A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson
1638. Kepler's indecisive Mysterium Cosmographicum appeared only in
2563 words | Chapter 58
1597; his treatise on the motions of the planet Mars not till 1609.
One of the first to bring the new cosmological conception to bear on
philosophic thought was Giordano Bruno of Nola (1548-1600), whose
life and death of lonely chivalry have won him his place as the
typical martyr of modern freethought. [186] He may be conceived as a
blending of the pantheistic and naturalistic lore of ancient Greece,
[187] assimilated through the Florentine Platonists, with the spirit
of modern science (itself a revival of the Greek) as it first takes
firm form in Copernicus, whose doctrine Bruno early and ardently
embraced. Baptized Filippo, he took Giordano as his cloister-name
when he entered the great convent of S. Domenico Maggiore at Naples
in 1563, in his fifteenth year. No human being was ever more unfitly
placed among the Dominicans, punningly named the "hounds of the Lord"
(domini canes) for their work as the corps of the Inquisition; and
very early in his cloister life he came near being formally proceeded
against for showing disregard of sacred images, and making light of
the sanctity of the Virgin. [188] He passed his novitiate, however,
without further trouble, and was fully ordained a priest in 1572,
in his twenty-fourth year. Passing then through several Neapolitan
monasteries during a period of three years, he seems to have become
not a little of a freethinker on his return to his first cloister, as
he had already reached Arian opinions in regard to Christ, and soon
proceeded to substitute a mystical and Pythagorean for the orthodox
view of the Trinity. [189]
For the second time a "process" was begun against him, and he
took flight to Rome (1576), presenting himself at a convent of his
Order. News speedily came from Naples of the process against him,
and of the discovery that he had possessed a volume of the works
of Chrysostom and Jerome with the scholia of Erasmus--a prohibited
thing. Only a few months before Bartolomeo Carranza, Bishop of Toledo,
who had won the praise of the Council of Trent for his index of
prohibited books, had been condemned to abjure for the doctrine that
"the worship of the relics of the saints is of human institution,"
and had died in the same year at the convent to which Bruno had
now gone. Thus doubly warned, he threw off his priestly habit, and
fled to the Genoese territory, [190] where, in the commune of Noli,
he taught grammar and astronomy. In 1578 he visited successively
Turin, Venice, Padua, Bergamo, and Milan, resuming at the last-named
town his monk's habit. Thereafter he again returned to Turin,
passing thence to Chambéry at the end of 1578, and thence to Geneva
early in 1579. [191] His wish, he said, was "to live in liberty and
security"; but for that he must first renounce his Dominican habit;
other Italian refugees, of whom there were many at Geneva, helping
him to a layman's suit. Becoming a corrector of the press, he seems
to have conformed externally to Calvinism; but after a stay of two
and a-half months he published a short diatribe against one Antonio
de La Faye, who professed philosophy at the Academy; and for this he
was arrested and sentenced to excommunication, while his bookseller
was subjected to one day's imprisonment and a fine. [192] After three
weeks the excommunication was raised; but he nevertheless left Geneva,
and afterwards spoke of Calvinism as the "deformed religion." After
a few weeks' sojourn at Lyons he went to Toulouse, the very centre
of inquisitional orthodoxy; and there, strangely enough, he was able
to stay for more than a year, [193] taking his degree as Master of
Arts and becoming professor of astronomy. But the civil wars made
Toulouse unsafe; and at length, probably in 1581 or 1582, he reached
Paris, where for a time he lectured as professor extraordinary. [194]
In 1583 he reached England, where he remained till 1585, lecturing,
debating at Oxford on the Copernican theory, and publishing a number
of his works, four of them dedicated to his patron Castelnau de
Mauvissière, the French ambassador. Oxford was then a stronghold
of bigoted Aristotelianism, where bachelors and masters deviating
from the master were fined, or, if openly hostile, expelled. [195]
In that camp Bruno was not welcome. But he had other shelter, at the
French Embassy in London, and there he had notable acquaintances. He
had met Sir Philip Sidney at Milan in 1578; and his dialogue, Cena de
le Ceneri, gives a vivid account of a discussion in which he took a
leading part at a banquet given by Sir Fulke Greville. His picture of
"Oxford ignorance and English ill-manners" [196] is not lenient; and
there is no reason to suppose that his doctrine was then assimilated
by many; [197] but his stay in the household of Castelnau was one
of the happiest periods of his chequered life. While in England he
wrote no fewer than seven works, four of them dedicated to Castelnau,
and two--the Heroic Fervours and the Expulsion of the Triumphant
Beast--to Sir Philip Sidney.
Returning to Paris on the recall of Castelnau in 1585, he made an
attempt to reconcile himself to the Church, but it was fruitless;
and thereafter he went his own way. After a public disputation at the
university in 1586, he set out on a new peregrination, visiting first
Mayence, Marburg, and Wittemberg. At Marburg he was refused leave to
debate; and at Wittemberg he seems to have been carefully conciliatory,
as he not only matriculated but taught for over a year (1586-1588),
till the Calvinist party carried the day over the Lutheran. [198]
Thereafter he reached Prague, Helmstadt, Frankfort, and Zurich. At
length, on the fatal invitation of the Venetian youth Mocenigo, he
re-entered Italian territory, where, in Venice, he was betrayed to
the Inquisition by his treacherous and worthless pupil. [199]
What had been done for freethought by Bruno in his fourteen years of
wandering, debating, and teaching through Europe it is impossible to
estimate; but it is safe to say that he was one of the most powerful
antagonists to orthodox unreason that had yet appeared. Of all men of
his time he had perhaps the least affinity with the Christian creed,
which was repellent to him alike in the Catholic and the Protestant
versions. The attempt to prove him a believer on the strength of
a non-autograph manuscript [200] is idle. His approbation of a
religion for the discipline of uncivilized peoples is put in terms
of unbelief. [201] In the Spaccio della bestia trionfante he derides
the notion of a union of divine and human natures, and substantially
proclaims a natural (theistic) religion, negating all "revealed"
religions alike. Where Boccaccio had accredited all the three leading
religions, Bruno disallows all with paganism, though he puts that
above Christianity. [202] And his disbelief grew more stringent with
his years. Among the heretical propositions charged against him by
the Inquisition were these: that there is transmigration of souls;
that magic is right and proper; that the Holy Spirit is the same thing
as the soul of the world; that the world is eternal; that Moses, like
the Egyptians, wrought miracles by magic; that the sacred writings
are but a romance (sogno); that the devil will be saved; that only
the Hebrews are descended from Adam, other men having descended from
progenitors created by God before Adam; that Christ was not God,
but was a notorious sorcerer (insigne mago), who, having deceived
men, was deservedly hanged, not crucified; that the prophets and
the apostles were bad men and sorcerers, and that many of them were
hanged as such. The cruder of these propositions rest solely on the
allegation of Mocenigo, and were warmly repudiated by Bruno: others
are professedly drawn, always, of course, by forcing his language,
but not without some colourable pretext, from his two "poems,"
De triplice, minimo, et mensura, and De monade, numero et figura,
published at Frankfort in 1591, in the last year of his freedom. [203]
But the allusions in the Sigillus Sigillorum [204] to the weeping
worship of a suffering Adonis, to the exhibition of suffering and
miserable Gods, to transpierced divinities, and to sham miracles,
were certainly intended to contemn the Christian system.
Alike in the details of his propaganda and in the temper of his
utterance, Bruno expresses from first to last the spirit of freethought
and free speech. Libertas philosophica [205] is the breath of his
nostrils; and by his life and his death alike he upholds the ideal
for men as no other before him did. The wariness of Rabelais and the
non-committal skepticism of Montaigne are alike alien to him; he is
too lacking in reticence, too explosive, to give due heed even to
the common-sense amenities of life, much more to hedge his meaning
with safeguarding qualifications. And it was doubtless as much by
the contagion of his mood as by his lore that he impressed men.
His personal and literary influence was probably most powerful in
respect of his eager propaganda of the Copernican doctrine, which he
of his own force vitally expanded and made part of a pantheistic
conception of the universe. [206] Where Copernicus adhered by
implication to the idea of an external and limitary sphere--the last
of the eight of the Ptolemaic theory--Bruno reverted boldly to the
doctrine of Anaximandros, and declared firmly for the infinity of
space and of the series of the worlds. In regard to biology he makes
an equivalent advance, starting from the thought of Empedocles and
Lucretius, and substituting an idea of natural selection for that
of creative providence. [207] The conception is definitely thought
out, and marks him as one of the renovators of scientific no less
than of philosophic thought for the modern world; though the special
paralysis of science under Christian theology kept his ideas on this
side pretty much a dead letter for his own day. And indeed it was
to the universal and not the particular that his thought chiefly
and most enthusiastically turned. A philosophic poet rather than
a philosopher or man of science, he yet set abroad for the modern
world that conception of the physical infinity of the universe which,
once psychologically assimilated, makes an end of the medieval theory
of things. On this head he was eagerly affirmative; and the merely
Pyrrhonic skeptics he assailed as he did the "asinine" orthodox,
though he insisted on doubt as the beginning of wisdom.
Of his extensive literary output not much is stamped with lasting
scientific fitness or literary charm; and some of his treatises, as
those on mnemonics, have no more value than the product of his didactic
model, Raymond Lully. As a writer he is at his best in the sweeping
expatiation of his more general philosophic treatises, where he attains
a lifting ardour of inspiration, a fervour of soaring outlook, that
puts him in the front rank of the thinkers of his age. And if his
literary character is at times open to severe criticism in respect
of his lack of balance, sobriety, and self-command, his final courage
atones for such shortcomings.
His case, indeed, serves to remind us that at certain junctures it is
only the unbalanced types that aid humanity's advance. The perfectly
prudent and self-sufficing man does not achieve revolutions, does
not revolt against tyrannies; he wisely adapts himself and subsists,
letting the evil prevail as it may. It is the more impatient and
unreticent, the eager and hot-brained--in a word, the faulty--who clash
with oppression and break a way for quieter spirits through the hedges
of enthroned authority. The serenely contemplative spirit is rather
a possession than a possessor for his fellows; he may inform and
enlighten, but is not in himself a countering or inspiriting force:
a Shelley avails more than a Goethe against tyrannous power. And it
may be that the battling enthusiast in his own way wins liberation
for himself from "fear of fortune and death," as he wins for others
liberty of action. [208] Even such a liberator, bearing other men's
griefs and taking stripes that they might be kept whole, was Bruno.
And though he quailed at the first shock of capture and torture,
when the end came he vindicated human nature as worthily as could
any quietist. It was a long-drawn test. Charged on the traitor's
testimony with many "blasphemies," he denied them all, [209] but stood
to his published writings [210] and vividly expounded his theories,
[211] professing in the usual manner to believe in conformity with
the Church's teachings, whatever he might write on philosophy. It
is impossible to trust the Inquisition records as to his words
of self-humiliation; [212] though on the other hand no blame can
rationally attach to anyone who, in his place, should try to deceive
such enemies, morally on a level with hostile savages. It is certain
that the Inquisitors frequently wrung recantations by torture. [213]
What is historically certain is that Bruno was not released, but sent
on to Rome, and was kept there in prison for seven years. He was not
the sort of heretic likely to be released; though the fact of his being
a Dominican, and the desire to maintain the Church's intellectual
credit, delayed so long his execution. Certainly not an atheist (he
called himself in several of his book-titles Philotheus; he consigns
insano ateismo to perdition; [214] and his quasi-pantheism or monism
often lapses into theistic modes), [215] he yet was from first to last
essentially though not professedly anti-Christian in his view of the
universe. If the Church had cause to fear any philosophic teaching,
it was his, preached with the ardour of a prophet and the eloquence
of a poet. His doctrine that the worlds in space are innumerable was
as offensive to orthodox ears as his specific negations of Christian
dogma, outgoing as it did the later idea of Kepler and Galileo. He had,
moreover, finally refused to make any fresh recantation; and the only
detailed document extant concerning his final trial describes him as
saying to his judges: "With more fear, perchance, do you pass sentence
on me than I receive it." [216] According to all accessible records,
he was burned alive at Rome in February, 1600, in the Field of Flowers,
near where his statue now stands. As was probably customary, they tied
his tongue before leading him to the stake, lest he should speak to
the people; [217] and his martyrdom was an edifying spectacle for the
vast multitude of pilgrims who had come from all parts of Christendom
for the jubilee of the pope. [218] At the stake, when he was at the
point of death, there was duly presented to him the crucifix, and he
duly put it aside.
An attempt has been made by Professor Desdouits in a pamphlet
(La légende tragique de Jordano Bruno; Paris, 1885) to show that
there is no evidence that Bruno was burned; and an anonymous
writer in the Scottish Review (October, 1888, Art. II), rabidly
hostile to Bruno, has maintained the same proposition. Doubt on
the subject dates from Bayle. Its main ground is the fewness of
the documentary records, of which, further, the genuineness is
now called in question. But no good reason is shown for doubting
them. They are three.
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