On August 20, 1586, “Iordanus Brunus Nolanus, Italian doctor” inscribed himself in the register of the University of Wittenberg, ready to see what the Lutheran version of the Reform might offer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Consolation and Valediction
WITTENBERG, PRAGUE, AND HELMSTEDT, 1586–1589
It is immoral to hold an opinion in order to curry another’s favor; mercenary, servile, and against the dignity of human liberty to yield and submit.
—One Hundred and Twenty Articles Against Mathematicians and Philosophers
The bracing weather and northern light of Upper Saxony could not have made a stronger contrast with the “benign heaven” of Giordano Bruno’s youth. The landscape around Naples had been shaped by subterranean fires, a chain of volcanic cones and craters, most of them eroded into jagged, precipitous crags. Germany was shaped by water, by rivers and streams snaking through gently rolling hills. Sprawling, neat half-timbered houses, barns, brooks, and fields emerged from the dense German woods that in their time had swallowed up whole Roman legions. The slopes above the Rhine near Mainz and Wiesbaden may have been famous for their vineyards, but Wittenberg was so far north that it could brew only beer. And, as always, there was an Italian in place, someone afflicted by the same wanderlust as Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, and Father Matteo Ricci, the Italian Jesuit who had just arrived in those days in China and would end his days as a mandarin in Beijing. In Wittenberg, the wandering Italian was a Protestant lawyer named Alberico Gentili.
Exiled from Italy because of his beliefs, Gentili had come to Oxford in 1580, where, with the help of a recommendation from the Earl of Leicester, the university’s chancellor, he secured a position lecturing in civil law at St. John’s College. He had heard Bruno’s lectures and was unimpressed: “I happen to have heard the most false, absurd, and ridiculous things from the greatest of men … of a moon that is a world with many cities and mountains, that the earth moves, that other elements stand still, and countless similar things.” Despite his high connections in Elizabeth’s court, Gentili could tell his own tales of Oxford’s hostility; in 1585, when he mentioned his hopes to succeed to the highest position on the law faculty, Regius Professor, his English colleagues (who were also his rivals for the post) accused him of “Italian levity.” Gentili then threatened to leave England altogether, at least until Francis Walsingham secured him a temporary mission as secretary to the queen’s ambassador to Saxony, Giorgio Pallavicino—the plan was to remove Gentili for a time until the situation at Oxford had settled. In Pallavicino’s entourage, Gentili had arrived in Wittenberg in the summer of 1586, not long before Bruno. It was long enough, however, for the famous Italian jurist to use his influence on Bruno’s behalf, a sign that he had changed his mind about the Nolan since their last encounter in 1583—the six Italian dialogues and three new Latin works that Bruno had written in the ensuing three years may have improved his opinion about the little philosopher. Gentili’s own story had a happy ending: he would return to Oxford the following year as Regius Professor of Civil Law, his ambition fulfilled.
Bruno’s story had taken a happier turn as well. He responded to his German colleagues and their hospitality with unusual warmth. His admiration for German philosophers began with Nicolaus Cusanus and continued with Copernicus (whom he considered a German rather than a Pole), but he was no less impressed by the openness of his colleagues at Wittenberg. His lectures at the university concentrated, in standard fashion, on readings from Aristotle. For the first time in his career, apparently, he presented a course on rhetoric. Rhetoric provided Bruno with a perfect pretext to introduce the art of memory but also to acquaint his Protestant students with the refinements of public speaking that he had learned himself as a Dominican preacher in Naples. His own research concentrated on natural philosophy, and in the process he conceived a wary respect for the Swiss doctor and alchemist Paracelsus. He also gathered a coterie of students, many of whom would become serious professional scholars, including the physician Hieronymus Besler.
Bruno’s gratitude to his new colleagues suffuses the preface to his next book, The Llullian Combinatory Lamp, printed in Wittenberg in 1587. He planned the work as the first of a series of Lamps, each one meant to shed light on a different aspect of the Nolan philosophy, and as he often did, he began with the secure terrain of his own art of memory. Despite his love for wild Neapolitan rhetoric, the tone he adopted to address his German colleagues was unusually positive and unusually sober. The professors of Wittenberg must have provided a striking—and welcome—contrast to the xenophobic mockery he had met in England, and he thanked them with rare humility:
On behalf of such a university, the foremost in spacious, august, powerful Germany, the highest praises should be raised, where free and welcome access and residence is open, not only to students, but also, according to their talents, to professors from all of Europe (which is the sole mother and preserver of all the disciplines). Certainly in my own case, you received me from the beginning with such humanity, and kept me for a year with such hospitality, and have with such benevolence included me as your friend and colleague, so that anything could happen except that I should feel myself a stranger in your house … You took me in, accepted me, and have treated me kindly up to this very day, a man of no reputation among you for fame or worth, a refugee from the French wars, supported by no prince’s recommendation, distinguished by no exterior signs (such as the crowd is wont to demand) … Thus (as is only right for the Athens of Germany), let me recognize what is truly a university.
After The Llullian Combinatory Lamp came a commentary on Aristotle, On the Progress and Hunter’s Lamp of the Logicians, and The Lamp of Thirty Statues, a work on memory that he decided not to publish for the time being. (Preserved in two contemporary manuscript copies, one with Bruno’s own notes, it was finally published for the first time in the nineteenth century.) If the Nolan philosopher seemed to be moving back to the subjects that had first captured his interest as a young scholar, he was doing so with the maturity of an experienced professor, a maturity that showed up both in his relentless emphasis on ever clearer methods of presentation and in genuine, if not entirely successful, attempts to tone down his combative personality, both in public and in print.
Bruno’s idyll in Wittenberg lasted almost two years, and then, once again, the Wheel of Fortune began to move. Like most of the tiny states that made up Germany, Wittenberg was governed by a duke, whose privileges included electing the Holy Roman emperor (although generations of electors had simply chosen successive members of the Habsburg family). The city’s moderate Lutheran politics had long reflected the convictions of Duke Augustus I, whose policies had made the University of Wittenberg into the “Athens of Germany,” as Bruno described it. Augustus, however, died in 1586, shortly after Bruno’s arrival. His son, Christian I, lacked his father’s political skill; more ominously for the university’s faculty, he preferred Calvin to Luther, and strictness to leniency. He began to pressure the Lutheran professors to change their creed. In 1587, Polycarp Leyser, one of the university’s most illustrious professors, left the University of Wittenberg to head the Lutheran church of Braunschweig, complaining of persecution for his beliefs. Soon many of Bruno’s closest colleagues admitted to feeling the same pressures as Leyser. As a diplomat of the English embassy, Alberico Gentili was relatively secure, but he soon returned to Anglican Oxford and his long-awaited Regius professorship.
Bruno knew that it was only a matter of time before someone unearthed his own history with the Calvinists, and so he decided to act on a tip. A friend, Nicodemus Frischlin, had passed through Wittenberg in 1587, bragging about earning a salary of three hundred talers a year in Prague, paid out by the king of Bohemia, Rudolf II. The Habsburg ruler of Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, and, nominally, parts of Germany, Rudolf nurtured passionate interests in astrology, magic, alchemy, and the arts, and had gathered a remarkable group of scholars and artists around him. He
would eventually lure Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler to serve as his court mathematicians, but he had already attracted Tycho’s sister Sophie, a superb mathematician in her own right, and her alchemist husband, Erik Lange. Rudolf’s galleries included works by the fanciful Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who painted strange images of people made from assemblages of fruit, grain, or fish, and the German Bartolomäus Spranger, whose erotic mythological allegories drew from Albrecht Dürer and from the stylish Florentines who had dominated Italian art since the mid-sixteenth century.
Educated as a strict Catholic in the Spanish court of his great-uncle Philip II, Rudolf tried with indifferent success to impose a Catholic regime in Prague, hindered by a largely Calvinist aristocracy in Bohemia and Lutherans in Germany and parts of Austria, as well as the city’s fifteen thousand Jews, the second-largest Jewish community in Europe (after Salonica). His own antipathy to the Jesuits further hampered his efforts to create a Catholic state; as a result, the twice-excommunicated Bruno could hope, like Prague’s other scholars, to work relatively undisturbed.
Before he left Wittenberg, on March 8, 1588, Bruno delivered a heartfelt farewell speech to his colleagues, the Valedictory Oration. It was both an expression of thanks and a forceful plea in favor of the society that Duke Augustus and his moderate Lutheran creed had managed to create. Bruno used the ancient Greek myth of the Judgment of Paris to describe the pursuit of philosophy that had led him to the north of Germany. The story began with the goddess Strife throwing a golden apple among the gods of Olympus, with the inscription “To the Fairest.” Predictably, an argument erupted, with Juno, Venus, and Minerva each claiming her right to the apple. Finally the gods decided to appeal to a mortal judge, Paris, the handsome prince of Troy. Each goddess offered the young man a bribe for his vote: Juno promised power, Minerva wisdom, and Venus the most beautiful woman in the world. Never distinguished for his intellect, Paris chose Venus, and was soon packing off for Sparta to abduct that most beautiful woman, Helen of Sparta, and turn her into Helen of Troy—at least until her husband and an expedition of a thousand Greek ships set sail to take her back.
Bruno had already used the myth of the Judgment of Paris before, in his Heroic Frenzies, to show that philosophy participated in all three kinds of beauty and granted all three gifts:
Venus, third heaven’s goddess and the mother
Of the blind archer, tamer of every heart,
And she who had the Jovial head as father,
And haughty Juno, Jupiter’s counterpart,
Call forth the Trojan shepherd to advise
Which beauty should receive the golden prize.
And yet if my own goddess were so tested
Then Venus, Pallas, Juno would be bested.
For pretty limbs the measure
Is Cypria; Minerva for the mind;
For Saturn’s daughter, beauty’s in the shine
Of lofty rank, the Thunderer’s chief pleasure.
But she wins for all three:
Beauty, intelligence, and majesty.
In Wittenberg, however, Bruno’s oration moved swiftly from classical myth to Scripture. He quoted the Bible to show all the reasons for which he, unlike Paris, had chosen Minerva and wisdom as the fairest of goddesses. Ironically, he chose a biblical book, the Wisdom of Solomon, that most Protestants had rejected as apocryphal:
Hear Solomon: And I preferred her before kingdoms and thrones, and esteemed riches nothing in comparison of her. Neither did I compare unto her any precious stone: for all gold in comparison of her, is as a little sand, and silver in respect to her shall be counted as clay. I loved her above health and beauty, and chose to have her instead of light: for her light cannot be put out … Her have I loved, and have sought her out from my youth, and have desired to take for my spouse, and I became a lover of her beauty.
Bruno himself extended the biblical image to describe the University of Wittenberg as a house of wisdom, enumerating each of the liberal arts taught under its aegis, and then describing his own journey toward Saxony as a pilgrimage:
I came myself among many others to see this house of wisdom, burning with ardor to see this Minerva, for whom I was not ashamed to suffer poverty, envy, and the hatred of my own people, curses, ingratitude of those I wanted to benefit, and benefited, the effects of extreme barbarism and sordid greed; from those who owed me love, service, and honor, accusations, slanders, insults, even infamy … but for her it has been no shame to suffer labor, pain, exile, because in laboring I improved, in suffering I became experienced, in exile I learned, for I found daily rest in brief labor, immense joy in slight pain, and a broad homeland in my narrow exile.
Soon afterward, the broad homeland of his narrow exile had expanded its horizons into the hills of Bohemia. After the imposing but spare Gothic architecture of Saxony, Prague was a blaze of ornament, with its forests of Gothic spires and gold leaf gleaming in the sunlight, and its great ornate cathedral dedicated to Saint Vitus, a figure familiar to Bruno from his youth in the Kingdom of Naples, where the saint’s famous dance preserved the remnants of an ancient Greek orgiastic cult. But Bruno soon discovered that his friend Frischlin had exaggerated the amount of easy money to be earned in “golden Prague.” Not all the emperor’s choices for intellectual companionship were as inspired as Kepler, Tycho, and Arcimboldo; Rudolf had a weakness for charlatans and showmen as well as philosophers and artists. To be sure, he had turned a skeptical eye on the English scholar John Dee and his oleaginous assistant Edward Kelley, who had arrived at the end of a long journey from England in 1587. (Dee may have seen Bruno debate with John Underhill at Oxford in 1583 during the visit of the Polish prince Albert Laski.) Like Bruno, Dee was interested in mathematics, but he had become still more interested in probing the secrets of the universe by making direct contact with the supernatural world. Unable to make those contacts himself, he had hired a series of scryers, or crystal gazers, to act as his mediums. Of these characters, Kelley was by far the most gifted; he had introduced Dee to a series of angels, from the archangels Uriel and Michael to a mischievous imp named Madimi, who had revealed the course of current political events and dictated the elements of their angelic language. The two had followed Laski to Poland in 1583, proceeding on to Prague, with wives and children in tow, so that Dee could bring the emperor Rudolf an angelic command to repent of his sins. By the time Bruno arrived in the city, Dee and Kelley had been banished to the countryside, where they were quarreling fiercely: Kelley had convinced Dee that the angels were commanding them to share their wives.
Rudolf was not always so suspicious, but then most of the alchemists, kabbalists, and astrologers who flocked to his court were more circumspect than Dee had been. Often the emperor withdrew from his state responsibilities into conclaves with scholars and magicians. He hoped to construct an obelisk that would call down the power of the stars, and would shortly collaborate with a local rabbi to summon a golem, a spirit—which seems to have had mechanical components as well. Rudolf liked the concreteness of alchemical alembics, the traditional astronomical paraphernalia of astrolabes and sextants, and the giant instruments that Tycho Brahe was building on his island observatory in the Danish strait. In fact, Rudolf liked objects of every kind, and collected them with princely avidity: marvels of nature, monstrous creatures, gems, stone inlays, minerals, and lathe-turned ivory pinnacles (he would eventually be tutored himself in this art by the Nuremberg turner Peter Zick). In 1606, Rudolf’s siblings would finally have him declared a madman and pass control of the Holy Roman Empire to his younger brother Matthias.
Bruno made his approach to the eccentric emperor through the Spanish ambassador, Don Guillén de Haro de San Clemente. Still, after all these years, Bruno counted as a citizen of Naples, for whom San Clemente was his official representative in Bohemia. As a calling card, he dedicated a short book to the diplomat, On the Scrutiny of Species and the Combinatory Lamp of Ramon Llull. It was another in his series of Lamps—in fact, he recycled literal pa
ges, and most of the title, of one of his Wittenberg Lamps, The Llullian Combinatory Lamp, for this new publication. His letter of dedication made certain to emphasize the Catalan heritage that San Clemente shared with Llull, and the tribute worked well enough to obtain the Nolan philosopher an audience with Rudolf. Bruno must have hoped to impress the emperor on that occasion with his more intense recent interests, which included climate, the atmosphere, the microstructure of the universe, and the way that profound study of these subjects would require a new kind of mathematics. He dedicated his next book to Rudolf, with a polemical title: One Hundred and Twenty Articles Against Mathematicians and Philosophers. The letter of dedication was a striking document in itself, with its bleak account of the wreck that religious war had made of Europe, Bruno’s expressed hopes that the Holy Roman emperor could help to set the turmoil right, and his profession of a religion beyond controversy:
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