Giordano Bruno

by Ingrid D. Rowland

  Thus, as Bruno alerts his readers, the love poems of The Heroic Frenzies—including Tansillo’s—only seem to form a collection of conventional love poetry. In fact, as he notes to Sidney in his letter of dedication, they are arranged to convey the same divine message as the erotic poetry of the biblical Song of Songs, however great their differences of form or content:

  Finally, I mean to say that these heroic frenzies achieve a heroic subject and object, and for that reason they can no more be reduced to consideration as common and natural loves than dolphins can be seen in the trees of the forest, or wild boars beneath the sea cliffs. Therefore, in order to liberate them all from such a suspicion, I first thought of giving this book a title similar to that of Solomon, who under the cover of ordinary love and emotion contains similar divine and heroic passions, as the mystical and kabbalistic doctors interpret them. I wanted, that is to say, to call it Canticles. But for several reasons I resisted in the end, of which I will note only two. First of all, because of the fear that I have conceived of the rigorous disapproval of certain Pharisees, who would regard me as profane for usurping sacred and supernatural titles for my natural and physical discourse, whereas they, criminals and ministers of every ribaldry, usurp more profoundly than one can say the titles of holy men, of saints, of divine orators, of sons of God, of priests, of kings; while we await that divine judgment that will make plain their malign ignorance and the learning of others, our simple liberty and their malicious rules, censures, and institutions. Second, for the great difference one can see between this work and that, however identical the mystery and substance of soul that are contained beneath the shadow of the one and the other. Now, in the one case, no one doubts that the basic intention of the Wise Man was to represent divine matters rather than anything else; for there the images are openly and manifestly images, and the metaphorical sense is so well-known that it cannot be denied as a metaphor: where you hear those dove’s eyes, that neck like a tower, that tongue of milk, that fragrance of frankincense, those teeth that are like flocks of sheep come up from the washing, that hair like the goats who appear from Mount Gilead.

  In other words, the Italian vernacular verse of The Heroic Frenzies introduces, for Bruno’s own place and time, the same truths that Solomon expounded in his Song, and Plato in dialogues like Symposium and Phaedrus. His Neapolitan vernacular Canticles, like the Hebrew verse of Solomon’s Song and the dramatic dialogue of Plato’s Symposium, lays out the human soul’s path to understanding divinity through language that does not reveal itself immediately except to the worthy and the initiated. All three works are thus the equivalent, in their way, of Egyptian hieroglyphs. As so often in Bruno, what is most new about the Nolan philosophy is as old as the universe that philosophy reveals, old beyond the creation narrative of the Bible, old as Egyptian chronicles and the geological record of nature. Tansillo, in his allegorical poetry, thus acts as a kind of Copernicus to the Nolan’s more radical allegories about a more curious universe. But that universe has existed all along, and wise men all along have seen it, though not quite with the Nolan’s same penetration.

  But in fact, evoking the Song of Songs chiefly served his readers notice that for Giordano Bruno, no less than for Petrarch, poetry was the language in which he most appropriately expressed his greatest love. The word “philosophy” itself, by its very etymology, declared its love of wisdom; the term was said to have been invented by Pythagoras. Bruno’s own love of philosophy drove him to nearly the same levels of literary productivity as Petrarch himself, and unlike Petrarch’s expressed willingness to lay down his life for love, which brought him a life of fame and leisure, Bruno’s love for philosophy was repeatedly put to the test. His prefatory letter to Sir Philip Sidney presses the point insistently; it is not unrequited love for a woman that drives him, but the love of a higher idea:

  In this poetry, however, you will not discern a face that so vividly urges you to seek after hidden and occult sentiment, as its ordinary manner of speech and its comparisons, which are more attuned to the common images that lovers use and which the usual poets put in verse and rhyme, resemble the feelings of those who spoke to Cythereis, or Lycoris, to Doris, to Cynthia, to Lesbia, to Corinna, to Laura, and the like. For which reason it would be easy to think that my first and basic intention had been directed by an ordinary love that inspired me to such conceits, and then by dint of rejection had taken wings and become heroic, just as it is possible to convert any ballad, romance, dream, and prophetic riddle and transfer it by the power of metaphor and the pretext of allegory to signify whatever might please those who are better able to press their emotions into creating anything out of anything, just as the wise Anaxagoras said, “All is in all.” But let any of them think what he likes and pleases, because in the end, like it or not, in all fairness everyone should understand and define it as I understand and define it, and not as they would understand or define it. Because just as the passions of that wise Jew have their own style, order, and title, which no one could understand or better explain than he himself, were he present, so, too, these canticles have their own proper title, order, and style, which no one can explain and understand better than I myself, if I am not absent.

  The order and style that Bruno has imposed on his Heroic Frenzies relegate the figure of Luigi Tansillo, graceful poet of love, to the first half of the work. He is thus a dominant but not definitive figure, a figure who marks the initial stages in the heroic lover’s passage from passionate raving to calm enlightenment.

  Indeed, the dramatic two-part structure of The Heroic Frenzies carefully divides the five conversations of Tansillo and Cicada from the more profound conversations in part 2 of Cesarino, Maricondo, Liberio, Laodomio, Severino, Minutolo, and, in the last section, two young ladies of Nola, Laodomia and Giulia—probably, again, members of the Savolino clan and Bruno’s cousins. Miguel Angel Granada has identified the dividing line of the dialogue as the moment when the lover leaves off belief in the immortality of the individual soul. But Bruno himself more evidently denotes the break between the first and the second parts of his work by a change of setting: part 1 concentrates on the lover’s interior development; part 2 thrusts him into the surrounding world. In a general sense, then, Tansillo, like Plato’s Socrates, serves as the teacher who begins to nurture a philosophical spirit but must inevitably then send that spirit on its way.

  In effect, The Heroic Frenzies, despite profound differences of structure and content, are to Bruno’s Nolan philosophy what the Symposium was to the philosophy of Plato, an initiation into philosophy through the imagery of love, in which Luigi Tansillo, like Socrates, provides a father figure who eventually steps aside to admit a higher wisdom. Remarkably, this higher wisdom is revealed, in both dialogues, by women. Bruno’s description of his female characters, Laodomia and Giulia, says a good deal about his own reading of Plato’s Diotima, the prophetess of the Symposium, who must be one of the most misunderstood figures in Western literature. Bruno writes:

  because two women are introduced, for whom (according to the custom of my country) it is inappropriate to comment, argue, decipher, know much, and act as professors as if to usurp a man’s prerogative to teach, establish guidelines, rules, and teaching, but they may, on the other hand, divine and prophesy whenever the spirit moves their bodies. Let it suffice, therefore, to make them only the players of the allegory, leaving the ideas and the business of declaring the meaning to some masculine wit.

  Plato, on the other hand, flouting the custom of his country, has his prophetess Diotima tell Socrates the deepest truths about philosophy, including matters she doubts that he shall be able to understand completely:

  These are the lesser mysteries of love, into which even you, Socrates, may enter; to the greater and more hidden ones which are the crown of these, and to which, if you pursue them in a right spirit, they will lead, I know not whether you will be able to attain. But I will do my utmost to inform you, and do you follow if you can.

  And yet
the final revelation of The Heroic Frenzies will also revolve around a woman who is as capable and enlightened as Diotima. The last section of The Heroic Frenzies is taken up with nine young men, all of them blinded by love, who have stumbled along together from Naples to arrive at the banks of the Thames, carrying a jar of water given to them by the goddess Circe. If they can open it, the enchantress has told them, they will be cured of their blindness. Laodomia and Giulia, standing at the riverside, help them to open the jar, and at that moment the nine blind men see the “twin lights” of an English nymph’s eyes, and are cured of their inability to see.

  The blind men are a direct borrowing from the Neapolitan poet Marcantonio Epicuro’s poem Cecaria (Blindness), published in 1543, but also available in Girolamo Seripando’s library in manuscript, bound together with Giles of Viterbo’s “Love’s Beautiful Hunt.” Although the swains are nine in number, they parallel, in their travels and their experience, another, single, man who once left Circe’s lair as a blind lover, only to find full enlightenment in England: Bruno himself. The nymph whose eyes restore the blind man’s power of sight is naturally to be understood as Elizabeth, a fine courtly tribute to the queen, but the symbolism does not end there. The fact that there are two eyes, two “lights,” two “windows,” suggests that there is always more than one path to philosophy’s transcendent vision: Bruno describes these two guiding beacons elsewhere in the dialogue as “the lights of the twin splendor of divine goodness and beauty.” If two can become one, so can infinity.

  Like Plato’s Symposium, The Heroic Frenzies is more than a literary tour de force: it is a call to action, an encouragement for Philip Sidney to turn his own poetic talents away from glorifying an individual woman, Penelope Rich née Devereux, to glorifying God, creating not another version of Petrarch’s Songbook, but rather the sacred love poetry of Solomon’s Song of Songs, just as Bruno himself has done at impressive length.

  Although The Heroic Frenzies emphasizes the Nolan’s connections to ancient philosophy, the dialogue also points out the novelty of his own convictions. Like hieroglyphs in Egypt, like the Song of Songs in Israel, like Plato’s Symposium in Greece, the dialogue has been written in a combination of visual imagery with contemporary language, so that the Nolan can share his experience as a philosopher-lover with those, like Sidney, who can understand it, but without divulging his insights wholesale to everyone. The Nolan philosophy requires proclamation to the wise as well as hiding from the ignorant, so that eventually it can redeem the world, a world of almost inconceivable immensity. For the wise few, the very shape of the heavens has changed: not simply purified, as in The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, but revealed in its full, boundless majesty. The Nolan and humanity are on the threshold of something new:

  But here contemplate the harmony and consonance of all the spheres, intelligences, muses, and instruments together, where heaven, the movement of the worlds, the works of nature, the discourses of intellect, the mind’s contemplation, the decrees of divine Providence, all celebrate with one accord the lofty and magnificent oscillation that equals the lower waters with the higher, exchanges night for day, and day for night, so that divinity is in all things, so that everything is capable of everything, and the infinite goodness communicates itself without end according to the full capacity of all things.

  For Bruno himself, this enlightenment came through physical displacement as well as expenditure of time, study, and passionate devotion. The journey that began in Nola in the house of Giovanni Bruno ends on the banks of the Thames, as it does, too, for the blind men, who sing:

  As day and night grant mutual release

  When night’s star-spangled mantle steals away

  The color from the chariot of day,

  Our ruler thus secures

  His law that e’er endures:

  The lofty fall, the humble shall increase.

  The lofty fall, the humble shall increase

  By law of him who keeps the great machine

  That, spinning quickly, slowly, in between,

  Has power to dispense

  Throughout the world immense

  What’s hidden and what everybody sees.

  What’s hidden and what everybody sees:

  Deny it not, nor claim that it prevails

  Over the peerless end to our travails

  Through mountain, countryside,

  Pond, river, ocean wide;

  Through crags and gorges, thorns and rocks and trees.

  The dialogue’s closing vision shows Elizabeth as ruler of the heavens and the oceans alike, a goddess on a par with Jove and Neptune, because, as we already know from The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, she is wiser by far than either of these two ancient gods, and here again, two become one:

  “O Jove, I envy not your firmament,”

  Said Father Ocean, with his haughty glance,

  “For I am well content

  With such delights as my own empire grants.”

  “What arrogance is this?” Great Jove replied;

  “What added to the riches that you know?

  God of the raging tide,

  Why does your crazy daring overflow?”

  “You have,” the briny god said, “in your hands

  The flaming heaven, where the zodiac

  Bears on its burning back

  The chorus of the planets in their dance;

  “The Sun earns universal admiration

  Among them, but I tell you that it pales

  Before her who regales

  Me with the brightest light in all creation.

  “And I within my vasty breast contain

  That land among all others where the source

  Is found of Thames’s glad course,

  Whose lovely nymphs gambol in pleasant train.

  “And one among them beams with such a light

  As ought to make you, Thunderer on high,

  Love sea better than sky;

  Your sun can’t so outshine the starry night.”

  Jove answered: “God who rules the bounding sea,

  My happiness can never be exceeded,

  For so Fate has decreed it,

  But we may share our riches equally.

  “Among your nymphs the Sun shall take the station

  She held, and by the laws that regulate

  Our kingdoms alternate

  She’ll shed her glow among my constellations.”

  From the invectives against women in his opening letter, Bruno has moved by the end of his dialogue to a vision in which a woman wields power equal to that of any man; like Plato and Saint Paul, he occasionally stated, and must have believed on some level, that male and female made no real difference to the potential of an individual soul. Society, however, was another matter.

  Giordano Bruno may have found his illumination on the banks of the Thames, but his host, Michel de Castelnau, was bound to follow more worldly orders. The ambassador had fallen from royal favor already in 1584, although his family’s desperate financial situation had earned him a year’s extension of his position in London. In October 1585, the household left for Paris. No other sponsor had made a bid to sustain Bruno in England, and hence the Nolan philosopher had no choice but to return with Castelnau’s entourage; only John Florio stayed behind. The trip was disastrous; thieves robbed the family of everything they owned, and they arrived in Paris looking, as Castelnau himself described it, “like those Irish exiles who walk around the city with their children in hand, begging.” Fortunately for Bruno, the thieves were not literate thieves; he was able to salvage a manuscript he had begun in London: the first three books of his long Latin poem On the Immense and the Numberless.

  Without his official position abroad, Castelnau could no longer keep gentlemen in his house. Once again, therefore, Giordano Bruno set out on his own. In Paris, at least, he could make his own living.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Squaring the Circle

  PARIS, 1585–1586

 
; I think he’ll be stoned by this university. But he’s heading soon for Germany.

  —Jacopo Corbinelli

  The Paris to which Michel de Castelnau and Giordano Bruno returned in October 1585 was a menacing, unstable place. In the two and a half years since Bruno’s departure, the Catholic faction led by the duc de Guise had become ever more powerful and ever more impatient with Henri III’s tolerance of the Huguenots; de Guise, after all, had struck the first blow in the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. In 1584, when Bruno had already left for England, the king, under pressure, rescinded the edict that had granted a degree of recognition to French Protestants since 1576.

  In this militant Paris, Bruno had every reason to fear for his safety. He tried again to reconcile with the Church. Again, too, he went to a Jesuit to present his case. If the Society hoped to attract Protestants back into the Catholic fold, perhaps he could hope to be received as well. As he told his inquisitors: “[I presented myself to a confessor] another time in Paris, to another Jesuit, while I was negotiating a return to religious life through Monsignor the bishop of Bergamo, who was then nuncio in Paris, and Don Bernardin de Mendoza, with the intention of making my confession.” Once again, the Jesuit had to tell the renegade Dominican that only a higher authority could handle his case. Bruno knew Mendoza from London; as a native of Nola and a resident of Naples, the Nolan was still officially a subject of the Spanish king, Philip II (the same Philip after whom he had been named by his parents). Mendoza had been serving in London as Spain’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, where he gained a reputation as a ruthless intriguer at the very time when Spain was beginning to build up its Invincible Armada. Not surprisingly, Francis Walsingham expelled him in 1585, and he moved on to Paris to serve Philip II at the court of Henri III. On Bruno’s behalf, Mendoza, in turn, contacted the papal nuncio, Girolamo Ragazzoni, whose office treated all the problems that would have fallen to the Inquisition in Spain or Italy. This time Bruno asked specifically to have his excommunication lifted, but also to be released from his obligation to live in a convent. The ambassador and the nuncio agreed that under such conditions, only the pope could make the final decision.