by Dan Falk
Bruno was trained as a Dominican monk in his native Naples, but even as a young man his unorthodox views turned many of his friends into enemies. Among other things, he imagined a broader kind of Christian faith, larger than that embraced either by the Catholics of his home country or by the Protestants north of the Alps; under his guidance, he imagined, religious fighting would become a thing of the past, and a new golden age could be ushered in. Although Bruno succeeded in attaining the priesthood, he was also suspected of heresy and was forced to flee the land of his birth.
THE WANDERER
Bruno would spend more than twenty years wandering across Europe—years that he appears to have spent teaching, writing, and, when money was tight, proofreading. And perhaps above all, arguing—and making even more enemies. (One gets a sense of this even from his scribblings in other people’s books. In the margin of one text, he wrote, “Remarkable that this ass professes himself a doctor.”) He was also known for his feats of memory, and taught mnemonic techniques for improving memory (even demonstrating his methods to the pope, Pius V, before fleeing Italy).
Bruno, like Tycho and Digges, lived at a unique moment in the history of our understanding of the cosmos, a time when ancient wisdom was confronted with new doubts. The poet Dante Alighieri, Bruno’s countryman, had described the structure of the heavens in his fourteenth-century epic poem Divina Commedia (the Divine Comedy), built on a strictly Ptolemaic view of the universe—but such descriptions could no longer be taken at face value. As Bruno’s biographer Ingrid Rowland writes:
Dante’s certainties about natural philosophy were no longer certain. Astronomy had begun to split away from astrology, substituting a mechanical system of stars and planets for a system tied to the gods of Olympus. Mathematicians like Copernicus could track their movements with the help of complex equations, an activity as absorbing, in the end, as tracking their personalities had been in times past. In a whole series of applications, from cosmology to mechanics to geometry, algebra promised more exciting discoveries than numerology.
Bruno had read the works of Aristotle and the other influential thinkers of antiquity, and he respected their opinions. But he didn’t grant them any special authority just because of their age or their perceived wisdom. He believed that much of what had been learned in the intervening millennia might be equally useful. Moreover, not lacking in ego, he imagined his own intellect as very much on par with that of the ancients: he could build on what they had begun.
Bruno’s wanderings included more than two years in England, from the spring of 1583 to the autumn of 1585. When crossing the English Channel for Dover, he apparently used the voyage as a chance to test his ideas concerning the curvature of the Earth. Certainly he had already begun to embrace the Copernican model by this time. He had recently been in Paris and Wittenberg, both of which were home to at least a handful of Copernicans. (In Paris, he likely encountered a French translation of book 1 of De revolutionibus, published in 1552.) He was also keenly interested in a philosophical tradition known as Hermeticism, a cult based on obscure sacred texts, believed (incorrectly) by its practitioners to be of Egyptian origin. Followers of Hermeticism believed that nature’s secrets could be discerned through careful study, and that this knowledge could, in turn, be used to influence natural forces. In his embrace of Hermeticism, Bruno would have had the sympathy of John Dee, who had similar occult leanings.
While in England, Bruno published two books, both of which contain a vigorous defense of the Copernican theory: La cena de le ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper) and De l’infinito universo e mondi (On the Infinite Universe and Worlds), both dating from 1584. These were part of a series of six cosmological “dialogues,” penned in the Italian vernacular. (Why not Latin? As Giovanni Aquilecchia has noted, it could be partly because of the appreciation of all things Italian in the Elizabethan court—but also, perhaps, because thinkers such as Robert Recorde and Thomas Digges were publishing in their own vernacular.)
In England, Bruno was naturally drawn to Oxford, already a renowned center of learning. There he delivered a series of lectures on cosmology and philosophy. Outspoken and argumentative, Bruno’s reputation would have preceded him; indeed, the French ambassador had written to the queen’s advisor and “spymaster,” Francis Walsingham, to warn of Bruno’s imminent arrival in England. (Just for good measure, Walsingham also had a spy working in the French embassy.) And so we can imagine a packed hall each time Bruno approached the lectern. While the details of the lectures are lost, we know that Bruno was met with at least some measure of ridicule. As Rowland points out, this was probably as much the result of how he spoke as what he said: His Latin would have been Italian-sounding, very different from the Latin of the Oxford dons. They may well have mocked him for his diminutive size and his awkward manner. Still, if they listened attentively, they must have at least caught the drift of his arguments. And when he returned to Oxford in August of the same year, we know that he spoke in support of Copernican astronomy. George Abbot, who would later become the archbishop of Canterbury, noted that Bruno “undertooke among very many other matters to set on foote the opinion of Copernicus, that the earth did goe round, and the heavens did stand still; whereas in truth it was his owne head which rather did run round.”
WORLDS WITHOUT END
Bruno was likely familiar with Tycho’s alternative model of the solar system, and this, too, may have been mentioned in his Oxford lectures, though in the end he clearly preferred the vision of Copernicus:
For he [Copernicus] had a profound, subtle, keen and mature mind. He was a man not inferior to any of the astronomers who preceded him … his natural judgment was far superior to that of Ptolemy, Hipparchus, Eudoxus, and all the others who followed them, and this allowed him to free himself from many false axioms of the common philosophy, which—although I hesitate to say so—had made us blind.
Indeed, Copernicus was “ordained by the gods to be the dawn which must precede the rising of the sun of the ancient and true philosophy, for so many centuries entombed in the dark caverns of blind, spiteful, arrogant, and envious ignorance.”
Bruno, however, would go further than Copernicus, embracing the idea of an infinite cosmos and an infinity of worlds (and arguing the case in both of the books he published while in England). Indeed, Bruno was more explicit on the subject of infinite space than even Digges had been:
There is a single general space, a single vast immensity which we may freely call Void: in it are innumerable globes like this on which we live and grow: this space we declare to be infinite, since neither reason, convenience, sense-perception nor nature assign to it a limit.
Not only is the Earth one of the planets, Bruno argued, but our planet is “merely one of an infinite number of particular worlds similar to this, and that all the planets and other stars are infinite worlds without number composing an infinite universe, so that there is double infinitude, that of the greatness of the universe, and that of the multitude of worlds.” Bruno was not the first to entertain such thoughts; indeed, the problem of the “edge of the world” had been debated from antiquity. The ancient Roman philosopher Lucretius (whose influence we will examine in Chapter 13) pondered the matter in his remarkable poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things). He writes:
Suppose now that all space were created finite, if one were to run on to the end, to its furthest coasts, and throw a flying dart, would you have it that that dart, hurled with might and main, goes on whither it is sped and flies afar, or do you think that something can check and bar its way?
With infinite space, one might imagine, it is a short step to the possibility of the stars extending off to infinity as well. As we’ve seen, Thomas Digges was perhaps the first to widely publicize the idea—but a century earlier, a German cardinal, Nicholas of Cusa, had presented a similar argument. Each star, Nicholas imagined, might well appear sun-like, if only we could view it from a close enough distance. Bruno, however, took the idea further, arguing not only for in
finite space, but infinite time as well. While most of his contemporaries imagined the universe to be about six thousand years old, Bruno—inspired by the writings of Plato as well as more obscure ancient texts—was willing to grant it an eternal past.
Could Bruno have been influenced by the work of Digges, perhaps encountering his ideas during his stay in England? Historians suspect that even if Bruno never met Digges, he would have at least known of the Englishman’s work. As Hilary Gatti notes, Digges’s mentor, John Dee, taught mathematics to the courtier and poet Sir Philip Sidney—to whom Bruno dedicated two of his dialogues; and Dee once hosted Sidney and his entourage, after the group had visited Oxford (a meeting at which Bruno is known to have been present).
Digges’s almanac—the one with the diagram showing the stars receding to infinity—had been published in 1576, and had gone through at least two editions before Bruno’s arrival in England. As Gatti points out, Bruno was not fluent in English and would have needed help with Digges’s text—but if he saw Digges’s diagram, showing the stars extending outward without limit, he would have understood its meaning instantly.
* * *
Did Bruno have any sense of what might be in store for him? He surely knew what his English hosts thought of his sharp tongue, and must have understood the risks of speaking openly on such dangerous subjects—especially if he were to leave the relative safety of England. Mocked in Oxford, Bruno was eventually accused of plagiarism, and it became clear he was no longer welcome there. He was hardly more welcome in London, where, in his own view, he was seen as a dangerous revolutionary threatening to subvert “a whole city, a whole province, a whole kingdom.” If the English distrusted Bruno, he was equally repulsed by their manners and their unbridled xenophobia. He writes:
England can brag of having a populace that is second to none that the earth nurtures in her bosom for being disrespectful, uncivil, rough, rustic, savage, and badly brought up.… When they see a foreigner, they look, by God, like so many wolves, so many bears who have that expression on their faces that a pig has when its meal is being taken away.…
Bruno was forced to take refuge at the French embassy in London, where he served as a secretary to the ambassador. Although he scorned the supposed intellectuals at Oxford, he nonetheless held the English queen in the highest regard. Elizabeth was, in his words,
superior to all the kings of this world, for she is second to none of the sceptered princes for her judgement, her wisdom, her advice and her government. As for her knowledge of the arts, her notions of science, her intelligence and expertise in the use of those European languages which are spoken by the erudite and the ignorant, there is no doubt that she compares favourably with all the other princes of our time.
One can sense why the very mention of Bruno’s name would have been met with disdain back in his home country. Nearly every word he uttered was an affront to Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant; that he bestowed praise on a foreign head of state only made matters worse. And his arrogance was beyond the pale. Here was a man who insisted that millennia of religious teachings had been wrong—that only he had the wisdom needed to set the record straight. God didn’t create the world, Bruno argued; he couldn’t have, because God is a part of nature. Bruno was an atomist: Echoing the sentiments of Lucretius, he believed that the universe is made up of a myriad of atoms, each imbued with a divine essence; from these atoms were composed not only our own world but an infinity of worlds, all of them teeming with life. Infinity holds the key, “for from infinity is born an ever fresh abundance of matter.” Nothing dies; living beings simply take part in what we might call an eternal cosmic recycling program. Heaven and hell are mere fantasies.
An infinite cosmos was problematic on many levels: If the universe was created for man’s benefit, why must it be so large? Why all of that extra space? In this infinite cosmology, there is no longer any essential difference between the substance of the Earth and the substance of the heavens, no distinction between the terrestrial elements and the “quintessence” of space. This allowed Bruno to take the next logical step: to imagine that these infinite worlds were populated, perhaps with creatures not so very different from man. But what kind of faith would such creatures have? How would they receive Christ’s message? How would they be saved? Christians believe that God sent his only son, Jesus Christ, to offer salvation to human beings. If there were people on other worlds, how would they know of God’s word? Would there have to be multiple messiahs and multiple Crucifixions? The very idea was blasphemous. For Bruno, the notion of a singular savior, in the form of Jesus Christ, was no longer tenable. This was too narrow a view of the divine. He believed that “God was present in everything, everywhere, always,” as Rowland puts it. Unfortunately, one man’s expanded view of God is another man’s heresy. The very idea of a multitude of inhabited worlds threatened the established view of man’s central—and unique—place in the cosmos, and struck at the very heart of the Christian faith.*
ON THE ROAD AGAIN
Eventually, the French ambassador fell out of favor with his English hosts, and Bruno, his tenant, took to the road once again. He lived briefly in France before moving on to Germany and then to Prague, where the emperor, Rudolf II, had a penchant for filling his court with all manner of alchemists, astrologers, and magicians. Though London was now a thousand miles behind him, Bruno had at least one more encounter with a noteworthy Englishman: In 1587, none other than John Dee had arrived in town, traveling with a colleague, a shadowy figure named Edward Kelley. (Convinced that others could wield the magic of various crystals more effectively than he could, Dee had employed a number of assistants, Kelley being the latest.) By the time of Bruno’s arrival, the emperor had grown tired of the Englishmen’s antics, and Dee and Kelley had been banished to the countryside. (Things went downhill further when Kelley tried to convince Dee that the angels wanted the two men to share their wives.) His fortunes in decline, Dee had no choice but to return to England, where, long out of favor at the royal court, he struggled to evade his creditors and those who accused him of witchcraft. He lived out his final years in poverty, his daughter selling off his books one by one to buy food.
For Bruno, however, there was work to be done, and, still residing in Prague, the Italian set out to describe his vision of the cosmos in more detail. The result would be his final poem, De innumerabilibus, immenso, et infigurabili (On the Innumerable, Immeasurable, and Unfigurable), published in 1591. Latin verse was now his instrument, in homage to Virgil and Horace—and especially to Lucretius, whose On the Nature of Things had influenced him deeply. Bruno readily embraced Lucretius’s theory of atoms and the void. The atoms were many, and existed in a state of endless flux, while God was everywhere and unchanging. For Bruno, God was “an all-pervading world-soul” that he sometimes compared to the ocean. And the stars? Of course, they appeared to spin around the Earth every twenty-four hours, but Bruno understood that this was an illusion. Wouldn’t it be “the mother of all follies,” he writes, to imagine
That this infinite space, with no observable limits,
Laid out in numberless worlds, (stars is how we define them) …
Should be creating but one single continuous orbit
Around this point, rotating in such measureless circles
In such a short time?
As with Dee, we have in Bruno a figure whose thinking encompasses science and theology, the rational and the magical. And perhaps the political: As Rowland puts it, Bruno’s universe “is a republic of stars, not a monarchy, in which all stars are created equal, all circled by equal ‘earths’…” It was not a popular view.
“AN IMPERTINENT, PERTINACIOUS, AND OBSTINATE HERETIC”
Bruno eventually returned to Italy—foolishly, we might imagine, unless he wanted a martyr’s fate. (Perhaps he did.) He first settled in Padua, and then Venice—where one of his patrons turned against him and reported him to Church authorities. He was arrested by the Holy Office of the Inquisition, que
stioned, and eventually charged with a litany of heresies, including the belief in a multitude of inhabited worlds and an infinite cosmos. (There is no evidence that Copernicanism per se played a role in Bruno’s trial—but the theory seems to have become tainted by association. This fact is particularly salient when we think of what lay in store for his countryman, Galileo, three decades later.) Bruno’s trial, beginning in Venice and ending in Rome, dragged on for eight years, with Bruno clinging to his beliefs right to the end. He was finally sentenced on February 9, 1600. Bruno, the Inquisition concluded, was “an impertinent, pertinacious, and obstinate heretic.” Even with his fate sealed, priests and churchmen continued to try to sway his opinions—to at least save his soul—but to no avail. Eight days later, the sentence was carried out: The prisoner was stripped naked, his tongue was clamped, and, by tradition, he was set on a mule that would carry him to the Campo de’ Fiori, where he was tied to a stake and burned alive.
* * *
In the curious figures of John Dee and Giordano Bruno we see a peculiar mixture of science and mysticism. Peculiar to our sensibilities, that is; as we have seen, such mixtures were simply part of the intellectual landscape in early modern Europe. We can also view Dee and Bruno as Renaissance polymaths, men for whom all fields of knowledge were inexorably linked. In hindsight, we can look at the gradual acceptance of the Copernican theory—with people like Dee and Bruno as early adherents—as one of the indications that a new worldview was taking shape, one that bore at least some resemblance to the one that defines our world today. This, of course, is partly a reflection of our modern biases, and the tendency to read historical figures as engaging in a struggle to be “like us” is, as mentioned, an obvious and ever-present danger. Still, the gradual decline and fall of the Ptolemaic system surely signaled that change of some kind was in the air. Of course, paradigms do not shift easily, and many decades would pass before the “new astronomy” gained widespread acceptance. Nonetheless, historians have come to see these years as a critical period in Europe’s intellectual history. Mordechai Feingold calls these years an “incubatory period” in which great minds grappled with an array of “rival theories, old and new cosmologies, rational and irrational elements of science.” If rival theories were at war in late-sixteenth-century England, there were three main battlefields: the university cities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the commercial and cultural heart of the nation, found in London. Academia and commerce both had use for science, but took radically different approaches. The latter was, naturally, far more concerned with practical matters; but, as we will see, even the most down-to-earth merchants and tradespeople saw the value in looking up.