although it is illegal for a man to kiss a woman in public, the police let the streets swarm with prostitutes, from the streetwalkers who ply their trade alongside the port and the marketplace to the “women of honor,” courtesans who receive their wealthy clients so long, one of them muses, as their beauty lasts; the money they make in their teens and early twenties will have to sustain them for a lifetime. Blasphemy is severely punished by law, but every character
in the play swears by a pantheon of saints and their relics, as well as the long-suffering Madonna. Greed for money is matched by the scramble for personal advantage; by robbing and tricking rich old men, the women, young men, and ruffians in this profane comedy get by in a harsh, uncompromising world. And yet, as Bruno stresses over and over again through the varying voices of his characters, this world, for all its corruption, is unfolding exactly as it should.
The most eloquent voices in the play, strikingly, are those of the women, who lay bare the cruelty of their society in forthright speeches. It is the courtesan Vittoria who best sums up the comedy’s overall meaning: “The world is fine as it is”—“Il mondo sta bene come sta.”
Consider that, like virgins, some of us are called foolish, and others wise; so that among those of us who taste the best fruits the world produces [that is, sex], the crazy ones are the ones who love only for passing pleasure, and don’t think about old age stealing up on them so fast that they neither see nor hear it, all the while it’s driving our gentlemen friends away. As old age wrinkles her face, he closes up his wallet; age saps her juices from the inside, his love wilts on the outside, age strikes her at close quarters, he waves goodbye from a distance. So it’s important to line things up in time. Whoever waits for time is wasting time. If I wait for time, time won’t wait for me. We need to take advantage of their situation when they still think they need us. Grab the prey when it’s chasing you, don’t wait until it runs away. If you don’t know how to keep a bird in a cage, you’ll never catch it on the wing. He may have a small brain and a bad back, but he has a fine wallet: as for the first circumstance, too bad for him; as for the second, it’s not my problem; as for the third—now, that’s something to reckon with. Wise men live for fools, and fools for the wise. If everyone were a lord, they’d be lords no longer: if everyone were wise, no one would be wise, and if they were all fools, none would be fools. The world is fine as it is.
The play’s prime mover, Gioan Bernardo, a young painter who ends up bedding both the heroines, is obviously Bruno as he would like to be, a genial, sexy swain, an artist whose greatest work is his own life. His pronouncements have often been read as quick doses of the Nolan philosophy, delivered by the play’s most attractive male character, but on the occasions when he appears, Gioan Bernardo is more of a trickster than a philosopher, as slippery as the Don Giovanni of Mozart’s opera. Like Don Giovanni, he is almost always playing a part rather than speaking frankly. His most straightforward speech involves the economy of nature:
It is common opinion that things are so ordered that nature never stints on the necessities, and never gives in excess. Oysters have no feet because, no matter where in the sea they find themselves, they have everything they need to sustain them, for they live on water and the heat of the sun (which penetrates into the deep). Moles have no eyes because they live underground, and live on nothing but earth, and can’t possibly lose track of it. If someone lacks art, they’re not granted tools.
Perhaps, as a creature of wishful thinking as much as out of dramatic necessity, Gioan Bernardo is a little too attractive for his own good. Bruno’s real presence in the world, especially when he first arrived in Naples, was surely more like that of a character who appears in only one scene of The Candlemaker, Ottaviano, a student of the tedious schoolmaster Manfurio, so much brighter than his teacher that he turns the pedant’s rhetoric against him and walks offstage in triumph. First, however, he butters up the silly old man with a torrent of sarcastic flattery:
OTTAVIANO: O gentle master, subtle, eloquent, gallant steward and cupbearer of the Muses.
MANFURIO: O lovely apposition.
OTT: Patriarch of the Apollonian choir …
MAN: “Apolline” were better.
OTT: Trumpet of Phoebus, let me kiss your left cheek, for I am unworthy to kiss that sweet mouth.
MAN: I envy not Jove his nectar and ambrosia—
Abruptly, Ottaviano switches from this abject flattery to insult; by the time Manfurio realizes that Ottaviano has been pulling his leg, the boy has skipped off, back into the streets where another student, Filippo Bruno, once scrabbled with the same ingenuity for survival in a harsh, beautiful, beleaguered city.
Bruno would eventually come to the same philosophical conclusion as Vittoria the courtesan: the world was fine as it was, with God vitally present in the chaos of everyday reality rather than off in some transcendent world of Ideas. But that revelation of the world’s essential rightness never kept him from acting to improve it. His alter ego in The Candlemaker is not a prostitute, after all, but an artist.
Furthermore, Bruno spent his years in Naples at San Domenico Maggiore, the very center of resistance to Spanish rule. Within its halls he learned how to link theology with political action.
CHAPTER FIVE
“I have, in effect, harbored doubts”
NAPLES, 1562–1576
In the abstract, Bruno may have eventually come to believe that the world was fine as it was. He spent much of his time, however, trying to change it, beginning, when he was seventeen, with his cell in the convent of San Domenico Maggiore. Bruno’s new home was no ordinary convent; its friars came from the most powerful families in the Kingdom of Naples. The novices, therefore, lived like nobles, in vaulted rooms around an immense courtyard.
The Neapolitan barons who sent their younger sons to the convent and their dead to crypts beneath the church also met in the convent’s labyrinthine halls to hold learned conversations (eventually enshrined in 1611 as the Accademia degli Oziosi, the “Gentlemen of Leisure”) and to plot resistance to the Spaniards, abetted by the friars themselves. Dominicans from San Domenico led the revolt in 1547 against imposing the Spanish Inquisition in Naples; as the city’s inquisitors, they would have been responsible for enforcing the harsh Spanish rules. The friars would revolt again in 1599, urged on by their own Fra Tommaso Campanella and a handful of renegade barons. Campanella would spend the next twenty-seven years in prison (and forty hours on a torture seat called the Judas cradle), but the viceroy could not suppress the entire convent, let alone the barons; instead, he kept track of them through the Royal University, still housed on the premises, and by participating in person in the barons’ learned gatherings.
In short, the sixty-odd friars of San Domenico were accustomed to exceptional freedom of thought and action, and also to aggressive manipulation of political power. Yet even this loose conventual life proved too strict for many of them. A dozen were convicted of thievery during Bruno’s fourteen-year stay, unprepared for the rigors of monastic poverty. Furthermore, it was nearly impossible to separate a sixteenth-century gentleman from his weapons; no matter what religious vows the gentleman may have taken, his arsenal was a matter of basic identity. Steel blades, usually daggers, flashed forth from the friars’ white robes with some regularity; in 1571, Fra Teofilo Caracciolo, still an aristocrat to the core, struck another brother with his sword. In an unusually intelligent community, forgery thrived in several media, from bank checks to notarial documents. Novices copied the keys to the outside doors and slipped out into taverns like the notorious Cerriglio, only a few blocks away, or into the taverns’ upstairs brothels. The confessional served as another way to meet women; more than one Dominican faced a paternity suit from an outraged neighbor, and one friar barely escaped the man who chased him around Piazza San Domenico with a rake. Punishments for violent infractions, as well as for forgery, were harsh: years of service as a galley slave for the worst offenders, or a lifetime of menial tasks in a distant monastery. In 1580, however, Pope Gregory XIII could still write that he “understood that the inquisitors of the Order of Saint Dominic claim to be entirely immune from obedience to their superiors, and do not want to obey or observe their rule, and leave the convent when they wish without informing anyone where they are going.” Religious life within the walls of this singular institution may not have taught Bruno obedience, but it certainly taught him how to move among the ruling class.
When Bruno made trouble a second time, Fra Eugenio was less accommodating. A novice had been sitting in the courtyard, reading a cheap pamphlet with a devotional poem, The Seven Joys of the Virgin, when the little Nolan asked what he was doing with that book and told him to throw it away, and read some other book like the Lives of the Holy Fathers. This time, Fra Eugenio reported Filippo da Nola to the Inquisition; he took the incident as more than a case of bad manners, or a demanding scholar’s recommendation of sober Latin literature over a vernacular tract. Instead, for a novice who had already banished the Madonna’s picture from his cell, criticizing The Seven Joys suggested a distinct lack of reverence for the Virgin Mary, an attitude, again, that was particularly surprising in Naples, a city that prided itself on devotion to the Madonna. Reporting this outspoken novice to the Inquisition was only a matter of walking down the hall—the Holy Office, staffed by friars from San Domenico, occupied yet another of the convent’s many courtyards—but it was a significant move, one that left Bruno with a permanent record in the Inquisition’s archive.
Fra Eugenio recognized that Filippo da Nola, for a Neapolitan Catholic, was behaving suspiciously like a Protestant. In the mountainous regions of northern Italy, native Protestant communities, isolated from big cities, had worshipped in their own way since the late Middle Ages, but Naples, especially under its Spanish overlords, had always adhered staunchly to the Roman Church. Any change in that situation had the potential to upset the city’s tense balance of interests among Madrid, the local barons, and Rome, and, equally, the balance among the city’s dominant religious orders: the Franciscans, Augustinians, Benedictines, and Dominicans.