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Giordano Bruno After 400 Years
We live in a publicity-craving era of frenetic fame-seekers. So it can be ironic to realize how some of the most celebrated people of the past somehow slipped into obscurity, even after a lifetime spent earning acclaim. Take Aldous Huxley, for example. The author of Brave new World and many other bold novels -- who also helped usher in the psychedelic era -- managed to time his death so the obituary vanished in a back corner of any newspaper that bothered to mention it at all. He did this by passing away on Nov. 22, 1963, the same day that President John F. Kennedy was shot.
Care to top that? Try this. Even as we slowly work off our hangovers and headaches from those Y2K non-events and anticlimactic "millennium celebrations" -- and while we watch the Internet undergo partial self-destruction at the hands of some of its brightest sons -- I notice on my calendar that we nearly let pass without notice the 400th anniversary of the death (on an execution pyre) of Giordano Bruno.
Giordano who?
Giordano Bruno... only one of the greatest geniuses of the later Renaissance and one spectacularly interesting fellow.
All right, few people know of him today. Tourists blink in puzzlement at his statue, now standing in the Roman square -- the Campo de Fiori -- where the Inquisition incinerated him. But his name wasn't always obscure. With a colorful personality and a flood of unconventional opinions, Bruno was a sensational figure as the 17th century drew to a close -- a prominent Renaissance thinker who, true to that complex era, mixed philosophy, religion, logic and mysticism while preaching a daring worldview that helped set the stage for what we now know as science.
Born near Naples in 1548, Bruno joined the Dominican order of monks at age 18. But soon his restless spirit and critical mind led him to question church teachings, including the notion that the heavens revolved around the Earth, forcing him to flee to Geneva, then France, England and Germany. Bruno's habit of questioning established doctrines brought him into conflict with powerful leaders of both the Catholic and Reformed churches, few of whom were known to tolerate free-thinkers.
Still, with luck and uncanny survival instincts -- and by appealing to the intellectual excitement of the time -- Bruno kept teaching unconventional views in Oxford, Marburg, Wittenberg, Prague, and Frankfurt. Eventually lured back to Italy on a pretext, Bruno was imprisoned in 1592 by the Inquisition, tried as a heretic and burned alive on Feb. 17, 1600.
It can be easy to get carried away over some of Bruno's most prescient views - for instance championing the heliocentric astronomy of Copernicus before Galileo did, then going much further to suggest that the twinkling stars in our night sky are actually suns shining on distant planets, possibly harboring other forms of life. He also held that humans might someday acquire almost godlike powers by understanding lightning and other heavenly mysteries. In that event, we might still need religion for moral guidance -- he opined -- but no longer to shape our models of the physical or biological world.
In an era transfixed by the primacy of the human image -- when great minds of the establishment insisted that the Creator must have a navel and a beard -- Bruno completely rejected the anthropocentric universe, believing instead that the Earth and individual humans are ultimately accidental products of a single living world-substance. In this, he presaged many notions of Darwinian biology.
To a modern mind, his call for tolerance and open enquiry seems especially poignant and prophetic.
Still, one does Bruno a disservice by emphasizing only the things he got right. Many of his other writings now seem silly, deliberately provocative, or just perplexingly obscure, such as his doctrine of panpsychism (belief that reality is constituted by the mind), which anticipated the teachings of Gottfried Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza... and may be echoed in today's extropian movement. He used to get into terrific rows with contemporaries over minutiae that would put most of today's philosophy professors into snoring catalepsy. (People cared deeply about such things, once upon a time.) His fascination with magic and the occult would hardly impress scientists in the year 2000, though it might lend him a New Age cult appeal.
So? The essential point -- and the reason I find this long-dead fellow's life worth noting -- is how Bruno looked around a superstitious age with eyes that were essentially modern. Even his flaming egotism and penchant for pushing other peoples' buttons would fit in well, today.
The clergy of his time weren't dummies; they had their own "grand unified theory" of how things worked and how people should behave. If we have made progress since that era, we owe it less to our improved orthodoxies than to the way we've learned to _tap_ the creative energies of those who defy the intellectual status quo, instead of killing them. Slowly, often grudgingly, society discovered that there is something to value in the rancorous, difficult, blasphemous few who gleefully challenge authority. Those who rip away the set pieces of any conservative worldview to reveal disturbing truths that lie beneath and beyond. Such people, though irksome, are also responsible for much progress in the world.
Imagine if Bruno somehow got teleported into our time -- perhaps with other standout intellects like Benjamin Franklin. One could picture him adjusting with relish to an era so enamored of flamboyant eccentrics. In a month, he would be on all the talk shows. In a year, he might have his own.
In fact, why not spin a story about that? Imagine that some future, time-traveling age will share our own fascination with exceptional men and women of the past. Suppose they reach back to grab Bruno out of his pyre at the last moment, if only to repair and then enjoy a colorfully vivid person who surged so far ahead of his time, caroming about the realm of ideas like a joyous crank, shouting at his stupefied contemporaries to _wake up!_
Not all geniuses are saintly or perfect. Some can be simultaneously offensive, delightful, in your face and profound in both their prescient visions and their spectacular errors. They are also terrifically alive.
So very alive that I feel they somehow testify for the rest of us. They help justify us, showing that humanity _must_ have a reason -- beyond mere creation or natural selection -- for being.
david brin,copyright 2/00 1000 words
==
David Brin is a scientist and bestselling novelist. His 1989 thriller Earth foresaw both global warming and the World Wide Web. A movie with Kevin Costner was loosely based on The Postman and Startide Rising is in pre-production at Paramount Pictures. Brin's non-fiction book -- The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Freedom and Privacy? -- deals with threats to openness and liberty in the new wired-age. His latest novel, Foundation's Triumph, brings to a grand finale Isaac Asimov's famed Foundation Universe.
Forgotten famous individuals are very common. Sometimes they really aren't that famous or that important on a global sense. There aren't very many REALLY special or known people, but there are an incredible amount of people who are sort of famous. Is anyone going to remember scientists such as Murray Gell Mann (coined the term "quark"), Stan Pruisner (nobel for discovering the prion) or David Ho (Time's Man of the Year a few years ago -- Aids research)? Although sad, I really don't think so.
I think that like media, the digital age is going to enhance our understanding of present day figures in the future. Just like we will watch a TV show from today that has been digitalized 20 years from now identically, we will have better access to documents and academic insights on important people of our era.
-- Moondog
And they'd be right.
But they would also claim that this invalidates belief in Jesus. There, they would be wrong. The actions of misguided people abusing Jesus' name 400 years ago have nothing to do with my faith now -- although they do serve to point out some of the hazards awaiting those who forget the church's purpose.
Just thought I'd mention that. :) -1 here I come!
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-- Slashdot sucks.
I wrote a long essay on Bruno in college. One thing that is fascinating about him and remarkable for his era was his openess to ideas from non-Christian traditions - he incorporated a lot of ideas from Sephardic Judaism (especially Qabalaism) and from Islamic philosophers. This fact was one of the reasons why he was targetted by the Vatican. He got right in the crosshairs of the counter-reformation.
While I agree that those who fundamentally tear at rules or even whole mindsets do produce the biggest advances, I disagree that we have gotten any better at tolerating non-conformity. In philosophy of science studies, the role of non-conformists has been analysed by TS Kuhn. His major publication is "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". Unfortunately, non-conformists are just as frequently burnt at the stake today as they ever were by the Inquisition. The role of the liberal arts professor nowdays, at least at the University of Chicago, is perceived as stamping out any original thought in their students, indoctrinating them with the correct viewpoints, quotables and pet phrases and even pre-arming them with dirt on the major players of opposition academic camps. It is mostly the toadies and parrots who survive and prosper amid such an education. Heretics are still burnt at the stake, but with modern methods.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Bruno wouldn't be cherished today for the crazy, creative ideas he brings out - he would be reviled if he tried to spout new and creative ideas. Anyone who tries to alter the rules of discourse from the outside (as Kuhn warned) is laughed out of the house, and so would Bruno be today. Only the people who work from WITHIN the system, as Bruno stubbornly refused to do, can actually help us make any progress. Look at great visionaries in our own time whose work is scorned, or simply sidelined by mainstream academia. (Noam Chomsky leaps to mind.)
The clergy of his time weren't dummies; they had their own "grand unified theory" of how things worked and how people should behave. If we have made progress since that era, we owe it less to our improved orthodoxies than to the way we've learned to _tap_ the creative energies of those who defy the intellectual status quo, instead of killing them. Slowly, often grudgingly, society discovered that there is something to value in the rancorous, difficult, blasphemous few who gleefully challenge authority. Those who rip away the set pieces of any conservative worldview to reveal disturbing truths that lie beneath and beyond. Such people, though irksome, are also responsible for much progress in the world.
We really need to be careful about patting ourselves on the back here. We might not be killing dissidents today, but they can be marginalized enough to prevent their voices from being heard by more than a handful of people.
Power structures will do anything to maintain their power, they never simply close up shop becuase they realize they aren't working anymore. Many years ago religious structures set the rules including their "absolute truths" and taboos (still true in some countries today). The institutions running things today might not be specifically religious, but they aren't necessarily acting any different.
We need to be especially careful today because of what technology allows us to do, from manipulating public opinion with mass media to the ability to track what people do without them knowing it.
Even the scientific community is guilty. They have their own absolute truths, and anyone who tries to cross them gets cut down until the evidence is too overwhelming to ignore.
Don't get me wrong, the human race has made a lot of progress, I just don't think we've made as much as everyone else seems to think we have.
Bruno was actually written up in Scientific American several years ago now; that's where I first heard of him. (No, I don't know which month off-hand, but it was almost certainly pre-1986.) He was a trouble-maker in many ways as well.
When you get right down to it, Galileo was put under house arrest because Bruno had been using Galileo's discoveries as part of his arguments against the Church. Galileo himself wasn't all that active politically, and the political side of the Church probably would have ignored him completely if Bruno hadn't used Galileo's observations of the moons of Jupiter as proof that not everything revolved around the Earth, and then went on to challenge the other teachings of the Church. (The Church didn't really care if people believed in the Copernican model; hell, the Church financed Copernicus. But they really took exception when anyone challenged the idea of the Earth being the spiritual centre of the universe. Which Bruno did.) Bruno's agitation helped fuel the anti-science leanings of the Church at the time, and made life a whole lot harsher for many other scientists at the time.
Bruno himself was an interesting thinker; unfortunately, when he got the Church's attention, he ended up taking a number of others down with him.
-- Bryan Feir
C.S. Lewis also passed away on Nov. 22, 1963. I read a good book once, Between Heaven and Hell, that describes a possible conversation the three might have had on their way into the afterlife. Completely fictional of course, but interesting.
Constitutionally Correct
Maybe it's just the memory of being beat up as a kid, many times, for being what one tormentor called a "walking dictionary"; or knowing people who have been subject to, or threatened with, violence (by the state or by private citizens) because of their personal lifestyle choices; or knowing that both Presidental front-runners describe themselves not just as Christians but as "born-again" Christians; but I just don't see a love of diversity and eccentricity in the mainstream of our culture. I think we covered that point here pretty well in the post-Columbine "Hellmouth" threads.
Yes, there's a certain amount of "geek chic", but there's a simple reason for that. The mainstream is somewhat enamored of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs because they're filthy rich, plain and simple.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
A small point, to be sure, but the part about the "pretext" isn't really true. In the 1580's Bruno had developed an elaborate theory of memory training (published in, most famously, his Clavis Magna or Great Key). In 1591 he was invited to Venice by a gentleman named Mocenigo, who was keenly interested in his methods of memory training. Angry after failing to obtain from Bruno the secret of his "natural magic", Mocenigo denounced him to the Inquisition. The Ventian authorites reluctantly extradited him.
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
In fact Giordano Bruno has since long been thought of as a precursor to modernism. Samuel Beckett, for example, wrote a well-known essay describing the connection between him and James Joyce (called Dante..Bruno..Vico..Joyce, I can't remember the exact number of dots, though). His ideas about "panpsychism (belief that reality is constituted by the mind)" were instrumental in defining Joyce's vision (Ulysses, if you'll remember, consists of a description of the reality of Dublin seen through the eyes -stream-of-consciousness- of a number of its inhabitants. The modernists, therefore, were already quite aware of him, so I think it's fair to say his ideas were an important predecessors to our modern mindset. After all, like it or not, Joyce's ideas, as well as Becket's, have slowly slipped into our collective unconscious during the past century.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
"Awwww! That went away with the Dark Ages! Anyway, America has never had that. It was =FOUNDED= on freedom!"
Tell ex-President Carter. Castigated and shredded for the crime of being an honest politician and an acknowledged falliable human being. Truth didn't mean a whole lot to Americans, on voting day.
Then, there's the mysterious case of a well-known TV chat-show host, who dared to suggest the American meat industry might have a non-zero level of BSE. A $60 million dollar lawsuit followed, for "damaging" the reputation of the industry.
Technological heretics - anyone hear from Sir Clive Sinclair, lately? Or the guy who invented the clockwork radio? The Osborne was the first laptop - they don't seem to have an up-to-date product list, though. Seems to me that there's a fairly long list of latter-day heretics being burned at the financial stake.
Then, there are those who disagree with the "orthodox" religion of politics. Marx is not only hated by the US, but anyone associated with his views of power equality was, for many years, banned from the shores of the allegedly free US. Those Americans who had the least sympathy for the idea that the underclass are probably just as intelligent as the ruling class were mauled by Macarthy and his thugs, and held with deep suspicion even to this day.
Is America the only country with such *cough* liberal views? By no means! In England, members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament were "Potential Subversives" and monitored by British Intelligence. At least one executive of CND is believed to have been assassinated by the British Government, for their moral and political views.
Exceptional circumstances, surely! Nope. The Greenham Common protesters were threatened with summary execution by the American military. Several =were= killed, in hit-and-run "accidents" in which the American and British Governments decided that the soldiers had diplomatic immunity, thus avoiding any kind of trial.
Then, of course, there's always the RUC's "Shoot To Kill" policy, in Northern Ireland, in which innocents were fair game for machine-gun fire, without warning, if a policeman decided he wanted live target shooting. The person designated to investigate the massacres, John Stalker, was pulled off the case after asking the wrong questions.
France, of course, has no problem with tolerence. It'll blow up ships in other people's ports (eg: Greenpeace Warrior) and award the agents medals of honor, after terrorising the innocent nation involved (New Zealand) into submission by threats of a complete blockade.
I'm sure the Algerians in France are happy with the tolerence there, too. No persecution! Just some unfortunate, mysterious deaths, injuries, beatings and abuse by the police and other French natives.
Freedom of the Press, though, is universal! I mean, look at what happened when Salman Rushdie published his "Satanic Verses"! Iran was extremely moderate, in it's response, don't you think?
Pacifists are routinely (and illegally) imprisoned during wars, in almost every nation on Earth. Many nations practice Conscription, with heavy fines or other penalties for conciencious objectors, pacifists and those who are politically, religiously or morally bound to refuse to condone violence or organisations dedicated to violence.
Whilst outright, open murder is much rarer than it was, in the middle ages, the same intolerence and hatred of those who are different is still there, and still destroying others. Minds who would probably be of enormous benefit to the world at large are crushed, or their owners quietly disposed of. Personally, I don't know which is the worse - the open slaughter of the differently-thinking innocents, or their quiet, legalised murder.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Nowadays, everyone is a specialist. An artist could never be a respectable mathetician. These gentlemen were metheticians, astromoners, chemists, artists, architechs, physicists, writers and other professions too. Not just one profession each, but usually 2 or 3 or more all at the same time.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/feb2000/brun-f16 _prn.shtml
... was the first and decisive step toward man's self-liberation. Man no longer lives in the world of a prisoner enclosed within the narrow walls of a finite physical universe. He can traverse the air and break through all the imaginary
... to be found in a transition from an intellectual sphere dominated by a vision of the world in essentially theological terms to an
... pronounce sentence and declare the aforesaid Brother Giordano Bruno to be an impenitent and pertinacious heretic, and therefore to have incurred all the ecclesiastical censures and pains of the Holy Canon.... We ordain and command that thou must be delivered to the Secular Court ... that thou mayest be punished with the punishment deserved, though we earnestly pray that he (the Roman Governor) will mitigate the rigour of the laws concerning the pains of thy person, that thou mayest not be in danger of death or of mutilation of thy members.
A man of insight and courage
Giordano Bruno, philosopher and scientist, burnt at the stake 400 years ago
By Frank Gaglioti
16 February 2000
Four centuries ago today, on February 16, 1600, the Roman Catholic Church executed Giordano Bruno, Italian philosopher and scientist, for the crime of heresy. He was taken from his cell in the early hours of the morning to the Piazza dei Fiori in Rome and burnt alive at the stake. To the last, the Church authorities were fearful of the ideas of a man who was known throughout Europe as a bold and brilliant thinker. In a peculiar twist to the gruesome affair, the executioners were ordered to tie his tongue so that he would be unable to address those gathered.
Throughout his life Bruno championed the Copernican system of astronomy which placed the sun, not the Earth, at the centre of the solar system. He opposed the stultifying authority of the Church and refused to recant his philosophical beliefs throughout his eight years of imprisonment by the Venetian and Roman Inquisitions. His life stands as a testimony to the drive for knowledge and truth that marked the astonishing period of history known as the Renaissance--from which so much in modern art, thought and science derives.
In 1992, after 12 years of deliberations, the Roman Catholic Church grudgingly admitted that Galileo Galilei had been right in supporting the theories of Copernicus. The Holy Inquisition had forced an aged Galileo to recant his ideas under threat of torture in 1633. But no such admission has been made in the case of Bruno. His writings are still on the Vatican's list of forbidden texts.
The Church is currently considering a new batch of apologies. A theological commission headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the modern successor of the Inquisition, has completed an inquiry entitled "The Church and the Faults of the Past: Memory in the Service of Reconciliation", which proposes making an apology for "past errors". The results have been handed to Pope John Paul II, who is due to make a statement on March 12. The execution of Bruno is one of the church's crimes being considered but it is unlikely that major concessions will be made in his case. A number of hard-line Catholic figures have opposed the investigation from the outset, saying that excessive penitence and self-questioning could undermine faith in the Church and its institutions.
The current attitude of the Roman Catholic Church to Bruno is defined by a two-page entry in the latest edition of the Catholic Encyclopaedia. It describes Bruno's "intolerance" and berates him, declaring "his attitude of mind towards religious truth was that of a rationalist". [1] The article describes in detail Bruno's theological errors and his lengthy detention at the hands of the Inquisition, but fails to mention the best-known fact--that the church authorities burnt him alive at the stake.
Bruno has long been revered as a martyr to scientific truth. In 1889 a monument to him was erected at the location of his execution. Such was the feeling for Bruno that scientists and poets paid tribute to him and a book was written detailing his life's work. In a dedication for a meeting held at the Contemporary Club in Philadelphia in 1890, American poet Walt Whitman wrote: "As America's mental courage (the thought comes to me today) is so indebted, above all current lands and peoples, to the noble army of old-world martyrs past, how incumbent on us that we clear those martyrs' lives and names, and hold them up for reverent admiration as well as beacons. And typical of this, and standing for it and all perhaps, Giordano Bruno may well be put, today and to come, in our New World's thankfulest heart and memory."[2]
Karl Marx's co-thinker Fredrick Engels summed up the period that produced figures, such as Bruno, who challenged the church and laid the basis for modern science. In an introduction written in the 1870s to his unfinished work the Dialectics of Nature, Engels wrote: "It was the greatest progressive revolution that mankind had so far experienced, a time which called for giants and produced giants--giants in power of thought, passion and character, in universality and earning. The men who founded the modern rule of the bourgeoisie had anything but bourgeois limitations. On the contrary, the adventurous character of the time inspired them to a greater or lesser degree. There was hardly any man of importance then living who had not travelled extensively, who did not speak four or five languages, who did not shine in a number of fields....
"At that time natural science also developed in the midst of the general revolution and was itself thoroughly revolutionary; it had indeed to win in struggle its right of existence. Side by side with the great Italians from whom modern philosophy dates, it provided its martyrs for the stake and the dungeons of the Inquisition. And it is characteristic that Protestants outdid
Catholics in persecuting the free investigation of nature. Calvin had Servetus burnt at the stake when the latter was on the point of discovering the circulation of the blood, and indeed he kept him roasting alive during two hours; for the Inquisition at least it sufficed to have Giordano Bruno simply burnt alive."[3]
What is most characteristic of Bruno is his vigorous appeal to reason and logic, rather than religious dogma, as the basis for determining truth. In a manner that anticipates the Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century, he wrote in one of his final works, De triplici minimo (1591): "He who desires to philosophise must first of all doubt all things. He must not assume a position in a debate before he has listened to the various opinions, and considered and compared the reasons for and against. He must never judge or take up a position on the evidence of what he has heard, on the opinion of the majority, the age, merits, or prestige of the speaker concerned, but he must proceed according to the persuasion of an organic doctrine
which adheres to real things, and to a truth that can be understood by the light of reason."[4]
A complex intellectual figure
An examination of Bruno's philosophical legacy reveals a complex figure who was influenced by the various intellectual trends of the time, in a period when modern science was just beginning to emerge. His enthusiastic polemics earned the
admiration of the most advanced thinkers of the period and the loathing of the Church, whose authority was being shaken to the core by learned assaults such as these.
Bruno was born in the town of Nola, near Naples, in 1548, at the dawn of the revolution in astronomy which was heralded by the publication of Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri VI in 1543. Copernicus asserted that the sun, not the Earth, was the centre of a finite universe, with the planets on circular orbits around it and the stars on a fixed sphere a
considerable distance beyond.
The Copernican system not only challenged the Church's cosmological views, but also the rigid social hierarchy of feudalism. The previous neatly ordered view of the universe, with the Earth at the centre, reinforced the rigid feudal order
with serfs at the bottom and the Pope at the pinnacle. The dangerous implication of the Copernican theory was that if the Church's credo of infallibility could be challenged in the cosmological arena then its social position was also cast into doubt.
The Church was already under siege from all sides. In 1517 Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door in Germany, denouncing the practices of the Roman Catholic Church, the first blow in the Protestant Reformation that swept across Europe. The Vatican responded with a counterattack--the Counter Reformation--on anyone who appeared to challenge Catholic doctrine. In 1542 it established the Roman Inquisition to enforce its edicts with torture and execution.
Thus Bruno entered a world in ferment. In 1563 Bruno entered the monastery of St. Dominic, where he came to the notice of Church authorities for his unorthodox religious views. He used his time as a novitiate to acquaint himself not only with the philosophical works of the ancient Greeks, but also his more contemporary European thinkers. It was at this time that he first encountered the work of Copernicus, which was to have such a profound impact on his life.
Bruno took holy orders in 1572 but then left the order in 1576 after travelling to Rome. He had been caught reading philosophical texts annotated by the Dutch humanist philosopher Erasmus and escaped before being denounced to
ecclesiastical authorities. He spent the rest of his life until his capture wandering Europe discussing and promoting his philosophical ideas.
After three years in Italy he went to Geneva, which was then dominated by the Protestant sect led by Calvin. He soon came into conflict with academic authorities when he published a pamphlet stating that a local professor of philosophy had made 20 errors in one lecture. He was imprisoned by the Calvinist authorities and only released after withdrawing the offending publication. Twenty-six years earlier the Calvinists had burnt Servetus, a Spanish doctor, geographer and man of letters, at the stake for his scientific views.
Bruno then travelled to Toulouse in France, where he lectured on Aristotle's De anima and wrote a book on mnemonics--systems of memory training. He arrived in Paris by 1581, where he came to the attention of King Henry III who was attracted by his reputation of having a prodigious memory. The King found a position for him at the College de France after he had been forbidden entry to the Sorbonne by the ecclesiastical authority.
During his stay in Paris he wrote three books, two on mnemonics and a play entitled The Torch-Bearer by Bruno the Nolan, Graduate of No Academy, Called the Nuisance. In this play Bruno described his time in the Dominican convent in Naples and
presented a withering indictment of the Church. Giovanni Gentile's commentary on the play describes Bruno's characterisation of the Church as follows: "You will see, in mixed confusion, snatches of cutpurses, wiles of cheats,
enterprises of rogues; also delicious repulsiveness, bitter sweets, foolish decisions, mistaken faith and crippled hopes, niggard charities, judges noble and serious for other men's affairs with little truth in their own; virile women, effeminate men and voices of craft and not of mercy so that he who believes most is most fooled--and everywhere the love of gold."[5]
Bruno was forced to leave France in 1583 and travelled to England where his three-year stay proved to be one of the most fruitful periods of his life. He was introduced into a society that craved all forms of Italian learning and already had a considerable Italian and foreign exile community. Many had fled to avoid persecution for unorthodox philosophical and religious ideas. Bruno held discussions with Queen Elizabeth I, who was attracted by the prospect of discussing
philosophical matters directly in Italian. He quickly attracted a number of intellectuals who eagerly discussed the philosophical ideas of the time.
In England, Bruno published six books, all in Italian, fully elaborating his philosophical ideas for the first time. He was one of the first philosophers to discuss scientific issues in the vernacular. The very act of publishing in Italian was an open challenge to the Church, which sought to maintain Latin as the language of intellectual discourse and so limit the wider dissemination of ideas. Copernicus's groundbreaking work had been published only in Latin. So afraid were Bruno's printers that not one of them identified himself in the printed texts.
Bruno's view of the universe
Bruno's cosmology is outlined in The Ash Wednesday Supper, Cause, Principle and Unity and On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, which represent a brilliant anticipation of subsequent scientific and philosophical developments. In some respects
the conclusions Bruno arrived at by bold intuition surpassed the work of his successors such as Galileo and Kepler. The works are in the form of dialogues, where Bruno's characters argue various philosophical positions from different points of
view, one representing Bruno himself.
In The Ash Wednesday Supper Bruno was one of the first to argue for the existence of an infinite universe, which contained an infinite number of worlds similar to the Earth. In doing so, he rejected the limits of the Copernican system, which posited a finite universe limited by a fixed sphere of stars just beyond the solar system. He argued that the sun was not the centre of the
universe, saying that if the sun were observed from any of the other stars it would appear no different from them. Bruno even speculated that the other worlds would be inhabited.
German philosopher Ernst Cassirer explained the significance of Bruno's conception of an infinite universe as follows: "This doctrine
boundaries of the celestial spheres which have been erected by a false metaphysics and cosmology. The infinite universe sets no limits to human reason; on the contrary, it is the great incentive of human reason. The human intellect becomes aware
of its own infinity through measuring its powers by the infinite universe."[6]
Bruno's other three works published in England-- The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, Cabal of the Cheval Pegasus and On Heroic Frenzies --contain a biting critique of the Counter Reformation. Italian historian Hilary Gatti in her book
Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science observed: "The sense of these final Italian works, in my opinion, is
intellectual sphere dominated by a vision of the world in essentially philosophical terms. In this passage from theology to philosophy all forms of revealed religion receive harsh treatment, but above all the Christian religion that dominated the life and culture of the Europe of the sixteenth century, often through violence and oppression."[7]
It was in England that Bruno had his most profound impact. His views were discussed in intellectual circles and the arguments presented in his various books give a flavour of the contemporary discussion. Two leading scientists, William
Gilbert and Thomas Harriot, became leading proponents of Bruno's cosmological views. Gilbert, whose De Magnete (1600) stood as a basic text on magnetism until the nineteenth century, was prominent in a grouping that discussed scientific issues. He was particularly interested in developing his magnetic theories in relation to Bruno's cosmological views.
Harriot was a noted mathematician and astronomer, who was thought to have discovered sunspots before Galileo. Harriot exchanged letters with Kepler in 1608 discussing Bruno's conception of an infinite universe, which Kepler was to reject. Harriot was one of the scientists cultivated by the Ninth Earl of Northumberland--a devoted follower of Bruno.
Northumberland had an extensive library of Bruno's works, which he made available to the scientists in his circle.
Bruno was forced to return to France because of the decline in the fortunes of his patron, the Marquis de Mauvissiere, with whom he had travelled to England. He produced three works on his return to Paris but was forced to leave after his
challenge to debate all comers on the topic One Hundred and Twenty Articles on Nature and the World resulted in him being set upon by supporters of the Church. He then travelled to Germany, where he resided in Wittenberg and Marburg until 1588.
He was forced to leave Marburg after coming into conflict with the Lutheran authorities, then wandered Europe--Prague, Helmstedt, Frankfurt and Zurich.
In 1591 Bruno returned to Italy after being invited by the Venetian nobleman Zuane Mocenigo to educate the aristocrat in mnemonics. Mocenigo subsequently denounced him to the Inquisition. Bruno was arrested on May 23, 1592, cross-examined
on his philosophical works and on January 27, 1593 handed over to the Inquisition in Rome on the direct request of the Papal Nuncio, Taverna, acting on behalf of Pope Clement VIII.
During his detention in Rome he was interrogated on all aspects of his life and his philosophical and theological views over a period of seven years. On February 15, 1599 the Inquisition charged Bruno with eight specific acts of heresy, which the church has not revealed to this day. According to the limited documents available, Bruno was indicted for his "atheistic" views and for the publication of The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. He refused to recant.
The Inquisition delivered its verdict on January 20, 1600, stating: "We hereby, in these documents
"Furthermore, we condemn, we reprobate and we prohibit all thine aforesaid and thy other books and writings as heretical and erroneous, containing many heresies and errors, and we ordain that all of them which have come or may come in future into the hands of the Holy Office shall be publicly destroyed and burned in the square of St. Peter before the steps and that they shall be placed upon the Index of Forbidden Books."[8]
Despite the false note of concern about Bruno's physical well-being, the Inquisition's verdict was a death sentence. Bruno was defiant to the end. Gaspar Schopp of Brelau, a recent convert to Catholicism and a witness to the sentencing, reported that Bruno exclaimed on hearing the sentence: "Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it."[9]
The Holy Inquisition and its tormentors are remembered only as symbols of arch-reaction. But Bruno has stood the test of time. An examination of his life reveals a true Renaissance man with a passionate interest in all aspects of human learning, who participated with great energy and determination in the intellectual turbulence of his times. His insights made an important contribution to the ideas that laid the basis for modern science. His stubborn refusal to bow to the authority, power and repressive apparatus of the Roman Catholic Church, the most powerful institution of his day, will no doubt be an
inspiration for centuries to come.
The German philosopher Georg Hegel summed up the generation of thinkers to which Bruno belonged in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy: "These men felt themselves dominated, as they really were, by the impulse to create existence and to
derive truth from their very selves. They were men of vehement nature, of wild and restless character, of enthusiastic temperament, who could not attain to the calm of knowledge. Though it cannot be denied that there was in them a wonderful insight into what was true and great, there is no doubt on the other hand that they revelled in all manner of corruption in
thought and heart as well as in their outer life. There is thus to be found in them great originality and subjective energy of
spirit; at the same time the content is heterogeneous and unequal, and their confusion of mind is great. Their fate, their lives,
their writings--which often fill many volumes--manifest only this restlessness of their being, this tearing asunder, the revolt
of their inner being against present existence and the longing to get out of it and reach certainty. These remarkable individuals really resemble the upheavals, tremblings and eruptions of a volcano which has become worked up in its depths
and has brought forward new developments, which as yet are wild and uncontrolled."[10]
Notes.
1. The Catholic Encyclopaedia (http://www.knight.org/advent/cathen/03016a.htm)
2. Quoted in The Infinite Worlds of Giordano Bruno by Antoinette Mann Paterson, 1970, page ix
3. Dialectics of Nature by Frederick Engels, page 21-22
4. De triplici minimo by Giordano Bruno as quoted in Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science by Hilary Gatti, 1998, page 4
5. Quoted in Giordano Bruno, His Life and Thought by Dorothea Waley Singer, 1950, page 22
6. Quoted in The Infinite Worlds of Giordano Bruno by Antoinette Mann Paterson, 1970, pages 33-34
7. Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science by Hilary Gatti, 1998, page 229
8. Quoted in Giordano Bruno, His Life and Thought by Dorothea Waley Singer, 1950, page 176-177
9. Quoted in Giordano Bruno, His Life and Thought by Dorothea Waley Singer, 1950, page 179
10. Lectures on the History of Philosophy by G.W.F.Hegel, Volume 3, pages 115-116
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On a side note, C.S. Lewis, another great thinker and writer, also died the same day as J.F. Kennedy, relegating his passing into obscurity as well.
It's worth noting that to many of his contemporaries, Bruno was seen as a chief proponent of the hermetic tradition (alchemical natural magic philosophy), not necessarily of Copernican scientific truth. Perhaps this was to his chagrin, but he played the part. While Bruno did indeed believe that Copernicus stumbled upon the truth, he also firmly held that it was his duty, as an Hermetic Messiah, to popularize and recontextualize the discoveries into hermetic symbolism. Unfortunately for Bruno, in his lectures he would do this in the precise words of one Marsilio Ficino, a contemporary natural philosopher, and his unacknowledged alchemical theories and terms were laughed at by the "grammatical pedants" at Oxford.
Bruno, who frequently referred to himself in the third-person as "The Nolan", took Copernican science and dragged it back into the murky prescientific, hermetic paradigm. A quote from Bruno's Cena de la ceneri:
Perhaps he did this to enlighten the masses, but his reward for this was obscurity and a nice statue.It is, perhaps, by happy accident that these notions were driven almost entirely by Bruno's Hermetic thought, and not by his acceptance of either the empirical or the mathematical veracity of the Copernican system.
Nonetheless, the man was a stud: regardless of his intentions, the result was laudable.
For further information, I would say the definitive work on Bruno is Francis A. Yates' Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964).
--
"There's a word for people who live close to nature -
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Eh, perhaps. While I think that most non-religious people aren't very "evengelical" about their views, I've met agnostics and athiests who were extremely disparaging of anyone with religious beliefs - these are the "abortion clinic bombers" of the non-religious world, the fanatics who give their views a bad name because they use it as an excuse to persecute, belittle and denigrate others. These people are the equivilent of Christian-right homophobes who believe their viewpoint is right, all others are wrong, and that this gives them moral superiority and the right to treat people who disagree with them as less than human. They practice conversion by denigration, instead of by evangelism.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
Repression never stops. The Spanish Inquisition comes back every few years. Right now it's the atheists and OSS zealots. In a few years it'll be the Blacks again.
Actually, right now it's drug users. As of a few days ago, the U.S. passed the two-million prisoner mark. According to the Department of Justice's own figures, one quarter of those, or one half million U.S. citizens are imprisoned for non-violent drug offences alone.
Mandatory minimum prison sentences were applied in 64 percent of drug cases in 1998. The average length of imprisonment for drug offenses was 76 months; for firearms violations it was 63 months; and for manslaughter, it was 45 months. -- The Washington Post
Even if you find yourself with incurable cancer, like Steve Kubby, and all that is keeping you alive is regular use of medical marijuana, you are subject to imprisonment and likely death in prison from deprivation of your medicine if you are caught using an illegal medicine, i.e. one that is not patented by a campaign-contributing pharmaceutical company. Many medical marijuana patients, once discovered, find themselves under a court order not to use the only medicine that will keep them alive, and are subject to drug tests, and risk imprisonment and death in prison if they dare to continue using their medicine.
Drug users in general are subject to abuse and murder by the police. Their property is subject to seizure without trial, thus bankrupting them and preventing them from defending themselves. They are sent to special "drug courts" where they find that their constitutional rights don't apply. They are subject to "mandatory minimum" sentencing rules that forbid the judge from using any discretion in sentencing, hence the 76 month average drug sentence.
Back to the original point, if you go back far enough, the origins of most religions are based on the teachings of individuals who have had mystical -- i.e. hallucinatory, drug-like experiences. During the inquisition, someone who accidently ate the wrong mushroom, had a "mystical" experience, and claimed to have seen God would be put to death. In the year 2000, someone attempting to replicate the experience would face years in prison if caught.
Atheists and blacks, by contrast, are protected by a host of federal and state laws.
Bruno's teachings combined the new science of his time with traditional Cabalistic mysticism. He believed in a universe of infinite space with infinite inhabited planets, and in a kind of dualistic pantheism, in which the divine is incarnate in every part always in conflicting forms that both oppose and support each other. Whatever his link with occult secret societies, he influenced Hegel, Marx, theosophy, James Joyce, Timothy Leary, Discordianism, and Dr. Wilhelm Reich. Me: Discordianism, eh? He couldn't have been all bad...
The above comment is CopyWrong (K) Erisian Entertainment. All Rights Reversed. Ewige Blumenkraft!
>> gets cut down until the evidence is too overwhelming to ignore.
> It may look that way to an outsider, but if you ever as a scientist you
> will see that that simply isn't true. To be sure, there are some
> scientists that are dogmatic about their beliefs, but on the
> whole the scientific community as a whole is fairly tolerant of
> unorthodox views, provided that there is at least a smidgeon of
> evidence to back them up.
In fact, I must totally disagree. As a whole, the scientific community is fairly tolerant of unorthodox views, within the context of their own conceptual framework.
This is especially evident in epistemology. The scientific community of the twentieth century, confronted with the questions, "what is knowledge?" and "how are things knowable?" had two basic strategies. First, the great majority ignored them. Second, those few who took it upon themselves to become "philosophers of science" made great efforts to ramrod the truth into the mold of science. Perversely inverting the scientific method, they first they decided what was true, (that science was productive of knowledge), and then came up with reasons to justify it.
Take Logical Positivism, for instance, the darling of 20th century science. They chose to define knowledge to make science (and only science) fit it: "to be knowable is to be open, at least in theory, to empirical verification". This despite the obvious fact that this statement itself is not empirically, or even logically, verifiable!
Scientists are indeed open to a great deal, so long as you presume a materialist universe which is empirically knowable, and don't trod on any of their other pet assumptions. I have seldom heard any group, however, so willing to state their presumptions as fact: "the universe is without purpose", "evolution is the result of random mutation", even "B consistently follows A, so A causes B". Their faith is very strong, and many just as testy about it as the most dogmatic Christians.
I can think of something better: the Socratic method. Question everything. The unreflected life is not worth living.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
No recording from any of the process recordings that remaind till nowadays mentions Copernicus or heliocentrism: Bruno was prosecuted mainly for paganism, heresy and blasphemy.
Nowadays he would have been considered to be a harmless maniac, they would put him in one of those quiet rooms and give lots of paper and a soft crayon. It **** me off whenever he is called "a missionary", a "martyr of the Truth". And when someone mentions Bruno in one sentence with the science I go berserk (like now, because now I did it).
Regards,
January