The gentlemen, as it turns out, are scarcely better. By arriving late for the Ash Wednesday meal, Bruno and his company have missed the ritual passing of the “loving-cup,” which Teofilo counts as an advantage. The idea of sharing a goblet with his fellow diners revolted the fastidiously neat Bruno, who dwells in horrified detail on the way that the men of England gather scraps of food in their beards and neglect to wipe their mouths before drinking.
Against this shadowy background of men gathered in a dark, wood-paneled dining room to exchange their barbarous ceremonies in the last dank vestiges of English winter, the Nolan philosophy and its proponent are intended to blaze like the sun, and they do. At the same time, the unworthiness of Greville’s two donnish guests forces Bruno, in effect, to talk to statues and converse with the living dead. When he begins to speak about Copernicus, they spout adages from Erasmus and shout, “Ad rem, ad rem”—“Get to the point”—with Bruno yelling back, “This IS the point!”
The dialogue’s endless play between dark, light, and shadow broadly emphasizes the Nolan’s ability to shed light everywhere, in order to discern reality from its image, in human nature, in religion, and in the infinite reaches of the heavens. Armed with his philosophy, he strikes a sure path through a world of oscillating appearances. His struggles on the streets of London and the waters of the Thames are a symbol, like the dark, dangerous Naples of The Candlemaker, of maneuvering through a world he had once thought was “fine as it is.” That world had since shown him much more of its cruelty, and he aimed his praise of it more at the stars in heaven than at the maelstrom on the ground. He also directed a good measure of praise to himself. To all those who had missed his message in Oxford, Bruno drives home the originality of his ideas, in the words of his character Teofilo. (It is worth remembering that extravagant self-promotion, like extravagant flattery, was frequent among sixteenth-century men, from Benvenuto Cellini, whose biography is a masterpiece of inflated exploits, to Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim, alias Paracelsus, who gave the world the adjective “bombastic.”)
Now, what shall I say of the Nolan? Perhaps, when he is as close to me as I am to myself, it is inappropriate for me to praise him? Certainly, there is no reasonable man who would reprove me for that, for on this occasion it is not only appropriate but also necessary.
He goes on, remarkably, to make a stinging condemnation of European colonialism, before contrasting the effects of the Nolan philosophy with the effects of capitalist greed. At the time, England had only begun its colonial explorations; Bruno was writing primarily about Spain and Portugal. He must have read the denunciations of Spanish cruelty in Mexico made by the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas—most probably in Naples, where the Dominicans knew a thing or two about Spanish oppression themselves.
Now, in order for you to understand the present business and its importance, I set for you the premise to a conclusion that will be easily proven shortly: namely, that if Tiphys is praised for having invented the first ships and crossed the sea with the Argonauts, if Columbus is acclaimed in our own time for being “the Tiphys who uncovered new worlds,” what is to be done with him who has discovered the way to climb the heavens, traverse the circumference of the stars, and leave the convex surface of the firmament at his back? The Tiphyses of this world have found the way to disturb the peace of others, violate the ancestral spirits of the regions, muddle what nature had kept distinct, and for the sake of commerce redouble the defects, and add further vice to the vices of each party, violently propagating new follies and planting unheard-of madness where it had never been before, concluding at last that the stronger are also the wiser, displaying new sciences, instruments, and arts by which to tyrannize and murder one another, so that the time will come, thanks to those actions, that by the oscillation of all things, those who have thus far endured to their misfortune will learn, and be able to give back to us, the worst fruits of such pernicious invention.
The Nolan, to cause entirely contrary effects, has released the human spirit and intellect, which were confined in the narrow prison of the turbulent atmosphere; whence they scarcely had the capacity to look, as through certain holes, upon the distant stars, and whose wings were clipped, so that they could not fly through the veil of these clouds and see what is really to be found above … Now behold him, who has crossed the air, penetrated the heavens, wandered among the stars, and passed beyond the margins of this world, made to vanish the imaginary walls of the first, eighth, ninth, tenth, and as many other spheres as you would like to add, according to the reports of vain astronomers and the blind visions of vulgar philosophers; [who] thus, in the presence of all sense and reason, with the key of clever investigation has opened those cloisters of the truth, that can be opened by us, stripped naked the covered and veiled truth, given eyes to moles, enlightened the blind who could not focus their eyes to admire their own image in these many mirrors appearing on every side, loosened the tongue of the mute who could not and dared not express their innermost feelings, healed the lame who could not make that progress with their spirits that our ignoble and dissolute flesh cannot make, and makes them no less present than if they were dwellers on the Sun, the Moon, and the other known stars … These flaming bodies are the ambassadors who proclaim the glory and majesty of God. Thus we are moved to discover the infinite effect of the infinite cause, the true and living footprint of the infinite vigor, and we have a teaching that tells us not to seek divinity outside ourselves, but within, more deeply inside us than we are ourselves.
From footprints in the Forest of Matter—explicitly evoked in the sentence above—the Nolan philosophy has moved to footprints among the stars. Bruno sets all the uncertainties of the physical world, with its oscillation from one extreme to the other, its changing fortunes, and its evils, against the steady presence of God, both in the infinite space of the universe and deep within the individual spirit. Rather than defending the Copernican system, Bruno’s Ash Wednesday Supper sets Copernicus within a much larger vision of the universe, where solar systems are as plentiful as the stars in the sky. The recognition that this is our true position in the world, Bruno promises, will be good for everyone’s mental and spiritual health. Certainly, the Nolan philosophy prepared its misanthropic creator, the Academic of no Academy, nicknamed “the exasperated,” to love every creature from here to outer space, a realm, possibly inhabited, that is suddenly given a distinct identity in this section of The Ash Wednesday Supper. Nor is outer space Bruno’s only innovation in these pages: they also mark one of the first times that a natural philosopher describes the earth together with its atmosphere. Behind all the dialogue’s heated Neapolitan rhetoric, professions of grandeur, and Platonic spirituality, The Ash Wednesday Supper contains serious ideas about natural philosophy. Some readers, at least, recognized those serious ideas; in many ways, Galileo Galilei’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) is a direct response to Bruno’s maddening, scintillating Ash Wednesday Supper.
Bruno knew that he had produced a work that fitted poorly into any category except, perhaps, that of Plato’s Symposium. He called it a banquet to emphasize the variety of its offerings, and, as with The Candlemaker, he simply trusted his readers to make sense of it all. Bruno used his own systematic prose for his art of memory. His Italian dialogues, on the other hand, are discourses on philosophy, but they are also dramas, with poems attached. It was impossible for Bruno to separate the poet in him from the natural philosopher, the natural philosopher from the priest—and in his own day these distinctions did not yet matter as much as they would a century later. Galileo himself was a poet and musician as well as a natural philosopher and mathematician—that is, astronomer.
To his many personalities in The Ash Wednesday Supper, Bruno was compelled to add one more: the courtier. He had exchanged a post as royal reader in a Catholic absolute monarchy for a Protestant monarchy that had included a strong parliamentary system since 1215. Repelled as he was by Londoners, Bruno could not bri
ng himself to imagine a system of government that would include such people rather than simply rule them, but he appreciated the way in which Elizabeth managed to maneuver between Catholic and Protestant, monarchy and parliament. As for the explosion of inventiveness in art, literature, and music she inspired, he joined right in.
Spread your wings, Teofilo, and get yourself in order, and recognize that at the moment it is no time to speak about the highest things in the world. You have not the material here to speak of that earthly divinity, that singular and rare Lady, who from this chill sky near the Arctic Circle sheds such clear light on the whole terrestrial globe; Elizabeth, I say, who in title and royal station is inferior to no king in this world; for judgment, sagacity, counsel, and government she cannot easily come second to any who bears a scepter on this earth, in knowledge of the arts, awareness of the sciences, intelligence, and fluency in all the languages that common people and scholars may speak in Europe, I let the whole world judge what rank she holds among all the other princes. To be sure, if the empire of Fortune corresponded to and equaled the empire of her generous spirit and wit, this great Queen of the Sea, this Amphitrite, would needs open her borders and expand her circumference, so that just as she commands Britannia and Ireland, she would be given an entire globe, equal in size to our own, so that with fuller meaning her powerful hand would hold the orb of a general and universal monarchy.
In the meantime, Bruno’s attacks on English rudeness hit back harder than he may have anticipated. If he had found a trip through the streets of London a risky enterprise before, it was worse after The Ash Wednesday Supper appeared in John Charlewood’s bookstall. Bruno had already finished a second dialogue, Cause, Principle, and Unity, when The Ash Wednesday Supper caused its furor. He added a section to the new work in which he tried to explain himself, complaining that he could barely leave the French embassy for fear of being accosted. Writing as Filoteo, he suggests to his English friends Elitropio and Armesso that his English readers have been oversensitive:
FILOTEO: Now what customs have I named that cannot be found—similar, worse, or much stranger in kind, species, and number—in parts of the most excellent parts and provinces of the world? Would you call me an ungrateful slanderer of my homeland if I were to say that criminal customs like these, and worse, are to be found in Italy, in Naples, in Nola? Will I for that reason disparage that region, delightful to heaven, set from time to time at the head and right hand of this globe as the governor and ruler of all other peoples, ever esteemed by ourselves and others as the mistress, nurse, and mother of all the virtues, disciplines, humanities, modesties, and courtesies? Do we exaggerate what the poets have said about her—those same poets who have also called her the mistress of every vice, deception, greed, and cruelty?… Tell me the truth.
ARMESSO: It pains me, Teofilo [sic], that in our genteel country you should have come upon such experiences as gave you the occasion to complain in an ashy supper, when there have been many, many others who have shown you that however separated our country may be from the rest of the world, it is still devoted to the pursuit of good literature, of arms, chivalry, humanity, and courtesy.
Yet Bruno must have circulated in London society more than his rhetoric suggests: he had made a new friend, Alexander Dicson, a Scotsman who shared his interest in the art of memory and who appears as a character in the four original sections of Cause, Principle, and Unity. There Dicson understands the Nolan philosophy well enough to expound it in tandem with Teofilo. Neither does the controversy surrounding The Ash Wednesday Supper seem to have hurt its sales; John Charlewood continued to publish the Nolan’s dialogues as fast as he could write them. They were the young printer’s first venture into publishing Italian, but far from being his last; in London, at least, Italian books found a good market.
Cause, Principle, and Unity develops the Nolan philosophy by taking familiar philosophical terms from the Scholastic tradition and redefining them to fit an infinite universe pervaded by life. Once Bruno has vented his spleen against Englishmen and pedant asses in its first section, he gets down, amid some comic interludes, to a dense philosophical discussion about matter, form, nature, idea, and, not least, women. This second dialogue’s reigning pedant, Poliinnio, finds confirmation for his own misogyny in Aristotle:
As I was studying in my little sanctuary of the Muses, I came upon that passage in Aristotle, at the beginning of the Physics, in which, when he wishes to expound upon what the primal matter may be, he takes as its mirror the feminine sex, that sex, I say, which is wayward, fragile, inconstant, soft, feeble, unlucky, ignoble, vile, abject, despicable, unworthy, reprobate, sinister, detestable, frigid, deformed, empty, vain, indiscreet, insane, perfidious, sluggish, affected, filthy, ungrateful, lacking, maimed, imperfect, inchoate, insufficient, cut short, attenuated, that rust, that caterpillar, that chaff, plague, disease, death.
Among us placed by nature at God’s will
To be a burden and a bitter pill.
Gervasio, the comic character, blames Poliinnio’s outburst on his preference for boys:
You humanists, who call yourselves professors of good literature, when you grow so full of your great ideas that you can’t contain yourselves anymore, you have nothing better to do than dump them on the poor women, just as, when another kind of frenzy takes you, you vent it on the first of your wretched students who passes by.
Teofilo and Dicson, on the other hand, mount a spirited defense of women, introducing the example not only of Elizabeth but also of Bruno’s hostess, Madame de Castelnau, and her young daughter, John Florio’s pupil Catherine-Marie. Bruno’s letter to the vice-chancellor of Oxford had claimed that he “[preferred] as company neither Briton nor Italian, male nor female, bishop nor king,” and this equality was surely his ideal. In the real world, his escape from the convent also meant an escape from the vows of chastity and obedience, and he pursued women with Falstaffian matter-of-factness rather than poetic pining.
For the moment, however, he concentrated most of his energies on presenting the Nolan philosophy, so that no one who read The Ash Wednesday Supper, Cause, Principle, and Unity, or his next dialogue, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, could think for a moment that Giordano Bruno was only a plagiarist of Marsilio Ficino and an apologist for Copernicus. In these later dialogues, the fury that seethed in The Ash Wednesday Supper subsides, overwhelmed by Bruno’s enthusiasm for his real concern: to show how the realization that we inhabit an infinite universe will transform every aspect of our lives. It is also clear from these dialogues that Bruno was able, in the end, to make constructive use of his experience at Oxford. Shattering as it had been to his pride, the setback also shocked him into sharpening his ideas. He used his dialogues to vent his anger, but he used them still more importantly to refine his arguments.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Art of Magic
LONDON, 1584
It is said that the art of magic is so important that against nature it makes the rivers run backward, stops the sea, makes the mountains moo, the abyss groan, restrains the sun, detaches the moon, uproots the stars, removes day, and holds back the night; hence the Academic of no Academy said, in that odious title and lost poem:
It makes the rivers rush in upward flight,
Displaces stars from heaven’s lofty space,
Turns night to day and turns the day to night,
Uproots the moon from her own orbit’s trace,
Switches her crescent’s left horn to the right,
Swells ocean waves, and freezes them in place.
It alters earth and water, air and fire,
And molts the plumes of all human desire.
—The Candlemaker, act 1, scene 2
However new and radical the Nolan philosophy must have seemed in Elizabethan England, its inventor insisted that there was really nothing new about it. His dialogues on the structure of the universe, Cause, Principle, and Unity and On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, refer back insistently to the ancie
nt philosophers who preceded Plato and Aristotle, and in The Ash Wednesday Supper he explicitly describes his own enterprise as renewing “the ancient philosophy”:
The point on which we should fix our mind’s eye is this: Do we abide in the daytime with the light of truth above our horizon, or are we in the regions of our adversaries, our antipodes? Do we stand in the shadows, or rather they? Do we, in conclusion, who begin to renew the ancient philosophy, stand in the morning to put an end to the night, or in the evening to put an end to the day?
For Giordano Bruno, as for the ancient Greeks, there was no civilization older than that of Egypt. For fourteen years, he had lived in Naples alongside a battered statue of the river Nile that stood just off Piazza San Domenico; it gave its name to his district, the Seggio di Nilo. Perhaps for its nudity, the image was called the Corpo di Napoli—the Body of Naples—but it might well have begun life as a “Body of Alexandria.” Ancient Neapolis had maintained an active colony of merchants from Alexandria in Egypt, for whom this little statue must once have stood as a reminder of home. Along with their trade, their expertise, and their ancient culture, the Alexandrians also brought their cult of the goddess Isis, which took its first firm hold in the region of Naples a little more than a century before another religion, Christianity, began to make its own appearance. For three centuries, the worship of Isis continued to make converts in waves of devotional enthusiasm that shook the Roman Empire, until Christian priests finally stamped it out; by then, however, important aspects of her cult had been transferred to worship of the Virgin Mary, another loving mother, devoted mourner, and patient consoler of souls. In Naples, the little statue of the Nile must have remained aboveground well into the Christian era if it was still mentioned in thirteenth-century chronicles; shortly afterward, however, it was buried, and rediscovered in 1446.
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