Giordano Bruno

Bruno, Giordano (1548–1600)

Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher of nature and proponent of artificial memory systems who abandoned the Dominican Order and, after a turbulent career in many parts of Europe, was burned to death as a heretic in 1600. Because of his unhappy end, his support for the Copernican heliocentric hypothesis, and his pronounced anti-Aristotelianism, Bruno has often been hailed as the proponent of a scientific worldview against supposed medieval obscurantism. In fact, he is better interpreted in terms of Neoplatonism and, to a lesser extent, Hermeticism (also called Hermetism). Several of Bruno’s later works were devoted to magic; and magic may play some role in his many books on the art of memory. His best-known works are the Italian dialogues he wrote while in England. In these Bruno describes the universe as an animate and infinitely extended unity containing innumerable worlds, each like a great animal with a life of its own. His support of Copernicus in La Cena de le ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper) was related to his belief that a living earth must move, and he specifically rejected any appeal to mere mathematics to prove cosmological hypotheses. His view that the physical world was a union of two substances, Matter and Form, had the consequence that apparent individuals were merely collections of accidents. He identified Form with the World-Soul, but although he saw the universe as permeated by divinity, he also believed in a transcendent God, inaccessible to the human mind. Despite some obvious parallels with both Spinoza and Leibniz, Bruno seems not to have had much direct influence on seventeenth-century thinkers.

1 Life

Giordano Bruno was born in Nola, near Naples, and frequently called himself ‘the Nolan’. His baptismal name was Filippo, and he adopted the name ‘Giordano’ on entering the Dominican Order in 1565. He fled from the Dominicans in 1576 on learning that he was to be accused of heterodox views, and wandered in Italy for a while, supporting himself by private teaching and tutoring. By 1579 he was in Geneva, where the municipal records show that he petitioned against a denial of participation in the Calvinist sacraments. This denial was apparently the result of Bruno’s attack on a leading philosopher, which also led to brief imprisonment. Next he went to France, finally settling in Toulouse, where he lectured on Aristotle’s On the Soul. He was in Paris 1581–3, where his lectures attracted the attention of Henri III. From 1583 to 1585 he was in London, staying at the house of the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau. Unknown to Castelnau, Bruno was probably a spy, reporting to Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I’s secretary, about the plots of the English Catholics (see Bossy 1991). He had an unfortunate experience in Oxford in 1583, being forced to abandon a series of lectures when a member of the audience pointed out that he was plagiarizing the works of Ficino. When Michel de Castelnau was recalled to Paris at the end of 1585, Bruno went with him. After some problems there, including opposition roused by a disputation in which his view of the universe was defended by a pupil, he turned to the German Protestant universities. In 1586 he went to Marburg, and matriculated at the university there but (as the Rector has recorded) angrily withdrew his name when denied the right to teach philosophy publicly. He then went to Lutheran Wittenberg, where he was allowed to lecture. In 1588 he visited the court of Rudolph II in Prague, and then went to Helmstadt, where he seems to have been excommunicated by the Protestants. In 1590 he was resident in the Carmelite monastery in Frankfurt. At this point he was invited by a Venetian nobleman, Zuan (a form of ‘Giovanni’) Mocenigo, to go to Venice and teach him the art of memory, and he took up the invitation in the autumn of 1591. In May 1592 Mocenigo, perhaps disappointed at what he had learned, handed Bruno over to the Venetian Inquisition. The following year they handed Bruno over to the Roman Inquisition. A long sequence of interrogations followed. In the end he refused to recant, though the list of final charges is not known. Despite the fact that heretics were normally strangled in prison and burned only in effigy, Bruno was burned to death on February 17, 1600, in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome.

2 Works

Bruno was an extremely prolific writer who wrote more than fifty works and opuscula, of which nearly forty, all from the period 1582–91, are now available in print. He wrote one comedy, Il Candelaio (The Torch-Bearer) (1582a), which influenced Molière, and several didactic and critical works. His works on magic, probably written in Helmstadt, were all unpublished during his lifetime. His most significant works include those on the art of memory and Ramon Llull’s combinatory method. His first surviving work on these (or any other) issues is De umbris idearum (On the Shadows of Ideas) (1582b), published with Ars memoriae (On the Art of Memory). In 1583 there followed four works in one volume: Ars reminiscendi (On the Art of Remembering), Explicatio triginta sigillorum (The Explanation of the Thirty Seals), Sigillus sigillorum (The Seal of Seals), and a letter to Oxford setting out his claims to be heard. Another work in the same series is Lampas triginta statuarum (The Lamp of Thirty Statues) (c.1587).

Much of Bruno’s fame rests on his six Italian dialogues. The cosmological dialogues are: La Cena de le ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper) (1584a); De la causa, principio et uno (Cause, Principle and Unity) (1584b); De l’infinito universo et mondi (On the Infinite Universe and Worlds) (1584c). The moral dialogues are: Spaccio della bestia trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast) (1584d), modelled on the satirist Lucian; Cabala del cavallo Pegaseo con l’aggiunta de l’Asino cillenico (The Kabbalah of the Pegasean Horse with an Appendix on the Cillenican Ass) (1585a); De gl’Heroici Furori (The Heroic Frenzies) (1585b), a sonnet sequence with prose commentaries.

The final version of Bruno’s philosophical and cosmological speculations is found in three Latin poems with prose accompaniment, published in 1591: De triplici minimo et mensura (On the Threefold Minimum and Measure); De monade, numero et figura (On the Monad, Number and Figure); De innumerabilibus, immenso et infigurabili (On the Innumerables, the Immense and the Infigurable).

Bruno was never a professional philosopher with a permanent university post, a fact which helps explain both his chaotic style of writing and his exploration of various literary forms. He did not write organized textbooks, and there is little close argumentation or precise definition in his works. On the other hand, particularly in his dialogues, he is witty, bawdy, disputatious and hostile. Women are ‘a chaos of irrationality’ ([1584b] 1964: 118); his contemporary Patrizi is that ‘excrement of pedantry, who has soiled many quires with his Peripatetic Discussions’ ([1584b] 1964: 99); Oxford doctors, who know beer better than Greek, are characterized by ‘discourteous impoliteness and brazen ignorance’ ([1584a] 1975: 142). His invective is balanced by elaborate praise of ‘the Nolan’, who has ‘set free the human spirit and cognition’ ([1584a] 1975: 60).

One feature of Bruno’s style that seems particularly strange to modern readers, is his elaborate, extravagant, use of verbal descriptions of images, seals and emblems (symbolic devices representing abstract qualities, astral powers and so on). These devices are often arranged in groups of thirty, though The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast is organized around forty-eight constellations, each linked to a vice which is to be expelled and replaced by the contrary virtue.

The influences on Bruno’s work are manifold. As a Dominican, he had studied Thomas Aquinas, whom he greatly admired, and Thomistic distinctions and categories still pervade his works. Obviously he knew Aristotle well, though he is generally opposed to his views. He frequently refers to the Presocratics (see Presocratic philosophy), and also to Lucretius, but his general framework is Neoplatonic. Plato and Plotinus are of particular importance, along with the Corpus Hermeticum, Ibn Gabirol and Nicholas of Cusa. Bruno also made much use of Ramon Llull, Marsilio Ficino and Agrippa von Nettesheim (§5), especially Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia (1533).

3 Memory and magic

The art of memory, which grew out of rhetoric, had a long history (see Memory §1). It developed rules for the cultivation of so-called artificial memory. These rules focused on places and images. First, one should imagine a place, such as a house with several rooms; then one should place images in each room. Later, by wandering in thought through the rooms, one would be enabled to remember the topics or things associated with each image. Bruno was trained in this tradition, but when he went to Paris, he became acquainted with Ramon Llull’s combinatory art, which involved using letters and figures to represent basic concepts, and writing them on moving wheels in order to make new combinations (see Llull, R. §2). Bruno adapted Llull’s technique by employing images and emblems in place of mere letters. On turning the concentric wheels, one could relate the images in various ways and multiply the triggers of memory, as well as the complexity of what was represented.

Bruno’s use of images has been linked to magic and Hermeticism (or Hermetism) as well as to the privileging of the imagination in epistemology. On the traditional view, the imagination was taken to be one of the inner senses, and had two functions, the forming of images which help us to retain sense impressions in memory, and the manipulation of images to form images of things never experienced, such as a golden mountain. Given a realist epistemology, images both reflected the outer world and formed a basis for the operations of the intellect. Bruno seems not to have departed from this account, and while he naturally emphasized the imagination when speaking of artificial memory, his other accounts of the human search for knowledge always subordinate the imagination to the intellect. The noetic process is triggered by sense perception, and involves an ascent beyond the imagination to as much understanding as the human mind can achieve. In The Heroic Frenzies Bruno emphasizes that love is the stimulus, and that the final ascent to union with God through understanding is unattainable in this life. There are difficulties with Bruno’s epistemology, in that it is not always clear how much room is assigned to illumination from above, or how it is that human notions (the ‘shadows of ideas’) reflect the divine ideas that structure the world without being innate, but it is not the case that his account of cognition is reducible to his account of the imagination.

The link between magic and the art of memory can be explained by appeal to Bruno’s realist framework, together with the premises that symbols and reality are linked and that knowledge as such has operative force. If external symbols and internal images represent not just the world but the natural forces which pervade it, the magician can achieve mastery of these natural forces by increasing his ability to represent them. Not only that, he can even influence others by projecting images into their minds. While Bruno’s works on magic were all written at the end of his literary activity, he does speak of natural magic (as opposed to black magic) approvingly in The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. He describes the cult of the ancient Egyptians as ‘magic and divine’ ([1584d] 1964: 239), and says that their ‘magic and divine rites’ provide a way of ascent ‘to the Divinity by means of the same ladder of Nature by which Divinity descends even to the lowest things in order to communicate herself’ ([1584d] 1964: 236).

Frances Yates links both these references to magic and Bruno’s praise of the ancient Egyptian religion to the Corpus Hermeticum, a group of writings dating from ad 100 to ad 300, and attributed to the mythical Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus. She argues that Bruno’s main aim in all his writings was to preach Hermeticism, and to establish it as the one true religion. Although her thesis is overstated, it does provide a way of reconciling Bruno’s works on memory and magic with his more directly philosophical works (see Hermetism).

4 Cosmology

Bruno is best known for his championship of Copernicus in The Ash Wednesday Supper. In De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) (1543), Copernicus had argued both that the earth had its own daily rotation, and that it rotated around the sun (see Copernicus, N.). These theses challenged Aristotelian cosmology, but the force of the challenge was recognized only gradually. It was not until 1616 that De Revolutionibus was put on the Index of books forbidden by the Roman Catholic Church, and ironically, it may have been in part Bruno’s defence of Copernicus that led to this result, for he pointed out that Copernicus’ theory was inconsistent with the standard ways of interpreting the Bible at that time. Bruno took Copernican cosmology more seriously and less metaphorically than Yates suggests when she writes ‘The sun-centred universe was the symbol of Bruno’s vision of universal magical religion, inspired by the works of "Hermes Trismegistus"’ (Yates 1982: 219). Nonetheless, it is true that Bruno showed little interest in the mathematical basis of Copernicus’ work. He criticized Copernicus for ‘being more intent on the study of mathematics than of nature’ ([1584a] 1975: 57), a point which ties in with his other attacks on mathematics, and his emphasis on numerology in such writings as De monade. Moreover, Bruno got some of the technical details wrong, perhaps because he was drawing on the writings of a French bishop, Pontus de Tyard, who was favourable to Copernicus, but muddled.

In both The Ash Wednesday Supper and On the Infinite Universe and Worlds Bruno makes a series of cosmological claims that owe much to Lucretius and Nicholas of Cusa. First, the universe is infinite, which means that it can have no centre, though there are many world-systems each of which may have its own centre. Second, these worlds may be inhabited. Third, the stars can be regarded as suns, that is, as self-luminous bodies, and they should not be seen as fixed on spheres. Fourth, the earth is made of the same stuff as the other worlds: there is no difference of kind between the sublunar realm and the heavenly realms, as Aristotelians argued. Finally, the celestial bodies that constitute the universe are ‘intelligent animals’ ([1584a] 1975: 46). Indeed, it is because the earth is animate that it must rotate. It has an ‘innate animal instinct’ ([1584c] 1950: 266), and there is no need to postulate extrinsic movers.

5 Metaphysics

Bruno’s main argument for the infinity of the world relied on his view of God as infinite in power and goodness. Goodness diffuses itself, and the only appropriate product of infinite power must itself be infinite. He went on to give an account of the created world in largely Neoplatonic terms. In De umbris idearum he claims that all things are ordered and connected, and he presents a fairly standard account of the ‘ladder of nature’ (scala naturae, or the Great Chain of Being), with pure act or infinite unity at the top and matter or infinite number at the bottom. The intelligences or pure spirits come below God, followed by the corporeal world, with soul as an intermediary.

The theme of the ladder of nature goes together with two other themes, the division into three worlds (found in the Corpus Hermeticum), and the Neoplatonic scheme of exitus and reditus, or going out and coming back, ascending and descending. The three worlds are described in Sigillus sigillorum. The first world is the fons idearum (the fount of ideas) which is God himself as containing the divine Ideas by which the created world is structured; the second is the mundus ideatus, the created world; and the third is the human mind which reflects the created world. Just as God’s power flows down the ladder of nature, creating the third world through the second, so human contemplation ascends the ladder, knowing the first world through the second.

This Neoplatonic schema was considerably complicated by Bruno’s account of matter in Cause, Principle and Unity. While he retained Aristotle’s account of physical reality in terms of form and matter, he attacked Aristotle’s view of prime matter as purely receptive and devoid of form. Rather, matter contains all things within itself, and ‘unfolds what it holds folded-up’ ([1584b] 1964: 131). Forms both desire and need matter. In language very reminiscent of Ibn Gabirol (§2), Bruno developed his theory by claiming that there are just two substances (apart from the transcendent God, who is the only genuine substance), namely Matter and Form, and these are united. Universal Form is identified with the World-Soul, which through its faculty of intellect serves as efficient cause of the world, and through its status as form, animates and informs the world. As a result, it is both a part of the universe (as form) and not a part (as efficient cause). It was this part of Bruno’s theory that led to mistaken accusations of pantheism.

His view of matter has two consequences. First, he rejected the Neoplatonic hierarchy in relation to the created world. One can no longer think of matter as at the bottom of the ladder, for it is indivisible from form and indeed from life: ‘there is not the least corpuscle that doesn’t contain internally some portion that may become alive’ ([1584b] 1964: 87). Second, he abandoned the Aristotelian account of individuals as substances belonging to a species. Neither humanitas (‘humanity’) nor Socrateitas (‘Socrateity’) are substantial forms, that is forms which by union with matter constitute a substance capable of receiving accidents. Instead, Socrates is himself an accident of the one material substance, and so what we take to be an individual is a collection of fleeting accidents.

Bruno also believed in atomism (see Atomism), but his account in De triplici minimo et mensura seems to retain the dualism of form and matter. Atoms are the smallest parts of things, and are indivisible, but there are different types of atom. Some atoms are the constituents of material things, other atoms are soul, while a third simple element, the monad, is found rationally in numbers and essentially in all things ([1582–1600] 1962 vol. I, part 3: 140). Indeed, Bruno even calls God the monad of monads (monadum monas) ([1582–1600] 1962 vol. I, part 3: 146) because he is one in the fullest sense.

6 Influence

At first, Bruno had little influence, partly because his works were placed on the Index in 1603, but also because some of them were in Italian, while Latin remained the language of science and scholarship well into the seventeenth century. Kepler cites him a number of times, and there seem to be hints of his thought in Spinoza and in Leibniz, but it is difficult to tell whether there was any direct influence. He became popular in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when such thinkers as Schelling and Jacobi praised him for his supposed pantheism. In the later nineteenth century he became an Italian national hero, and was regarded as a martyr for freedom of thought and modern science.