book De Monade these words, ' Thomas Aquinas is the

glory and illumination of all kinds of theologians and of peripatetic philosophy.' " ^ Aquinas commanded his respect mainly because he was one who sought for a coherent body of truth, completing the work of his master, Albrecht of Koln. Aquinas hammered the logical works of Aristotle and Chris- tian dogmas into one whole ; nay, more, it was he who made an even bolder attempt than that of Albrecht to con- dense all the knowledge of his time into an encyclopaedic statement. The great spirit of Aquinas still seems to haunt his ancient home in Naples and still impresses itself on the best monks of his order. Bruno also admired Albrecht of Koln (Albertus Magnus) and declared that " he had no equal in his time and far surpassed Aristotle." ^ Perhaps he rated this great schoolman so high ^ because of his little book on Alchemy ; a subject which embraced much of the very inconsiderable knowledge of nature which men pos- sessed in the thirteenth century.
But, except as an intellectual whetstone, such study is the least fruitful ; and the inadequacy of formal logic to scientific investigation (useful as it proves for the detection of deductive fallacy) was soon apparent to Bruno. Over and over again in his works he expresses his scorn for the barren logic of the Peripatetics ; for they not only blindly follow Aristotle, but they misconstrue him and avert their eyes from gazing at natural things. Could Aristotle
* Doc. xij. * Oratio Valedictoria.
' It is worth noting that Dante places Albert, the universal Doctor, with Thomas the Angelic Doctor among the spirits of the Wise {Parad., x, 97-99).
2 2 GIORDANO BRUNO
have been summoned from the grave he had been with Bruno.
Perhaps it was as a part of his theologic education that Bruno applied himself to Hebrew. We know that he recited the 86th Psalm in the original before the Pope ; • he uses Hebrew letters as symbols, and would appear to have attributed some mystic significance to the language.
n. The Neo-Platonists
When the literature of Hellas reached Italy in the previous century, the soil was ripe for its reception. Scholasticism had exhausted itself. Men were weary of dead distortions, desiccated dissections of reality, and they turned their eyes from the mediaeval museum to Plato, " the dove cleaving the thin air," and to Plotinus, " the eagle soaring over Plato's tomb." They listened no longer to tired, wearisome voices from the cloister, and they hailed Plato and Plotinus as heavenly messengers. Plotinus and the Alexandrian scholars, repelled by Aristotelian formalism, tried to grasp the flow of life, its passion and the source of its passion, by insight rather than by discursive thought ; and, what they achieved, they strove to express in allegory and metaphor ; for they felt the impossibility of putting ultimate reality into logical form.^ Ficino and his fellows translated Plato and the Neo-Platonists, and Bruno read these translations as well as the Platonic writings of the translators. We know from his character and from his Neo-Platonic works ' how he must have lived in his own enthusiasm and found spiritual nourishment in thoughts too vital, not merely to
1 Cfr.il. II.
' Zimmermann, R ; Gesch. d. JEsthetik, Vienna, 1858,/. 123. ' Notably from the Eroici. Also from De Umbris and Sigillus Sigillorum.
DISCIPLINE OF BOOKS 23
be put by the syllogistic method of the schoolmen, but even to be quite definitely expressed.
A modern writer has justly observed that Plotinus is " the greatest individual thinker between Aristotle and Des- cartes." ^ Much in Neo-Platonism fascinated Bruno, espe- cially the conception of the universe as a process of produc- tion from One who suffers no loss thereby,^ and Plotinus' explanation of the lower by the higher ; ^ much Alexandrian thinking became an integral part of his own philosophy, often transmuted and improved, however.
St Clement had declared that " we cannot discern what God is so much as what He is not " ; Cusanus had taught the same thing, and Bruno accepted the final limitation of human reason and experience and Plotinus' doctrine of a being above discursive thought, above good and evil and beauty, and above the distinctions, within the Will, of power and freedom and necessity. For our thought, being dis- cursive, is imperfect.* The Absolute produces Mind con- templating itself; i.e., it is self-conscious; and from Mind proceeds the Soul of the World. This is the trinity of being, and The One participates in all ; souls, separate in space and time, being present to one another in the Soul of the Whole.^ The Soul of the World is not in time, but, just as light (which in Plotinus' and also in Bruno's time was sup- posed to suffer no loss in transmission) passes by gradations into darkness, so does the Ineffable pass, without loss, through gradations of being ; and, even as privation of light
1 Whittaker, T ; TAe Neo-Platonists, Camb., igoi,p. 34.
* Plotinus ; Enn., V, 1,6. » Ibid., Enn., V, 9, 4.
* Ibid., Enn. F, i, 9 ; V, 4, i.— Bruno, Sigillus, />./,§ 16 ; § 30 ; P. II, §11.— Compare the profound and original thought of our English philosopher Bradley ; Appearance and Reality, a.nA. its reflec- tion in Taylor, A. E ; Problem of Conduct.
= Enn., iij, 9, 3; v, i, i.— Bruno, Sigillus, P. /., §31.
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is darkness, so is the privation of God evil ; ^ though even in evil there is a rational order which issues in good.^ Although individual souls are comprised and co-present to one another in the Soul of the World, they are separate in lower spheres. Having descended from the Absolute, they ever tend to return to Him ' " who is at once thine inner- most self and thine unattainable desire."
Plotinus further perceived that life is no mere collection of particles; he makes the unextended, individual soul form its own body ; it dwells wholly in every part which it animates ; for, can a part act vitally when separated from the whole to which it belongs?* The individual soul is the cause of its own thought and action, but is determined in its context.* The universe and its souls are in activity without beginning or end; all things being traces or shadows, in vastly differing measures, of the Supernal. Bruno maintained this doctrine of shades, vestiges, through- out his life.® Like Plotinus Bruno accepted universal animism ; so did every thinker of his own time ; in fact, the view dated from Thales.'
" The common mark of all Alexandrian philosophy is that it regards divine revelation as the highest source of knowledge."* Porphyry tells us that Plotinus was rapt into ecstatic vision of the Absolute four times, being united with Him ; and that he (Porphyry) had the experience
1 Enn.^ V, I, I ; ■z/, I, 6 ; vj, 7, 9. — Bruno, De Umb., Int. I, IV; Sig.P.I,%'ii.
'^ Enn., in, 2, 18. — BrunOj Sig. P. /, §32.
• Enn., iv, 4, 36. — Bruno, De Umbr., Int. VII j Eroici, passim.
* Enn., Hi, 6, 4; iv, 3, 21 ; vj, 4, 5.— Bruno, De Umb., Cone, v; Causa, Dial. II j De triplicis min., I, iij.
' Enn., iij, i. — Bruno, De Imjnenso, Cap. x.
° De Imag. Comp., Cap.jj Cap. iv.
' Aristotle ; De Anima, I, 25. — Cicero ; De Natura Deorum, I, 10.
' Windelband, W ; Hist. Phil., tr. Tufts, London, 1896,/. 219.
DISCIPLINE OF BOOKS 25
once.i Plotinus writes of this emotional and mystical union wherein there is absorption in sublime tranquillity, and thought is still.2 There is, he says, "a flight from the alone to the alone." The soul suddenly becomes pure intellect ; but after intellectual discipline. Bruno accepted such experiences as miracles of faith; but held that one may, by strenuous effort and by the study and contempla- tion of Nature, penetrate lower "shades" and reach the rapturous light.^ But such illumination is rational as opposed ito the alogical illumination of the pure mystic*
Through translations, or more directly, Bruno became acquainted with Philo Judaeus, Porphyry, JambHchus, the pseudo-Orpheus, the pseudo-Hermes and other masters of the Alexandrian school. These authors were deeply
^ Porphyrias ; £>e Vita Plotini-
" Enn. ; z/, 3, 17 ; v, 8, II ; vj, 7.
'' Cabala, Dial. I; Eroici, Parte I, Dial. II; Parte II, Dial. II.
* All mystics, whatever their country, period or religion, seem to agree as to the main characteristics of their experience. Self-con- sciousness ceases; the subject of the experience feels himself lifted out of self and out of thought. To some, this beatific vision vi^ould seem to come suddenly ; to others, only after preparation. The condition is less rare than is supposed ; and it is most frequent in people of very high mental endowment and practical common sense. These excellent witnesses all declare that intellectual activity dis- appears and is replaced by a single emotion, a feeling of one-ness with the Absolute. Tennyson frequently experienced something of the kind ; he speaks of it as a " waking trance,'' which would come upon him from boyhood up, when he was alone, and which he could frequently bring on by repeating his own name : " All at once as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, when death was an almost laughable impossibility ; the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life." There would seem to be a far-off approach to this condition experienced by a few excep- tional people during the administration of aniesthetics ; but no psycho- logists, mental pathologists 6;" specialists in hypnotism would seem to have given the subject mubh attention.
26 GIORDANO BRUNO
permeated by the Pythagorean doctrine of the mystical nature of numbers ; and this fascinated Bruno, who was instructed in the mathematics of his time.'^ Jamblichus and other Neo-Platonic writers had a strong drift towards the occult, and with this tendency the Neo-Platonists had profound sympathy. Pico della Mirandola exhibited a craze for the Cabala, — that curious collection of rabbinistic mysticism to which the ninth and thirteenth centuries gave birth. From such sources as Pico, Bruno absorbed what these writers conceived that they knew of the lore of Chaldea, Assyria, Persia, India and Egypt. There was little or no idea of the historical development of thought, and every man dragged in each and every writer who could be supposed to support his own convictions, and would quote them all as of equally authoritative value. Moreover, as in the time of Dante, natural facts and even words were held to contain symbolic significance and to be adumbrations and indices of truth. Bruno did not escape from these intellectual habits, which were universal. He drew much mystical lore from Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa ^ of Nettes- heim (1486-1535). Agrippa's work on the "Vanity of Human Knowledge " led him to take an ironical interest in " asinity." ^