CHAPTER XI

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The Thirty Seals and Seal of Seals
Soon after Bruno's arrival in England appeared " The Explanation of Thirty Seals ^ For Finding Out, Arranging And Memorising All Sciences And Arts. To which Is Added A Seal Of Seals For Comparing All Mental Opera- tions, And Is Conducive In The Highest Degree To Em- bracing Their Reasons," etc. etc.^ Some copies, as already stated, do not contain a preliminary poem, a letter to Castelnau, the famous letter to the Vice Chancellor of Oxford and an Introduction.* The second part of the " Incantation of Circe " is reprinted under the title of " The Art of Recollection." * Then follows " The Explanation of Thirty Seals," and then more important pages, " The Seal of Seals." The " Thirty Seals " is but one more exposition of Mnemonics. The " Seal of Seals," * in two parts, is Neo-Platonic and is very artificially arranged. But it is an important work. Bruno wishes it to be understood that his views must not be taken as absolutely true, but as more conformable with sense and an understanding of the world than is the generally received opinion to which they may seem to be in opposition.
' Or Impressions or Images.
* Triginta SigiUorum ExpHcatio, etc.
' Tocco, F ; Opere Latine di G. B., pp. 63-66.
• Ars Reminiscendi. » Sigillus SigiUorum.
"S
Il6 GIORDANO BRUNO
He makes an advance on the Neo-Platonists in declaring intellect to be always with us, whether we are aware of the fact or not ; ^ there is an evolution from sense upwards, more complex and more perfect as it ascends.* One Prin- ciple alone unfolds itself in all its manifestations, whether these be high or low ; for Essence, Power, Activity, Actua- lity and Possibility are all one in the last resort, as Parme- nides saw.^ The guides of the Intellect are Love, the producer of all things ; Art, which is highest when nearest Nature (for in Nature the Soul of the World * operates) ; Mathematics and True Magic, which reveals the inner nature of things.* Form and Matter do not exhaust themselves in any particular thing; they are endless
Here and there acute observations are to be found ; such as that Alchemists will never arrive at the secret of the Philosopher's Stone, but will make many valuable discove- ries in their attempt, and that Logic is a sharp spur, but emotion is its driving force. And he expresses his abhor- rence of the enthronement of suffering by religion. He is at one with the less cautious of the Psychical Researchers of our own time ; he accepts the levitation of St Thomas Aquinas, second sight, the migration of the soul, and trances, wherein a wise " control " unites with the spirit of the psychic ; ' while he scoffs at vulgar pretenders to magic arts.
» Sig. SigilL, Pars II, § 31. « Ibid., Pars I, §§31-34.
'76ici.,§§33, 34.
* The Middle Ages found in Plato the notion of the world and stars being " animals," and of a Soul of the Universe proceeding from the Creator and enjoying " a never ceasing and rational life." Cfr. Plato, Timtsus ; 30-37. This philosophical doctrine was generally current in Bruno's time.
= Stg.sigia.,p.ii,^^2-s.
" Ibid., p. 11,^7. ' 76«i., 7, §§ 45, 46.
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11
The Ash Wednesday Supper
In the next work, so full of those English experiences with which we have already dealt, Bruno for the first time gave his great original genius free scope in a novel direc- tion. At a time when the old Greek questioning of experi- ence had been well nigh abandoned for centuries, and before the advent of methods of induction, he provided, to borrow Bacon's phrase, " anticipations of Nature rather than reasoned interpretations." ^ These were brilliant, and, if somewhat rash, they have usually turned out to be true. He perceived that to get at truth you must extract it from Nature, wherein it lies imbedded like her own gold. Nature is the one solid ground on which to " build for aye." He was one of the first to break away from the worship of antiquity and the retention of time-mouldered opinion and to open a new era.
The " Cena De Le Ceneri " " The Ash- Wednesday Supper " has five brisk, entertaining dialogues between four interlocutors. Teofilo, who is Bruno under another name, recounts those famous episodes we know of and defends the Nolan's views to Bruno's friend Smith, Trulla and Prudentio, the last named being a representative of narrow-minded, ignorant and obstructive pedantry in general and, in particular, of those Peripatetics who " get heated over what they don't understand — not even the titles of Aristotle's books." ^ As we know, the talk is enHvened with caustic observations on the Aristotelians and social England, for " these animals have no such tender skins that they would mind a trifle of blows yet heavier." * Now,
' Bacon ; Nov. Org., xxvj. ^ Cena, Dial. I.
' Ibid., Proem. Epist.
Il8 GIORDANO BRUNO
as always, he scoffs without reserve at men who object to
changing their opinion simply because they detest novelty,
and he seizes each congenial opportunity of displaying a
patrician and scholarly prejudice against the common herd,
those
"_souls of geese That bear the shape of men.''
Bruno took his opportunity of being among " Italianised Englishmen " to write in his own tongue ; in this, as in much else, being a pioneer ; for he was one of the first to treat of such high matters as philosophy and science in a modern language; nor was the dignified and once con- venient habit of addressing the cultured classes in Latin quite abandoned until two centuries later.
He will give full expression in his native Neapolitan to his fulness of thought and feeling. His style, he determines, shall imitate the painter, " who does not content himself with depicting his main subject, but, in order to fill his canvas and to make art conformable with nature, puts in rocks, mountains, trees, fountains, streams and hillocks. Here, you may find a royal palace, there, a wood ; here a strip of sky with the half of a rising sun, and, scattered about, a bird, a pig, a stag, a donkey, a horse ; but these merely indicated by head, horn or limb ; or ears, even, may suffice ; but at another spot is the whole shape of a beast ; some characteristic movement or expression is given; so that one discerns everything with enhanced interest ; one criticises and, finally, centres one's attention on the main subject." ^ Again, he tells us he will achieve " a full and mighty prose, taking its own time ; coming, not as of clerkly art, but flowing and strong as are the waters of a mighty current."*
With what success does he pursue this aim ? He records
' Cena, Proem. Epist. ' Ibid., Dial. I.
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a feast and compares his work to a banquet.^ Each dish is designed at once to gratify and stimulate the palate for the next. But the courses are served in tumultuous profusion, and his table groans with " miscellaneous feeding." Nor is this all ; the repast is accompanied by a wild, resounding orchestra, which stuns a deUcate ear and makes the brain spin round. For not wind and brass and strings only are employed ; big drum, marrow-bones, cleaver, every conceiv- able instrument is used in turn, and sometimes, which is worse, together. We pass rapidly from key to key without modulation ; we are swept along in a Bacchic rout. Some- times boisterous gaiety drops into coarseness ; but the age was unwilling to omit the zest of obscenity ; it appealed to every reader and, throughout time, wit has flourished on the dung-heap. Bruno alights but he does not dwell there. For him even the Earth is no abiding place ; when he can, he escapes, soars aloft and bursts into rapturous song. The characteristics of " The Supper " are to be found in even richer measure in almost every other work. All are filled with the wealth of a full and impetuous personality.
Aristotle conceived of space as being " the limit of the surrounding body in respect to that which it surrounds." ^ His universe is split into a celestial region above and a terrestrial below — a doctrine very convenient for the localization of Heaven, especially as his upper region is filled with ether and is removed from the strife of the four elements. Above the solid sphere of earth, which lies in the centre of the universe, are those of water, air, fire and ether. On earth the elements are mixed and therefore impure,* and, since everything passes from opposite to opposite, one passes into another. But everything tends
' Cena, Proem. Epist.
» Zeller, E ; Arist., tr. Costelloe and Muirhead, 1897, /, p. 432.
» Aristotle ; Gen. et Corr. II, 3, 330, 6, 21.
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to move to its own proper place ; hence there can be only one world. Like Plato, Aristotle conceived of the stars as being souls of a god-like nature,^ the causes of physical change.^ Such was the accepted faith. Bruno conceived it to be his mission to destroy every article of it which pertained to physical theory. He carried it on with zeal. Not of him as of Aristotle can it be said that he was " moderate to excess."
In the " Supper " Bruno's bent towards natural science bursts forth with all the sudden vigour of an Italian spring. Henceforward the secrets of Nature claim the greater part of his attention. He did not accept the Copernican theory in his youth ; ^ but when he became convinced of its truth he was the first to see beyond it. Liberated from the fetters of the past by the genius of one solitary thinker, he sent a search-light through the heavens and applied Copernicus' theory to the fixed stars. If Nature repeats her operations in planets all of which revolve round the sun, each showing but a variation of one single plan, shall she cease to repeat herself through an unending universe of stars and planets ? The universe is all of a piece ; the principles which obtain on earth are observed throughout space. Here Hes his indisputable merit. He was the first to extend the Coper- nican theory to all the hosts of heaven. He did so with characteristic boldness. It was a marvellous sweep of the scientific imagination, for we must remember that Galileo and Newton had not yet come to supply their confirmatory evidence. He went further: he was soon to declare that the physical universe occupies infinity — a magnificent con- ception which the hardihood of the science of to-day would perhaps hesitate to affirm.
' Aristotle ; De Ccelo, II, 12, 292, a, 18 ; Eth. Nic, VI, 2, 269, a; 30, 6, 14.
' Aristotle ; Meteor, I, 2, 339, a, 21. » Cena, Dial. IV.
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He accepts the animation of the universe ; some creatures are vastly higher, others vastly lower than we are ; but the earth, the planets, the stars, are "celestial animals, more intellectual than we." ■*■ In a universe which is infinite and eternal " the flaming bodies of space are the messengers of God, declaring his excellent glory and majesty. Thus our vision is enlarged to behold the infinite effect of the infinite Cause, and we are taught to seek the divinity not far off but closer to us than we are to ourselves." ^ He perceived that if the discovery of Copernicus had diminished the im- portance of man in the Universe, it had exalted him as a being capable of grasping so large a view. The Aris- totelian view of the universe was based, like the plain man's, on sensible appearance ; but it is the function of the intellect to pass beyond the mere appearances of sense to truth.^ Yet, to do this we must observe Nature and, quitting the Aristotelian definitions of Essence and Attri- bute and the like, we should examine natural phenomena and enquire for the conditions under which events do or do not happen.
Existence and its Cause are alike Infinite, and nothing perishes though everything changes. "This entire globe, this star, not being subject to death, and dissolution and annihilation being impossible anywhere in Nature, from time to time renews itself by changing and altering all its parts." * There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught ; no absolute position in space ; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the universe, and the observer is always at the centre of things. All celestial bodies are no less secure than is the
* Cena, Dial. Ill, 4a Prop, di Nundinio ; cfr. Aristotle ; Eth. Nic., vj, 7, 1 141, a, 34 ; De Coslo, i, 2.
« Ibid., Dial. I. " Ibid. • Ibid., Dial. V.
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Earth; they require nothing to support them.^ There is no absolute Hghtness or weight in things, as Aristotle taught, but (here he almost foreshadows the great dis- covery of Newton) they have a certain impetus towards or away from each other.^ He accepts an ancient scientific conception : there is certainly an ether ; for movement can only take place by direct contact ; but, since the ether is too light to move the heavenly bodies, they must be pro- pelled by the energy of their souls.* The sun moves on its axis ; but this is not all : it varies its position among the stars, of which it is one. He tells us of the discovery of Cusanus that there are spots in the sun,* and he attributes the scintillation of the stars to their being suns which give out their own light ; Venus does not twinkle, because hers is a reflected light.® He observes that the Earth's atmos- phere rotates with her. Much shrewder is the geologic discernment that natural forces are in constant operation and produce very slow but vast changes in land and sea.*
Bacteriologists may choose to find a remarkable anti- cipation of modern discovery in the passage : " It seems to me more than likely, since everything shares in life, that a countless multitude of creatures live not only in us but in all composite things." ' He goes on to say : " when we observe anything to die as we call it we should not so much believe it to be death as change; the mere accidental composition and harmony ceasing, but the things to which they happen remaining immortal whether they be spiritual or material, as we shall show on another occasion." *
1 Cena, Dial. V. " Ibid., Dial. V.
' Ibid., Dial. Ill, 4a Prop, di Nundinio.
* Ibid., 3« Prop, di Nundinio. ' Ibid., la Prop, di Nundinio.
' Ibid., Dial. V. ' Ibid., Dial. Ill, 4a Prop, di Nundinio.
8 Ibid. Cfr. Ovid ; Metam. xv. " In this vast universe nothing perishes ; but it varies and changes its appearance ; and to begin to be something different from what it was before is called birth, and to
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Instinct is not mechanical activity induced from without, but is due " to a sixth sense or reason or pure intellect, working within the creature who manifests it." *
Bruno was keenly alive to the evils which attend com- mercial greed, especially those which follow the conquest and occupation of alien lands.*
In Science, then, he shows himself the precursor of Galileo, Newton and Lyell, and points to paths which recent investigators have pursued.
He could not but recognize in Aristotle one of the most inquiring minds of Antiquity. Passages are to be found in his works wherein he accepts the teaching of the Stagirite and follows him very closely. He felt the force of a thinker who, even in the mutilated form in which he came to the Middle Ages, exercised despotic sway over many generations of highly disciplined minds. But he regarded the Aristotelian Cosmology as wholly reactionary : it had put an end to the advancing speculation commenced by the early Greeks ; and the dead weight of Aristotle's authority kept the world in bondage. The Christian fol- lowers of Aristotle were far more obscurantist than he. So Bruno determined to smite and spare not. In the Cena he commences a battle which occupied most of his energies through the years when he was still at liberty. " Ever a fighter," he attacked the defenders of Aristotle wherever he could find them with whole-hearted zeal. In the Cena he opens up new channels for mental energy and sub- stitutes genuine thought for the paralysis which had come of making everything conform with Aristotle and the Bible. What he finds worst in his opponents is their
cease to be the same thing death. Whereas, perhaps, those things are transferred hither, and these things thither ; yet in the whole all things continue to beJ' 1 Cena, Dial. I. " Ihid.
124 GIORDANO BRUNO
pretentiousness born of their ignorance. It were better to be frank about one's ignorance than to pretend to false knowledge."^
From a perusal of Algazel, the Arabian theologian, he ■ has learned that religions have a practical object : their ordinances are designed for good conduct, general welfare, social needs, peace and the progress of the State.^ Their authority must be recognised ; but there are as many interpretations of the abstract and metaphoric as there are faiths.*
Now such early Fathers of the Christian Church as Tertullian and Augustine had taught that much of Scrip- ture must be regarded as purely allegorical ; * Aquinas had emphasized their doctrine,^ and Dante had expounded in the vernacular that " such speech must accommodate itself to your mind. Scripture condescends to your faculty of comprehension."* But it was a great advance to declare that religions embody a merely practical attitude, and have nothing to do with theoretic truth — an advance on the compromise of William of Ockham and Duns Scotus, who excused the results of their dialectic by asserting that, however much the results of reason may contradict the teachings of the Church, both are equally true. Bruno will have but one final truth and one final reality, and the approach thereto is by the free exercise of intellect.' He foresaw the quarrel between science and religion, but thought, if the Scriptures were interpreted in the Ught of science, this might be avoided.^ Nay, he is persuaded that lofty minds will find support in rehgion more than in any
1 Cena, Dial. I, " Ibid., Dial. IV. » Ibid.
* Tertull.; Adv. Marc. II, 16. — S. Aug. ; In Gen. xvij. ° Aquinas ; Sum. Theol. I, i, 10 ; xix, 11; I^, iv, 7.
' Dante ; Par., IV, 40-48. ' Cfr. Sigillus, I, §33.
* Cena, Dial. IV.
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Other philosophy.^ And, quite ingenuously, he adopts a time-honoured device : he quotes everything from the Scriptures which may suit his purpose and artlessly inter- prets them to his own end.
He forgot that in filling the stars and planets with inhabitants, some better and some worse than ourselves,^ he dealt a blow to the central Christian doctrines of the Fall and Redemption.
He is fully aware that the thinker and the investigator of nature have no easy road to traverse in their aim to overcome contradictions and arrive at the unity which underlies them. " O difficulties to be endured, cries the coward, the feather-head, the shuttlecock, the faint-heart. . . . The task is not impossible though hard. The craven must stand aside. Ordinary, easy tasks are for the common- place and the herd. Rare, heroic and divine men overcome the difSculties of the way and force an immortal palm from necessity. You may fail to reach your goal. Run the race nevertheless. Put forth your strength in so high a business. Strive on with your last breath."^
He is always conscious of the importance of his own labours. "The Nolan has given freedom to the human spirit and made its knowledge free. It was suffocating in the close air of a narrow prison-house, whence, but only through chinks, it gazed at the far-off stars. Its wings were clipped, so that it was unable to cleave the veiling cloud and reach the reality beyond."^ These are big words ; but in sooth Bruno had pierced the stubborn vault of old heaven and enlarged the boundaries of the Universe.
1 Cena, Dial. IV. ^ Ibid., Dial. II. » /jj(^_
126 GIORDANO BRUNO
III
On Cause, Principle, And The One
This is a brilliantly original treatise on Metaphysics. The new view of the Universe carried with it a perception of the inadequacy of scholasticism and the need of a new departure in Philosophy.^ The work consists of five dialogues.^ The first of these has three interlocutors and is intended to excuse and vindicate the strictures on England which had proved distasteful. In the four fol- lowing dialogues, Teofilo expounds the Nolan's philosophy to Gervis, Dickson and a humanist called Polinnio. The dialogues are prefaced by a letter to Castelnau and five short poems, of which three are in Latin and two in Italian. These verses strike that note of lofty thought and feeling which finds fuller expression later on in the work, Bruno springs from the ground and wings skyward like the lark, soaring in ever widening circles, floating his throbbing song into the infinite, but interrupting it now and again by a sudden drop for rest to the homely earth.
Throughout Bruno's life-work we find Plato's doctrine of Ideas and the Neo-Platonic imagery of Emanation becoming less and less operant. In the " Cause " he takes up Aristotelian conceptions and works by means of these philosophic distinctions, as well as through certain theo- logic distinctions, to an independent view. But, while he is obliged to use current terminology and the categories of Aristotle and the schoolmen, he feels that they hamper him in getting his thought out clearly and unmistakably. " Aristotle never tires of distinguishing by reason what
^ Cfr. Cena, Dial. I.
" The second dialogue has been translated by I. & K. Royce in Rand's Modern Classical Philosophies, London, igo8.
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is indivisible in Nature and Truth."* For Aristotle had reduced Actuality into two principles, Matter and Form, and neither can be deduced from the other. Further, he set bounds to the Universe, and, which is worse, perceiving thought to be non-corporeal, he assumed an unmoved mover beyond the ether, at the circumference of the world and unconditioned by it.^ Bruno finds such abstractions as matter, form, potency etc. incapable of yielding a true interpretation of the world.^ He must rise above these logical distinctions, unshackle the mind and give it free play in order that it may grasp the unity to which they point and wherein they must coincide.* He opens up a new path ; but, as is always the case, in doing so, to some extent, he confuses methods and boundaries.
Human knowledge is limited; it is no easy matter to discover the immediate cause and principle of dependent things. And things which are knowable by us are but traces, the universal effect, of the First Principle and Cause. To use an illustration, in contemplating statues which are the works of a sculptor we do not behold the real being of him from whom they proceed, but only its effects.* "No eye can draw near Him who is at once absolute light and deepest obscurity." * Bruno will there- fore leave the Absolute, as transcendent, to revelation and theology and turn himself to the interpretation of Nature, where he shall find the Absolute as immanent. There is a " Soul of the Universe." '
1 Causa, Dial. II.
" Aristotle ; Met, vj, i, 1026, a, 13 ; xij, i, 1096, a, 30 ; De Anim., I, I, 403, b, 7 sqq ; Phys., vhj, 10, 267, b, 6 ; De Casio, I, 9, 279, a, 16 sqq.
» Causa, Dial. III. ' Ibid., Dial. Ill, V.
» Ibid., Dial. II. ' Ibid., Dial. III.
' Ibid., Dial. II. The germ of the notion is to be found in the TimcBUs, 34.
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He has worked himself through the trammels of scho- lastic terminology and subtle but inadequate distinctions ; but they are mental currency and there is no other way than to employ them. So he begins by distinguishing between Principle and Cause. A Principle is that which lies within the constitution of a thing and is necessary to its being, while the cause of a thing is external to it, yet "concurs" with it as necessary to its production. Now the Schoolmen, following Aristotle, employed certain useful distinctions in Causality. Bruno deals, therefore, with Cause as Efificient, the source of change ; Formal, that which makes a thing what it is, and Final, purpose to be attained. In the Efficient cause of the Universe he discovers the " Universal Mind, yvhich is the inmost, most real and characteristic faculty and potential aspect of the Universal Soul." It is not fully expressed in any particular thing, and, so far, is extrinsic ; yet it also operates within the thing, and is therefore also intrinsic. The Formal Cause is that " ideal reason " without which the agent could not operate any more than an artist can work without the idea of his work in his mind. The Final Cause of the Universe is its "perfection, wherein, in different parts of matter, all the forms actually exist. This end so delights and satisfies the universal intellect that it never wearies in giving birth to all kinds of forms in matter." ^ But while the " ideal reason," as presupposed in the actual, is a Cause, as actualized, it is a Principle. We find that, in this regard. Principle and Cause coincide. So far we have been dealing with Forms (another ancient distinction):^ we have also to deal with the Matter in which they are realized, using
^ Causa, Dial. II. Aristotle asserted the ultimate cause of move- ment to be a final cause. {Met. xij, 7, 1072, a, 25.)
" Mop^ii, ?'5o!, ISta, figure, species, appearance, are almost synonyms. For Bruno, Form is an "impression" of the Ineffable, whether idea or material configuration.
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the term as that out of which anything may come to be formed.
Of course there is not to be found in Bruno any sharp distinction between the " thinking thing " and the " extended thing." Until Descartes made that distinction, thinkers were content, with the child and with primitive man, to take body and soul as a unity in action. In less mature years, he had indeed been led away by ancient philosophers and Avicebron, and had regarded Matter as the sole sub- stance of things. " But on deeper thought and taking other facts into consideration, we must distinguish between form and material substance."^ The Soul of the Universe must be as the individual soul and, to use our old image, may be Hkened to a pilot guiding a vessel,^ who is none the less within that which he guides. In our world Matter and Form are never separate. Virgil knew this when he wrote that the world is interpenetrated by Spirit and that Mind moves Mass.* Solomon declares the same thing when he says " The Spirit of the Lord filleth the world : and that which containeth all things hath knowledge of the voice." * " If Spirit, Soul, Life, is in all things, it is the form of all things, directing and governing matter."* Forms are for ever changing; what has been, in the vicissitude of things, becomes nothing ; there must be something, then, beyond the varying forms of spirit; there must also be something beyond varying material forms.* There must be a Soul of the Universe which gives it unity. We must conclude that this exists wholly in the whole and in every part. To understand how this may be, let us borrow a metaphor from Plotinus : " It is as a voice which is wholly
1 Dial. III. For the Scholastics the Soul was a Form. ^ Cfr. Aristotle ; De Anima, II, j; Plot. ; Enn., iv, 3 ; 7, ' Virgil ; ^n., VI, 724-7. * Book of Wisdom, I, 7.
6 Causa, Dial. II. * Ibid., Dial. II, III.
I
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throughout the whole of a room and in every part of it; it is wholly heard by all. . . . Could it fill the whole I universe it would still be all in all."^
It became a necessity with the early mediaeval thinkers to posit substance. In a nugget of gold, for example, there is yellowness, hardness, etc. ; but these qualities are to be found elsewhere also. They exist in unity in the nugget, and the inexplicable fact that they do so may be indica- cated by the word substance. Later on, in order to support the doctrine of transubstantiation, they went further and 1 attributed to substance an underlying, enduring reality Iwhich " supports" its accidents. To substance, unalter- able and ever the same with itself, attributes were ascribed. Bruno usually employs and works through the earlier notion of substance, the " I know not what " of Locke, which gives unity .^
We allow substantive value to brute matter and also to spirit. Let us consider material substrate, that invisible something which gives one-ness to all visible forms.
It exists not merely in actual being, but also as the possi- bility of being. All that is possible and all that is actual must be referred to a principle which is both possibility and substance. Everything that exists is possible, but power or potency has caused it to be. So matter is more than an existing substrate ; it is potentiality and possibihty and actuality in undistinguished unity. Aristotle held the in- finite to be potential only, not actual.
Now in what relation does the substrate of brute matter stand to Spirit or Form in general? The spiritual and material worlds can be distinguished ; but there can be no distinction without an underlying identity; so we are
' Causa, Dial. II. — Cjr. Plotinus ; Enn., VI, iv. 12. " Cfr. Sensini, T ; Sul pensiero filosofico di G.B., 1907 ; Mclntyre, op. cit, p. 165.
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bound to acknowledge that, in the last resort, spirit and brute-matter, Form wherever it occurs and Matter in all its forms, imply one Subject or Substrate or Substance. Nor is this enough: Power, Possibility and Actuality, whether material or spiritual, must also be One.^ Nature is one and many, sending all forth from her womb in endless flux.^
Bruno comes near asking the question : What is left of existent matter when stripped of all sensuous quality ? But he never did so. One little step and he had anticipated Berkeley's advance, made a century and a half later. He would have asserted sensuous experience to be the minimum of being. He perceives however that there is no real divorce between the individual mind and that Universe in which it dwells and whereby it is. " That judgment of Heraclitus shall not sound badly which says all things are an unity which, through mutability possesses all things in itself, and since all forms are in it, all definitions come together therein, and all contradictions are enunciations of its truth." " The universe is one, infinite, unalterable. One is absolute possibility, act, thing, being, the greatest and the best, which cannot be comprehended, to which limits and com- pletion cannot be set, which, for that reason, is infinite and unending and consequently established. It does not move its place, for there is no whither to which it can transfer itself, since it is all. It does not come into being, for there is no other to desire or wait for it. It does not decay, for it can change with no other, all things being itself. It cannot increase or grow less, for it is infinite. It adds and takes nothing to itself, for the infinite has no proportional parts." 3
1 Causa, Dial. III. " Ibid., Dial. IV.
^ Ibid., Dial. V, beginning. Aristotle had got so far as to assert the eternity of the world ; he claims to have been the first to do so (De Ccelo, i, 10, 279, b, 12). But he also declared the world to be a complete, finite whole (Phys. iij).
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j Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists, while apprehending the i one-ness of the Universe, had divorced unity from reality ' and unwarrantably asserted the independent being of a mere abstraction. Bruno advanced far beyond this ; nor, although Schelling found in the Nolan's thought a kinship with his own, was Bruno's Absolute a mere Indifferenz- punkt, a " blank featureless Identity." " We rejoice " he writes " in the unity of the sensible {in uno sensibile) but most of all in that which comprehends in itself all sensi- bility ; in one knowledge which comprehends all cognitions, in one power of apprehension which embraces all that can possibly be apprehended, in one being which completes everything ; most of all, in the unity which is the whole itself." ^ It is " absolute simplicity " — not because it is ab- stract, not because no differences exist within its bosom, but because all divisions are healed in the one single com- prehensive, harmonious intuition which is God. In other i words Bruno arrives at One Reality, which moves and knows itself in its many aspects and is that Whole in and through which the manifold exists. All things in process are nothing apart from the Whole. "The highest good, ^the highest perfection, the highest blessedness consists in the unity which enmeshes the all." ^
Bruno's thought reappears in Spinoza, whom he directly influenced ; * but Bruno's speculations are less rigid, statical and systematic than Spinoza's. Bruno never loosens his hold on the notion of Living Spirit. He stands by his master, Cusanus; philosophy points for both thinkers to the union of all distinctions and contraries in that which
» Causa, Dial. V, end. ' Ibid.
' Spinoza, B ; Tractaius De Deo et Homine ; (Euvres, tr. et annoUes par C. Appuhn, t. 1, 1907. — Sigwart, C. von ; Spinoza's Tractat v. Goti etc., Gotha, 1866 ; Ibid.j T. v. Gott, Titbingen, 1870. — Avenarius, R ; Die Beiden Ersten Phasen d. Sp. Pantheismus, Leipzig, 1868.
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transcends and includes them and which is no mere collec- tion of parts or mere unity of parts. Both men were on the road towards the Metaphysic of a great English thinker of our own day : ^ they had the root-idea of an all-including Absolute, wherein are all centres of experience and all differences as such, but not merely as such : in and for the Whole they are also transmuted and harmonized.
Whatever else the Absolute may be we know that, as transcendent, it unites all contraries in one perfect cogni- tion ; as immanent it is the Universal Soul, unfolding the eternal meaning, infinite and without beginning or end. Living out our share of the divine meaning and being actually one with the Infinite and Eternal, we need not fear death. Bruno flatters himself that he has " taken away the dread of Orcus and greedy Charon, which spoils the sweet of life." 2
Such are the conclusions of Reason, let Theology say what it will. But " discreet theologians will always admit natural reasoning, whithersoever it may lead, provided it does not dispute divine authority but submits to it." ^ Indeed, from the early days when Scotus Erigena wrote, there had been thinkers who had no desire to oppose dogma if they were permitted to interpret it by their own metaphysical conclusions ; nor had the Church thought it wise to interfere with them seriously. As has been said, from the less coura- geous days of William of Ockham and Duns Scotus, philo- sophy had evaded the interference of the Church and secured some independence in philosophic thinking by a dodge. Truth was held to be of two kinds, philosophic and theologic, which might be in opposition to one another. Bruno be- longed to the bolder line of Erigena.
' Bradley, F. H ; Appearance and Reality. Cfr. Book II, chaps, xiij-xv. 2 Causa, Proem. Epist. ' Ibid., Dial. IV.
134 GIORDANO BRUNO
It has been generally supposed that Bruno, following Cusanus, had some dim perception of the possibiUties of a
\ dialectic method when he wrote : " Profound magic is it to draw the contrary out after having discovered the point of union." ^ Hegel in his review of Bruno's philosophy found in this " a great word." ^ Schelling, too, discovered in Bruno a spirit akin to his own in his attempt to deduce the Universe logically from the " point of union." ^ But it is very doubtful whether he had first-hand acquaintance with the Causa. Bruno's point of view seems to me to be closer to that of the thinker who is to day in fashion ; for he is of the intuitive rather than of the logical, abstract school.
' Bergson writes : " Concepts, as we shall show elsewhere, generally go in couples and represent two contraries. There is hardly any concrete reality which cannot be observed from two opposing standpoints, which cannot consequently be subsumed under two antagonistic concepts. Hence a thesis and an antithesis which we endeavour in vain to reconcile logically, for the very simple reason that it is impos- sible, with concepts and observations taken from outside points of view, to make a thing. But from the object, seized by intuition, we pass easily in many cases to the two con- trary concepts ; and, as in that way thesis and antithesis can be seen to spring from reahty, we grasp at the same time how it is that the two are opposed and how they are reconciled." *
Bruno writes : " It is one and the same series whereby Nature descends to the production of things and the intel- lect ascends to the cognition of them ; and in both unity
' Causa, Dial. V.
' Hegel, G. W. F ; Werke, Vorlesungen u. d. Gesch. d. Phil., B. XV, pp. 224-44.
' Schelling, F. W. J. von ; Bruno, oder U. d. gOtt, u. natural. Prinzip. d. Dinge.
Bergson, H ; Introd. to Metaphysics, tr. Hulme, 1913, />. 34.
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proceedeth to unity, through the multitude of means " ^ — an emphatic statement of the essential identity of the process of thought with the transformations of Nature.
Bruno's philosophy of the " animation " of the Universe — his view that it was no mere " collection " but " infusion," "interpenetration" — readily lent itself to doctrines of "secret sympathy " or " magical properties " — that is to say undis- covered natural principles. Hence he thought very highly of that half-quack, half-genius, Aureol Theophrast Para- celsus,^ who audaciously burned Galen and Avicenna in his lecture-room and commenced a new era by studying Chemical Therapeutics. That worthy had at least directly questioned Nature and experimented on her, and Bruno was desirous of a Natural Philosophy above all things. Because Ramus neglected to attack Aristotle from the side of Physics, he regarded him as nothing but a logical trifler. For the same reason he despised Patrizzi and denied that he had an intimate acquaintance with the philosopher he attacked. Blind folk cannot open the eyes of the blind. So Ramus is for him a " French archpedant " and Patrizzi " another filth of an Italian pedant " ; but for Telesio he has nothing but praise.^
Following the Italian Platonists, he shows a great inte- rest in all kinds of out of the way, unverified or " occult " phenomena.* " I do not contemn those who in the various departments of physic set to work magically by applying roots, hanging stones on, and murmuring incantations, if the rigor of theologians will allow me to speak in a purely
1 Causa, Dial. V.
" Ibid., Dial. III. In Sigillus Bruno calls Paracelsus " chief author among physicians."
' Ibid., Dial. III. Cfr. Tocco, F ; Le fonti piu recenti della /. del B., Acad, dei Lincei, Ser. Rend. V, vol. i, p. 530.J
* Cfr. Sig. Sigill., II, § 5.— J. B. N. Opera, Vol. Ill, c. Tocco and Vitelli, 1891, De Magia «fc.— Troilo, E, La filos. di G. B, Torino, 1907.
136 GIORDANO BRUNO
natural sense. . . . That physician who shall cure me is better than others who kill or torment me."^ In fact he was ready to employ those forces which he did not under- stand, just as we employ electricity. He accepted much of the miraculous as due to undiscovered natural causes. He hints at this when he writes : " I am not now considering that not without reason do necromantists hope to do much with the bones of the dead, believing that these retain some vital activity." ^
The dialogue of the Causa is natural even at its highest flights. Sometimes Bruno thinks to give his readers breath- ing time by digressions, which, however, are anything but restful. Every now and then, to press a point, he calls every auxiliary he can think of into his service ; every kind of sacred writing, the lore of strange peoples and of far- distant ages is drawn upon ; any utterance, sacred or profane, in which he can detect a resemblance to his own views, is pounced upon and cited as authority. For is there not a measure of the truth in all things ? Without any discrimination he heaps together Mystics and Magi, the Cabala and the Latin poets. Wonder-workers and wise men are referred to as of equal value. The effect on the modern reader is comic. Goldsmith, one thinks, must have come across him when he put " Sanchoniathon, Manetho, Berosus and Ocellus Lucanus " into the mouth of the vendor of the gross of green spectacles to Moses Primrose.
IV
The Infinite Universe And Its Worlds
This work begins with a dedicatory letter to Castelnau which contains much self-revelation — words which he had not dared to write to one who knew him so well had they
1 Causa, Dial. III. ' Ibid.
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been other than strictly sincere. " I wish," he writes, " the world to possess the glorious fruit of my labour, to awaken the soul and open the understanding of those who are deprived of that light which, most assuredly, is not mine own invention. Should I be in error, I do not believe I wilfully go wrong. And in speaking and writing as I do I am not contending through the desire of being victorious ; for I deem every kind of renown and conquest God's foe, vile and without a particle of honour in it, if it be not the truth; but, for love of true wisdom and in the effort to reflect aright, I weary, I rack, I torment myself." ^
He will give his reasons for holding that the Universe endures, ever one and itself, in eternal flux throughout infinite space. " From which contemplation, if we apply the mind, we shall neither be dismayed by incidence of pain and dread nor exult in pleasure and hope ; we shall pursue the path of right conduct, shall be large-minded observers of puerile thoughts and shall behold greater matters than gods whom the vulgar adore ; we shall secure clear-sighted contemplation of the course of nature, which is written in ourselves, and observe, with even tenor, those divine laws which are graven in our hearts." The same nature is to be found in the skies as here ; so we may quit ourselves " of the vain desire and stupid anxiety and hanker- ing after distant good; for it is already at hand and with us." " By means of this knowledge we shall surely attain that well-being which we so vainly seek elsewhere." ^
The consideration of the Universe as the manifestation of God will, he considers, set the human spirit free. " Here is the philosophy which opens the senses, contents the soul, enlarges the mind and brings true blessedness to man. . . . For deeply considering the Being and Substance in which we are fixed, we find there is no such thing as death, not ' Infinito, Proem. Epist. ' Ibid.
138 GIORDANO BRUNO
for US alone, but for the true substance. Substance never diminishes but changes, and this throughout infinite space. Since, in the vicissitudes of particular being, we are all subject to the best Efficient Cause, we ought not to believe, think or hope otherwise than that everything, which is wholly derived from the good, is good, through good and to good. The contrary can only be held by one who understands nothing but what is immediately before him : the beauty of an edifice is not to be judged from its smallest
part but is most apparent to him who views the
whole and the relation of part to part.''^ Good and evil are contraries which are, in fact, eternally reconciled in the eternal core of being — the " That Which intrinsically brings to pass"^ the whole of reality, "wherein we live in an appointed order." Contraries imply that which transcends and holds them in harmonious unity. God is above Good and Evil, but our highest conception of him is as Good.*
" The Divine one extols his own glory and sets forth the greatness of his sway, not in one sun, but in uncountable suns ; not in one earth, but in worlds without end." *
After the letter to Castelnau come three sonnets, and then all the new intellectual tendencies of the era are brought to a head and the directions which science was to follow are pointed out in five dialogues. Bruno habitually introduces real people into his dialogues as interlocutors, and, in the first four of the Infinito, Filoteo expounds the Nolan philo- sophy to Girolamo Fracastoro, the humanist,^ and two other persons, one of whom is the indispensable pedant. In the
1 Infinito, Proem. Episl. 2 Causa,, Dial. II.
' Cfr. Be Immenso, VIII, vij, ix, x ; Lampas Triginta Siatu- arum, Op. Lat, iij, pp. 21, 108 ; Eroici, passim. For modern treat- ment of the conception see Taylor, Prof. A. E ; Problem of Conduct, London, 1901, cap. viij. « Infinito, Proem. Epist.
^ For Fracastoro, see Greswell, W. P ; Memoirs of Politianus etc., 1805.
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fifth dialogue, Alberico Gentile, the great jurist,^ whom he had met here in England, is introduced. The entire work has an unwonted didactic tone ; yet the dialogues are easy and spontaneous. I have attempted furnishing some feeble indication of Bruno as a poet by a free translation of the third sonnet in the Introduction.
" Rising on wing secure, with burning heart, What fate may scare me, smiling at the tomb. Bursting all bonds and scorning gates of doom. Whence few are chosen for such lofty part ? I soar beyond the mortal years, and start For regions where grim irons cast no gloom Nor adamant restrains. Forth from the womb Of darkness, free and passionate, I dart.
I dread no barrier of banished spheres ; I cleave the sky, and other suns behold ; Celestial worlds innumerable I see ;
One left, another company appears ; My pinion fails not, and my heart is bold To journey on through all infinity." ^
He frequently quotes passages from Lucretius through- out this work. The Latin poet exercised a powerful in- fluence over Bruno, as the upholder of atomism and of the infinity of space. The notion of a plurality of worlds was very old, dating from Anaximander, but the paramount and paralysing authority of Aristotle and the Church put an end to all such speculations.
Bruno opens his campaign by distinguishing between certain functions of cognition. " The service done by sensa- tion is to excite the reason into action, to indict, to point out the way, to impart and to witness." The sensible
' Author of De Jure Belli, not written at this period.
* Its author would seem to have approved of this sonnet, for he paraphrased it in the Latin poem on Immensity (De immenso, I, i). It is an imitation of two sonnets by Tansillo, which open : " Amor m'impenna I'ale," and " Poi che spiegat'ho."
140 GIORDANO BRUNO
object " is only a small part of Truth ; it is as a mirror " ; therein lies no certitude. The reports of sense may be brought into harmony by discursive thought — the " under- standing" of Kant — which Bruno calls "reason." Still higher is intellect, which directs principles and draws from them their conclusions. Highest is a fourth faculty, " mind," which is " the proper and living form of truth," and is none other than direct insight or intuition or immediate appre- hension, beholding its contents in an immediate compre- hensive whole.'^ We shall find in later works that this crown of enquiry is an exp>erience in which we share, in our feeble measure, that of the Godhead, and he allows the rare experiences of Plotinus and the Mystics to be of the same essential nature.^
His temerity is unbounded ; he strikes out a perilous a priori path to his conclusions. God's power, he says, is infinite ; therefore his works also must be infinite ; for the agent would be imperfect if his works did not fulfil his power ; infinite power, then, must have infinite effect. Our imagination, too, which is a shadow of the real, forbids any- thing but infinity ; but we must remember that, in that infinitj' as it is for itself, all particulars are one : " it is no more an infinite man than it is an infinite ass." * " Ass " carries many impUcations for Bruno, as we shall see later on.
More convincing, perhaps, are other arguments which may be quickly summarized. Our sense - perception is limited and changes with change of position ; but we can appeal to reason, which shows all the observations of sense to be entirely relative, as are constructions based on them.
• Infinito, Dial. I, beginning.
' Eroici, P. /, Dial. II, after Canz. xj and xv ; P. II, Dial. I, vj after Canz. vj ; Dial. IV, after Canz. 71. ' Infinito, Dial. II, end.
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Here is where I stand (my now is what I immediately experience). Position and motion in space (and time) must be conceived as relative to any point which we choose to take for the purpose of comparison. " In the Universe there is no centre and no circumference ; but the centre is every- where, and every part is outside some other part." ^ In all this may we not detect some glimmering, primitive per- ception, some feeble germ of an idea which has been developed by Lorentz and others into the revolutionary " Principle of Relativity " ? But Bruno lived too early, science was too little developed for him to pursue his thought ; he thinks that, although not the Transcendent Absolute, he can rise above sense and its interpretations and grasp the real conditions in which the World-Soul expe- riences its vicissitudes. So far as sense goes, it reveals spacial continuity, and so it should be interpreted. All posi- tions and all shapes are contained in space and bounded by space, and if that which contains has no limit, so will it prove with the contained : if space be infinite, so is matter.^ Bruno's certitude as to the Infinity of the Universe was by no means accepted by his younger contemporaries Galileo and Kepler. The latter, who refers to him by name, inclined strongly towards the opposite view, perhaps for religious reasons ; ^ the judicious Galileo wrote : " Reason and my mental powers do not enable me to conceive of either finitudg^r infinitude." * " No one has proved the world to be finite and determinate or infinite and in- determinate." ^
1 Infinito, Dial. V. " Ibid., Dial. I. Cfr. De Immenso, IV, i.
' Kepler, Johann ; Op. Omnia, ed. C. Frisch, vj, pp. 137, 8. Burton writes in his Anatomy of Melancholy : "Kepler will by no means admit of Brunus' infinite worlds."
* Galileo, G ; Lettera a F. Ingoli.
^ Ibid., Dial, dei massimi sistemi. — Cfr. Tocco, Le Op. Lat. di G. B., 1889, p. 380.
142 GIORDANO BRUNO
Bruno grasped the general principle of the relativity of knowledge. In this work he demonstrates the relativity of sense ; in the Spaccio he will point out the relativity of morals ; in De Minima he will demonstrate that there is no absolute measure for either time or space. But the asser- tion of the relativity of knowledge is obviously an assertion which claims to be absolutely true knowledge. Bruno goes further than such a claim, although, while it is an assured, it is by no means a modest one. The contradictions which are involved in conceptual time and space were felt even then. But Bruno unhesitatingly grasped one horn of the dilemma : for him the other horn did not exist. " In infinity, thought out, there is no measure, no proportion, no compre- hensible number,'' he says.'^ Yet he has just argued from mathematical conceptions to physical reality. Space is for him an actually boundless continuity, an endless field for the motion of an actually endless number of solar systems. It is filled with the ether.* He writes of the " corporeal infinite . . . the simulacrum of the First Principle " ^ as actual, existent being. He distinguishes between the con- taining and the contained, between space as room to move in, the condition for motion, and the ether which occupies room;*„ but, in positing an infinite ether asj occupying infinite space, he clearly asserts absolute position in space, or in the language of the generation preceding our own, that space is absolute. This question is under dispute.^ He perceives that continuity is quite a different thing from
* Infiniio, Dial. II, III ; De Imm., II, viij.
2 Ibid., Dial. I. ' Ibid., Cfr. De Imm. IV, i.
* Ibid., Dial. I. Cfr. De Imm. I, vij, t'. 3, 4 ; 10-13 and schol.
^ Cfr. Russell, the Hon. B ; Position in Time and Space, Mind, 1901 ; Foundations of Geometry, chaps, iij A, iv ; Campbell, N; Common Sense of Relativity, Phil. Mag, April igii ; Poincar^, H ; Derniires Pensees, Chap. II, L'espace et le temps, p. 35 sqq. Paris, 1913. Bruno contradicts himself. See pp. 121, 141.
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series;! but does not perceive that one cannot think of an infinite (as opposed to a merely indefinite) series [without thinking of it as a sum, and an infinite sum is self-contra- dictory. It is true that of late years Dedekind and others have defined an Infinite as a systematic whole, the internal structure of which completely and consistently expresses a single self-consistent principle ; ^ but Modern Metaphysics, in trying to apply' this analysis of the nature of Infinity,* has fallen into an ancient, hopeless blunder — that of explaining Metaphysics by Mathematics instead of confining it to its legitimate task of criticizing the presup- positions of all the sciences, including Mathematics. It is a blunder from which Bruno is not free; it crops up from time to time, and is very conspicuous in one of his last work^.? Further, the question does not occur to Bruno, Are the characters of the members of the series wholly determined by the principle of endlessness to which they are referred? If not, the answer would be fatal to his claim. The grave perplexities which are involved in terms or qualities and relations, like those already referred to, were, happily for the Nolan cosmology, reserved to a later age.
For the present, too, Lorentz's Principle of Relativity would appear to have banished the ether to the museum of scientific curiosities. But it may only be suffering tempo- rary eclipse.^
Not content then with merely stating that we can extend our knowledge by taking Nature to be of one pattern, inde- finitely repeated with variations, he asserts and reasserts that Nature repeats herself infinitely throughout infinite
' Infinito, Dial. I.
* Dedekind ; Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen. ' Cfr. ' Royce, Josiah ; The World and the Individual, Ser. II, Appendix. * Cfr. De Monade.
° Campbell, N. op. cit.; Poincard, op. cit., c. vij.
144 GIORDANO BRUNO
space. " There are countless suns and an infinity of planets which circle round their suns as our seven planets circle round our sun." ^ Particles are incessantly shot out through space from each of these worlds to other worlds and from one body to another, bodies being a composition of these. ^
He tells us that each heavenly body, being animate, moves by its own intimate energy. The moon is an earth, and our earth, seen from the moon, would appear a luminous disc, as the moon does to us. " It is not unreasonable to suppose that there are planets which circle round other suns, not perceived by reason of great distance or small mass or not much (reflecting) water on their surface." He speaks of the World-Soul as an " animal, the all-sustainer of worlds which are souls and contain souls, some of which are higher, some lower than we ; and there must be plants and minerals in the worlds of space like those of our earth or different. We can attribute life to worlds with better reason than we can to our own earth." *
He had the merit of perceiving that comets have a regular course and are bodies not altogether different from the planets.* Some of his speculations are very remarkable; .\they read like intuitive forecasts of modern discovery. Of such are : The sun's heat is produced by similar causes to those which produce heat on earth ; light emanates from the atmosphere immediately surrounding the sun ; ^ the sun has its own motion ; some of the suns may revolve, as iplanets, round others ; there are suns which cannot be seen by reason of their great distance ; ® probably the heavenly
1 Infinito, Dial. III. " Ibid., Dial. II, IV.
» Ibid., Dial. Ill, IV.
* Ibid., Dial. IV. In fact he thought they revolved round the sun.
" He supposes solar heat to radiate outwards only : the sun is a relatively cold, dark body.
' Infinito, Dial. Ill,
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bodies decay and give place, in time, to new formations ; ^ their particles are in constant motion ; ^ and the fixed stars are really in motion.'
He accounts for the phenomenon of cohesion by the pre- sence of water.*
Possibly the difficulty of accounting for the phenomena of light, heat and meteors was one of the reasons which in- duced Bruno to adopt the theory of indecomposable atoms or " prime bodies " of which all worlds are really made up. These atoms are always in incessant movement, passing from body to body and from world to world ; they are for ever entering or leaving some combination of themselves.^ This reads almost Hke a dim prophecy of the discovery of radio-activity; and the disappearance of the ether, if not temporary, will necessitate a very serious modification of the undulatory theory of light.
A great part of the Infinito is given over to vigorous attack on Aristotle's limited conceptions of the Universe. Bruno's arguments are acute, and many of them are de- structive; but they sound strange to-day: the work of Galileo and Newton brushed them aside. Two of them may serve for examples of the remainder. Aristotle had imagined spheres of water, air and fire surrounding the earth.® Bruno points out that there is no evidence for the existence of these spheres. On the contrary, the evidence is all the other way ; the elements are all mixed up together ; there is air in the earth ; hot and cold springs prove the presence of water in the rocks ; fire leaps forth from the mountains.' An argument employed by Aristotle against infinity was
1 Infinito, Proem. Episi. ' Ibid., Dial. II.
3 Ibid., Dial. Ill, V. ' Ibid., Dial. III.
6 Ibid , Dial. Ill, IV. ' Aristotle ; De Ccelo.
' The centre of the earth is the hottest part of it, for being an animal, this must be so to sustain its vitality {De Imm. Ill, v.).
K
146 GIORDANO BRUNO
that heavy bodies move down ; light bodies, up ; therefore there would be infinite lightness and infinite heaviness in an infinite universe. Bruno shows that the phenomena of upward and downward motion are determined by relations of situation between bodies ; what appears to us as an upward motion towards the moon would, to an inhabitant of the moon, appear a fall towards his own globe. ^ All this is acutely argued, but Bruno's cosmology is less reasoned construction than leaps towards truth, many of them reach- ing it. The most powerfully logical mind may wander far from truth : by innate disposition or education or habit or prejudice it is apt to incline towards wrong paths. It was Bruno's strength that, in the main, he had an instinct as to the right direction. And it is to such an instinct that success is most likely to fall. He was ahead of his time in emphasizing the need of observation and experiment, abstraction and comparison. " Why turn to vain fancies when there is experience itself to teach us ? " ^
He retains a lively recollection of the Calvinists of Geneva and other protestants he had come across. He has a word to say on the doctrine of Predestination and its moral effect. In God, since to make is the same as to be made, free-will and necessity are the same ; but for man they are partial, yet valid aspects. Theology is right in maintaining that the will is free, for man is not the same as God, though supported in His immanence. Men misconceive of absolute truth. Antecedent determination is not basal truth. Prac- tically to will and to be free are one and the same, and man possesses a measure of freedom.* " The rude and ignorant are wholly unable to understand election, dignity and the merits of justice, whence predestination, filling them with assurance or desperation, they become very vile. Whiles,
1 Infinito, Dial. II. « Ibid., Dial. III.
' Ibid., Dial. I.
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certain corrupters of laws, faith and religion, wishing to appear wise, have infected so many folk by the conclusions they draw from such like premises that they become more barbarous and wicked than they were before, despisers of good works and tightly bound to all vice and wickedness." True theologians condemn such evil teaching, allowing instructed and disciplined minds only " to entertain true propositions, from which we do not infer other than the truth of nature and the excellence of its Author ; which we do not set before the populace, but only before the wise who may be able to understand our reasoning. Hence men not less learned than religious have never obstructed philo- sophic freedom, and true, politic and experienced thinkers have supported religions ; for both the one and the other know that faith is necessary for the organisation of rude folk, who require government, and that ratiocination is for the thoughtful who can govern themselves and others." ^
Later on, Bruno set too much of his philosophy before one who was not wise or " able to understand our reason- ing," with the result that he learned what sort of notion Pope and Princes of the Church " not less learned that religious " had of " philosophic freedom." ^
1 Infinito, Dial. I.
' Bruno, whose works had never become popular in England or on the continent and had become scarce in Catholic countries on account of their being on the Index Expurgatorius, impressed John Toland, the English Deist, as being the forerunner of free thinkers, and he translated the Introductory Letter of the Infinito and wrote an account of the book. Coll. of sev. pieces of T., 1726, v. I.
148 GIORDANO BRUNO
V
The Expulsion Of The Triumphant Beast, Pro- posed By Jove, Effected By The Council, Revealed By Mercury, Related By Sophia, Heard By Saulino, And Set Down By The Nolan; Divided Into Three Dialogues, Each Of Three Parts.
In an " Explanatory Letter " to Sidney, Bruno tells him that this work is introductory to another, which shall be " a treatise on moral philosophy according to the inner light, which the divine intellectual sun has illuminated and illumi- nates in me." He wishes the present work to be read in a broad, generous, uncarping spirit : the author must not be taken "too assertively"; he introduces interlocutors who " speak for themselves and report the judgements of many others, equally full of their own convictions, and expressing them with fervour and zeal, and, emphatically, in their own character." ^
The book recalls Lucian's " Parliament of the Gods," ^ convened to expel deities introduced by the barbarians; and probably it was suggested by this classic as well as by a work of Niccolo Franco.* It is crammed with fragments from Bruno's vast reading and is a proof of the strength of his memory. He quotes from Ariosto, Tasso and Tansillo, and it is clear that he knew his Dante. The Dialogue is mainly between Sophia (wisdom) and Saulino, some kinsman on his mother's side ; but Mercury makes an appearance also. The general form
' Spaccio, Epist. Esplic. " OeSiy 'EicKXijo-^a.
' Dial, nel quale sannio con la suida della virtH va in cielo etc., 1539. The author was hanged for a pasquinade by Pius V in 1563. Cfr. Fiorentino ; op. cit., p. 44.
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is allegorical : It is related how " repentant Jove " ^ " after having enjoyed youth for so many years, gave himself up to wild ramblings and took up all his time in the affairs of arms and love. But now, being tamed, he begins to decline in his wantonness and vices and to lose the diver- sions and entertainments of youth and manhood." He " begins to advance in years and admits none unto his council but such as have snowy heads and furrowed brows " ; those who have learned to be thoughtful, prudent, continent, forgetful of affronts, and have acquired general, practical wisdom.^ " Jove stands for each one of us : " ' for every man is ultimate reality individualised as a living spirit, which rules over a microcosm; and man passes through a period of sensual enjoyment and passion into years that bring the philosophic mind. But Jove also represents the changes that take place in collective humanity: he is the Zeitgeist. He swears a great oath that virtue shall reign in heaven. The goddess of love proposes a ball to celebrate the victory of the Gods over the Titans ; but Jove resolves to hold a grand Council of the Gods instead. These Olympian deities are our good and evil qualities personified, Jupiter seats himself on his throne and announces his determination to purge the sky of its beastly impurities. The Constellations, such as the Bear, the Dragon, the Lion, the Hydra, all represent brutal vices and must be replaced by those virtues which are their contraries. It should not be for- gotten that the revolving heavens were universally believed to co-operate in determining the character and lives of men ; * nor that Bruno had achieved an enlarged conception
1 Spaccio, Epist. Esplic. " Ibid., Dial. I, i.
' Ibid., Epist. Esplic.
• The belief survived so long as the present century, even if now extinct. The late learned Richard Garnett wrote in its support.
15b GIORDANO BRUNO
of the inhabitants of space and believed them, with the men of his time, to be a society of spirits.
The assembled Gods ratify Jove's decision, and the sky is forthwith purged of its " beasts " and ancient signs, one by one. Each is replaced, after much discussion, by the symbol of some quality conducive to good behaviour. By an adroit stroke, Momus, the god of ridicule, is made to act as jester to the Olympian Court, and Bruno is thus able to get out a good deal not to be taken " too asser- tively." Sometimes, too, he attracts attention to novel thought by Momus' over-emphasis or exaggeration. Momus is for ever jesting : he is the spirit that denies ; the critical, earnest spirit speaking through the mask of mockery; there is something in him of Lucian and Voltaire, of Ibsen and Shaw, even ; he is at once the spirit of humour and of dissatisfaction ; he is an inner illumination, observing what progress is being made in reform and finding relief in bitter jest.^
A tumultuous throng of ideas surges to and fro to find expression ; hence the allegory is not systematic or always well sustained. Bruno's real conviction has to be extracted from a hundred odd, fantastic and dispersed imaginations. For his ideas rush forth like the winds escaped from the cave of iEolus. It were interesting could we know how Sidney, whose " wit was the measure of congruitie," took the work dedicated to him.
Allied vices are grouped together in the same constella- tion and are replaced by virtues also more or less related to each other and the contraries of the vices to be expelled ; ■ for " the beginning, middle and end of the birth, growth and perfection of whatever we behold is from contraries, by contraries and to contraries; and wheresoever con- trariety is, there is action and reaction ; there is motion, * Spaccio, Epist. Esplic.
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diversity, multitude and order ; there are degrees, succes- sion and vicissitude." ^ Man, in his social relationship and activity may pass from the practice of this or that vice to the pursuit of its opposed virtue.
Bruno formulates no ethical system ; he is dependent on no theologic command or sanction ; he takes man just as he finds him in social life, and, in the main, he deals with moral qualities from the point of view of the needs of society and active life. The distinction between active and contem- plative life was emphasized by the theologians whom Bruno had studied.^ Truth, the divine object, is reserved for later treatment ; though the distinction between con- templative and active qualities is by no means strictly observed here. The Renaissance turned the eye away from heaven and hell to this life on earth ; it concentrated its attention on Man. But, in Bruno's time, natural reason and feeling were deemed to be ethically valueless.^ He was the first to ignore Christian tradition and discuss moral conduct as a natural phenomenon, valuing it for its useful- ness in binding men together in a social whole.
The relation of the debates of the Gods in reconstructing the heavens is a " grotesque and overpowering farrago " of learning, allegory, metaphor, rhetoric and rollicking, reckless satiric humour,* much of the latter being derived, but by no means copied, from Rabelais. The style is characteristically Brunian : it did not captivate many contemporary readers and is not likely to hold those of our own restless, impatient age. Those who are by nature Borrowites alone appreciate the flavour of Borrow ; chiefly Shavians that of Shaw ;
1 Spaccio, Dial. I, i.
^ E.g., Aquinas, Tj Summa Th., ij, 2; Q. clxxix, A, 2. C/n Dante; Purg. xxvij ; Conv.,iv, 17.
' Spaventa, B: Saggi di Cntica, Napoli, 1867, vol. I, p. 143.
' See the excellent remarks in J. Owen's Skeptics of the It. Renaiss., 1893, under G. B.
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Rabelais would bore most readers but for his indecorum, and no man could ever batter himself into the enjoyment of those peculiar turns of thought and treatment which Bruno takes : he must be born a Brunian. The thinker's torren- tial rush of ideas and words swerves hither and thither ; his metaphors are often fantastic, whimsical, extravagant; he scorns moderation ; he knows not the meaning of reserve. Not merely does he play on a thought with all possible variations, but he splashes words about with the rich enjoy- ment of an urchin in a bath. That he piles words on words, all of similar meaning, is sometimes a trick of emphasis, sometimes because he is aware of the many facets presented by every fact, and desires to deliver himself of a complete meaning. He never learned the lesson of simple directness taught by Boccaccio, or tried to imitate the limpid flow of Tasso's prose. Worse still, he fell into a fashionable vice of his time. Translating the classics directed men's atten- tion to the power lying latent in every word; they dis- covered the richness of modern speech, and some of them fell into the vulgar view that a sonorous and pompous display of words is impressive, even when they are of almost identical meaning. Bruno marshalled whole batta- lions of ineffective synonyms and was happy when he had decorated an idea with " verbal ruffles and frills." He would seem to have known that his style was apt to sprawl.^ The Gods, after much humorous debate concerning each holder of a constellation, who typifies certain human vices, eject him and seat corresponding virtues in his place. The Little Bear, occupying the fixed centre of the revolving sky, has stood for Falsity, Hypocrisy and allied vices ; let Truth, which follows Reality, take his place and preside. "The act of the Divine Knowledge is the substance of the being of all things, and, therefore, all things . . . not like ours, 1 Spaccio, III, ij.
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which follows things ; but is before all things and is every- thing." ^ Since our Knowledge is imperfect, then, we must be careful how we give liberty to the vulgar to read what they please and form their own conclusion therefrom. Certain " books, any more than theological books, should not be allowed to be read by ignorant men, who would thereby become wicked, and receive evil instruction from them." ^
All shams, all that is pernicious to society, all enslaving dogmas and whatever fetters the mind ; the " altar of superstition," ignorance, violence, conspiracy, cruelty etc., are in turn banished, and prudence, courage, law, diligence, humanity are to reign in their stead. The proper organiza- tion and conduct of society being the object of morals, no laws which have not the perfecting of human intercourse as their object should be acknowledged.' The test of a supposed virtue is how it works. He would turn chastity, for example, into a " gallant, humane, affable; and hospit- able continence ; " " of herself she is neither virtue nor vice, nor contains any goodness, dignity or merit . . . when she yields to any urgent reason, she is called continence, and has the being of virtue, as partaking of such a fortitude and contempt of pleasure, which is not vain and useless, but improves human society and the honest satisfaction of others." * Filled with the spirit of the Renaissance, though possessed by a moral earnestness which scarcely belonged to it, a " citizen and intimate of the world ; son of father Sol and mother Earth " ^ as he calls himself, quoting Tasso, he was all for quaffing the deepest draughts of Life.
He perceived that moral practice is not under unalterably fixed law : it is relative. Like Plato he did not think social sexual arrangements perfect : perchance Jove may " restore
1 Spaccio, I, Hi. ^ Ibid., II, ij.
" Ibid., II, i. ' Ibid., Ill, ij.
' Ibid., Epist. Esplic.
154 GIORDANO BRUNO
that natural law by which every man is allowed to have as many wives as he can maintain and impregnate " ; and he supports this bold suggestion by the fallacious argument of increasing population.^ " We call those virtues which by a certain trick and custom are so called and believed, though their effects and fruits are condemned by all sense and natural reason ; such as open knavery and folly, the malignity of usurping laws and of possessors of tneuin and tuum; the strongest being the most rightful possessor, and he being the most worthy who is most solicitous, most industrious, and the first occupant of those gifts and parts of the earth which Nature, and consequently God, gives to all indifferently." ^ We almost might be reading modern propaganda !
Here and there he drops in a Philosophical sentence. " There is an eternal Principle or Substance which is truly the man and no accident derived from Composition. This is the deity, the hero, the particular God, the intelligence in, from and through whom different Complexes and bodies are formed and form themselves, so that it continually re- appears in different species, names and fortunes." *
The Soul, which is the eternal basis and meaning of souls, does not change and cannot become subject to dissolution : but in body and experience there is nothing but vicissitude.* " God, considered absolutely, has nothing to do with us, but only as he communicates himself by the effects of Nature, to which he is more nearly allied than Nature itself; so that if he is not Nature itself, certainly he is the Nature of Nature and the Soul of the World, if he is not the very soul itself."* Bruno, if he does not go so far as a certain modern philo-
> Spaccio, Dial. I, i. ^ Ibid., Dial. Ill, j.
» Ibid., Epist. Esplic. « Ibid., Epist. Esplic ; I, i. jj
6 Ibid., Ill, ij.
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sopher, seeks reality not in the Idea, not in static abstrac- tions, but in the ever changing fulness of Life.^
Presently Bruno shall "build the soaring spires That sing his soul"; now "of earth he draws Though blind to her, by spelling of her laws His purest fires." He trusts to Nature and all she may reveal ; he thinks that, if God is in Nature, man will find himself at home in natural morals. He would have us guide our conduct by common sense. But the world "cannot subsist without law and religion." ^ " All those who are capable of judging will agree that the laws are good inasmuch as they have prac- tice for their scope ; and those are always the best that give the best encouragement to the best actions. For all laws have been given to us, or invented by men, chiefly for the convenience of human life : and because some do not see the fruit of their merits in this life, good and evil, rewards and punishments in another life are promised and laid before their eyes according to their deeds." ^
Unhappily, the success of Theodosius in uniting Chris- tianity and the State resulted in a general conviction that social order was bound up with religious government. This belief, not inoperant even now, although more than fifteen centuries have elapsed, was deeply rooted in the mind of the Middle Ages, was little affected by the Revival of Learning, and strongly influenced Bruno's thought. It was an important factor in those " wars of religion " which he had witnessed; for days when the state had need of strength, unification and organised direction, favoured the very human tendency of pope, protestant prophet or secular monarch towards absolutism, and supported this or the other well-defined form of Christianity within the area
' Cfr. Bergson. Introduction to Metaphysic, ir. Hulme, 1913, p. 64.
' Spaccio, II, j. ' Ibtd., I, iii.
156 GIORDANO BRUNO
of rule, to the forcible suppression of all competing forms of faith. Bruno valued Christianity above all religious systems, because it proclaimed the doctrine of love : it was a " religion, which began, increased and maintained itself with the raising of the dead, the healing of the sick and self-sacrifice for others." Yet, in some respects, he found Paganism superior. It was more tolerant, nearer to Nature and he thought it had a profounder metaphysical basis. " Those wise men knew that God was in things and that the divinity lay hid in Nature, shining and dis- covering itself differently in different subjects, and made them partakers of itself."^ "From whence, with magical and divine rites, they mounted by the same ladder of Nature to the very height of the Divinity which descended to the meanest and lowest things by the communication of itself. But what I think most deplorable is that I see some senseless and foolish idolaters, who no more imitate the excellency of the Egyptian worship than the shadow partakes of the nobility of the body, who look for Divinity, without any manner of reason, in the excrements of dead and inanimate things. . . . And what is worse than all this, they triumph for joy to see their own foolish rites in so much reputation, and those of others vanished and annulled." ^ " Divinity hath, is, and will be present in divers subjects, however mortal they may be," and it is a mistake to suppose that the wise Egyptians worshipped " crocodiles, cocks, onions and turnips " ; they only adored " the Divinity " therein ; "you ought not to count this an evil, for animals and plants are the living effects of Nature, which Nature, you must know, is no other than God in things." The Greeks,^ too, "did not worship Jupiter as 1 Spaccio, III, ij. 2 ij^^^^ jjj^ ^y
' Sometimes Bruno refers to Christians when he speaks of Greeks. Probably there is a veiled allusion to the nature of the Divinity of Christ in this passage.
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if he had been the Divinity, but they worshipped the Divinity as if it had been in Jupiter " ; for all the Gods were once really men, and " seeing excellent majesty, justice and magnanimity in a man, they presumed there was a magnanimous just and bountiful God within him . . . or at least the Divinity which communicated itself in such a manner, by the name of Jupiter." * Bruno's religion was metaphysical and mystical ; he was so strongly imbued with Neo-Platonic thought that he found himself in sympathy with all kinds of faith when philosophically inter- preted. But Catholic Christianity, which owed so much to Neo-Platonising theologians in the fifth and sixth centuries and to the systematizing of Alexandrian speculations by the schoolmen, was further endeared to him by early edu- cation and habit ; the authority of Rome had, until lately, been recognised in the political constitution and laws of the great Western peoples whom it had welded into some sort of union ; so it had a strong claim on him as a formal faith; he was always willing to hand over to theology the contemplation of the Divinity as transcending the infinite universe,^ if he might make an independent study of Nature, and freedom were allowed him to form his own conclusions therefrom. But, as the field of know- ledge is enlarged, the demesne of Theology is apt to be encroached on. The incompatibility of systematic know- ledge with dogma is progressively discernible in Bruno's writings. Yet he thought adjustment within the Church was possible, if it would give a twist to its doctrines and accept synthetic development. As a Catholic, he pours scorn on irreconcilable Reformers with their new-fangled dogmas and hide-bound forms. Especially does he re- probate those who hold to salvation by faith, despise works, and think " doing good and abstaining from evil ' Spaccio, III, a. ' Causa, Dial. IV.
158 GIORDANO BRUNO
does not render them acceptable to God ; but only hoping and believing according to their catechism."^ "Among ten kinds of such teachers there is not to be found one who has not formed to himself a Catechism ready to be published to the world, if not published already, approv- ing no other institution but his own, finding in all others something to be considered, disapproved or doubted of; besides that the greater part of them disagree with them- selves, blotting out to-day what they had written yester- day." ^ Bruno was all for tolerance, but he perceived a menace to society in every man, however ill-qualified he might be, setting himself up as the sole possessor of truth and endeavouring to coerce his fellows into sub- mission to his own opinion.
But if he despises Protestant sectaries, he is no less severe on the defects of his own Church. He objects to ecclesiastical authority setting up and enforcing rigid dogmas which it either does not in the least understand or which it misinterprets. The practical end of Religion should not be burdened with subtle and valueless theological specula- tions. Bruno is always as faithful to truth as the needle to the pole ; heedless of personal advantage and even of personal safety. He was expecting to go back at once with Castelnau to a country which was suppressing all freedom in religious thought and speech when he put into the mouth of Momus a scoff which is not hard to unriddle : the fate of the centaur Chiron is under debate — a being, he says, " in which one Person is made up of two Natures, and two substances concur in one hypostatical union. ' Momus, Momus,' answered Jupiter, ' the mystery of this thing is great and occult and you cannot comprehend it ; and therefore you ought only to believe it as a thing too high and great for you .... you should not desire to 1 Spaccio, I, iij. ' Ibid., II, i.
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know more than is necessary to be known ; and believe me, 'tis not necessary to know this . . . Chiron being a most just man .... healing the sick, teaching the way how to mount up to the stars. I judge him' (says Jove) 'most worthy, because in this heavenly Temple, at the altar where he assists, there is no other priest but himself, whom you see with a beast in his hand ready to be offered up and a libation-bottle hanging at his girdle : and because an altar,
a chapel and an oratory are necessary therefore
let him eternally continue, if Fate has not otherwise decreed.'"^ Bruno held to Hfe, and never fails to show how he disliked the morbid, pessimistic side of Christianity ; its asceticism, self-depreciation and glorification of death and suffering. Saulino exclaims, chiefly hitting at Protestant exaggeration, however : " our professors of a sham religion cry That we ought to glory in I don't know what Cabalistic tragedy."^ Bruno had already spoken in the Sigillus of crude sacramental doctrines, and he returns to the subject here. New evangelists have "found better bread, better flesh and wine than that of the Saone, Candy or Nola." ^ A few years later he. declared that he could not discover the Divine splendour in " I know not what kind of material." * If the Catholic Church ceased to insist on incomprehensible and self-contradictory dogma, the law of love in its bosom might yet unite the world in common human aspiration and effort.^ They are hateful persons who cast bones of contention before an ignorant world. Probably, too, he shared the prejudice of Montaigne : " the best and soundest side is that which maintains the ancient religion and govern- ment." But it must be purged of superstition and " those
' Spaccio, III, iij. ^ Ibid., II, j. — Cfr. De Monade, cap. vj.
2 lUd., Ill, i.
* De Immenso, I, i. — Cfr. Tocco, F ; N. Antologia, S. iv, Sept., 1902. ° Artie, adv. Math., Dedicatio.
l6o GIORDANO BRUNO
priests of Diana " should be less ready to exalt their office and mysterious function.^ Bruno was a " Modernist " of the i6th century; he thought the Catholic position needed revision and re-statement; those qualified to think freely should be free to do so.
He believes neither in a universal deluge nor in the recent creation of man.^ He cannot credit that the various races of men should have descended from a single pair ; if so, it must have been by some miracle like that by which Jonah had a marvellous voyage — " a handsome way of transporting men by some blast of wind or some passage of whales, that have swallowed persons in one country and gone to spue them alive in other parts and upon other continents."* Such biblical miracles are absurd, as are those of the saints, and much doctrine taught by the Church. Momus declares that Orion, " who can walk upon the waves of the sea without sinking or wetting his feet ; and consequently can likewise do a great many other pretty tricks," shall be sent among men, " and let us order him to teach them everything which he pleases, making them believe black is white and that human understanding, when it thinks it sees best, is mere blindness, and that what appears to Reason good, excellent and choice is base wicked and extremely evil ; that Nature is a whorish baggage, that Natural Law is knavery, that Nature and the Divinity cannot concur to the same good end ; that the justice of the one is not subordinate to the justice of the other, but are things as contrary to one another as hght is to darkness; that the entire Divinity is Mother of the Greeks, and is like a hard stepmother to all other genera- tions, whence none can be acceptable to the Gods but by becoming Greeks. For the greatest Russian or Poltroon who lived in Greece, as being allied to the generation of 1 Spaccio, III, iij. ^ Ibid., Ill, ij. a jjj^^
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the Gods, is incomparably better than the most just and magnanimous who could come from Rome . . . however preferable in manners, sciences, valour, judgment, beauty and authority; because these are natural gifts, and there- fore despised by the Gods, and left to those who are not capable of greater privileges; that is, those supernatural ones which the Divinity gives, such as dancing on the waters, making lobsters sing ballads, cripples cut capers, and moles see without spectacles, and such other fine gallantries without number.^ Let them persuade withal, that all philosophy, all contemplation and all magic, which may make them like us, is nothing but bagatelle ; that all heroic acts are nothing but knight-errantry ; that ignorance is the finest science in the world, because it is acquired without labour and pains, and keeps the mind free from melancholy." ^ One can hardly wonder, after reading this, that Bruno should request not to be taken " too assertively " and inform his reader that the personages in the book speak sincerely, but in their own proper character.* None the less, he exhibits considerable courage in such free criticism of what was generally held sacrosanct in all Christian countries. That he could do so in England, and especially attack Protestantism in a land which had at least broken away from Rome, testifies to the liberty she enjoyed.
Bruno satirizes the belief in particular interventions of Providence ; * and holds it " foolish, unworthy, profane and injurious to imagine that the Gods seek reverence, fear, love, worship and respect from men for any other good advan- tage or end than that of men themselves, being most glorious
1 All these wonders may be found paralleled in those of the Acta Sanctorum, quas coll. J. Bollandus, cont. 1734-1894. The Greeks are, of course, narrow Christians, while the Romans stand for the enlightened nations of antiquity and for enlightenment generally.
« Spaccio, III, iij.
' Ibid., Epist. Esplic. • Ibid., I, iij.
L
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in themselves and not capable of receiving any glory from without." 1
" Give a blow," says Jupiter, " to all prophets, diviners, fortune-tellers and prognosticators, and all such as traverse and run about to spoil my progress." ^ He expresses con- tempt for " altars and statues erected to certain persons whom I am ashamed to name, because they are worse than our satyrs, fauns and other half-beasts — viler than even the crocodiles of Egypt." ^ Bruno has a fling, in turn, at current Christianity, Judaism (for some reason or other he detested Jews),* and Mohammedanism : all are useful and valid, but contain distortions of philosophic truth.
He has no beHef in a Garden of Eden or " sweet Age of Gold." He foreshadows our modern knowledge of the evolution of humanity : " in the Golden Age men were not more virtuous than the beasts at present are virtuous ; and perhaps they were more stupid than many of the beasts." * But he derived this view from Lucretius.
Nor was this his sole indebtedness to the great Latin poet. He adopted the theory of " atoms " — imperishable physical identities — which Lucretius drew through Epicurus from Leucippus and Democritus. And the consideration of physical individuals must have led him on to ponder, if he had not done so before, on the problem of individual souls. Is there atomic personality ? From his first works to his last, he insists on the One Soul of the World, which is the unfolding of the Absolute to itself. But, in and for the Divine mind, there are centres of experience. " In every man, in each individual a world, a universe re- gards itself." ^ Is each centre of experience a permanent, inexhaustible energy ? Are souls immortal, even as is
1 Spaccio, II, i. 2 ii){d_^ n, iij.
2 Ibid., I, i. 4 lUd., Ill, ij, iij: Cabala, Dial. I. 6 Ibid., Ill, i. ' Ibid., Epist. Esplic,
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that Absolute, for which they are and which includes them?
It is not always easy or even possible to get at Bruno's meaning : he often designedly masks it in crooked allegory and veiled allusion. And it is quite in his manner to indulge in " blazing paradox " to excite reflection, or even as cryptic suggestion of his own thought. He writes to Sidney about the possibility of Transmigration, as held by Pythagoras.^ It may be that he found in that teaching merely a close approximation towards the deepest principle of his own philosophy — the permanence of the One in vicissitude, the Essence animating its different receptacles. Be it under- stood clearly that Bruno is never wearied of proclaiming, in various ways, the one-ness of the Divine Energy as Sustainer and Embracer of the infinite " communications " of itself to itself, and the one-ness of all experience in the Divine Intui- tion. But did he also accept the separate immortality of individual souls ?
Seven years later, when asked about Transmigration, he told his judges : " I have held and hold souls to be immortal and that they are substantiae subsistentiae, that is intellective souls." He uses a scholastic term which means any special sort of existence taken on by substance. But the state- ment is vague; he had not said whether he understood substance in its earlier or in its later meaning ; the phrase might cover the immortality of one single substance which is found differentiated, or it might be taken as an acceptance of the immortality of individual souls. He goes on : " Speak- ing as a Catholic, they do not pass from body to body, but go to Paradise, Purgatory or Hell. But I have reasoned deeply, and, speaking as a philosopher, since the soul is not found without body and yet is not body, it may be in one body or in another, and pass from body to body. This, if * Spaccio, Epist. Esplic.
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it be not true, seems at least likely, according to the opinion of Pythagoras." ^ The answer is a riddle, which may be unravelled in more than one way. Here, in the " Expul- sion," he suggests that " If not to be believed, it is gravely to be pondered " whether a vile life " be not disposed of by fatal justice, interwoven in a prison-house suited to its failure or crime, with organs and instruments suitable for such a workman or craftsman." And again : " Let us sup- plicate the Divinity to bestow happy geniuses upon us in our transfusion, passage or metempsychosis ; since, how- ever inexorable he be, we must attend him with wishes, to be either preserved in our present state or to enter into a better, or a like, or one but a little worse ... he that is favoured by the Gods must obtain this by means of good wishes and good actions." ^
We may be sure that Bruno did not accept Pythagorean doctrine in a crude and vulgar form. He employs it, just as he employs Catholic dogma, not by way of dodge, but in the sincere belief that various adumbrations of Truth must be adapted to vari®us grades of illumination. The result is that his own inner meaning is lost in obscurity. Pytha- goreanism is far from removing that " dread of Orcus and greedy Charon " which he had promised to take away.' But, co-operating with his Neo-Platonism and belief in hidden " sympathies " in Nature, such facts as the re- appearance of ancestral qualities, vital similarities in widely differing species, and innate tendencies would naturally lead him on to vague speculation in order to explain them.*
' Doc. xij. Cfr. Ovid; Metam., I. xv.
' Spaccio, Epist. Esplic. Compare page 179.
' Causa, Proem. Epist.
* As pointed out by Bergson, the present is pregnant, as it were, with the past ; is its momentum. Some scientific men accept Butler's and Hering's suggestions and talk about that contradiction in terms " unconscious memory." Even to-day we have not quite set ourselves free from vague " explanations " and metaphors.
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But so shrewd a thinker as Bruno must have perceived that, if in some way individual centres of experience persist in the Soul of the World, they can hardly be said to do so for themselves. If they endure as centres of energy they do not retain a true memory-synthesis : recurrent habits in life are not equivalent to self-conscious recollection. In- dividual immortality loses its value if the soul has to pass through the waters of forgetfulness.^ But that " to be " is " to experience " was not explicitly recognised by Bruno or anyone before Berkeley wrote ; and it is quite possible that he entertained the idea of centres of energy persisting within the Absolute, and that these bear effects, though not precise memories, of past incarnations. The question of immortal souls will recur in connection with the great Latin poems.
The fire, the intemperate vigour of his Southern nature made him rejoice in the " Bacchic rout " of life and nature. He is for ever insisting on the universality and value of vicissitude. The Spaccio commences : " If there were no change in bodies, no variety in matter and no vicissitude in beings, there would be nothing agreeable, nothing good or nothing pleasant. . . . We see that pleasure and satisfac- tion consist in nothing else but a certain passage, progress or motion from one state to another. 'Tis certain that the state of hunger is irksome and unpleasant ; and satiety is a state of sadness and dulness : but what is pleasing in any of these is a change from one to another. . • . Labour pleases us only a short time after the state of rest : and we find no pleasure in rest, but only a few minutes after the state of weariness." *
Political dissimulation was a prevailing vice in the i6th century. Bruno as an Ambassador's " gentleman " must
' Cjr. Dante ; Pmg. xxvj, 106-8 ; xxxi. ' Spaccio, Dial. I.
I 66 GIORDANO BRUNO
have had ample opportunity for observing it at work. He attacks it with vigour : " You see what a pass the world is reduced to by a custom which is become a proverb That Governors are not obliged to keep faith." ^ Nevertheless, " even the Gods are forced to use it at times. For some- times Prudence hides the truth with her skirts in order to escape blame and outrage."^
He thinks the hunting of game cruel: a sport worthy only of butchers ; " the hunting-dog should be sent to Corsica or England."' The Cup must be given to the " chief tippler in Germany, where gluttony is regarded as heroic virtue and drunkenness as a quality of heaven." The affected dignity of potentates in their dress and baubles of rank is satirized, but with a weaker hand than is usual with our author.*
This work, although addressed to Sidney, would, like the others published in England, seem to have fallen flat. In 1633, however, a masque, the general idea and details of which were based on the Spaccio, was played before Charles I and Henrietta Maria ; * and the Spaccio may have influenced Spenser in writing the " Two Cantoes of Muta- bihtie."* Interest in Bruno was manifested by a little group of English deists at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and one of these, supposed to be W. Morehead, translated the Dialogues but not the Dedicatory Letter of the Spaccio. This translation keeps so closely to the original and renders its involved style and redundant language so exactly that I have availed myself of it in the
* Spaccio, III, ij. ' Ibid., II, iij. » Ibid., Ill, ij, ' Ibid., Ill, iij.
' Carew, Thos ; Coelum BriUanicum. Cff. Elton, O ; Modern Studies : G. B. in England, 1907, p. 34.
* Whittaker, T ; Essays and Notices, 1895 ; Elton, O ; G. B. in England, Quarterly R., Oct. 1902.
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quotations given. It was a general belief that the Pope was the expelled Beast,^ an opinion shared by Leibnitz ! ^
VI
The Cabala Of The Steed Like Unto Pegasus, With The Addition Of The Ass Of Cyllene
This work is really a supplement to the Spaccio. Both books show what liberty of thought and speech had already established itself in England. Lucian, the inimitable satir- ist, gave the ancient world the adventures of an ass,^ and Apuleius wrote that strange romance, " The Golden Ass." * After the revival of learning, Machiavelli called one of his poems by the same title, and we have seen that the ass held a distinguished position in a work of Bruno's youth. In the Spaccio, the space left by the Great Bear, hard by that occu- pied by Truth, and also the space left by Eridanus remain vacant. Bruno proceeds to fill the one with Donkeydom in the abstract and the other with Donkeydom in the concrete.
The classical scholar will recall how the winged steed, Pegasus, flew up to heaven,^ served Zeus with his thunder- bolts,^ and struck forth a fountain with his hoofs.' Thereby the Italian poet, Boiardo, connects Pegasus with the home of the Muses. Bruno probably had all this, as well as Balaam's ass, in his mind when he wrote this work ; ^ also
' Cfr. Schoppius ad Ritterhaus in Berti, op. cit., appendix ; Bayle, P., Dictionnaire, sub Bruno.
' Letter to Lacroze, quoted by Mclntyre, op. cit., p. 346. Bacon, Burton and Budgell just mention Bruno.
' Aoiixios ^ 6vis. * Done into English, 1566.
^ ApoUodorus ; ed. Heyne, //, iij.
' Hesiod; Theogonia, 281.
' Pausanias, GrcBcia descript., II, 31 ; IX, 31.
• Cfr. Cabala, Dial. II, i.
I 68 GIORDANO BRUNO
Cusanus' "Learned Ignorance," which commends ardent
search for truth while encouraging a critical spirit and
demonstrating the impossibility of reaching truth as it really
is. Cornelius Agrippa's work "On the uncertainty and
vanity of all knowledge " was very popular.^ The lighter
touches in the Cabala Del Cavallo Pegaseo probably owe
something to the perusal of Erasmus' "Praise of Folly";
and part of its title is taken from the Jewish Cabala, a
ftiedley, in part, of Jewish, Neo-Platonic and Pythagorean
mysticism. The work is gravely dedicated to a mythical
personage, the Bishop of Casamarciano, an obscure little
place in Italy, and commences with a satiric letter. This
is followed by a sonnet in praise of the ass: "Oh, holy
donkeydom, holy ignorance, holy foolishness and pious
devotion, who alone can so perfect the heart that human
capacity and study may not improve it! Thou dost not
employ the weary painstaking of any art or discovery, or of
study of the skies, where thou has built thy home. Of what
worth is study to us, o prying folk, to desire knowledge of
the works of Nature, or if the stars are indeed earth, fire
and sea? Holy donkeydom does not concern itself with
such matters, but with folded hand and on bended knee,
awaits what God shall send. Nothing endures, save the
fruit of eternal repose, which God only gives when we are
buried ! " An address to the reader comes next, in the
form of a pulpit exhortation : we must strive with all our
might to become asses, if we are not yet in that state of
grace, and persevere in our asinity if we have reached it :
" so shall ye find yourselves written in the Book of Life,
obtain grace in the Church Militant and glory in that
Church Triumphant wherein God dwells and reigns for
ever and ever. So be it ! " "A very pious sonnet " follows
on " the Ass and its foal."
' It was translated into English by James Sanford in 1569.
WORKS PRINTED IN LONDON 1 69
Bruno has now given the motif of the work. The dialogues which follow are filled with bitter irony and merciless satire, interspersed with very serious thought. No one wielded a more incisive lash or knew better how to apply it. Sometimes he becomes unduly violent; but often, when he is girding with sardonic grin, it changes into a laughing smile or takes on noble severity. His object is to destroy the notion that ignorance and super- stitious belief and fear are requisite in true religion ; he would away with the pretentious simplicity of pietists and the empty mysticism, stupidity, and obstinacy which render religion synonymous with obscurantism. He shows that Scripture has been misused to glorify ignorance ; as if the world, that wonderful open book, were not also the work of God. He lashes the hypocrite. But ignorance is by no means confined to the Church. It is to be found among philosophers, whether they be Pyrrhonists or Aristotelians, and also among such as pin their blind faith on authority. In fact, the Ass is to be found every- where; in the church, the cloister, the law-courts, the schools: Asinity is as widespread as is the Soul of the World. But true religion and true philosophy, must not be confounded with foolish superstition or supine ignorance.
There are three short dialogues. In the first Saulino reappears and holds lively talk with Sebasto and Coribante, a pedant. In the second dialogue, which is in three parts, a fresh interlocutor is introduced, one Onorio, who like the heroes of Lucian and Apuleius, has been an ass and endured much throughout many transformations. Once he was in the service of a gardener and was wont to be loaded with vegetables for Thebes' market; he dragged charcoal after this ; then he became a steed of the Pegasus type and served the gods in that happy region where is the fountain which gushed forth when the hoof of the
170 GIORDANO BRUNO
steed struck earth and which Apollo consecrated to the Muses. In the course of his metempsychoses he has occupied the body of Aristotle himself! It is splendid fooling ; and all that may impede the progress of human knowledge is treated with withering scorn. The third dialogue has only a few lines. A messenger from Sebasto informs Saulino that his master's wife is dead; he must act as her executor, and, therefore, further discussion is to be postponed; moreover, Coribante has the gout and Onorio has gone away to take the waters.
Bruno recurs again and again to Pythagoreanism.
" See. Do you hold that the soul of man is substantially the same as that of beasts and that the only difference is one of form ? Onor. That of man is the same in its specific and generic essence with that of flies, oysters, plants, and everything which lives, or has a soul : it is not matter, which it possesses in a more or less lively way — there is a thorough permeation of spirit in itself. Now, the aforesaid Spirit, by fate or providence, order or chance, unites itself to this or that kind of body, and, by reason of difference in structure or of members, reaches different grades and perfections of faculty and act. Hence, that spirit or soul, which was in the spider, and possessed its industry, claws and members of a certain number, mass and shape, united with human seed, acquires another intelligence, instruments, postures and deeds." ^ Just before, Onorio has declared that, from experience and memory, he knows the doctrine of Pythagoras and the Druids as to metempsychosis to be most assuredly true.
It will be noticed that, in the quotation given above, Bruno has observed the importance of organs to function. In another interesting digression he points out the im- portant part played by the hand in giving man his position
ginning.
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among animals ; his domination is due less to intelligence than to that " organ of organs." * He is quite confident that mental functioning is dependent on physical structure and physical operations. "Could the form of a snake change; could its head mould itself into human form, its belly swell and grow into the shape of the human breast, its tongue enlarge, shoulders spread out and arms and hands shoot forth from it, and its tail bud into legs, it would understand, breathe, speak, work and walk about like a man, and seem to be so because it would have become no other than a man." '
The Cabala repeats the central philosophical theory to be found in nearly all his works : " I say the efficient universal intelligence is one in all; is that which moves and makes intelligence ; but there is, moreover, a particular intelligence by which they are moved, illuminated and com- prehend, and this is multiplied according to the number of individuals. Even as the power of seeing is multiplied according to the number of eyes, all stimulated and illumi- nated by fire, light or a sun, so is the intellectual power multiplied according to the number of subjects participating in soul, illuminated by a supreme intellectual sun." *
First and foremost Bruno is an idealist ; but he is ham- pered by the notion of spirit operating on something that is not quite spirit. It is his great merit, as Hoffding points out, that he is an idealist who is determined to unite his idealism with a scientific conception of the world process.*
Cyllene is a mountain in simple-minded Arcadia : hence the title of the little adjunct to the Cabala — the " Ass 01 Cyllene." An ass, wishing to enter a Pythagorean academy,
1 Cabala, Dial. II, i, at the beginning, " Ibid.
' Ibid., Dial. I, near end.
* Hoffding, H ; Hist. Mod, Phil., tr. Meyer, 1900, vol. i, p. 139.
172 GIORDANO BRUNO
finds that he has to observe the difficult regulation of re- maining silent for the space of two years. Mercury takes pity on the unhappy beast, bestows on him the gift of elo- quence and transforms him into a dogmatic pedant. " Be at home with all, scamper about with all, be the brother of all, identify yourself with them, rule them, be themselves." ^ The innocent beast is no such ass as not to want to know something. " Tell me, sir," he asks, " and help me a little. Which holds the first rank, a man who has become a donkey or a donkey transmogrified into a man ? "
Six years later Bruno informed his readers that he had suppressed the Ass of Cyllene, " for it annoyed the vulgar, and, on account of its sinister flavour, did not please the wise." * Probably the Cabala was withdrawn as well as the supplement.
VII The Transports Of Intrepid Souls
The full significance and subtle associations of the title Gli Eroici Furori cannot be adequately rendered.^
Plato discovered in the passion of Greek friendship an imperfect image of divine, ideal beauty and goodness, and taught that it may be converted into a spur to our highest desire. Through the Alexandrian thinkers, who mingled Platonic doctrines with Oriental mysticism, this thought reached the Middle Ages. United with the Provengal senti- ment of chivalrous devotion to a chosen lady, it influenced Dante, and transfigured love occupied the great poet in his two most important works.* Taking a more fleshly form in
• A sin. Cellen.
• G. B ; Z)e imaginum, Signorum et idearum composiiione, Frcf., 1 591
' Patrizzi, Bruno's contemporary, wrote " Delia diversitk de' furori poetici." * Divina Commedia ; Vita Nuova.
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Petrarch, the sentiment found a lower level, and by the sixteenth century it had furnished a vast crowd of poetasters and dilettanti with fashionable affectations. Yet, in the fifteenth century, Benivieni, Pico and others, and, at the beginning of the sixteenth, Castiglioni, soared almost as high as Plato on wing hardly less confident.^ But the usual Petrarchistic sonneteer, forced, artificial and absurd, was as hateful to Bruno as the pedant, and not less foolishly dull. He makes Tansillo, the Petrarchist, his chief interlocutor, point out a new and sure way. The intellectual lover may, by strenuous effort, reach a comprehensive vision of Nature,^ which is the very image, nay the presence of God, though he may not reach that sense of direct union, which is pure feeling, granted to Plotinus ^ and other mystics.
The work is one long hymn to intellectual beauty, in prose and verse. One feels the influence of the Timaus and the vision of the Platonic soul " moving about the same in unchanging thought of the same." Bruno tells us that he followed lines laid down in the Symposium and Phcedrus.'^
In the introductory letter to Sidney, when writing con- cerning the constant transformation of all things, he digresses to distinguish between " those who declare accord- ing to reason and their own light " and " those who declare by faith and a higher light." He follows with a frank word as to his own attitude towards current Christian doctrine. " As to my faith," he says, " I hold it a most proper thing to declare and affirm with theologians and those who are concerned with the laws and institutions of the people in their interpretation : just as I am not slack to affirm and
" Cjf., Benivieni, G ; Commento . . . dello amore et della bellezza divina. Fir., 1500. — Ficino, M; Sopra lo amore o ver' convito di Platone, Fir., 1543.— Castiglione, B; II libra del Cortigiano {tr. Sir J. Hoby, 1 561). ' Eroici, P. II, Dial. II.
' Porph ; V, Plot. 23. * Spaventa ; op. cit., I, p. 141,
174 GIORDANO BRUNO
accept the sense of those, among the good and wise, who speak according to reason." ^ That is to say. The rehgion of a people, being part of its poHtical constitution and laws, must be followed ; but the competent may subject it to judicious criticism. This is a most important passage, because, when tried by the Inquisition, we find Bruno willing to accept the Church as a practical institution and affirm its dogmas as adumbrations of truth, but resolutely maintaining the freedom of philosophy to interpret them and to pursue an independent course.
He did not write for the crowd however;* nor about social ethics as in the Spaccio ; he will redeem the promise he made therein ; * that work was but an introduction to this. The intellectually disposed will discover no abiding home in the transitory world of sense or in ordinary piety ; only by the exercise of intellect, which is a divine passion, shall these find anchorage for the soul. Such as would purify the will sprout " wings to the soul " ; * they already possess the divine spirit they seek after, and so are at once the lover and the loved ; and their love shall enable these undaunted heroes to pass through suffering (which is no other than a golden spur), become spectators of Infinite Power and Act, and be at one, not indeed with the inner- most being of God, but with God in the highest manifesta- tions of his mind.^ The innermost being of God is not reached, even by the mystic.
Bruno is the first thinker who based the soul's duty to itself on its own nature : not on external authority, but on inner light.® He leaves theology to itself and is not here
' Eroici, Argomento del Nolano.
" Eroici, P. I, Dial. II ; P. II, Dial. II.
' Spaccio, Epist. Esplic. • Eroici, P. II, Dial. II.
= Ibid., P. I, Dial. II, III: P. II, Dial. IV.
• Spaventa, B ;lop. cit., p. 143.
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concerned with social duty; still less with vulgar aims, but only with the unwearied ardours of noble desire, and with that hero who shall rise above the tumult of sense and the conflict of contraries. No work of Bruno's is fuller of strange imaginings, or better expresses his inmost soul.^
It is in two parts, each of five dialogues. In the first part, Tansillo, the poet, reads his own cryptic stanzas or those of the Nolan or of some other poet ; and, sometimes, a symbolic picture is set before Cicada and is described ; then, after the manner of Dante's Vita Nuova, poem or poem and picture are explained. The same plan is con- tinued in the first two dialogues of the second part between Cesarino and Maricondo ; the third dialogue between Liberio and Laodonio contains eight sonnets (two propositions and two replies of the heart to the eyes, and the same number of propositions and replies of the eyes to the heart). In the fourth dialogue Severino and Minutolo discuss, and nine Wind men are spoken of, each of whom has disbur- dened his soul in a sonnet. Finally, in the fifth dialogue, two ladies, Laodomia and Giulia, are introduced. Laodomia describes how the nine blind men, " having overpassed all the seas, crossed all the rivers, surmounted all the hills and traversed all the plains, during a space of ten years, at the end of that time found themselves under the temperate sky of Britain and in the presence of the beauteous and gracious nymphs of Father Thames." The nymphs have passed a sealed vase to one of their number ; it opens of itself and sprinkles its contents over the blind wanderers, who, to the amazement of everybody, themselves included, recover their sight.
The allegory is discontinuous, the symbols are far- fetched; there are dubious side-lights of mystic meaning,
^ Happily, the body of the work is translated : " The Heroic Enthusiasts" by L. Williams. London, Redway, 1887-89.
176 GIORDANO BRUNO
and all is intermingled with observations alien to the pur- pose in hand and even with personal reminiscences. But obscurity charmed the " intellectuals " of the era ; they found no entertainment more agreeable or more mentally stimulating than moral conundrums — the more quaint and singular the better. Bruno certainly succeeds in reviving any flagging of attention by change of interlocutors, brisk and natural dialogue, surprise and unexpected digression.
He would have the service of the soul directed to " the fountain of the Ideas, the ocean of all truth and goodness." " The Infinite, being infinite, must be infinitely pursued." * The pursuit of Natural Knowledge is a most exquisite means of endowing the human soul with an heroic temper. For there are stages in the contemplation of the Divine Love and Wisdom. But, cast back into the body and bound by the body, the soul is not always in progress.'' It must then arouse itself and make a new intrepid attempt ; first through desire; next, by attention; then by study, and lastly by being filled with loving enthusiasm.* And though we can never attain the divine infinitude of Power, Love and Know- ledge, we can share in its blessedness.
Bruno makes his start then with an impulse of intellectual passion, and treats of the upward ascent which the intellect must traverse to reach a right comprehension of God manifest in Nature. He makes Tansillo utter an Apologia pro vita sua. "That which hath no splendour beyond bodily charm is worthy only of that form of love which hath the perpetuation of the race for its object. Methinks it is piggish to enquire or bother about it. For mine own part, I was never more infatuate about such matters than I am
' Eroici, P. I, Dial. IV, Tansillo loq., after canz. 20 ; cfr. Spaccio,
III, a.
» Ibid., P. I, Dial. IV, Tansillo loq., after cam. 23. » Ibid., P. I, Dial. V, vij.
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now about any picture or statue to which I may be indiffer- ent."^ "The contrary is the reason why its opposite is hankered after and enjoyed." ^ "But the wise hold all mutable things as if they were not, and affirm them to be vanity."* Sense would live according to sensible things, after its own manner ; but there are other laws : * he who would aim at the imperishable object must rise, by heroic effort, above matter and flesh and the transitory things of earth.^ The fulness of knowledge must be united with a burning passion for that which is both love and truth. The desire to comprehend is the soul's home-sickness which causes it to soar aloft for true wisdom and joy ; it does not avoid, nay, it voluntarily seeks the path of suffering, the " Gethsemane of the soul," which shall lead it to true beauty — the ultimate harmony and conformity of all things.*
There are two kinds of ecstasy which may be reached by the divinely transported : there is the abstraction of passive mystics, who, usually, are ignorant folk, " into whom the divine sense enters as it were into an empty room " ; and there are those who are filled with intellectual ardour, which spurs them to constructive activity, "so that, by rational process, the spirit becomes godlike in contact with its divine object." " The first kind possess more dignity, power and efficacy in themselves ; the second kind are worthier, more powerful and efficacious and are divine. The first are worthy as is the ass who bears the sacraments ; the second are as a sacred thing." ' The experience of the mystic has empirical value, but philosophy deals with the rational.*
To Bruno, philosophy and science were "musical as is
' Eroici, P. I, Dial. II, at end.
' Ibid., after cam. 9 ; cfr. Spaccio, I, i. ^ Loc. cit.
* Eroici, P. I, Dial. IV, after sonnet 22.
» Ibid., P. II, Dial. II. ' Ibid., P. II, Dial. Ill, foil. xiij.
' Ibid., P. I, Dial. Ill, at beginning.
' Cfr. Sensini, T ; op. cit, p. 19.
M
178 GIORDANO BRUNO
Apollo's lute." He pursued them with the passion of a lover. He holds that when once intellectual love is aroused nothing else will really satisfy.^ We are indeed bound to the body, and restricted by our vegetative life; but our proper activity is, in ceaseless strife, to contemplate the divine object, whereby we shall bear even the most terrible of hfe's evils with unshaken mind.^ Sensible beauty alters and fades ; but there is an intelligible beauty which cannot perish : Love inspires us with love to pursue it. The desire of the soul is an infinite one, and this is of itself an assur- ance of its own unending fulfilment. The soul which has touched its shining goal holds eternity in a moment. Man " becomes a god through intellectual contact with that transcendent object, and has no thought but of divine things and shows himself insensible and unmoved by that which ordinary men feel most of all ; but, through love of the divine, he disdains all other enjoyments and takes no thought of life." ^ These are no mere words. Bruno proved that they were sincere throughout life and in death. " It is neither natural nor expedient that the infinite should be grasped, nor can it render itself as finite, for then it would cease to be infinite ; but it is expedient and natural that the infinite, being such, should be infinitely pursued ; in which mode of seeking, not by physical desire, but by thought, the im- perfect is not to be deemed the perfect, but, circling upwards through the grades of imperfection, strains after that infinite centre which is neither formed nor forms." * •f Of Bruno, as of Spinoza, it may be said that he was " God-intoxicated." He felt that the Divine Excellence had its abode in the very heart of Nature and within his own body and spirit. Indwelling in every dewdrop as in the
> Eroici, P. II, Dial. I, ix. " Ibid., P. I, Dial. IV, V.
^ Ibid., P. I , Dial. Ill, beginning. • Ibid., P. I, Dial. IV, after cam. 20.
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innumerable host of heaven, in the humblest flower and in the mind of man, he found the living spirit of God, setting forth the Divine glory, making the Divine perfection and inspiring with the Divine love. The Eroici is full of the pantings of his soul for intellectual enfranchisement and contact with Truth, the divine object. He breaks out into many a canzone to express the heroic rapture of the upsoaring soul. Not all the verses are his own ; perhaps the finest is a sonnet by Tansillo. There is much of the poetic conceits, so fashionable at the time, and, at his worst, Bruno has the fatal facility of the improvisatore ; at his best he may be compared with Michel Angelo. A single example, not of his worst or best verse, may be translated to give, however poorly, some idea of his poetic manner in this work :
" Circles the sun and seeks whence he hath come ;
And wandering lights make ever for their source ;
The child of earth returns to earthly home ;
From sea to sea again, the waters course ;
Divine desire, wherever it may roam,
Soars ever upward, of its native force.
'Tis thus the soul, born of my lady fair,
Turns back to find that goddess past compare." ^
Bruno repeats that his teaching is for the few ; for even the learned of the Universities are soul-less pedants knowing nothing of the strenuous life and caring less,^ and, as for the wholly uninstructed, "the multitude can, with great difficulty, be kept from vice and urged to virtue by belief in eternal punishments." * This passage suggests that the permanence of the individual " soul " through the vicissitudes of the forms it assumes and the retributive justice which follows it, so pronouncedly brought before
» Eroici, P. II, I, viij, Ottava del Nolano.
» Ibid., P. II, II. ' Argomento.
l8o GIORDANO BRUNO
Sidney in the dedicatory letter of the Expulsion, must by no means be taken au pied de la lettre?-
The heroic soul, says Bruno, shall seek truth and find it. The time had not then come for Pilate's question to be put again. Bruno was happily unvexed by the problem of truth. No germ is to be discovered in any of his writings of any one of the three popular solutions which philosophy has since provided — that Truth is a copy of Reality, or constitutes Reality itself, or is a mere sign for practical life. He takes Truth quite simply and uncritically. But there is a view implicit in the Eroici and in all but the earliest of his philosophical writings, and this is that our truth is a progressive, ideal approximation towards that whole Truth which is one with the inmost nature of Being.
Hoffding justly remarks that, in this work, complexity of feeling is taken as a criterion for its development.^ As to the eternal striving of the Infinite, Bruno anticipates Kant and Fichte. The interest he took in physics peeps out even in this ethical rhapsody : he points to the expan- sive force of steam.*
There are excellent remarks on poetry. " Poetry is not born in rules," says Tansillo ; " rules are derived from poetry; and there are as many sorts of true rules as there are of true poets." Cicada : " But how are true poets to be recognized ? " Tansillo : " By their song." *
^ See pages 163 sq. of this work.
* Hoffding, H ; Hist, oj Mod. Phil., if. Meyer, 1900, vol. I, p. 147.
» Eroici, P. I, Dial. V. * Ibid., Dial. I.