Like Virgil escorting Dante through the inferno, these wise ancients helped to guide both Bruno and his readers in their first steps through the infinite universe, but in the end all their philosophies and religions, however worthy, could present only the shadows of that universe rather than reality itself. Bruno’s real project was to find a language that could adequately describe infinity. He sensed that there were several possibilities, none of them simple. His dialogues Cause, Principle, and Unity and On the Infinite Universe and Worlds outline what might be required of mathematics, beginning with the ability to account for infinities and infinitesimals. The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast explores adapting the ancient art of memory—multiplying images as the heavens multiply worlds. In his sixth Italian dialogue, The Heroic Frenzies, he turned, at last, to words. It was no coincidence that he did so in England; the peculiarities of its politics and culture had created a fever of excitement about language in the late fifteenth century.
When Giordano Bruno arrived in London, Spain was already beginning to gather its Invincible Armada to fling against the Protestants, but there were many Londoners who already knew Spanish well. The city was one of the poles of the international cloth trade, the chief outlet for prized Cotswold wool, traded in a chain of connections that finally led, through Venice and Constantinople, down the Silk Road to China. As a result, English merchants had long maintained close contacts with merchants in Flanders and the Netherlands, which were beginning to rebel in the late sixteenth century against decades of Spanish control. Spanish dominion had nearly spread to England itself when Elizabeth’s predecessor, the Catholic queen Mary Tudor, married Philip II of Spain; now, married to a Habsburg cousin who was also his niece, Philip still yearned after the British Isles.
Elizabeth fought back the Spanish threat by building up her own fleet, led by dashing warlords like Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh, half merchants, half pirates, but she also fought back through culture; she had read her Thucydides and her Machiavelli well enough to apply their wisdom to her own circumstances. Learned in Greek and Latin, she spoke Spanish, French, and Italian well enough to negotiate in these languages, but above all, she had at her disposal an English that had begun to grow and change so radically that it seemed as new as the New World itself. Its basis both in Anglo-Saxon and in Norman French gave it a host of synonyms, as well as a structure that absorbed new coinages from Latin and Italian as if they were natural. Elizabethan poets, inspired by Italian models, were beginning to discover the potential of English to express the same vagaries of love as the sonnets of Petrarch and his followers. They adopted the discipline of sonnet form, even though Italian was far easier to rhyme than English, adapting a rhythm created for and by long, inflected words to Anglo-Saxon’s monosyllabic punch:
How can my Muse want subject to invent
While thou dost breathe, that pour’st into my verse
Thine own sweet argument, too excellent
For every vulgar paper to rehearse?
O, give thyself the thanks if aught in me
Worthy perusal stand against thy sight;
For who’s so dumb that cannot write to thee,
When thou thouself dost give invention light?
Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in words
Than those old nine which rhymers invocate,
And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth
Eternal numbers to outlive long date.
If my slight Muse do please these curious days,
The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise.
As William Shakespeare began to test the powers of English to express the full range of human behavior, Giordano Bruno made his own test of language: to see whether Neapolitan vernacular could sing the praises of philosophy. To counterbalance the unruly crowd of gods, animals, and personifications who populate The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, he claims to have resorted to plain, simple language, but for anyone born north of Rome, the plain, simple language of Naples sounded more like a torrent of oratory:
Here Giordano speaks the common language, he names names freely … he calls bread bread, wine wine, a head a head, a foot a foot, and other parts by their proper name, he calls eating eating, sleeping sleeping, drinking drinking … He holds miracles as miracles, prodigies and marvels as prodigies and marvels, truth as truth, doctrine as doctrine, goodness and virtue as goodness and virtue, impostures as impostures, deceptions as deceptions, knife and fire as knife and fire, words and dreams as words and dreams, peace as peace, love as love. He regards philosophers as philosophers, pedants as pedants, monks as monks, ministers as ministers, preachers as preachers, bloodsuckers as bloodsuckers, ne’er-dowells, mountebanks, charlatans, triflers, barterers, actors, parrots as that which they are called, show themselves to be, are; workers, benefactors, sages, and heroes as themselves.
It was perhaps inevitable that when Bruno came to describe the actions of those workers, benefactors, sages, and heroes, he turned to a different kind of language entirely: the poetry of love.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Canticles
LONDON, 1584–1585
Thus, great with childe to speak, and helplesse in my throwes,
Biting my trewand pen, beating myselfe for spite,
Fool, said my Muse to me, looke in thy heart, and write.
—Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, Sonnet 1
The sheer variety of Giordano Bruno’s writings shows how difficult he found it to convey his ideas about the universe. Leonardo and Galileo might write that the language of nature was mathematics, but sixteenth-century mathematics could barely be distinguished from arithmetic and geometry. These disciplines worked reasonably well for charting the movements of the stars and planets as seen from the earth, but they had yet to provide a good account for something as simple as the flight of a ball, let alone a bird. Bruno understood enough about the universe, and about contemporary mathematics, to realize that all the planetary systems propounded in his day, no matter whether they centered on the earth or on the sun, were only models; the real movements of the heavens took place on a much larger scale where, in the ancient formula of Hermes Trismegistus, repeated by Augustine and Cusanus, “the center was everywhere and the circumference nowhere.”
Bruno tried to convey his philosophy through pictures, both geometric diagrams and the mental images of the artificial memory. For the diagrams, there were always insurmountable limitations imposed by the size of a printed page and his own skill as an engraver—he seems to have made all his own illustrations for his books. For the artificial memory, he could only suggest images and how to combine them; the final result was always hidden away within the heads of his hearers and readers. As a writer, he used every kind of language at his disposal, poetry and prose, Italian and Latin, high rhetoric, expository prose, ribald vulgarity.
He faced a second problem because he believed that his findings about the universe should have consequences for human behavior. He began to outline those consequences first in his comedy, The Candlemaker, and then in his Italian dialogues. Living out the Nolan philosophy meant accepting the world as it was, which in turn implied accepting a much larger definition of life in which the earth, stars, and planets were also living things, infused with divinity. At the same time, Bruno still believed that the universe demanded moral behavior: no matter how huge and abstract its movements might seem, the world’s pervasive goodness demanded a matching goodness from all its creatures. The cosmos was not simply a huge mechanical system but something that he could only describe in emotional metaphors: a mother, a nursemaid, a wellspring, light, love, a creation truly worthy of an omnipotent God.
He did not describe any part of this creation as radically evil; he spent much more time denouncing pedant asses and rude Englishmen than he ever did inveighing against Satan. Although he had seen his share, and perhaps more than his share, of poverty, disease, bad government, cruelty, prejudice, intrigue, and religious hatred, he ascribed
most of these calamities to the changeability inherent in the structure of the cosmos rather than to any immanent principle of evil. Many of our problems, he maintained, were as self-inflicted as the agonies of lovers. Returning, like Plato before him, to the ancient analogy between human love and the love of wisdom, Bruno created the longest and most complex of his Italian dialogues. He dedicated it to Sir Philip Sidney in 1585.
Like Plato’s Symposium, De gli heroici furori (The Heroic Frenzies) presents love from a series of viewpoints, from the most physical to the most sublimely spiritual. He regarded that spiritual love as so disruptive of normal human existence that he called it raving madness, furore, Ficino’s translation for mania, the word Plato used to describe the divine possession that affects prophets, poets, healers, and lovers, especially lovers of wisdom—philosophers. By insisting in his title that he will discuss “heroic” divine possession, Bruno prepares his readers for a dialogue that, like Plato’s Symposium, will take them closer and closer to understanding the joys of philosophical love. Nothing in the restrained, elegant Plato can compare, however, with the bitter impetus of Bruno’s opening charge to Sir Philip Sidney:
It is truly, O most generous Sir, the work of a low, filthy animal nature to have made oneself the constant admirer, and to have fixed a solicitous attachment upon or around the beauty of a woman’s body. Good God! What more vile and ignoble vision can present itself to a clear-sighted eye than a man, brooding, afflicted, tormented, sorry, melancholy; who waxes now cold, now hot, now boiling, now trembling, now pale, now blushing, now in a pose of perplexity, now in the act of decisiveness, a man who spends the best season and the choicest fruits of his life distilling the elixir of his brain toward putting into thought and writ and sealing in public monuments those endless tortures, those grave torments, those reasoned arguments, those laborious thoughts and those bitter desires addressed to the tyranny of an unworthy, imbecilic, foolish and sordid smut?
What tragicomedy, what act, I say, more deserving of pity and laughter could be produced in this theater of the world, on this stage of our perceptions, than these many subjugated men, rendered pensive, contemplative, constant, steadfast, faithful, lovers, devotees, adorers, and slaves of a thing without faith, bereft of all constancy, destitute of intelligence, empty of all merit, void of any acknowledgment or gratitude, where no more sense, intellect, or goodness is to be obtained than might be found in a statue or a painting on a wall? And where there abound more disdain, arrogance, effrontery, vainglory, rage, scorn, perfidy, lust, greed, ingratitude, and other mortal vices than the poisons and instruments of death that could have issued forth from Pandora’s box, all to have, alas, such expansive accommodation within the brain of such a monster? Behold, inscribed on paper, enclosed in books, set before the eyes, and intoned in the ears, a noise, a commotion, a clash of devices, of emblems, of mottoes, of epistles, of sonnets, of epigrams, of books, of chattering scribbles, of terminal sweats, of lives consumed, of cries that deafen the stars, laments that make hell’s caverns reverberate, aches that strike the living dumb, sights that exhaust the pity of the gods, for those eyes, for those cheeks, for that bosom, for that white, for that crimson, for that tongue, for that tooth, for that lip, for that hair, that dress, that mantle, that glove, that slipper, that high heel, that avarice, that giggle, that scorn, that empty window, that eclipse of the sun, that throbbing, that disgust, that stench, that sepulchre, that cesspit, that menstruation, that carrion, that malaria, that uttermost insult and lapse of nature, that with a surface, a shadow, a phantasm, a dream, an enchantment of Circe plied in the service of reproduction, should deceive in the matter of beauty; which simultaneously comes and goes, issues and dies, flowers and rots, and is somewhat beautiful on the outside, but truly and fixedly contains within a shipyard, a workshop, a customhouse, a marketplace of every foulness, toxin, and poison that our stepmother Nature has managed to produce: and once the seed she requires has been paid out, she often repays it with a morass, a remorse, a sadness, a flaccidity, a headache, a lassitude, this and that distemper that are known to all the world, so that every place aches bitterly where it itched so sweetly before.
The invective launched by Bruno’s misogynist Poliinnio in Cause, Principle, and Unity pales by comparison. In that dialogue, moreover, the other characters rush to refute him by praising the virtues of women. Bruno’s letter to Sidney produces no such counterbalance; instead, the argument proceeds to sidestep women altogether: poetry, the Nolan insists at resonant length, should be devoted to philosophical rather than physical love.
Bruno’s vehemence may have reflected events in his own life, or perhaps in Sidney’s. Sidney had been betrothed for several years to Penelope Devereux, daughter of the Earl of Essex, but in 1581 the beautiful eighteen-year-old had been married instead, against her own objections, to Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick. In the following year, Sidney began to circulate, in manuscript, a sequence of sonnets and songs, Astrophel and Stella, that told the story of his love and its inevitable frustration (Astrophel means “star lover” in Greek, and Stella is “star” in Latin). By 1583, Sidney himself had married Frances Walsingham, daughter of Sir Francis, Queen Elizabeth’s head of secret services, but Astrophel and Stella continued to circulate among his friends.
To a Sir Philip Sidney newly (and by all accounts happily) married, The Heroic Frenzies argues that the love of God is the only love worth pursuing to the point of extreme self-denial; sexual love can and should be fulfilled physically. The dialogue is much more than a dialogue; it is also a veritable anthology of love poetry: a massive collection of sonnets, emblems, versicles, and songs, some of them borrowed from other writers, most of them Bruno’s own. Their widely differing tones and qualities suggest that he must have been writing poetry most of his life.
Any writer of Italian vernacular sonnets looked back to only one master, the virtual inventor of the form, Francesco Petrarca, known to his English admirers, like Sidney, Florio, and Matthew Gwinne, as Petrarch. Bruno’s admiration for Petrarch’s verse, and his liberal borrowings from it, did not prevent his harsh disapproval of the fact that these poems were inspired by their author’s obsessive, unrequited love for the woman he called Laura. As the preface to The Heroic Frenzies declared to Sidney, such self-denying “courtly” love was an absurd waste of time:
I mean for the world to be certain of one thing: namely, that the purpose for which I agitate myself in this prefatory outline, where I speak individually to you, excellent Lord, and in the Dialogues created around the following articles, sonnets, and verses, is that I want everyone to know that I would hold myself as most unworthy and beastly if with great expenditure of thought, desire, and labor I would ever have been satisfied with imitating (as they say) Orpheus in the worship of a living woman, and after death, if it were possible, retrieving her from hell … And by my faith, if I mean to equip myself to defend as noble the spirit of that Tuscan poet who showed himself so distraught along the banks of the Sorgue for a lady of Vaucluse, and do not mean to say that he was fit to be tied, I would give myself over to believing and force myself to persuade others that he studiously nourished that melancholy for lack of a talent equal to higher matters, to lavish his own gifts on such stuff, by spelling out the affections of an obstinate love that was vulgar, animal, and bestial.
Bruno’s dialogue begins in Nola, with two friends of his father’s, the poet Luigi Tansillo and the officer Odoardo Cicala (called “Cicada” in the text), discussing a series of sonnets, four of them Tansillo’s own. Indeed, Tansillo must have exerted a great influence on the young Bruno, who echoes his work repeatedly. There is nothing in the poet’s flowing, polished occasional verse to indicate that his love sonnets are any different from Petrarch’s; like Petrarch’s Songbook (Canzoniere), they seem to tell a biographical tale, in Tansillo’s case about his love for Laura Monforte, his travels abroad, his break with her, and his eventual marriage to Luisa Puccio. But Bruno presents Tansillo without hesitation as a writer of allegory
, whose love poetry is really, like Bruno’s, poetry about the love of wisdom.
The four sonnets that Bruno chooses from Tansillo certainly fit well with an allegorical interpretation. In them, God is light and warmth, inflaming the soul with desire for wisdom; vice, stupidity, laziness, and ignorance are dark, heavy, and cold:
With pretty blazes and with noble ties,
Beauty ignites me, honest virtue binds me;
In flames and servitude my pleasure finds me,
In flight from liberty and fear of ice.
The inferno rages; I endure the heat;
The world and I alike admire my noose.
Fear cannot chill me, nor pain set me loose;
The ardor’s peaceful, and the bondage sweet.
Above I see the light that draws me higher,
The cord spun out from such a sumptuous thread
As makes my thoughts arise, desires fall dead.
Within my heart there shines so fair a fire,
So sweet a shackle’s closed around my will,
My shade’s enslaved, my embers smolder still.
Like any good Neapolitan, Tansillo can also sling invective with gusto:
Felonious child of Love and Rivalry,
Who turns her father’s raptures to distress,
Alert to evil, blind to happiness,
The Minister of Torture, Jealousy.
Hell’s Fury, fetid Harpy, born to swindle
And poison other people’s sweet delight.
Cruel gale from the south, before whose blight
My hope’s most lovely flower is bound to dwindle.
Brute hateful to yourself, fell bird of fate,
With omens of distress your only screed,
You find a thousand ways to penetrate
The heart; but were you driven from the gate
Love’s kingdom would be lovelier indeed,
Sweet as a world released from death and hate.
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