Giordano Bruno

by Ingrid D. Rowland

  It happens that, against every reason, state, and nature, human law and consequently the true order of Almighty God instilled in all things, the bonds of nature lie unbound, and by the suggestion of misanthropic spirits and the ministry of hell’s Furies (who fan the flames among nations rather than bringing peace, and insert the sword of dissent between those who are most closely joined, selling themselves as Mercurys descended from heaven among their tricks and their many pretenses), it has come to the point that humanity quarrels most of all with itself, and is more contested by itself than by any other living creature, and that law of love that is spread far and wide lies everywhere neglected, which derives not from some evil demon but certainly from God the father of all things, so that it is in harmony with all nature, and teaches a general philanthropy by which we love even our enemies, lest we become like brutes and barbarians, and are transformed into his image who makes his sun rise over good and bad, and pours out a rain of grace upon the just and the unjust. This is the religion that I observe, which is without controversy and beyond all dispute, whether of the spirit’s inclination or the principle of ancestral or national custom.

  As the One Hundred and Twenty Articles left the press in Prague, a sudden storm off the coast of France descended on Philip II’s fleet, the Invincible Armada, launched to strike a mortal blow against Queen Elizabeth and her Protestant regime. Instead, it was the Catholic fleet that sank, opening the world to the British naval power, British colonialism, and British trade.

  For his book, in the meantime, Rudolf paid Giordano Bruno three hundred talers. It was exactly the amount he had offered to Bruno’s friend Nicodemus Frischlin, but in Frischlin’s case the talers represented a salary; for the Nolan philosopher they were a onetime payment with no promise of any further support, and they were a terrible disappointment. On the other hand, he had offered the emperor a work that was singularly difficult to interpret. It began by presenting the elements of geometry and ended with a series of enigmatic woodcuts, most of them geometric designs with strange names like “The Ray of Thoth,” “Mirror of Magicians,” some pictures of objects—a snake labeled “Prometheus,” a lute called “Mother of Life”—and many illustrations with no label at all. Bruno was still trying to find a way to analyze the infinite universe. The art of memory gave him a way to obtain very large numbers; geometry gave him a way to describe infinitesimals. He needed both infinitely large numbers and infinitely small intervals to describe the actions of the universe, and the One Hundred and Twenty Articles tried to link all these ideas into a single coherent system. The effort was only partially successful, but on another front Bruno expressed himself with unprecedented clarity.

  His letter of dedication to the emperor Rudolf links the liberal arts to “the dignity of human liberty,” a reminder that the root underlying both words is liber, the Latin word for “free”:

  As for the liberal arts, may I be spared habits of belief and the traditions of teachers or parents, along with that common sense that (in my judgment) convinces us, many times and in many ways, to deceive and circle around the point, so that I shall never make any philosophical pronouncement that is bold or unreasoned … 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; supremely stupid to believe as a matter of habit; irrational to decide according to the majority opinion, as if the number of sages exceeded the infinite number of fools … Endowed with the eyes of sense and intelligence by the bounty of Almighty God, and therefore confirmed as judge and jury in the matter, I would be ungrateful and insane, unworthy of that participation in light, if I were to act as agent and champion for someone else, seeing, perceiving, and judging by another’s lights.

  It was a remarkable set of assertions to make to an emperor. Machiavelli’s Prince may have advised princes to shun flatterers, but few monarchs have ever followed Machiavelli’s advice, including the Holy Roman emperor Rudolf II. As the autumn leaves began to turn, marking the start of another academic year, Bruno packed his trunk and headed back to Germany, to Tübingen, a beautiful little city set within the forests of the Swabian Alps. By November 17, 1588, he had been inscribed in the University of Tübingen’s books as “some Italian” (Italus quidam), forbidden to give public lectures, granted permission to lecture privately, and told that if he simply moved on altogether he would be given a bit of money “for humanitarian purposes.” Four days later, Martin Crusius, the school’s professor of rhetoric, recalled: “On November 21, Signor Giordano Bruno, Italian of Nola (who was teaching privately at Wittenberg), told me that because Frischlin bragged about having received three hundred talers a year from the emperor, he had believed him, and gone to Prague in hopes of receiving the same treatment from the emperor, but to no avail.”

  By January 1589, the “Italian of Nola” had returned to Saxony, this time to the Lutheran city of Helmstedt, whose ruler, Julius, Duke of Braunschweig and Lüneburg, had lent his name and his Lutheran leanings to the local university, the Academia Julia (unfortunately for Bruno, the Academia’s beautifully airy sixteenth-century lecture hall was built just after he left). Helmstedt is not far from Wittenberg, and soon Bruno’s student Hieronymus Besler came to join him. Besler’s own interest in magic prompted Bruno to draw up outlines for several courses on the subject, as we can see from a manuscript (made up of several different works bound together at a later date) now preserved in the National Library of Moscow. Most of these texts are in Besler’s handwriting, with marginal comments and some brief passages by Bruno and several pages by another, unknown, copyist. The papers, their arrangement, and their meaning are not easy to sort out, for they show Bruno’s thought, never simple, as it has been filtered through Besler, a scholar with his own share of complex ideas. They may be lecture notes, they may be the prospectus for a book, they may be both. It is equally difficult to assess their importance as a record of Bruno’s thought, although the fact that they were never published may indicate that Bruno regarded his other works in progress as more urgent.

  The very meaning of magic itself is not easy to define in these papers. On Mathematical Magic sets out a general outline of the principles on which magic depends:

  God flows into the angels, the angels into the heavenly bodies, the heavenly bodies into the elements, the elements into compounds, compounds into the senses, the senses into the spirit, the spirit into the living creature [Bruno uses the word “animal”]; the living creature ascends through the spirit to sense, through sense to compounds, through compounds to elements, through elements to the heavens, through them into the demons and angels, through them to God or into divine operations. Thus the descent of God or from God is through the world to the living creature; the living creature’s ascent is through the world to God.

  The next paragraphs of On Mathematical Magic explicitly mention both Plato and the Hebrew Kabbalah as ways to understand this transit back and forth between God and the world, both God’s descent into living creatures and living creatures’ ascent toward God. Bruno had already described the experience of the philosopher-lovers in The Heroic Frenzies as a similar meeting between divine emanation and human aspiration.

  I, for the exaltation of my goal

  Though once the least of men, reach godly height …

  And I (with thanks to Love)

  Change from inferior form to a god above.

  The first paragraph of On Mathematical Magic is one of the only places that Bruno mentions angels. His heavens are usually filled to bursting instead with stars and suns and earths, those great animals of the firmament, far greater than the demons and messengers of traditional Christian theology. This is one of many clues that On Mathematical Magic is meant to lay out a conventional course of study rather than marking a new, magical stage in the Nolan philosophy. Magic had always been a part of his “natural and physical discourse,” but that discourse was, pointedly, natural and physical, and it depended absolutely on adjusting to the reali
ties of the infinite universe. As a result, Bruno’s definition of magic brought him closer to Tycho Brahe’s observatory than to John Dee’s conversations with angels. When we read another of his magical works, On Bonds in General, it is important to remember that modern chemists use this same term to describe the pull of one atom on another within a molecule.

  At the same time that Hieronymus Besler was drafting the magical works that would interest him for the rest of his own career, another student of Bruno’s was at work on reading Paracelsus. That unnamed student’s marginal notes are still preserved in a copy of Paracelsus in the library at Wolfenbüttel, where many of the books from the Academia Julia of Helmstedt eventually ended up, and on occasion they sound remarkably like his teacher:

  Whoever comes across this book should prepare his mind for understanding; nor should he defame perversely and furiously by bold, hasty judgment what cannot be grasped by a first look. Let him imitate the alchemists who finally in their seventh operation obtain gold or gems. For here, too, on the seventh reading the reader will soberly perceive the author’s intentions and praise them, just as assayers of goods let the needle of their judgment waver until it finds its balance … There is nothing absurd, nothing obscure, nothing impious in this book, except to mules and asses … For in this book the true and certain wisdom is described … And there is nothing doubtful. Whoever arrogantly and disdainfully spurns this deep philosophy knows little or nothing, or else maliciously and willfully fights the truth …

  Don’t miss the preface, reader.

  Many of the magical operations that Bruno describes, especially those that fall under the category of “Natural Magic,” come closer to scientific experiments than they do to the scrying and incantations by which John Dee’s assistants called up angels. Bruno did retain a magician’s attachment to signs and seals, but he associated these images with using his art of memory, which, in an age before computers, was the most massive and reliable device available for storing information. But he must also have regarded his memory as capable of greater feats than the simple retrieval of facts. In one enigmatic passage of On Mathematical Magic, he claims that the signs and seals of that art can be used to act “against nature”:

  The things that seem appropriate to this art are such that they can be seen in action in natural actions; that is, signs, notes, characters, and seals, in which it is possible, as seems appropriate, to act outside nature, above nature, and, if the business requires it, against nature.

  He spent most of his time, however, trying to convince the rest of the world that nature itself was larger and more complex than they had ever imagined.

  In May, Duke Julius died, and Bruno offered a funeral oration in his honor as a way of making himself known to a larger public in Helmstedt; to guarantee its effect, he published the text of this Consolatory Oration with a local printer. Again, the theme of wandering and exile is prominent:

  This supreme concern and anxious care trouble me; I greatly fear that someone … will misinterpret what an obscure foreigner, whose purpose among you is unclear, should of my own volition, recognized by no one (as it seems) or encouraged to intrude on your mourning …

  Yet intrude he must, Bruno insists, for he could not be called a lover of the arts if he did not praise Julius and the Academia Julia, where no lover of wisdom is made to feel unwelcome.

  As an added flourish for his German audience, Bruno added a frontal attack on the Catholic Church, taking up the imagery of a redesigned heaven from his Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast to depict a firmament inscribed with the virtues of Duke Julius. This time, however, the Triumphant Beast is not some generic embodiment of vice but the pope in person, Sixtus V incarnate as the head of the Gorgon Medusa:

  That severed head of the Gorgon, in which snakes are implanted in place of hair, is the manifestation of the perverse tyranny of the pope, whose blasphemous tongues, more numerous than the hairs of her head, assist and administer, every one of them, against God, Nature, and humanity, who infect the world for the worst with their poison of ignorance and depravity, which we see cut off and weeded out by your virtue in these regions. That diamond-hard sword, red with the slaughter of the monster, is the constancy of an invincible mind, by which you slew that horrible beast.

  The speech apparently pleased the new duke, Heinrich Julius, who continued to support Bruno just as his father had done. But in other ways, history in Saxony began to repeat itself. After his father’s death, Heinrich Julius proved powerless against the wranglings for power of Helmstedt’s head Lutheran pastor, Gilbert Voët, who took a hard line against dissent of any kind, and against Bruno in particular. For reasons that are no longer entirely clear (and seem to have included intense personal dislike), Voët subjected the Nolan to a public writ of excommunication—remarkably, he charged Bruno with harboring Calvinist beliefs.

  To counteract the harsh judgments of his head pastor, Duke Heinrich Julius received Bruno and Besler at his riverside palace in Wolfenbüttel, a stately little classical building whose rows of wooden columns quaintly mimic ancient marble. The visit was more than symbolic; on the same occasion, Heinrich Julius also gave Bruno a gift of forty florins, obviously aware that the Nolan was planning to resume his travels. Bruno and Besler discussed a transfer to Magdeburg, where they could stay with Besler’s uncle, but from Bruno’s own standpoint the most promising destination seemed to be Frankfurt, with its book fair, its publishers, and its staunch independence of any imposed creed—the printers and the fair thrived on Frankfurt’s policy of tolerance. For once, Bruno felt a stronger need to be near a publisher than a university; since his days in England, he had been writing a large work on the structure of the universe, and he was nearly ready to see it through the press. The Frankfurt book fairs provided an incomparable market for any writer, but especially for one who needed money. To Frankfurt he went at last, in the spring of 1589.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Infinities

  FRANKFURT AND ZURICH, 1589–1591

  Love hides in molecular structures.

  —Jim Morrison

  At the same time that he wrote his Italian dialogues in England, Bruno began putting his thoughts on the universe into Latin verse. His model was the ancient Roman philosopher Lucretius, who had also chosen to cast his ideas into Latin poetry, and not just any poetry. Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura) is written in dactylic hexameter, the meter that Greeks and Romans used for epic. In ancient Rome, especially among the ambitious patricians of the late Roman Republic and early empire, poetry was particularly popular if it had an educational slant. Most people could only read aloud, and they especially enjoyed reading in company, taking turns with reading and listening. For wealthy Romans, learning astronomy, philosophy, or gardening through a poetic text promised to combine business with pleasure—though not perhaps to the point of trying to build a plow from the poetic directions that Virgil gave in his Georgics. It was no easy task to press Latin into a set of poetic meters originally invented for Greek, a language with a different repertory of sounds and a host of one-syllable words, but Lucretius acquitted himself remarkably well, especially in view of his intractable subject matter: atomic theory and the Epicurean philosophy of calm detachment from the world and its folly.

  Unlike Lucretius, Bruno could never quite make his Latin lyrical; whenever he seems to have succeeded, the melodious phrase turns out to have been borrowed from Virgil, or Horace, or Lucretius himself. He must have recognized that much of his own poetry was impossibly obscure, for he supplied almost every passage of his Latin poems with a prose explanation of what it was he had just tried to say in verse. Yet for all their obscurities, his poems, three of them in all, were not only published, in Frankfurt in 1591, but also read, by Germans in particular, including Kepler, Leibniz, and the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. By this unusual means, some of Bruno’s most radical ideas were transmitted to generations of readers in their most developed form.

  Like most early
modern writers, for whom paper was expensive and printing even more so, Bruno did not edit himself much by modern standards. He may have corrected individual proof sheets with fanatical care, but he still printed a good deal of what he wrote without cutting or rewriting, leaving a trail of clues both to his physical wanderings and to the steady development (and occasional meandering) of his ideas. Thus traces of local color and earlier ideas in the last of his poems to be published, On the Immense and the Numberless, show that it must also have been the first one he started to write, perhaps already in Paris in 1582, and certainly by the time he arrived in England. In fact, he published it before he had managed to complete all its lines of verse—but then, Virgil’s great epic, The Aeneid, also unfinished, has some of the same tantalizing gaps.

  On the Immense traced a biography of the universe, but also, at the same time, of Bruno himself. He recalls his childhood in Nola, when he believed that the world ended beyond Mount Vesuvius, and repeatedly describes the philosophy of Aristotle as “puerile,” because he himself was a boy when he learned it and marked his manhood by the moment when he rejected it. The change that Giordano Bruno underwent at age thirty may well have referred to the moment when he exchanged a conventional “puerile” idea of the cosmos for a vision of infinity. In On the Immense, he admits that he spent his youth believing what he was taught in school, and credits the fifteenth-century German cardinal Nicolaus Cusanus with finally opening his eyes to the realities of the cosmos. But Bruno’s vision of an infinite universe went far beyond anything Cusanus suggested, not least because Bruno saw that such an idea would have cataclysmic implications for the understanding of mathematics in his own day.