As an adult, he had put away childish beliefs, but in On the Immense he no longer refers to a moment of sudden revelation. He had lived with his infinite universe too long to be galvanized anymore by its novelty; it had simply become his way of seeing, and he seems more preoccupied by what its mathematics will be than by its effects on his personal life. If he followed his philosophy to its ultimate implications, the man Giordano Bruno was only a temporary conglomeration of atoms in the great sea of the world-soul.
Atoms were the last piece of the Nolan philosophy to fall into place, the minimum particles that composed his boundless universe, and they only appear as a fully developed aspect of the Nolan philosophy in 1591. Bruno may have begun On the Immense first among his three Latin poems, but the one he was so eager to publish in Frankfurt was his discussion of atoms, On the Triple Minimum, because it was in this poem that he finally managed to put atomic theory at the heart of his cosmic system.
Many of Bruno’s most revolutionary ideas had already been ventured by ancient Greek philosophers. Aristarchus of Alexandria had proposed a solar system (appropriately, in Hellenistic Egypt, the land of the sun god). The Greek philosopher Democritus of Abdera had been the first person to use the term atoma, “things uncut,” to denote the smallest particles of matter, but the Roman Lucretius was atomic theory’s most eloquent ancient spokesman.
But the ancients had confronted nature by using a mathematics that relied on geometry and numerology, contemplating the individual characters of numbers rather than subjecting them to arithmetical, and especially algebraic, operations. Bruno himself never had a mathematician’s instinct for calculation, but he did have a sense of what calculation might do. Lacking algebraic formulas for those operations, he resorted instead to diagrams that were meant to illustrate the ways of nature to those readers erudite enough to penetrate poetry, prose, and graphics. On the Triple Minimum uses precisely this combination to show how the infinite universe is built, throughout its entire vast extent, of tiny particles floating within a field of energy that he describes variously as a soul, as love, as an ocean.
The Nolan philosopher had never written for a large public (how could he, writing Italian vernacular in France and Britain?), but his Frankfurt poems aimed at a still more restricted readership. “I write for other than the crowd,” he declared in On the Immense, echoing the Roman poet Horace’s declaration “I hate the profane crowd and shun it.” In Frankfurt, he took up lodgings in a Dominican convent, but as a lay boarder rather than a friar, and spent his time with printers and booksellers. As always, the book fair attracted a large number of Italians, who brought him news of the death of Pope Sixtus V and of the conclave that eventually elected Clement VIII, the former Cardinal Aldobrandini. They all nourished high expectations for the new pope.
Bruno continued to refine his “natural and physical discourse” in a second poem, On the Monad, published shortly after On the Triple Minimum, and finally in On the Immense. “Monad” means “unit of one”; it was a term also used by John Dee in his book The Hieroglyphic Monad of 1564, in which the English magician combined all the planetary symbols in one (and would be used again by Leibniz in the following century). Bruno had already discussed the oneness of the world’s creator in his Italian dialogue Cause, Principle, and Unity, but now he linked his ideas to atomic theory, adding further points to the contrast between the unity of God and the universe and the incalculable variety of the particles and creatures within that universe. On the Monad then proceeded to list the qualities and virtues of two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten. Like Pythagoras, Bruno saw mathematics primarily through geometry and numerology. It was not yet easy to see how to combine geometry with calculation, but that combination would prove to unlock more secrets of the infinite universe than any other—and also of its infinitesimal counterpart.
Democritus and Lucretius had called atoms “seeds of things,” and Bruno borrowed the same term (semina rerum) from the Latin poet. These seeds mixed and matched in an eternally oscillating exchange of forms and compounds that Bruno called “vicissitude” (but has been translated in this book as “oscillation”). The only stable feature of this shifting universe was God, an all-pervading world-soul that Bruno likened to the ocean and sometimes personified in the sea queen Amphitrite, an image he once used for Queen Elizabeth, but had transformed long since into a cosmic principle. At the end of On the Immense, he calls this innermost property of all things
Principle of existence, wellspring of every species,
Mind, God, Being, One, Truth, Destiny, Reason, Order.
The four elements, whose atoms, charged by heat or sluggish from cold (a legacy from Bernardino Telesio), mingled together in various, ever-changing compounds throughout the infinite reaches of space. As On the Immense put it, in Lucretian dactylic hexameters:
Never shall you see the face of immense and starry Olympus
Come to an end, rather space fills what it continues conceiving
Stars without number, indeed, whole worlds of these wandering bodies
Nor can you think that of these a single one is less fertile
Than earth, for all are compacted of the identical elements.
Of such does measureless space shine by the splendor of starlight.
Following Telesio, Bruno divided the cosmos into two types of heavenly bodies, hot stars—suns—orbited by colder planets, which Bruno called “earths” in On the Immense:
Sun and Earth are the primal animals, first among species
Of things, and from the primal elements they have been fashioned;
They in themselves contain the archetype of every compound,
Whence all the dry parts conjoin with all the parts that are humid,
And in amid them thereafter, when air has been interjected,
Then they create great caverns, of ever burgeoning vastness.
Thus what lies latent in small scale can be observed when it’s larger;
What may be hidden in parts may be revealed in its wholeness.
The fixed stars were only fixed, Bruno declared, from our own point of view, so distantly removed from them that their motions were imperceptible. It was absurd to think that such a massive system would make a complete rotation about the earth every twenty-four hours. On the Immense asks:
Isn’t it the mother of all follies
That this infinite space, with no observable limits,
Laid out in numberless worlds (stars is how we define them),
Large enough of themselves to be fully self-sufficient …
Should be creating but one single continuous orbit
Around this point, rotating in such measureless circles
In such a short span of time?
In addition to infinite space, Bruno touched upon the concept of infinite time, although he seems not to have made much of it. In one of the prose explanations that accompany the verse of On the Immense, he says: “Now, if you please, ask me: Where is place, space, vacuum, time, body? In the universe. Where is the universe? In every place, space, time, body. Is there anything outside the universe? No. Why? Because there is no place nor space nor motion nor body.”
In this last exchange, in effect, time becomes subsumed in motion and disappears from his account. As for the fullness of time and God’s eternity, these, of course, are both standard features of Christian doctrine. But it is difficult to see Bruno, who loved reversals of time, place, and substance, failing to face the prospect of an infinite time past, whether infinite in our own eyes or infinite absolutely. Once again, On the Immense tantalizes:
Past time or present, whichever you happen to choose, or the future:
All are a single present, before God an unending oneness.
Hence contradictory things can never persist at the same time …
Everything, when it is, because it is, must exist, then.
God chooses what he wants, he grants it, he knows it, creates it;
He cannot change himsel
f, nor can he deny his own judgment:
What he wills always is one; his will is one with his power.
Nothing can ever be done without his willing its doing,
For he is fate itself; he is the divine will in person.
This “unending oneness” does not sound like a universe created only six thousand years earlier, as strict interpretation of the Bible had encouraged most contemporary Christians to believe. Nor was Bruno the only thinker to wonder about the age of the earth. It was risky, however, to express any such doubts openly in either Catholic or Protestant circles. Even Bruno seems to avoid raising the problem explicitly.
It was equally risky to suggest, as Bruno did in one of the passages already cited, that this unending universe carried the seeds of its own propagation everywhere, as the atoms that were the “seeds of things” tumbled through the world-soul that gave their compounds the spark of life. Like Lucretius before him and Athanasius Kircher afterward, Bruno beheld a world that, because of these seeds and the loving world-soul that surrounded them, was not only infinitely immense but infinitely sexual:
Bacchus and Ceres are thus; the Sun and the Earth, too: as neighbors
Hidden from our senses’ reach, they clinch in amazing embraces.
These are the beautiful seeds of God; these the excellent prime source
Of offspring up to the present tally of each of the species,
Everywhere that they touch the fecund thighs of the mother
With their dew …
He continues:
Now, this sex among gods is of a condition far better
Than our own: as for us, the gentle power of pleasure
Lasts a short while; moreover, the mounting force of our ardor
Breaks forth at once, in only one part of ourselves, whereas Earth can
Revel in every part, can revel in pleasure forever,
Ceaselessly, as her rotation affords her a thousand positions.
The idea of a universal divine fertility argued against the basic principle of Christianity: that God had become incarnate only once, at the birth of Jesus Christ; in Bruno’s world, God was everywhere and everywhere incarnate, although Bruno also seems to have thought, like Pythagoras, that souls, once embodied, were immortal, destined to endless reincarnation. Another central Christian mystery, transubstantiation, the transformation of the Host into the body of Christ, in Bruno’s cosmos was not a miracle that occurred only at Mass through the agency of an officiating priest. As a practicing Dominican priest, he had certainly effected that transformation repeatedly, but in his developed philosophy change of substance was the constant order of nature, and there was no reason to single out some specific moment in God’s boundless continuum. Neither did Bruno any longer see the need for the singular incarnation of God in Jesus Christ during the early years of the Roman Empire in order to save humanity from primal sin: God was present in everything, everywhere, always. So was heaven. Humanity needed to be saved less from primal sin than from primal stupidity, to recognize the divinity within itself and in the whole world outside. Bruno thinks of his soul as flying free through the “ethereal country” of the universe, no longer hampered by the fear of death or any other evil. It is the same journey the philosopher-lover made in The Heroic Frenzies, but carried, if anything, to a further degree:
Hence, as I make my journey, secure and sufficiently happy,
Suddenly I am raised aloft by primordial passion;
I become Leader, Law, Light, Prophet, Father, Author, and Journey,
Rising above this world to the others that shine in their splendor.
I wander through every part of that ethereal country;
Then, far away, as they gape at the marvel, I leave them behind me.
Bruno’s cosmology brought other repercussions as well. Although the preface to On the Immense effusively praises the Duke of Braunschweig-Anhalt, the poem itself suggests that Bruno is looking elsewhere for the true “example of civilization and love of virtue” that he claims to identify in Heinrich Julius.
For Bruno’s universe is a republic of stars, not a monarchy, in which all stars are created equal, all circled by equal “earths”—Bruno insists vehemently on their sameness, going so far as to deny that the retrograde motion of Mercury and Venus proves their closer proximity to the sun.
It may have been that state of mind that took him to Zurich, on the German-speaking side of Switzerland, far from French-speaking Geneva and its Calvinists. At the Frankfurt book fair in the fall of 1590, he had met two noblemen from that city who invited him to teach a series of courses. His stay in Zurich lasted for five months; one of the two noblemen, Raphael Eglin, would eventually publish the notes from one of those courses as the Summary of Metaphysical Terms. Bruno then returned to Frankfurt to publish two more works: On Bonds in General and On the Composition of Images, his last foray into the art of memory. His position in the German-speaking world looked promising, both in Frankfurt and in Zurich. And yet, in 1591, he made an entirely unexpected move: he returned to Italy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Return to Italy
PADUA AND VENICE, 1591
O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams.
—Hamlet, 2.2.254–56
Bruno’s first destination in Italy was Padua, whose university had been famous as a haven for free thought since its foundation, in 1222, by a group of students determined to break away from the University of Bologna. In their new setting, the students chartered their own institution, independent of kings, popes, or bishops, and because Padua lay just across the lagoon from the equally independent Venetian Republic, the University of Padua soon became the de facto University of Venice. From that moment onward, it has stood as a bastion of liberty, protecting its professors and students from the Inquisition, admitting Jews during centuries of rampant anti-Semitism, awarding the first degree ever granted to a woman, the Venetian noblewoman Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, doctor of philosophy, in 1678. Foreign students were welcome at Padua from the beginning, at a time when the usual Italian term for German was barbarus and the Swedes were known as Goths. At Padua, therefore, Bruno maintained his international contacts, moving as easily among Germans as among Italians. He renewed his close association with his former students Hieronymus Besler, from Helmstedt, and Raphael Eglin, from Zurich. But he also had Italian contacts, notably Giovanni Vincenzo Pinelli, the correspondent of Jacopo Corbinelli, his friend from Paris.
He would have learned quickly, if he did not know already, that the university hoped to appoint a new professor in mathematics, and Bruno adapted to the situation by lecturing on mathematics and writing two short treatises on mathematical subjects during his stay, Readings on Geometry and The Art of Deformations. As these works show, he continued to see mathematics in visual, geometric terms rather than in terms of calculation, or, as would prove to be crucial in Padua, of observational astronomy.
For the chair in mathematics went, two years later, to a candidate from Pisa, Galileo Galilei, as sharp-tongued as Bruno and like him a writer and draftsman of uncommon brilliance, but also, most important of all, a meticulous observer of nature as well as a philosophical speculator. By then, the Nolan was long gone; within a few months he had moved on to Venice. Several months earlier, a Venetian nobleman, Giovanni Mocenigo, had sent Bruno a letter in Frankfurt, asking him for private lessons in the art of memory. Tutoring had never been Bruno’s first choice of work, nor could Mocenigo have been his first choice among patrons; his sojourn in Padua shows that the offer was probably a last resort. Even after he had accepted Mocenigo’s invitation, Bruno initially kept his distance, living for a time in rented rooms. Eventually, however, he moved into the Ca’ Grande, or “Big House,” the powerful family’s palazzo on the Grand Canal.
Together the two men went to learned gatherings at the palazzo of another, still more distinguished nobleman, Andrea Morosini, to discuss the broad r
ange of subjects that could be considered philosophy at the end of the sixteenth century. Bruno also wandered among the Venetian bookshops, talking to the printers and their customers.
The city must have been a congenial place to a wanderer as sophisticated and well traveled as the Nolan. A merchant republic whose lagoon marked the intersection of several important religious and linguistic borders, Venice treated its residents, permanent and temporary, with conspicuous tolerance; the world’s trade in cloth and spices depended on the continuing ability of Turkish Muslims, German Protestants, Levantine Jews, and Venetian Catholics to strike deals with one another, and there were few ports on earth better placed geographically to receive them all. As a general rule, the Venetians let the Muslims live as Muslims, the Jews as Jews, the Protestants as Protestants; fear and discomfiture were bad for business. The ubiquitous mix of religions, dress, and skin colors seems to have made such an inveterate outsider as Giordano Bruno feel less isolated; he began to hear Mass in two grand Gothic churches: Santo Stefano near the Palazzo Mocenigo, and his old haunt, San Zanipolo. Surrounded by the tombs of the doges and paintings by Bellini and Paolo Veronese, and surely surrounded by equally luxuriant music, Bruno listened to Mass, but held back, as ever, from taking Communion. That carefully observed restriction, the literal expression of his Catholic excommunication, clearly bothered him, and once again, as at the very start of his wanderings, he inquired about full readmission into the Church—and this time, he spoke with a Dominican. In the free air of Venice it must all have seemed possible.
In May 1592, as Fra Domenico da Nocera left the sacristy of San Zanipolo, he saw a layman approaching him. At first the man looked unfamiliar, but gradually Fra Domenico, who was regent of the College of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples, recognized his former brother Fra Giordano da Nola. The two of them withdrew to a corner of the huge church, and there Bruno told the story of his life, his presumed defrocking, his contacts with kings, queens, and princes, and his plans. As Fra Domenico eventually reported to the Inquisition:
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