Giordano Bruno - free ebook by J. Lewis (James Lewis) McIntyre

GIORDANO BRUNO

BY J. LEWIS McINTYRE M.A. EDIN. AND OXON.: D.SC. EDIN.: ANDERSON LECTURER IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN London MACMILLAN AND CO., L IMITED NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1903 All rights reserved To MY WIFE...

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PREFACE

This volume attempts to do justice to a philosopher who has hardly received in England the consideration he deserves. Apart from the Life of Giordano Bruno , by I. Frith (Mrs. Oppenheim), in the English and Foreign Philosophical Library, 1887, there has been no complete work in our language upon the poet, teacher, and martyr of Nola, while his philosophy has been treated only in occasional articles and reviews. Yet he is recognised by the more liberal-minded among Italians as the greatest and mo

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BIOGRAPHIES AND GENERAL WORKS ON BRUNO

Bartholmèss, Christian, Jordano Bruno , vol. i., Paris, 1846—on the life and times of Bruno; vol. 2, 1847—on his works and philosophy. Carrière, Moritz, Die philosophische Weltanschauung der Reformationszeit , 1st ed., 1847; 2nd ed., 1887. Berti, Domenico, Giordano Bruno da Nola, sua vita e sua dottrina . Appeared first in the Nuova Antologia , 1867. Some new documents were published in Documenti intorno a Giordano Bruno da Nola , 1880. A second edition of the Life, including all the documents,

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I

Birth and Family. In 1548, at a stormy period of the history of Italy, Bruno was born in the township of Nola, lying within the kingdom of Naples, which at that time was under Spanish rule. His father, Giovanni, was a soldier, probably of good family, and in deference, it may be supposed, to the King of Spain, the son was named Filippo; the more famous name of Giordano was only assumed when he entered a religious order. Through his mother, Fraulissa Savolina, a German or Saxon origin has been cl

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II

Naples. When about eleven years of age, Bruno passed from Nola to Naples in order to receive the higher education of the day—Humanity, Logic, and Dialectic,—attending both public and private courses; and in his fifteenth year 1563. (1562 or 1563) he took the habit of St. Dominic, and entered the monastery of that order in Naples. Of his earlier teachers he mentions only two,—“il Sarnese,” who is probably Vincenzo Colle da Sarno, a writer of repute, and Fra Theophilo da Vairano, a favourite expon

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III

Noli. Bruno, who resumed for the time his baptismal name of Filippo, journeyed first to the picturesque little town of Noli, in the Gulf of Genoa, whither a more famous exile, Dante, had also come. 1576? There he lived for four or five months, teaching grammar to boys, and “the Sphere”—that is, astronomy and cosmography, with a dash of metaphysics,—to certain gentlemen. Savona. Turin. Venice. Thence he came to Savona, to Turin, [21] and to Venice. In Venice six weeks were spent, probably in the

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IV

Lyons. After a short stay in Lyons, where “he could not make enough to keep him alive,” Toulouse. Bruno passed to Toulouse, which boasted then of one of the most flourishing universities in the world. In his account of his life before the Venetian tribunal, he gives two years and a half to Toulouse, 1579–81 but he must have left it before the end of 1581, so that his actual stay was only two years. While he was holding private classes on the Sphere, and other philosophical subjects, a chair at t

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V

England, 1583. England under Elizabeth was renowned for its tolerance; all manner of religious refugees found there a place of safety: to Italians its welcome was particularly cordial, their language was the favoured one of the court, and Elizabeth herself eagerly saw and spoke with them in their own tongue. Florio—an Italian in spite of having had London for his birthplace, the friend of Shakespeare, of Spenser and Ben Jonson—was constantly at court; two of Elizabeth’s physicians were Italian,

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VI

London. It was after his return from Oxford that the pleasant and busy life in London literary society began—the period of Bruno’s greatest productiveness. In the house of the enlightened and cultured Mauvissière he found, for the first time since leaving Nola, a home. [49] Bruno’s position in London has given rise to great difference of opinion; none of the ordinary contemporary records make mention of him, or the slightest allusion to his presence in England. At his trial he professed to have

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VII

The Thirty Seals. No fewer than seven works from Bruno’s facile pen were published in England; the first of these was the Thirty Seals, and the Seal of Seals (1583) Explicatio Triginta Sigillorum, quibus adjectus est Sigillus [64] Sigillorum . It was dedicated to Mauvissière, but the introductory epistle was addressed to the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford. Bound along with it, in front, was a Modern and Complete Art of Remembering which is merely a reprint of the last part of the Cantus Circæus . The

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VIII

The women of England. It may not be amiss to give from these works some illustrations of life in England as Bruno found it. England, as in the days of Erasmus, was renowned on the continent for its beautiful women, and Bruno’s passionate and enthusiastic nature could not but feel the attraction of “the fair and gracious nymphs of England.” In the Cena he appeals to the muses of England, “gracious and gentle, soft and tender, young, fair and delicate, blond-haired, white of chin, pink of cheek, o

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IX

Return to France, October 1585. When Mauvissière was recalled, Bruno in all probability sailed with him. It had been decided, unjustly, as Mauvissière thought, to recall him to France in 1584; but owing to his wife’s health and perhaps his claims on the French treasury, he secured a postponement till the following year, on condition he should do his best for Queen Mary and her son with Elizabeth, “but not mix himself up with any of the plots against Elizabeth.” In October 2, 1585, he was still i

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X

Paris: Oct. 1585-June 1586. “In Paris I spent another year in the house of gentlemen of my acquaintance, but at my own expense the greater part of the time: because of the tumults I left Paris, and went from there to Germany.” [80] So Bruno told the tribunal at Venice; but the duration of his second visit to Paris was from October 1585 to June 1586. The Church. One of his first steps was to make further efforts towards reconciliation with the Church: he presented himself for confession to a Jesu

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XI

1586. Leaving France for Germany, the Nolan made his first halt at “ Mez , or Magonza , which is an archiepiscopal city, and the first elector of the Empire”; [89] it is certainly Mayence. Mainz. There he remained some days; but not finding either there or at “ Vispure , a place not far from there,” any means of livelihood such as he cared for, he went on to Wittenberg in Saxony. Marburg. “Vispure” has caused considerable exercise of ingenuity among Bruno’s biographers. The best explanation seem

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XII

Prague: 1588. The court of the Emperor Rudolph II. was at Prague, in Bohemia; from there his fame as a Maecenas of the learned, and especially of those who claimed power to read the heavens or to work magic, had spread to many countries. Perhaps Sidney, who had visited him from Elizabeth on the death of Maximilian, may have spoken of him to Bruno: while two of Bruno’s friends, the Spanish Ambassador St. Clement and the mathematician Mordentius, were at Prague in 1588. Thither, accordingly, he no

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XIII

Frankfort. These were the great Latin works he had been writing, perhaps begun in England itself;—the De Minimo , and the De Immenso , with the De Monade as a part of or introduction to the latter. The printing, however, was not begun till the following year: the censor’s permission was obtained for the first of them only in March 1591, and it appeared in the catalogue of the Spring bookmarket. He again sought and found patronage with an old friend of Sir Philip Sidney, one of the Wechels, famou

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XIV

Venice. During the second part of his stay in Frankfort, Bruno received an invitation from a young patrician of Venice, Giovanni Mocenigo, to come to him there and instruct him in the arts for which Bruno was famed. Aug. 1591. To the surprise of all who knew the circumstances, Bruno accepted, and re-entered, in August, the Italy which he had left some fourteen years earlier as a refugee. It was through the bookseller Ciotto that the negotiations were carried on. Mocenigo appeared in his shop one

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XV

Meantime Mocenigo was putting pressure on Bruno to obtain the secrets he sought to know, while Bruno at last became aware of his danger. He pretended he wished to go to Frankfort to have some books printed, and on a certain Thursday in May he took leave of Mocenigo. The latter, fearing his prey was about to escape, began to cajole him into staying, but passed to complaint and finally to threats as Bruno persisted. May 22. On the night of the following day (Friday), as Bruno had already made prep

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XVI

This closed the acts of the process so far as the Venetian tribunal was concerned. The “Sacred Congregation of the Supreme Tribunal of the Holy Office,” at Rome, was eager to secure the distinguished heretic for itself, and on the 12th of September the Cardinal San Severina wrote to this effect; the Venetian tribunal, on the 17th, gave orders that Bruno be sent as soon as possible to the Governor of Ancona, who would see to his further custody to Rome. On the 28th this decision was reported to t

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XVII

Bruno’s behaviour before the Venetian tribunal has been regarded as a signal blot upon his character. In the course of his cross-examination he entirely changed his attitude, which was at first one of defiant self-confidence, open confession of his (philosophic) differences from the Church, and of indirect attacks upon the faith in his writings; insistence upon his right to use “the natural light” of sense and reason, so long as the doctrines of the Church were accepted by way of faith. Later he

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XVIII

December 21, 1599. He was granted more than forty days, however, or the period was renewed, for it was not until the 21st of December of that year that the patience or perseverance of the Inquisition began to be exhausted. On that date—the next on which there is any record of Bruno—the congregation again reopened the case. In a rough copy of the report which has been found Bruno is quoted as saying, “that he neither ought nor will recant, that he has nothing to recant, no matter for recantation,

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XIX

It is not easy to characterise so complex a personality as Bruno undoubtedly was. The fiery passionate blood of the south ran in his veins, the joy of a strong-flowing life was in his heart and brain. A child of Nature, he was almost from the first, “cribbed, cabined, and confined” by the stone walls of the cloister, as his mind was hampered by the laws and dogmas of the Church. [131] From Nature herself he drew his first lessons. While his fellows taught that Nature was a thing of evil, he lear

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XX

For such coinage, as for illustrations to his theories, references to old authorities, material for his satire on pedants, as well as for more doubtful purposes,—mystical or magical formulæ, or “proofs,”—his prodigious memory never left Bruno at a loss. But if this memory, in its tenacity, supplied him with powerful and ready arguments against his opponents in their appeal to the authority of antiquity, it was also, in its fertility, the source of the chief defects of his writing, and perhaps al

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XXI

Religion. Bruno was far from being what we should now call a Rationalist; he felt that cold reason, mere human logic alone, could not fathom the deepest nature of things, which was God, but that this deepest nature of things was apart from conditions of time and space. Whatever occurred under these conditions,—whatever fell within the actual world,—he claimed for sense and reason, i.e. as a subject of natural explanation, as accessible in all its aspects to human knowledge. There are thus two ve

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WORKS OF BRUNO PUBLISHED AFTER 1592[146]

1. Summa terminorum metaphysicorum ad capessendum Logicae et Philosophiae studium, ex Jordani Bruni Nolani Entis descensu manusc. excerpta; nunc primum luci commissa; a Raphaele Eglino Iconio, Tigurino : Zurich, 1595. Reprinted in 1609:— Summa Terminorum Metaphysicorum, Jordani Bruni Nolani. Accessit eiusdem Praxis Descensus seu Multiplicatio Entis ex Manuscripto per Raphaelum Eglinum Iconium Tigurinum in Acad. Marpurg. Profess. Theolog. cum supplemento Rodolphi Goclenii Senioris , Marburg, 1609

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CHAPTER I THE SOURCES OF THE PHILOSOPHY

In the school and the monastery at Naples Bruno passed as a matter of course through a training in the Scholastic Philosophy. Before entering the monastery of St. Dominic at fifteen years of age he had studied “humane letters, logic, and dialectic,” [155] and had attended, among other lectures, a private course by Theophilus of Varrano, an Augustine monk and distinguished Aristotelian. From him, probably, Bruno received an impetus towards the study of Aristotle in the original works, if not also

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CHAPTER II THE FOUNDATIONS OF KNOWLEDGE[248]

It is the object of this chapter to give some account of the speculations on nature and spirit which occupied Bruno during his first year in England, and which show how hard he was striving to pierce through the shell of mediæval thought in which his mind was encased. However fiercely he struggled to gain his freedom, it was impossible that he should do so quite at once. With all his contemporaries, he was imbued in Aristotle’s ways of thought, and the problems he set himself to answer were larg

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CHAPTER III THE INFINITE UNIVERSE—THE MIRROR OF GOD[289]

In the contemplation of the infinite, writes Bruno, man attains his highest good. All things aspire to the end for which they are ordained, and the more perfect its nature the more nobly and effectively does each aspire. Man alone, however, as endowed with a twofold nature, pursues a twofold good,—“on the boundary line of eternity and time, between the archetypal world and the copy, the intelligible and the sensible, participating in either substance.” [290] Human effort can find satisfaction in

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CHAPTER IV NATURE AND THE LIVING WORLDS

We have found that, according to Bruno, the universe is infinite in extent, and that there are innumerable worlds within it: it remains to know what are the materials that constitute the universe, and the moving principles that govern its changes and direct the worlds in their courses. Uniformity of Nature. Nature, he said, is the same in kind, in its substance, and in its elements, throughout its whole extent—a daring conception for a time when the empyrean and all space beyond it were still re

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CHAPTER V[380] THE LAST AND THE LEAST THINGS: ATOMS AND SOUL-MONADS

The reaction against Aristotelianism had, as one of its results, a renascence of the atomic theory of Democritus and Lucretius; and one of the earliest adherents of the renovated doctrine was Bruno. Although a complete presentation of the theory was not given until his later works, the De Minimo and the Articuli adv. Mathematicos , appeared, yet already in the Italian dialogues there were frequent references to it. In the Cena , [381] for example, it is said that in the physical division of a fi

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CHAPTER VI THE PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BRUNO

The distinctively ethical teaching of Bruno is contained in the two dialogues—the Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante , and the Heroici Furori . The latter describes the struggles and aspirations of the “heroic” or generous human soul in its pursuit of the infinitely beautiful and good—its efforts towards union with the divine source of all things. To this more constructive work, in which moral philosophy was to be treated according to “the inward light with which the divine sun of intelligence had

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CHAPTER VII THE HIGHER LIFE

We now turn to the higher moral life, which is at the same time the religious life, of the heroic soul in its struggle towards perfection. This perfection consists in comprehension of the world as infinitely perfect, in the union with God as the source from which the world flows, the spirit in which it lives, and in the Love of God as at once infinite beauty and infinite goodness. We have seen that there are to Bruno, as to Plato and to Aristotle, two classes of men, the “vulgar” and the “heroic

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CHAPTER VIII POSITIVE RELIGIONS AND THE RELIGION OF PHILOSOPHY

The hostility which the Italian and some of the Latin writings of Bruno showed towards the positive religions of his day, alike the Catholic, the Reformed, the Jewish, and the Mahomedan, had two grounds: his belief that religious or sectarian strife was the chief cause of the evils of war and civil discord that were rife throughout Europe, and the fact that one and all of these Churches claimed the right of limiting thought as well as of dictating practice, and in their exercise of this right fo

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CHAPTER IX BRUNO IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

Perhaps no philosopher of equal originality and strength has had so little apparent influence upon contemporary or later thought as Bruno. His name hardly occurs in any of the writers of his own or the following century; when it does occur, it is mentioned only that the author may make sufficiently clear the discrepancy between the actual or reputed views of Bruno and those of himself. Yet it is easy to underestimate the influence his writings and his personality exercised; neither in France, in

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ADDITIONAL NOTES

1. To p. 5 and p. 27, Bruno’s upbringing .—In the Infinito , Lag. 362. 34, Burchio, the Aristotelian pedant of the dialogue, addresses Fracastorio in the following polite terms:—“You would be more learned than Aristotle—you, a beast, a poor devil, a beggar, a wretch, fed on bread of millet, perishing of hunger, begotten of a tailor, born of a washer-woman, nephew to Cecco the cobbler, figol di Momo, postiglion de le puttane , brother to Lazarus that makes shoes for asses!” It is almost incredibl

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