Because Bruno refused to acknowledge the inquisitors’ authority, they could only respond by showing him their power, which they did by forcing him to his knees as they read him his sentence:
We proclaim in these documents, state, pronounce, sentence, and declare you, the aforementioned Fra Giordano Bruno, to be an impenitent, pertinacious, and obstinate heretic, and for that reason to incur all the ecclesiastical censures and penalties of the sacred canons, laws, and constitutions, in general and in particular, as those are imposed on such confessed, impenitent, pertinacious, and obstinate heretics; and as such we degrade you in words and declare that you should be degraded, just as we order and command that you now be degraded from all the major and minor ecclesiastical orders to which you have been admitted, according to the order of the holy canons; and that you should be expelled, as we now expel you, from our ecclesiastical bar and from our holy and immaculate Church, of whose mercy you have rendered yourself unworthy.
Bruno’s reaction shows how clearly he understood the situation. A German convert to Catholicism, Gaspar Schoppe, was in the audience that attended Bruno’s sentencing and left a description: “He made no other reply than, in a menacing tone, [to say], ‘You may be more afraid to bring that sentence against me than I am to accept it.’”
The Church in 1600 had good reason to be afraid. Catholic power in Europe was more precarious than ever, not only pitted against the Protestants of northern Europe but also menaced by the thriving empire of the Ottoman Turks. The jubilee in Rome was normally an occasion for the city to present its most attractive face to pilgrims coming to collect indulgences and less devout visitors coming to see the show. Clement VIII, an apparently enlightened cardinal who became an authoritarian pope, used his jubilee for more basic displays of power, relying on help from the civic authorities headed by the governor of Rome. In a series of spectacular public executions, he gave dramatic proof of his, and therefore Rome’s, devotion to the principles of Church and family.
Thus in 1599, when the wife and children of the noble Cenci family were accused of plotting to kill their tyrannical, violent patriarch, they were all arrested, put into prison, and examined under torture. The investigators spared neither the teenage Beatrice Cenci, who had been molested repeatedly by her father, nor her younger brother, still a child. Their prosecution served to confirm, through an unforgettable public drama, that paternal rights were the only valid basis of family life. Each one of the Cenci was therefore sentenced to death by public execution. The spectacle took place, as it often did, in the piazza in front of the Tor di Nona prison. Beatrice and her mother were simply beheaded, although in the case of Beatrice the decapitation was not so simple—it took three blows of the ax. The males of the family were drawn and quartered, after having their flesh torn with hot pincers.
The Cenci, for all the public clamor of their trial and punishment, had tried to resolve their private travails privately, by a discreet assassination; it was the pope and the papal government that decided to bring their case out into the open. But the Protestant agitators who began to disrupt Catholic Masses in preparation for the jubilee intended their actions as public actions from the outset, as deliberate defiance of Catholic power both in the world around them and in the realm of the spirit.
The Inquisition’s response to these provocations was increased violence. Walter Merse, the Scotsman, had been burned alive at the stake just before the Cenci executions. Then it was the turn of Bruno’s former cellmate Fra Celestino da Verona.
The decision to burn Giordano Bruno was more complex, and required long deliberation. It seems likely that the inquisitors’ slow pace was dictated by more than an insistence on correct procedure. In the first place, Bruno, however heretical his propositions may have sounded to their ears, had been a formidable opponent. With the exception of Bellarmine (and perhaps not even he), they may not quite have understood his philosophy. Second, Bruno seems to have forged influential connections throughout much of Europe. His travels had taken him to the Continent’s largest cities and into the presence of an impressive number of kings and queens—Henri III and Henri IV in Paris, Elizabeth I in London, Rudolf II in Prague—not to mention a succession of landgraves, dukes, and electors, as well as a pair of popes, Pius V at the promising start of his career and Clement VIII at its tragic ending. Pope Clement and the inquisitors may well have taken time to consider exactly what kind of risk they ran in executing Bruno, and consequently how public, and how dramatic, they should dare to make his death. It was Bellarmine, in fact, who would live to regret their decision.
Article 20 of the Church of England’s Articles of Religion declares:
The Church hath power to decree Rites or Ceremonies, and authority in Controversies of Faith: and yet it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another. Wherefore, although the Church be a witness and a keeper of Holy Writ,… it ought not to decree any thing against the same.
Giordano Bruno’s vision of the universe has long since been accepted by Christian creeds of every stripe, proving the Nolan’s argument that insisting upon any more limited creation diminishes the grandeur of God. The same kind of grandeur distinguished Bruno’s view of divine mercy as an absolute certainty. However strenuously he continued to contest Christianity, he had absorbed the Christian Gospels through and through: “Then came Peter to [Jesus], and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.”
The Inquisition would take a less forgiving view of the Nolan and his philosophy. His sentence defined him irrevocably as a heretic, but this was only the beginning of his ritual separation from the Church. In the course of his life, he had taken a whole series of religious vows, and in a ceremony known as “solemn degradation,” performed immediately after the sentencing, he was formally stripped of them, one by one. A degradation usually took two or three hours, and the bishop who performed Bruno’s degradation on February 8, 1600, was well paid for his time. First he took away the symbols of Bruno’s priesthood—the paten and chalice of Communion and the chasuble—as he pronounced the terrible formulas that cast the Nolan permanently from the priesthood and forbade him to say Mass. Next he took away the deacon’s stole and New Testament, forbidding him to pronounce on Scripture, then a subdeacon’s alb and maniple, an acolyte’s candle, stripped off Bruno’s Dominican scapular, and then his white habit, and finally, to eliminate any trace of a friar’s tonsure (if it still existed), shaved his head and face.
At last he consigned the bald heretic, now hastily dressed in layman’s clothing, to the secular arm of Rome’s government—that is, to a bailiff—urging the Roman authorities all the while to use mercy and avoid the shedding of blood. Only then, after an ordeal of several hours, was the prisoner bundled off from a cardinal’s palazzo in Piazza Navona to the dank riverside cells of the prison of Tor di Nona. There followed eight days of appeals to repent by successive teams of friars: Dominicans, Bruno’s former order; Augustinians, the order of his beloved teacher Fra Teofilo da Vairano; and Franciscans, the friars who shared his belief that God was to be found everywhere in nature. And then, on February 17, 1600, it was all over. At dawn on Ash Wednesday, Giordano Bruno mounted a donkey and rode forth to the stake.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The Field of Flowers
Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.
—Lamentations of Jeremiah 1:12
Dispatch from Rome, February 19, 1600:
Thursday morning in Campo de’ Fiori that wicked Dominican friar from Nola was burned alive, the one mentioned before: the most obstinate of heretics, and because in his imagination he had formed certain beliefs contrary to our faith, and in particular about the Holy Virgin and the saints, the wicked man wanted to die obstin
ate in those beliefs. And he said that he died a martyr, and willingly, and that his soul would ascend with the smoke into paradise. Well, now he will see whether he spoke the truth.
Giordano Bruno, On the Immense and the Numberless:
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.
Epilogue: The Four Rivers
Opus doctore est, non tortore.
A teacher is what’s needed, not a torturer.
—Justus Lipsius, paraphrased
Giordano Bruno’s execution was designed to show the world that he had died a lone fanatic, not only defrocked and degraded by formal Church procedure, but also literally stripped bare of every worldly object before he was tied to the stake. If he had friends or sympathizers among the crowds who watched him burn to death, no one noticed them. Like the animals and people who were victims of the ancient Roman games, Giordano Bruno, or that part of him that had not been transformed into ether, was swept up with the ashes of his pyre and dumped into the Tiber. It would take a separate decree of the Holy Office to consign his writings, “every one of them”—“omnia scripta”—to the Index of Forbidden Books. And then Giordano Bruno was supposed to disappear.
But the reach of the Index stopped at the borders of Spain and Italy. Furthermore, a misprint in the Spanish version of the Index meant that in the Iberian Peninsula and the New World the forbidden author became “Iordanus Bruerus Holanus,” so that in theory some daring soul could have argued that no prohibition affected the reading of “Iordanus Brunus Nolanus.” There is no record, however, that anyone tried to do so. The error was reprinted, in issue after issue of the Spanish Index, suggesting that the list was neither read nor proofread with any particular care.
In Italy, meanwhile, powerful people could read whatever they liked. Francesco Cardinal Barberini, whose uncle Urban VIII led Galileo’s prosecution for heresy, owned a copy of Cause, Principle, and Unity. The library in the Jesuits’ Roman College must have contained several of Bruno’s books as well, because seventeenth-century Jesuit authors cite them.
An exchange between Kepler and Galileo in 1610 shows that Galileo had also read Giordano Bruno’s work on cosmology, and until 1601 it had been perfectly legal to do so. In 1610, when Galileo wrote his Starry Messenger to announce that the telescope had shown him moons around Jupiter and craters on the lunar surface, he sent a copy of the new book to Kepler in Prague. Kepler responded almost immediately in a long letter; this Galileo published in Florence as a small book in itself. In his letter, Kepler tellingly associates Bruno’s ideas about the infinite universe with prison and displacement, as if the philosopher’s thoughts automatically brought on the confinement and exile of which Bruno’s life had seemed to consist rather than, as Bruno had seen it, a deliverance from all bondage and all strangeness:
In the first place, I rejoice that you have restored me not a little by your labors. If you had found planets circling one of the fixed stars, there among Bruno’s infinities I had already prepared my prison shackles, that is, my exile in that Infinity. Thus you freed me from the great fear that I had conceived when I first heard about your book … because you say that these four planets run their course around Jupiter rather than one of the fixed stars.
Evidently, Kepler had no intention of giving up his own vision of a finite universe laid out according to musical intervals, until the day when observation would force him to revise it.
Another of Kepler’s comments to Galileo is, if anything, more revealing. The discoveries proclaimed by The Starry Messenger depended on the invention of a mechanical device, the telescope, in 1609. Making those observations, however, was by no means easy, and interpretation more difficult still. The Starry Messenger proves that Galileo was a superb technician, a superb observer, and a superb draftsman as well as an eloquent writer. His telescope boasted finer lenses than the Belgian original on which he based his design; his drawings of the moon’s surface are also extraordinary works of art. Some editions of The Starry Messenger show the constellation of the Pleiades bursting the margins of the page, just as contemporary cosmology was beginning to burst the margins of the universe. Yet Kepler tells Galileo that he himself is more impressed by the ingenuity of a thinker like Bruno, who predicted what the telescope would eventually reveal, than Galileo, who plied the telescope with such skill. Bruno’s gift for speculation, he suggests, is more truly godlike than Galileo’s empirical observations:
For the glory of this world’s Architect greatly exceeds that of the person, however ingenious, who contemplates it. The former, after all, drew the principles of its creation from within himself, whereas the latter, after great effort, scarcely recognizes the expression of such principles in that same creation. Certainly those who can conceive the causes of phenomena in their minds before the phenomena themselves have been revealed are more like Architects than the rest of us, who consider causes only after they have seen the phenomena. Do not, therefore, Galileo, begrudge our predecessors their proper credit … you refine a doctrine borrowed from Bruno.
Kepler’s admonition is not entirely fair; Galileo, writing in Italy, had good reason not to have mentioned his readings among Bruno’s banned books. Within six years, the Tuscan astronomer would be negotiating himself with Cardinal Bellarmine and the Holy Office. However, Kepler’s preference for speculation over experimentation was common to his time; Galileo, however strongly he advocated empirical observation, also made purely conceptual experiments. In fact, one of his most famous thought problems, involving motion, had also exercised Giordano Bruno.
Another of Galileo’s most vivid pronouncements had to do with the importance of mathematics to scientific investigation, although he calls this activity not science but philosophy in his 1623 book on comets, The Assayer:
Perhaps [my adversary] thinks that philosophy is a book, and one man’s imaginings, like the Iliad, and Orlando Furioso, books in which the least important matter is whether the contents are true. Signor Sarsi, it’s not like that. Philosophy is written in this great book that stands continually open before our eyes (I mean the universe), but you cannot understand it until you learn to understand its language, and know the script in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and the letters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, and without these means it is impossible for a person to understand one word; [to be] without them is to wander vainly through a dark labyrinth.
Galileo’s statement has been quoted ever since the eighteenth century because of its striking imagery, and because of the rigorous experimentation by which his science bore it out. Yet the idea that mathematics underpinned philosophy was as old as Pythagoras (and was so pervasive in Greco-Roman culture that the practical Roman architect Vitruvius could praise Plato first and foremost as a mathematician). In the generation before Galileo, Giordano Bruno had already made the same case for the preeminence of mathematics in philosophy. The Nolan philosophy, however, made scant use of calculations or empirical observations. Instead, it relied on mental geometries that are strange to us, and foresaw the need for new kinds of mathematics to account for the conditions of an expanded universe. Bruno’s mathematical world is in some respects entirely alien to modern science; in other respects (especially in the recognizably Platonic emphasis of string theory on unity and elegance) it is uncannily familiar.
Modern science, and the history of science, have emphasized the differences between Galileo and Bruno, but there are also profound similarities between the two, as both Johannes Kepler and Robert Bellarmine recognized from their different perspectives.
Another figure neglected until recently, the Ge
rman Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, was also a reader of Bruno who presented elements of the Nolan philosophy to a wider public. Among a welter of fanciful ideas, Kircher also made some real progress in the sciences: he is now acknowledged as the inventor of plate tectonics, as the first person to propose a microbial origin for bubonic plague, and as the first scholar to suggest that Coptic, the liturgical language of Egyptian Christians, would provide the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics. With dozens of books to his name, many of them lavish picture books, he was also one of the most influential writers on natural philosophy in the entire seventeenth century, an author whose books were literally distributed worldwide through the global networks of the Society of Jesus.
As a literary figure, Bruno also continued to exert influence beyond his imprisonment and execution; his impact on Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems is evident in the later dialogue’s subject matter and its sparkling style. The extent of his effect on English literature is harder to gauge, but from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra to an early-seventeenth-century motet like Orlando Gibbons’s “O Thou, the Central Orb” (in which God is addressed as “the central orb of righteous love / pure beam of the on high / eternal light to this our bleak world”) it is possible to see glimmers of the Nolan philosophy.
By bearing steadfast witness to his own beliefs, Bruno also influenced the Church away from a policy of punishment toward a policy of persuasion. For the jubilee year of 1650, rather than scheduling the immolation of heretics, Pope Innocent X commissioned projects to beautify Rome, redecorating churches and installing a monumental fountain in Piazza Navona. There, thanks to the collaboration of the great sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini and the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, an Egyptian obelisk stands above a travertine mountain whose slopes bear personifications of four rivers, representing four continents of the world, amid a burgeoning population of stone plants, animals, and sea monsters. At the obelisk’s peak flies a gilded bronze dove with an olive branch in its beak. The dove symbolizes the pope’s family, which had a dove in its coat of arms, but in 1650, with the Thirty Years’ War newly ended, it would be hard not to think about the dove in its usual role as a symbol of peace, as a kind of Christian hieroglyph of that idea. The fountain’s design, however, celebrates not so much the temporal peace of 1648 as peace of another kind: the partnership of natural philosophy—science—and religion. Only profound knowledge of nature’s laws could pump water into the middle of a city square in this profusion, or carve graceful texts into the surface of granite. But only faith could inspire the effort of carving granite in the first place. Mastery of physics keeps the obelisk standing above a hollow shell of travertine, but Bernini had no doubt that what guided his hand to create that hollow shell was divine inspiration. The Fountain of the Four Rivers simply could not exist if its makers did not believe that science and religion belonged together. Only a few blocks from the place where Giordano Bruno perished by fire, this assemblage of stone, water, and bronze suggests another kind of response to the challenges of his philosophy, joyful, generous, thoughtful, and surpassingly beautiful.
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