By the time Martin Luther conceived his Ninety-five Theses against the papacy in 1517, the culture of critical scholarship that defined the Renaissance had already trained readers of every social stratum to question what they read and apply rules of evidence to extract their answers. It did not take long to discover that only two of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church, baptism and Communion, had any basis in the Gospels; the other five—marriage, confession, holy orders, last rites, burial—were matters of tradition. When a Waldensian Protestant from the mountains of the Friuli, Marcantonio Pestalozzi, decided to convert to Catholicism in 1591, he spelled out his creed to the Venetian inquisitors:
I was born and brought up among heretics, of a heretic mother and father, and in a village where we have another faith … and in those places they hold to and believe in the Gospels but not in the sacraments, and for that reason they are called Evangelicals and they call the Catholics papists. In my faith I have believed up to now that neither the pope nor any other priest has authority to absolve us from sin, but only God alone. And I have not believed that the Mother of Grace or the saints have any authority to intercede for us. And I have not believed that there is a purgatory. I have not believed that Confession is necessary, but that it is an invention of the pope to make money.
I have not believed that baptism is necessary, and if a child dies un-baptized, it is saved because it was blessed in its mother’s womb, and this is what I have heard preached. I have believed that the Host that the Catholics consecrate, who are called papists in those parts, is not the real body of Christ, because we take the holy meal four times a year and after the minister’s sermon he takes up bread baked in the oven and gives it to each person, saying, “Take this bread in memory of the body of Christ who died for our sins.”
Another Protestant they examined, Girolamo Celeste, maintained in 1591 that salvation could be obtained by good works; a third, Serafino de Magris, had begun to form his own opinions about the sacraments and the simple apostolic life by reading a vernacular translation of the Bible. The Protestant overtones of many of Bruno’s own statements, combined with his long sojourns in Protestant countries, could not have been lost on either the Venetian inquisitors or their Roman counterparts.
Multiple worlds were also familiar terrain for the inquisitors: they appeared in a book that Giovanni da Gara had hoped to print in Venice, at least until he presented the project to the inquisitor Sebastiano Barbadico. The text had been written and printed about a hundred years earlier, by Rabbi Abarbanel (father of the popular sixteenth-century writer Leone Ebreo, whose Dialogues on Love helped to inspire Bruno’s Heroic Frenzies). But by the time this venerable Jewish author came up for discussion again, on June 9, 1592, Giordano Bruno was already in prison. As the Inquisition’s special consultant for the case warned:
In this book I have found the following false conclusions: that there have been and shall be many worlds, and that finally there shall be two consumptions, an individual one for each world at the end of seven thousand years, and another general at the beginning of fifty thousand years, during which time the souls of the just shall unite with God without a multiplication either of angels or of souls, and the souls of the impious, if they have not already been purged by that time, shall be converted into mind, as if they were corruptible bodies, and there are other errors regarding these conclusions to my mind … Furthermore, in the same book he maintains that the sensitive soul of animals and the vegetative soul of trees have not been created by God, but by a minister of God, whom he calls the operating intelligence, and in this way there come to be two creations, and these are the things that I think are repugnant to our Catholic faith.
Bruno’s heretical propositions, in other words, could not have struck the inquisitors as the theories of a lone philosopher; instead, they seemed to draw together a whole series of heretical themes with a cogency and an overarching structure that reflected his own training in the mighty mental architectures of Thomas Aquinas. Furthermore, unlike the humble Protestant workers Marcantonio Pestalozzi and Girolamo Celeste, Bruno came from the centers of Protestant power, almost to a one: Geneva, London, Wittenberg, and that prime source of all dangerous ideas, the Frankfurt book fair.
The other men confined in the same cell with Giordano Bruno could not have found much comfort in his company. Garrulous, betrayed, terrified, he talked constantly, to them and to God. He would awaken in the night, cursing God, Christ, and his own fate in a string of blasphemies: “Traitor! Take that, wretched dog fucked cuckold! Look how you run the world!” giving heaven the finger before going back to sleep. The Neapolitan carpenter Francesco Vaio, a simple layman, may have ignored the elaborate theological arguments that sometimes raged around him in Latin as well as a hodgepodge of Italian dialects, but most of the others, including a pair of friars, responded more actively to Bruno’s constant needling and casual blasphemy. By September, a volatile Capuchin brother named Fra Celestino Arrigoni had entered the cell, and the atmosphere grew more tense than ever. Fra Celestino already had a record with the Inquisition and a history of mental instability. As a relapsed heretic, he had little hope of a lenient sentence, and his fear and his short temper made him as irritating as Bruno in his own way; at one point during an argument Bruno actually slapped him. Mostly, however, they bickered about theology, the habit that had earned them both their prison terms in the first place.
Aside from one brief interrogation in jail, Bruno was taken six times for questioning into the chamber of the Ducal Palace reserved for such inquisitions, the Hall of the Council of Ten. The deceptively attractive Bridge of Sighs had not yet been built across the canal that divided the palace from the New Prisons (it was constructed in 1604), but the secret back staircase and the narrow, well-guarded passages through which prisoners could be spirited into various chambers under guard were already in place. Bruno’s three judges and the court recorder sat beneath a large oil painting of Jupiter casting down the rebellious giants; on the room’s two side walls, images of the pope and the doge reinforced the suggestion that for all the city’s political independence, Venetian serenity lay firmly on the side of the Catholic Church. Above their heads, an inlaid wooden frieze praised “WHAT UNCORRUPTED RELIGION BORE AND UNCONQUERED VIRTUE BROUGHT UP”—“QUOD IN-CORRUPTA RELIGIO PEPERIT INVICTAQUE VIRTUS EDUCAVIT.” In its own way, the opulent decoration of the Ducal Palace proclaimed the stern sobriety of Venetian justice no less ominously than the stark severity of the New Prisons.
Bruno’s interrogators, like the paintings around them, represented the power of the republic ranged alongside the power of the Church in the pursuit of justice: they included the papal nuncio Ludovico Taverna; the patriarch of Venice, Lorenzo Priuli; and the Venetian inquisitor Giovanni Gabriele de Sentis. Yet despite the prominent papal portraits in the chamber where they sat, the two Venetians, at least, were eager on principle to protect their republic’s spiritual life from papal rule, just as the doge was committed to preserving the republic’s political autonomy.
At the outset, Bruno’s position must have looked reasonably favorable; his arrest depended on the report of a single informer, his former host Mocenigo, and the Inquisition regarded the testimony of any single witness, even an aristocrat, as insufficient grounds for a conviction of heresy. Both the philosopher and his interrogators may well have assumed that his arrest would eventually result in no more than a reprimand and release (as in fact happened with several of his cellmates).
The initial line of questioning involved establishing who Bruno was, and then sounding out his response to the charges that Mocenigo had piled up in his first letter of accusation.
Mocenigo had also suggested three possible witnesses to corroborate his charges, and these three—two booksellers and a Venetian nobleman—were actually summoned to appear in court just before Bruno made his first deposition on May 26. None of the three, however, was much inclined to support Mocenigo’s accusations; a disagreeable man in his own right, he had done th
em no favor by referring them to the Holy Office. The first to be questioned was Giovanni Battista Ciotti, a Sienese printer whose Venetian bookshop must have been one of the city’s intellectual centers in the late sixteenth century. A good friend of the Servite friar Paolo Sarpi, whose scathing history of the Council of Trent would one day earn him a position next to Giordano Bruno on the Index of Forbidden Books, Ciotti made his testimony as studiously bland as possible. He did, however, furnish some secondhand rumors for the inquisitors’ ears:
I know this Giordano Bruni of Nola, or Naples, and he is a little skinny man with a bit of black beard, around forty years old … When I have conversed with said Giordano here and in Frankfurt, as I have said, he has never said anything to make me think that he was not a Catholic and a good Christian. But when I was in Frankfurt, I spoke to various scholars … who said to me, in essence, that said Giordano made grand claims about memory and having other such secrets, but no one had ever seen him do anything with anyone; indeed, that everyone who had anything to do with him on these subjects ended up dissatisfied; and they also told me, “I don’t know how it is in Venice, but here he is thought to be a man without religion.”
The second bookseller, Giacomo Brictano, was an expatriate from Antwerp who offered his questioners a good deal more than the cagey Ciotti:
Said Giordano … in Frankfurt spent most of his time writing and going around talking riddles and astrologizing new things … He read heretical teachers, because everyone in that city is a heretic, generally speaking … With me said Giordano has never said anything, nor have I ever noticed anything that would make me think that he was anything but a good Christian; however, the prior of the Carmelites in Frankfurt told me, when I asked what kind of man said Giordano was, that he had wonderful talent, an education, and was a universal man, but that he had no religion so far as he could tell.
Bruno’s own initial deposition revealed that he had been a fugitive from the Inquisition in Naples and Rome since 1576, and for just as long he had doffed his Dominican habit and, as he said, “left religion.” The inquisitors would have understood “religione” in his statement to mean the Dominican Order, but religione could also mean religion itself, and Bruno, looking back, may have meant it both ways. In the context of the booksellers’ nearly identical statements, Bruno’s mention of “leaving religion behind” must have taken on a more general significance than abandoning the Dominicans.
As questioning continued, Bruno revealed how thoroughly his strange life had accustomed him to speaking his mind; he admitted some of his doubts about orthodox Christian faith with what must have seemed shocking frankness. At the same time, his Dominican training showed through in the cleverness of his other arguments, some of them evidently devised to mask, or at least to obscure, his real beliefs. Alternately, then, the prisoner seemed recklessly bold and cannily calculating. The case, as it proceeded, grew more and more complex, not least because Bruno’s ideas seemed to echo, in the most sophisticated terms, what the Inquisition was hearing in its other cases.
Furthermore, Bruno’s arrest had reached the attention of the Roman Inquisition, which began to press Venice for his extradition. Under normal circumstances, Venice rejected any interference with its sovereignty from Rome in matters of church or state. In 1592, however, the Most Serene Republic had less room to maneuver than usual, with an unstable political situation in Europe and a new pope who showed no sign of willingness to compromise on any question of politics or religion.
Bruno seems to have had no sense that he might be in serious trouble. Accustomed as he was to the lordly prerogatives of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples and to the courts of Europe, he may have overestimated the inquisitors’ tolerance of new ideas. Although Venice itself may have been an international port, its society was tightly closed and conservative. After so many years on his own, he may also have grown inured to the novelty of his own thoughts; if his vision of the cosmos sent a thinker as bold as Kepler into an existential panic, it was still more likely to upset theologians and state officials who had enough trouble keeping order in Venice, let alone the whole universe.
Besides misjudging the intellectual flexibility of his Dominican captors, Bruno had not quite grasped how much times had changed in Italy, even in the free republic of Venice. He had lived in Naples under a series of repressive popes, but had done so in a Neapolitan convent that found its own ways to get around the Spanish rules; true to form, San Domenico Maggiore would foment yet another revolt against Spain in 1599, as his own trial reached its endgame.
In Rome, the militant pope Pius V, who had heard Bruno recite in Hebrew and perform feats of memory, had been superseded by figures of equal intransigence, at least on matters of religion. Gregory XIII had reformed the calendar with the help of Christoph Clavius, but he undertook that scientifically significant move for the most religiously conservative of reasons: to ensure that Easter fell at the correct time of year. Clement VIII, like Gregory before him, mixed intellectual enthusiasm with an increasing religious rigor, brought on in part by the growing economic power of Protestant nations, but also by a series of disturbances by Protestant agitators in Rome itself.
For some reason, in any event, Bruno answered his inquisitors frankly as they brought Mocenigo’s accusations, one by one. Some of his answers must have shocked them.
To this day, Italian blasphemy is a regional matter; what sounds horrific in Rome is casual conversation in Tuscany (“syphilitic Madonna,” “hang God,” “dog God”), or Bergamo (“shit Host”), or Florence (“pathic Madonna”). Strikingly, most Roman invective, like that of Sicily, is phallic rather than religious, aside from the occasional “pig Madonna.” Bruno’s rich repertory of Neapolitan curses may have jarred on Giovanni Mocenigo’s Venetian ears as harshly as the accent in which Bruno pronounced them.
Unfortunately, however, Bruno’s unbridled tongue also covered matters of theology, most damningly his remarks about the Holy Trinity. In his third deposition before the inquisitors, on June 2, 1592, he admitted that he “in effect … harbored doubts” about his Lord already as a novice friar. That statement would dog him for the rest of his trial. It was enough in itself to earn him a condemnation for heresy, and may be one of the reasons that he was kept in prison. Bruno denied most of Mocenigo’s other accusations outright, and where the inquisitors had no more evidence to pursue, they could do nothing more. Prisoner and inquisitors began searching for an agreement that could resolve their impasse. Bruno indicated his willingness to retract his more troublesome propositions, trusting, probably, that he could get off with a reprimand. Venice, after all, was famous for its independence and its tendency to live and let live so long as the lanes of commerce stayed open. He offered his repentance with the same eager familiarity that he had used to present his ideas, in all their originality. With only one accuser ranged against him and a sincere pledge to mend his ways, he would normally have stood a good chance of gaining his release.
Bruno could also have been relatively confident that his encounter with the Venetian Inquisition would remain confined to Venice. To its utmost ability, the Venetian Church resisted interference from Rome, a city with no head for business. Because of the relatively lenient standards that Venetian censors applied to the manuscripts submitted to their scrutiny, they had managed to save the city’s printing industry. The strong inquisitorial presence in places like Florence and Rome had drastically reduced the number of publishing houses, and in many small towns the printing industry had been destroyed altogether by rigid censorship. It was hard to believe, in the waning sixteenth century, that Italian printing had once been the glory of Europe. It is telling, also, that Bruno planned to publish his next book not in Venice but in Frankfurt.
As the months dragged by, Giordano Bruno, in his prison cell, began to speak about how Jesus behaved in the hour before his capture by the authorities of Roman Judaea. In the Garden of Gethsemane, in a moment of agonized, desperate prayer, Jesus had asked God to spare him the ordeal
he was about to endure. This prayer, Bruno crowed to his cellmates, resisted the will of God, an act that made Christ a mortal sinner like the rest of them:
Matteo Silvestri, fellow prisoner: “He had a huge argument with Fra Celestino and Fra Giulio, insisting that Christ had committed a mortal sin in the Garden when he prayed: ‘Father, let this cup pass me by.’ About this there was a huge commotion in prison, because at that moment Francesco Napolitano, Lame Graziano, those two friars and I were all in prison.”
At the same time, however, that bleak Venetian prison plunged Bruno into his own agony in the garden. He, too, prayed for the cup to pass, in his own words: “I despise you, fucked cuckold, done and undone!” His cellmates’ pious prayers drove him into the same kinds of rages that had first brought him to the attention of the Inquisition in Naples:
When the prisoners who were friars said the breviary, he said that these whispering friars had no idea what they were saying, and when he had the breviary in hand, it made his head ache, because it was badly put together, like a lute out of tune … and the person who compiled it was a great fucked cuckold.
Unlike the Christ in the Gospel who immediately resigned himself to his fate, Giordano Bruno also took more practical action to avoid his doom. As he well knew, if he were to admit error and publicly repent, he could not be sentenced to death. Therefore, at the end of his final deposition before the Venetian inquisitors, on July 30, 1592, he made an abject confession. Its text is still preserved in the Venetian State Archive, along with the detail that Bruno threw himself to his knees at the end of his speech as the inquisitors pressed him to stand:
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