I. Classics, Aristotle, The Schoolmen etc.

Bruno must have been a marvel of intellectual industry.
Interested in all things, burning to know, he must have
put every spare moment at the monastery to good purpose ;
for his education was vast and varied. A good memory
helped him ; though sometimes one finds it, like the equally
excellent memory of Macaulay, a trifle inaccurate ; certainly
he owed more to nature than to the systematized mnemonic
art in which he believed. He spoke Spanish,^ like all the
cultivated people of the " Kingdom." Latin, of course, was
a living language, spoken by every educated monk and
scholar. Bruno's works give evidence of a wide range of
reading in the Roman classics, and they contain many
quotations from the Roman poets, especially from Lucretius,
Virgil and Ovid. But his eager, romantic mind did not
allow of being moulded by such studies into classic reserve
and equipoise. He acquired an intimate acquaintance with
the literature of that graceful, unlaboured daughter of Latin
— his own tongue; that he commanded the great poets, Dante,
Ariosto and Tasso, references and quotations in his works
show ; but he especially valued the sugared conceits and
strained manner of Tansillo and the decadent Neapolitan
school. The one play he wrote indicates the study of
Bibbiena and Aretino no less than of Plautus and Terence.
He knew Greek, and shows a mastery of Aristotle in
^ Cena, Dial. II.
17 B
1 8 GIORDANO BRUNO
the original unequalled by any scholar of his time. Aris- totle was part of a Dominican's education, for Albertus Magnus and Aquinas had effected the Church's acceptance of the Stagirite as " topmost authority," " worthiest of faith and obedience."^ Petrarch, indeed, dared to say that, after all, Aristotle was only a man ; and, recently, Cornelius Agrippa, who lived and died in the bosom of Mother Church, had attacked Aristotle ; so had Ramus and others ; but all recent onslaughts on Aristotle's autho- rity were regarded as inroads on orthodox belief. Not merely did Bruno possess a masterly knowledge of Aristotle, but, by reason of his bent towards natural science, he made close acquaintance with the chief classical and Arabian commentators, translations of the latter having been published not long before. At first he accepted the cosmology of this most logical and comprehensive of thinkers ; and certainly Aristotle's teaching would impress on him the need of an attentive observation, which that master did not always carry out. The more observant scholars of the sixteenth century were aware that men have not more teeth than women,^ or two more sutures in the brain-pan ; ^ that they have more than sixteen ribs,* and that the back of the cranium is not an empty space.^ When Bruno studied Copernicus he came to regard the Stagirite as a clog to human progress. Unlike Aristotle, he cannot be charged with "moderation to excess": he accused that " master of those who know " * of relying on his own invention more than on fact and of being a desiccated sophisticator of truth, perhaps instigated by un- worthy motives ! ' Imbedded in Aristotle's writings, Bruno
' Dante ; Conviio, iv, 6.
'^ Aristotle ; Hist. Animal., ij, 3, 501, b, 19.
» Ibid,j, 8, 491, b, 2.
^ Ibid,j, 8, 491, a, 34. « Dante ; Inferno, iv, 131.
' Causa, Dial. Hi ; Dial. v.
DISCIPLINE OF BOOKS 1 9
found fragments of the earlier thinkers of Hellas, who interpreted the Cosmos quite differently; for they had not based their science on uncriticized impressions of sense. Moreover, how should the static view of the Universe, held by the lonians, be reconciled with its mobiUty, taught by the Eleatics, or the monism of Par- menides and Heraclitus with the pluralism of Anaxagoras and Leucippus ? Sooner or later, he perceived that the atomic hypothesis of Leucippus and Lucretius, modifi- cations of which, accepted by men of science rather more than two and a half centuries after Bruno's time, have proved so fruitful in speculation, went some way towards the required adjustment of such opposite views ; and that it was of inestimable importance.^ Aristotle had abandoned the right path ; he had lost sight of the stupendous spec- tacle opened up by the ancient astronomy and reintroduced, in part, by Copernicus ; he had missed that implication of Heraclitus which Cusanus discovered — how contraries condition one another, both negating and affirming at the same time, and how they pass over into one another. Close study of Aristotle made Bruno a rebel, while frag- ments of a yet earlier philosophy became fruitful in his own. He read the Arabian thinkers of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries with enthusiasm ; for they exhibited something of his own growing passion for physical science ; a passion which, possibly, may have been fanned by the " Academy of the Secrets of Nature " (the first scientific society ever formed in modern times), which was started in Naples A.D. 1560, and the influence of which is pretty sure to have penetrated into the courts and cloisters of San Domenico. He gave attention to the doctrines of Averrhoes (whom he greatly reverenced),^ Avicenna, Avem- pace, Algazel, and, above all, Avicebron. Averrhoes' » De tripHci minimo et mensura. ' Causa, Dial. iij.
20 GIORDANO BRUNO
reasonings as to an endless creation, proceeding from within, and not imposed by an external deity,^ and as to the individual mind forming part of a universal spirit remained with him ; ^ but the servile assimilation of Aris- totle by the Arabians soon ceased to commend itself.* Of Avicebron's " Fountain of Life " he had only indirect knowledge ; but he gathered its drift from comments and quotations, and perceived thereby that the Aristotelian categories of Form and Matter cannot be regarded as ultimate, but require an underlying unity.* From Algazel he learned how much habit has to do with the formation of belief; that sacred writings concern practice, not theory, and, consequently, employ the unscientific conceptions, current at the time, to enforce moral truth only.^
He had to read the Fathers of the Church, who were re- garded as important elements in the education of a Domi- nican monk, whose intellectual discipline lay in subtle distinctions and metaphysical refinements of thought. In this respect the schoolmen excel ; no men have exhibited such subtle discrimination : it was they who built up the triple wall of Catholic defence. The schoolmen, therefore, were studied by Bruno, whose acute mind appreciated the power and profundity of men who were so seriously handi- capped by authority and by the jealous watchfulness of Religion. Some years later a Parisian scholar noted in his diary : " He (Bruno) ranks St Thomas above all in his Suinma Contra Gentiles and Questionibus Disputatis ; " * and, six years later, Bruno said : " I have nothing but
' /it'd.. Dial. iv. ^ Eroici, P. I., Dial. V, viii.
' Causa, Dial. Hi.
♦ Causa, Dial. iij. For Bruno's indebtednesssee Wittman, Michael ; G.B^s Beziehungen zu Avencebrol, Archiv. fiir Gesch. d. Phil. Bana xiii,p. 14.
^ Eroici, P. II., Dial, iv, following poem 71.
° Auvray, L ; loc, cit., sub Dec. 7.
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respect for the doctors of the Catholic Church, and especi- ally for St Thomas Aquinas, whom, as I said before, I have ever valued and loved as mine own soul ; and, as witness to the truth of what I say, you may read in my