Giordano Bruno

by Ingrid D. Rowland

  Not only was Bruno’s statement openly defiant, but it also veered perilously close to the Italian secular ritual of giving the lie. When two men began the escalating exchange of insults that led to a duel, the final insult, the phrase that automatically provoked the challenge, was “menti per la gola”—“you lie through your throat.” In 1606, Giovanni Marsilio would more delicately describe Bellarmine’s authoritarian tendencies as taking the “road of supposition.” But there is nothing delicate about Bruno’s retort. It is an open challenge, and by specifically proclaiming his skepticism about the eight propositions, he ensured that the whole Inquisition knew that his challenge to this philosophical duel was aimed straight at Robert Cardinal Bellarmine.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Gethsemane

  And they came to a place which was named Gethsemane: and he saith to his disciples, Sit ye here, while I shall pray. And he taketh with him Peter and James and John, and began to be sore amazed, and to be very heavy; And saith unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death: tarry ye here, and watch. And he went forward a little, and fell on the ground, and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. And he said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt.

  —Mark 14:32–36

  I remember him saying that the apostles showed more constancy than Christ, because they showed themselves ready to die and Christ prayed not to die.

  —Giovanni Mocenigo, accuser

  As Bruno showered opprobrium on the figure of Jesus, their lives, ironically, took an increasingly parallel course. Bruno’s statements seem to regard Jesus as a symbol of the institutional Church rather than as a defiant figure in his own right, the flouter of Jewish Law who dined with publicans and sinners and described himself as a prophet without honor in his own country. But Giordano Bruno had also spent much of his life contemplating the acts, words, and death of Jesus, and the deeper significance of those meditations did not leave him in the prisons of the Inquisition. In many ways, his own passion not only paralleled but also imitated, whether consciously or instinctively, the passion of Christ.

  At times, that imitation of Christ all but carried him away, as Giovanni Mocenigo would testify. It is strange to imagine the two of them in a gondola bound for Andrea Palladio’s magnificent church of San Giorgio Maggiore, the excitable little Neapolitan bragging more and more extravagantly beneath a building whose calm harmonies and massive proportions could not provide a starker contrast:

  Giovanni Mocenigo, accuser: Once when I was going with Giordano to San Giorgio Maggiore, he said that there was no reason to marvel at the miracles of Christ, because he intended to do even greater things, and he added that it was no miracle that Christ predicted his own death, because with all his misdeeds, he would have to be strung up. In the matter of Christ’s miracles he said that he knew how Christ had performed his miracles, and using the same art he intended to do as much and more, but he did not say that Christ was a magician or whether his miracles were real or apparent so far as I remember. But I do remember that because he knew the Hebrew language, he wanted to infer that Christ, who had little knowledge of this language, performed these miracles. I remember him saying that the apostles showed more constancy than Christ, because they showed themselves ready to die and Christ prayed not to die.

  Sixteenth-century prisoners were routinely called upon to remember the passion of Christ and his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane; such meditations were seen as a way of steeling them for their own destinies, which often included punishments as brutal and violent as those of ancient Rome. Typically, Bruno laced his meditations with bravado and antiquarian precision:

  Francesco Graziani, cellmate in Venice: I heard him say that Christ had died a shameful death and that all the prophets and Christ died like wretches because everything they had done was a fiction … Seeing that the others and I crossed ourselves, he said there was no reason to make this sign, because Christ was not put on a cross, but on a pillory, on which they used to hang their condemned criminals, and the form of the cross that we have today is the sign that was sculpted on the breast of the goddess Isis, and that that sign had always been held in veneration by the ancients, and the Christians had robbed the ancients by pretending that the wood to which Christ had been nailed had taken that form.

  He also treated his cellmates to his own variety of gallows humor:

  Matteo Silvestri, cellmate: When he saw us make the sign of the cross, he laughed, and many times when he heard me chant the psalms, and especially chanting the psalm “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” he yelled at me, saying, “What kind of desperate psalm is this? Shut up, or you’ll go to jail!”

  The Nolan philosophy offered the Nolan philosopher a way to live in a boundless universe, but when it came to facing down the conventional forces of a world that might no longer have seemed to be “fine as it is,” he turned, ironically, instinctively, to something closely resembling Christian morality. Not the morality of his inquisitors, to be sure, but the morality of generations of martyrs, beginning with Jesus himself. In the prison of the Holy Office, Giordano Bruno found his own Gethsemane. Like the Jesus who, “sorrowful unto death,” prayed for any possible deliverance from his situation, the philosopher from Nola tried to bargain his fate with Robert Bellarmine, and then, just like the fearful, despondent Christ he had once derided as a tristo, he changed his mind.

  On the edge of Oxford’s Corn Market, on October 16, 1555, Hugh Latimer, bound to the stake, had called over to Nicholas Ridley, condemned to burn with him, “Be of good cheer, Master Ridley, and play the man; for today, God willing, we shall light such a candle in England as shall never go out.” Whether or not Bruno had read John Foxe’s account of their deaths in his Book of Martyrs, he would certainly have known about it from his Anglican hosts at Oxford, just as he knew the stories of early Christian martyrdom from his youth in Naples: Sebastian, bristling with arrows; Peter, crucified upside down; Paul, decapitated; Stephen, stoned; the virgin saints, tortured, healed, and finally decapitated—Catherine with her wheel, Agatha with her severed breasts, Margaret, Ursula, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia; the Dominican Peter Martyr, skull split by bandits. Like it or not, Bruno had been schooled in resistance, a resistance, he had always been told, that bore extreme witness to an ultimate truth.

  In his own way, in his own terms, Giordano Bruno now began to prepare his own martyrdom. If he truly believed his own philosophy, his own death formed an infinitesimal part of the eternal life of the universe, but, like Jesus in the garden, he could not face that truth without passing through a sorrow unto death. Like his God, who would even pardon the demons, Bruno eventually came to pardon, at least by emulation, the Christ figure he had contended with ever since the age of eighteen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Hell’s Purgatory

  Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

  If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

  If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;

  Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

  If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me.

  Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.

  —Psalm 139:7–12

  TEOFILO: To you, Smitho, I will send the Nolan’s dialogue called Hell’s Purgatory, and there you will see the fruit of redemption.

  —The Ash Wednesday Supper, dialogue 5

  And what communion hath light with darkness?

  —2 Corinthians 6:14

  In the end, Giordano Bruno seems to have decided that all the debates with his inquisitors about questions of doctrine, cosmology, and even philosophy were beside the point. The only question that mattered was
whether the Inquisition could justify its claim to authority over him. Aside from slapping his crazy cellmate, Fra Celestino, Bruno had done nothing in his life except talk, write, and argue. If he ever acted as a spy, we have no record of it. Although he moved at times in powerful political circles, he had fomented no rebellions, killed no one, tortured no one, stolen nothing. He may have ridiculed his cellmates in Venice for reciting the breviary, but he had never, like the Protestant agitator Walter Merse, interrupted the Mass or profaned the Host. He had observed the terms of his excommunications, Catholic, Calvinist, and Lutheran, as scrupulously as any believer. Nevertheless, his inquisitors, late in the game, discussed subjecting him to torture; technically, this meant ordering that he be examined stricte, “strictly.” It was his sixteenth interrogation, six years into his imprisonment. Their motive could no longer have been primarily to extract information; Bruno had readily told them his beliefs, in great detail. He had been much less willing, however, to retract those beliefs. Torture might make him do so, if only for the moment of his duress. Thus the recommendation to interrogate him stricte, endorsed by every one of his inquisitors, seems mostly to express their frustration with the case; it was an opportunity to watch their clever, obstinate victim bend at last, hanging from a beam by arms tied together behind his back.

  It is not clear that Bruno was ever tortured physically (neither is it clear that he was not), but in any case listening to the discussion of torture at the end of his sixteenth interrogation must have been a torture in itself. Some prisoners talked as soon as they saw the instruments that were to be used against them. But inflicting physical harm on a prisoner who had given information willingly was, as the cardinals and Bruno well knew, an outrage against the Inquisition’s own ideas of due process.

  It was at this point in his long trial, when the cardinals resorted to pure coercion, that Bruno, like many of the Inquisition’s victims before and after him, began to contest their very right to sit in judgment at all. Abruptly, as the records seem to show, he turned from an apparent willingness to negotiate with his inquisitors to radical defiance, both of Christian dogma and of the Inquisition’s right to enforce it.

  The initial negotiations began in mid-January 1599, as his inquisitors would remind him in their final sentence:

  [Eight] propositions were presented to you on the eighteenth of January 1599 in the congregation of the lord prelates held in the Holy Office, and you were assigned the limit of six days in which to deliberate and then answer whether you wanted to abjure said propositions or not.

  Bruno’s reply a week later only incensed them:

  You replied that if the Holy See and the Holiness of Our Lord [that is, the pope] had declared eight propositions as definitively heretical, or that His Holiness knew them to be such, or that they had been so defined by the Holy Spirit, then you were disposed to revoke them; and then you presented a document addressed to His Holiness and to us, which, as you said, concerned your defense.

  This strategy silenced the cardinals for another ten days. However, Bruno’s appeal to the pope over their heads seems to have failed; if Clement VIII read the document that Bruno submitted to him, he gave no sign of it. At the beginning of February, the inquisitors returned again to Bellarmine’s propositions, again demanding an abjuration. Now Bruno seemed to take a more conciliatory line—except that he still insisted on speaking directly with the pope:

  Subsequently, on the fourth of February 1599, it was ordered that the eight propositions be proposed to you again, as in effect they were proposed to you on the fifteenth of said month, and if you were to recognize them as heretical and desire to abjure them, you would be received in penitence, otherwise, that a term of forty days would be set for you to repent; and you said at the time that you recognized the said eight propositions as heretical and that you were ready to detest and abjure them at a time and place acceptable to the Holy Office, and not only the said eight propositions, but that you were also prepared to perform every obedience with regard to the others that were proposed to you, but afterward, after you had handed over other documents to the Holy Office addressed to the Holiness of Our Lord and to us.

  “From which,” the inquisitors concluded, “it is manifestly apparent that you stubbornly persevered in your aforementioned errors.”

  Bruno had to know that he would pay for having “stubbornly persevered” with his death. Thus his own agony in prison, like Jesus’ agony in the garden, ended with the resolve to drink the bitter cup he had prayed would pass him by.

  Bruno’s own view of divine justice could not have diverged more radically from that of the Church, a fact that had emerged early in his trial:

  Francesco Graziano, fellow prisoner in Venice: “He said that neither hell nor purgatory existed, but if one of them had to exist, it would be purgatory, which was more reasonable than hell, for even if the fire were eternal, it did not follow that the punishment would be eternal, because in the end everyone would be saved, and that God’s wrath was not eternal. He cited [Jeremiah 3:5] Will he reserve his anger forever? and also said that at the end of the world even the demons would be saved, because [Psalm 36:6] O LORD, thou preservest man and beast. And if I argued with him, he said that I was a beast and a goatherd, and that I knew nothing.”

  The Nolan philosopher’s last known act, as the eyewitness Gaspar Schoppe reported, was to turn his head away from the crucifix put before his eyes when he mounted the stake. Bound, with his tongue stopped (probably by a leather bridle, possibly by an iron spike), he could do no more than launch what Schoppe called “a fierce expression,” and that expression in that public place must have read as contempt for the crucified image as well as for the Church his executioners claimed to represent.

  His teacher Fra Teofilo da Vairano had written eloquently and broadly about the membership of the Church as a gathering of all humankind. Bruno himself had written about “that law of love that is spread far and wide … which derives … 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,” he had told Rudolf II, “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.” If the inquisitors killed him for observing it, they would have to explain to the world how they could do so in the name of love, forgiveness, and the Gospel. As Saint Paul wrote, “What communion hath light with darkness?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The Sentence

  ROME, 1600

  Ah, snake! You cannot flee, try as you might;

  Slink toward your lair; it’s lost now to decay.

  Summon your strength; you’ll find that it’s too slight.

  Await the sun; dark clouds obscure the day.

  Cry to the peasant: how he hates your bite!

  Call Fortune; fool! She’s turned her ear away.

  Escape, home, strength, stars, man, or destiny:

  Not one of them from death can set you free.

  —The Heroic Frenzies, dialogue 1.5

  You may be more afraid to bring that sentence against me than I am to accept it.

  —Giordano Bruno, at his condemnation

  Giordano Bruno’s conviction for heresy hinged on two points: his refusal to believe that the bread of Communion was literally transformed into the body of Christ; and his refusal to renounce as heretical the eight propositions distilled from his writings by Robert Bellarmine. But the eight propositions in themselves did not motivate his sentence. In his last defenses, Bruno declared that the inquisitors had no right to dictate what was heresy and what was not. It was this denial of their authority that sealed his fate: “You replied that if the Holy See and the Holiness of Our Lord had declared the eight propositions
as definitively heretical, or that His Holiness knew them to be such, or that they had been so defined by the Holy Spirit, then you were disposed to revoke them.”

  Needless to say, neither pope nor Holy Spirit intervened to pronounce in a way that Bruno regarded as binding. As for the cardinals, they understood from the outset that the Holy Spirit was present wherever two or more of them gathered together; the Gospel of Matthew said as much for any group of Christians, let alone the Princes of the Church who made up its “sacred Senate”: “Jesus said … where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Bruno’s own ordination as a priest and his ordination as a Dominican priest granted him the right to interpret Scripture on behalf of Holy Mother Church, but by insisting on his own rights to do so in the face of the cardinal inquisitors, he sounded like—was—a Protestant. His invocation of the pope could not negate his refusal to accept every other level of Catholic ecclesiastical authority.

  Bruno’s position on transubstantiation was also thoroughly Protestant, as the Church of England proclaimed in article 28 of its Thirty-nine Articles of Religion:

  Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of Bread and Wine) in the Supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by holy Writ; but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions. The Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner.

  Thomas Aquinas himself had been inclined to agree with Thomas Cranmer and Giordano Bruno rather than Robert Bellarmine on this issue; he insisted that the body of Christ existed in the Host “in symbol, not in actuality”—“signis tamen et non rebus.” On many matters, Bruno was a radical thinker. On this particular matter, he was not.