Chapter IV: Part I: Life of Bruno (2)

It is possible, on the other hand, that Bruno met Bacon, who was a rising young barrister and member of Parliament when he arrived in England, and had already achieved some fame as a critic of Aristotle. The idea, however, that he knew and influenced Shakespeare, is entirely fanciful. Richard Field, a friend of Shakespeare, had come to London in 1579, and served his apprenticeship with Thomas Vautrollier; and Field was Shakespeare's first publisher, having set up for himself by 1587. It has been suggested that before this time Shakespeare worked in Vautrollier's printing office. On the other hand, it has been universally received that Vautrollier was Bruno's publisher in England, and Bruno usually corrected his own proofs. Hence the two may have met, Shakespeare and Bruno, in a grimy printer's den. The idea is charming, but it has to yield before the light of fact. Shakespeare did not come to London until 1586, and there is no proof that he worked with Vautrollier. Bruno had left England by the end of 1585, and there is no proof that Vautrollier was his printer. The suggested analogies between one or two ideas in Hamlet and Bruno's conceptions of transmigration, of the relativity of evil, and the rest, are of the shallowest.[59] Thomas Vautrollier, a French printer who came to London some years before, and set up a press in Blackfriars, was said (by Thomas Baker) to have gained an undesired notoriety as Bruno's printer, and to have been compelled to leave England for a period, which he spent in Edinburgh, to the advantage of Scottish printing. The _Triginta Sigilli_ and all the Italian Dialogues of Bruno were certainly published in England, although Venice or Paris was set down as their place of publication. According to Bruno, this was "that they might sell more easily, and have the greater success, for if they had been marked as printed in England, they would have sold with greater difficulty in those parts." It is doubtful, however, whether Vautrollier was really the printer; in any case it was not on that account that he went to Edinburgh.[60]

[Sidenote: Florio.]

[Sidenote: Alexander Dicson.]

[Sidenote: _Antidicsonus_.]

[Sidenote: Watson.]

Of the Italians in England during Elizabeth's reign the most familiar to us is Florio, whose father had been preacher to the Protestant Italians in London. Florio had been at Oxford, from which university he dedicated his "First Fruites" to Leicester in 1578, so that he was already well known as a scholar when Bruno came to England and made his acquaintance. This may have occurred through Sidney; or _vice versa_, Sidney's attention may have been called to Bruno by Florio. The latter was described by Cornwallis as one who looked "more like a good fellow than a wise man," yet was "wise beyond his fortune or his education." It was long after Bruno's departure that Florio devoted himself to the charming translation of Montaigne (published in 1603), of which a copy has been found bearing Shakespeare's name, while to Shakespeare is attributed a sonnet in praise of Florio. Curiously, we find him in his translation acknowledging assistance from one with whom Bruno also has casually connected him in the _Cena_, viz. Matthew Gwinne. Of Bruno's more intimate acquaintance in England we know little: there are two whose names occur in the dialogues, "Smith" in the _Cena_, and Dicson in the _Causa_, both sympathetic listeners and adherents of _Theophilo_, who is Bruno's representative. The former it is naturally difficult to place: he may however have been the poet William Smith, a disciple of Spenser, who published a pastoral poem "Chloris, or the Complaint of the Passionate Despised Shepherd." Of Dicson,--"learned, honourable, lovable, well-born faithful friend Alexander Dicson, whom the Nolan loves as his own eyes,"[61] a little more can be told. He was the author of a _De Umbra Rationis_, (1583), obviously inspired by Bruno's _De Umbris Idearum_, and on the same basis of Neoplatonism. The work is extremely sketchy, occasionally diffuse, and of little value even were there anything of value in the Art of Memory which it teaches. But it seems from a reply it called forth (_Antidicsonus_) to have had some vogue, and to have been backed by a vigorous and aggressive school in which Bruno, who is joined in condemnation with Dicson, may have had a place.[62] The poet Thomas Watson has also connected Bruno with Dicson in his _Compendium Memoriæ Localis_, published in 1585 or 1586. Watson also published a translation of Tasso's _Aminta_, in Latin hexameters,--in 1585, _i.e._ in the year following the appearance of Bruno's _Spaccio_, with its satire on Tasso's _Age of Gold_.[63] Watson had been in Paris in 1581, when he met Walsingham, and he may of course have met Bruno also: he was a scholarly poet, although his work lay more in the direction of translation and imitation of foreign writers, than in that of original verse, but during his lifetime he ranked as the equal of Spenser and Sidney. The _Compendium of Local Memory_ is in clear, simple, classical Latin, in strong contrast with the corresponding works of Dicson and of Bruno; but the principles of the Art which it describes are those of Bruno, or Ravenna, or of some common source, more skilfully arranged and more aptly expressed.

VII

[Sidenote: _The Thirty Seals._]

[Sidenote: _Cena de le Ceneri._]

[Sidenote: _De la causa, principio et Uno_, 1584.]

[Sidenote: _De l'infinito universo et Mondi._]

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 work belongs to the mnemonic and psychological writings of Bruno; the thirty seals are hints "for the acquiring, arranging, and recollecting of all sciences and arts," the Seal of Seals "for comparing and explaining all operations of the mind. And it may be called Art of Arts; for here you will easily find all that is theoretically enquired into by logic, metaphysics, the cabala, natural magic, arts great and small." (The part called _Sigillus Sigillorum_ was a volume of Bruno's _Clavis Magna_, perhaps the only volume published.) It was followed by an Italian dialogue, "the Ash Wednesday Supper," _La Cena de le Ceneri_, also dedicated to Mauvissière. Written in praise of the Copernican theory, it goes beyond Copernicus himself in its intuition of the infinity of the universe, of the identity of matter in the earth with the matter of the planets and stars, and of the possibility that such living beings inhabit them as inhabit the earth: earth and stars themselves are also said to be living organisms: so there are not seven planets or wandering stars only, but innumerable such; for every world, whether of the sun-type or of the earth-type, is in motion, its motion proceeding from the spirit within it. Finally, this philosophy is shown to be in complete accord with all true religion, to conflict only with the false. After the "Ash-Wednesday Supper" came "Cause, Principle, and Unity" (_De la causa, principio et Uno_), 1584; again dedicated to Mauvissière.[65] The first of its dialogues is an apology for the _Cena_, which, as we have seen, had caused considerable feeling in Bruno's circle of readers, for the severity and irony of its strictures upon Oxford, and England generally. In the others the immanence or spirituality of all causation; the eternity of matter; its divinity as the potentiality of all life; its realisation in the universe as a whole (as a "formed" thing); the infinite whole and the innumerable parts, as different aspects of the same: the origin of evil and of death: the coincidence of matter and form in the One: the source of all individual and finite forms in the one material substance: the coincidence in the One of the possible and the real, the century and the moment, the solid and the point: the universe all centre and all circumference: diversity and difference as nothing but diverse and different aspects of one and the same substance: the coincidence of contraries:--these are among the chief topics of this, the freshest and most brilliant of Bruno's philosophical writings: "a dialogue worthy of Plato," Moritz Carrière has said. In the same year appeared _The Infinite Universe and its worlds_ (_De l'infinito universo et Mondi_), dedicated to Mauvissière.[66] It contained a masterly array of reasons, physical and metaphysical, for the belief that the universe is infinite, and is full of innumerable worlds of living creatures; sense and imagination are shown to be at once the source and the limit of human knowledge. Yet the argument is mainly _a priori_: the infinite power of the Efficient Cause cannot be ineffective, the divine goodness cannot withhold the good of _life_ from any _possible_ being; the divine will is one with the divine intelligence and with the divine action: all _possible_ existence falls within the sphere of the divine intelligence, therefore is willed; but whatever is willed is realised, for the power is infinite; and whatever is is good, for it is willed by the infinitely good. Whatever really is, is a substance, and therefore immortal. The substance of us is immutable, only the outward face or form of it changes, passes away; in the whole all things are good; where things appear evil or defective, it is because we look at the part or the present, not at the whole or the eternal.

[Sidenote: _Spaccio de la bestia trionfante._]

[Sidenote: The _Cabala_, 1585.]

"The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast," _Spaccio de la bestia trionfante_, 1584,[67] was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. In form an allegorical, satirical prose poem, it is in fact an introduction to a new ethical system. A repentant Jupiter resolves to drive out the numerous beasts that occupy his heavenly firmament--the constellations--and to replace them by the virtues, with Truth as their crown. He calls a council of the gods to consider this plan, and in the discussion that follows numberless topics are touched upon--the history of religions, the contrast between natural and positive religion, and the fundamental forms of morality. The _Spaccio_ is, however, preparatory to a future work, in which moral philosophy shall be treated "by the inner light which the divine intellectual sun has irradiated into my soul," says Bruno;[68] in it, and other dialogues, the whole structure of the philosophy is to be completed, of which the _Bestia_ is merely a tentative sketch.[69] Jupiter represents the human spirit; and the constellations, the Bear, the Scorpion, etc., are the vices of the age, which are to be driven out by Bruno's hierarchy of virtues. The work, which is rich in both moral and religious suggestion, was early regarded as an attack on the Pope or the Church, the supposed "Triumphant Beast." Gaspar Schopp, for example, writes to that effect after witnessing Bruno's death. It is really an attack upon all religions of mere credulity as opposed to religions of truth and of deeds. The "Cabal" (_Cabala del Cavallo Pegaseo, con l' Aggiunta dell' Asino Cillenico_) was published in 1585.[70] It is dedicated to an imaginary Bishop of Casamarciano, who represents the spirit of backwardness, ignorant simplicity, and was not a real person, as some biographers supposed. It is a still more biting, a merciless satire on Asinity (_i.e._ ignorance, credulity, and unenquiring faith in religion). In a later work[71] there is a remark on the _Asinus Cillenicus_, "the image and figure of the animal are well known, many have written on it, we among the rest, in a particular fashion; but as it displeased the vulgar, and failed to please the wise, for its sinister meaning, the work was suppressed." Whether this refers to the whole _Cabala_, or to the last part of it, is not known.

[Sidenote: _Heroici Furori_, 1585.]

The "Enthusiasms of the Noble" (_De gl' heroici furori_), 1585,[72] dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, consists of sonnets, with prose illustrations, after the model of Dante's _Vita Nuova_. Its theme is that of the _Phædrus_ and _Symposium_, the rising of the love for spiritual beauty out of that for sensible beauty, reaching its height in the divine _furor_--an ecstatic unity with the divine life, in which all the miseries and misfortunes of the merely earthly life disappear. Many of the sonnets are of extreme beauty, although Brunnhofer goes too far when he speaks of them as surpassing Petrarca's, except in smoothness of form, and as equalling Shakespeare's.

VIII

[Sidenote: 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, of enticing lips, eyes divine, breasts of ivory, and hearts of adamant: how many thoughts do I weave for you in my mind, how many emotions besiege my spirit, how many passions fill my life, how many tears pour from my eyes, sighs burst from my breast, fires sparkle from my heart?"[73] Nature was taking its revenge indeed for the long years of suppression in the Church. If this dark, slender, "interesting" Italian found favour with the fair and cultured inhabitants of England, he was the less successful with the people in general, the _Plebs_, then as now uncompromisingly opposed to the "foreigner." In his belief England "could boast of a Plebs which for want of respect, rudeness, roughness, rusticity, savagery, ill training, was second to none in the world."[74] No doubt he writes from experience when he describes the greater part of them as "appearing like so many wolves and bears, when they see a foreigner--one part of them, the artisans, shopkeepers, knowing you as some kind of foreigner, screw their noses at you, call you dog! traitor! stranger! which is with them a term of high abuse, and renders its object liable to all the injuries in the world, no matter what manner of man he is, young or old, in gown or in uniform, noble or gentleman. They will come upon you with a rustic fury, careless of the who or why, where, or how, not referring to one another, but every one, giving vent to the natural hatred he has for the foreigner, will try with his own hand and his own rod to take the measure of your doublet, and if you are not careful to save yourself, of the hair of your head;--and when at length you think you may be allowed to go to the barber's, and to rest your wearied, ill-handled body, behold them so many executioners and tipstaffs;--if they can pretend that you touched any one of them, you will have your back and legs as sore as if you had the heels of Mercury, or were mounted upon the Pegasean Horse, or bestrode the steed of Perseus, the Hippogriff of Astolfo, the dromedary of Madian, or had trotting under you one of the giraffes of the three Magicians: by force of blows they will make you run, helping you forward with their heavy fists,--better for you were they hoofs of ox, ass, or mule: and will not let you go till they have you fast in a prison,--and there I take my leave of you." In the second dialogue of the _Cena_, there occurs incidentally, a characteristic account of the state of Elizabethan London. Fulke Greville had agreed with Bruno to have a discussion in his house on the Copernican theory, on the evening of Ash Wednesday. When the day came, no further message arriving, Bruno concluded that the meeting had been postponed, and after dinner went out to visit some Italian friends. Returning after sunset, he found Florio and Guin (Gwynne), impatiently awaiting him: a number of cavaliers, gentlemen, and doctors, had met to hear the discussion, but the chief character of the play was awanting. They hurried him off, in the dark, and thinking to shorten the road, left the straight way and made for the Thames to get a boat to take them to the Palace. "Arrived at the bridge of Lord Buckhurst's Palace, we shouted and cried for 'oares'--'_id est Gondolieri_'--and wasted as much time as would easily have sufficed to take us by land to our destination, and to have done some business on the way. At last from afar two boatmen replied, and slowly, slowly drew up to the shore; after many interrogations and replies as to the whence, whither, why, and how much, they rested the bow on the last step of the bridge. Then one of the two, that appeared like the ancient boatman of the Tartarean world, gave his hand to the Nolan, while the other, who I think was his son, although his years were five and sixty or so, received the rest of us. Although there was no Hercules or Aeneas or Rhadamanth, king of Sarza, still

... Gemuit sub pondere cimba
Sutilis, et multam accepit limosa paludem....

"The sweet harmony (of its creaking and whistling) like love, invited us to forget our misfortunes, the times and the seasons, and to accompany the sounds with song. Florio (recalling his days of love) sang _Dove senza me dolce mia vita_, and the Nolan replied with _Saracin dolente_ or _Femenil ingegno_, and the like; and so little by little we advanced as the barque permitted. Although worms and age had reduced it to something like cork, it seemed from its _festina lente_ all of lead, and the arms of the two ancients worn out. So with much time we made little way, and before we had covered a third of the distance--a little beyond the place they call the Temple--our old fathers, instead of hurrying, ran their prow alongside the shore. To the Nolan asking if they wished a little breathing time, they answered that they were not going any further, for this was their stance. In conclusion, they would not budge for us, and when we had paid them and thanked them (there is nothing else to do when you suffer a wrong from one of these _canaille_), they showed us the direct road for getting on to the street. Now, oh for your help, Maphelina, muse of Merlin! That was a road which commenced in a black mud, from which there was no escape even by good luck. The Nolan, who had studied and practised in the schools more than we, bade us follow him through a passage, that he thought to see, filthy though it was. But he had not ceased speaking when he was planted in the mire so firmly that he could not drag out his limbs, and so with mutual help we went through the midst of it, hoping that the purgatory would be of short duration; but by unjust and hard fate he and we found ourselves engulfed in a slimy passage, that, just as if it were the 'field of jealousy' or the 'garden of delights,' was bounded on this side and on that by good walls, and because there was no light to guide us we could not distinguish between the way we had come and the way we ought to go, hoping at every step for the end." ... "Higher up the street we found a lava which on one side left a stony place where we could walk dry; step by step we stumbled like drunk men--and not without danger of breaking a head or a leg. To make a long story short at last the Elysian fields appeared, viz. the broad, ordinary street--and then from the houses we discovered we were about twenty steps from the place where we had set out to find the boatman, and not far from the Nolan's rooms!" The temptation to give up the expedition was overcome, and after sundry adventures with apprentices, servitors, and bravos of the gentle class, they arrived safely at Fulke Greville's, where supper was already in progress.

[Sidenote: Hostility in England.]

In the Italian dialogues the personal note of complaint sounds more highly than in Bruno's other works, and we may imagine that Bruno himself felt neglected in England more than in other countries, while English hostility to his teaching was probably more contemptuous, therefore more galling and more difficult to overcome. He might repeat as he did, the bold saying that "to the true philosopher every country is fatherland," or call himself with Socrates a citizen of the world; but a touch of despair sounds through the words:--"a citizen and servant of the world, son of Father Sol and Mother Earth; because he loves the world too much, he must be hated, cursed, persecuted, and rejected by it. Meanwhile let him not be idle, nor ill-occupied while awaiting death, transmigration, change."[75] Elsewhere there is almost a savage stoicism; he cries that he is attacked not by one but by many, almost by all, and the reason is that he hates the people, cares not for the multitude, adores one thing only:--"That through which he in subjection is free, in pain content, in necessity rich, in death living, and through which he envies not those who in freedom are slaves, in pleasure pained, in riches poor, in life dead, because in the body they have a chain that binds them, in the spirit an _inferno_ that depresses them, in the soul error that weakens them, and in the mind lethargy that slays, etc."[76] Yet the climate of England seems to have pleased Bruno: "there more than in any other region the climate is temperate; for the excessive rigour of the snows is driven out by the earth beneath, and the superfluous fervour of the sun blesses it with a continuous, a perpetual spring, as is testified by the ever green and flowery land."[77] From the _Spaccio_, it appears that he was struck in England, _inter alia_, with the multitude of crows, the richness of the sheep and the sleekness of the cattle, the stern game-laws, and the land-hunger of the people.[78]

IX

[Sidenote: 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 in London, for he wrote to his friend Archibald Douglas, the Scottish Ambassador, from London on that date; the following letter, however, was from Paris (Nov. 3, 1585) and told a pathetic story.[79] On his way across (Bruno with him, we may suppose) he had been "robbed of all he had in England, down to his shirt, of the handsome presents given him by the Queen, and of his silver plate: nothing was left, either to him or to his wife and children, so that they resembled those exiled Irish who solicit alms in England, with their children by their side." He had lent money also to the Queen of Scots, and was in great trouble concerning it, "for neither her officers nor her treasurer possessed a _sou_, nor did they speak of repayment." The unfortunate ambassador had fallen upon evil days: he was accused of having spoken ill of his successor, Chateauneuf, and had to write, as the report went, to Elizabeth, to unsay his insinuations. In December 1586, he wrote to Archibald Douglas of his wife--the Maria de Bochetel, whom Bruno praises--having died in childbirth. It would be interesting to know how Bruno fared in the robbery of Mauvissière's goods. At least we may assume that he arrived in Paris with very little worldly goods, but with part of the manuscript of a great work on the Universe (the _De Immenso_) in his possession, during the month of October 1585.

X

[Sidenote: Paris: Oct. 1585-June 1586.]

[Sidenote: The Church.]

[Sidenote: The 120 Theses.]

"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. One of his first steps was to make further efforts towards reconciliation with the Church: he presented himself for confession to a Jesuit father, while consulting with the Bishop of Bergamo (the Papal Nuncio), but they were unable to absolve him, as he was an apostate. What Bruno wished was that he might be received into the Church without being compelled to return again to the priesthood, and he begged the Nuncio to write to the Pope Sixtus V. on his behalf. The Bishop, however, had no hope of the favour being granted, and declined to write unless Bruno agreed to return to his order. To the same effect was the advice of the Jesuit father Alfonso Spagnolo to whom he was referred; to obtain absolution from the Pope he must return to the order--to his bonds, in other words; and without absolution he could not enjoy the privileges either of mass or of the confessional.[81] This idea Bruno could by no means entertain, and therefore he resigned himself to his position as an alien to the Catholic Church. He had no intention of remaining in Paris, where perhaps his Italian writings had made him no longer acceptable, but he desired not to leave it without some recognition of the favour shown him there in the past. The means he adopted was a public disputation, to be held in the Royal Hall of the university at Pentecost of the year 1586. These disputations of the learned were a delight to the youth of the time, and drew audiences comparable in our own time only to great football or cricket matches.[82] He drew up one hundred and twenty theses against the Peripatetic Philosophy, which still formed the substance of the teaching at the Sorbonne; and his side was taken up by the rival, more modern, college of Cambray (afterwards the College of France), of which he appears now to have become an associate.[83] It was the custom of the real propounder of the theses to preside at the debate, leaving it to another to act as protagonist, and intervening only when the latter's discomfiture was imminent. In this case Bruno chose a young Parisian nobleman of his own following--John Hennequin, a Master of Arts--but we may well imagine that he did not long keep silent himself. We have no knowledge of how the debate went, but it cannot have been too favourable to Bruno, for he left Paris immediately afterwards. Its date was the 25th of May; Bruno, therefore, left Paris probably in early June 1586.

[Sidenote: Criticism of Peripatetic Theory.]

The articles, with a note of explanation attached to each, and an introduction to the whole--(_Excubitor_, the Awakener)--being the address of Hennequin at the beginning of the disputation, but written by Bruno himself--were published in Paris and again at Wittenberg.[84] They contain a temperate but powerful criticism of the Aristotelians, by the words of Aristotle himself, and of Aristotle from the standpoint of Bruno's own physical theory, which he believed to be that of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. The right to criticise the "divine" Aristotle, Bruno claimed on the same grounds as those on which Aristotle himself enjoyed the right of criticising his predecessors: we are to him as he to them: their truth, which to him seemed error, may be right to us again, for opinion, like other history, moves in cycles. And as to authority, the mass of which was against Bruno, "if we are really sick, it helps us nought that public opinion thinks we are really making for health."[85] "It is a poor mind that will think with the multitude because it _is_ a multitude: truth is not altered by the opinions of the vulgar or the confirmation of the many"--"it is more blessed to be wise in truth in face of opinion than to be wise in opinion in face of truth."[86] The new philosophy gives wings to the mind, to carry it far from the prison cell in which it has been detained by the old system, and from which it could look out upon the orbs of the stars only through chinks and cracks:--to carry it out into infinite space, to behold the innumerable worlds, sisters of the earth, like it in heart and in will, living and life-producing; and returning, to see within itself--"not without, apart, or far from us, but in ourselves, and everywhere one, more intimate, more in the heart of each of us, than we are to ourselves"[87]--the divine cause, source, and centre of things. Aristotle and the sources of the scholastic philosophy were occupying Bruno's leisure almost exclusively at this time: he had begun the great Latin work, the _De Immenso_, which was to see the light in Frankfort; and he published in this year a commentary on the physics of Aristotle as well as an account of a mathematical and cosmometric invention of one _Fabrizio Mordenti_, which seems to be of much less value than Bruno supposed.[88]

XI

[Sidenote: 1586.]

[Sidenote: Mainz.]

[Sidenote: Marburg.]

[Sidenote: July 25, 1586.]

[Sidenote: Wittenberg.]

[Sidenote: Aug. 20, 1586.]

[Sidenote: Dedication of _De Lampade_.]

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. 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. "Vispure" has caused considerable exercise of ingenuity among Bruno's biographers. The best explanation seems to be that of Brunnhofer, that it represents Wiesbaden, which is not far from Mayence, and is still popularly known as Wisbare or Wisbore; but there may also be a telescoping of the words Wiesbaden and Marburg. Bruno was certainly at the latter town, but it is of course a long distance from Mayence. On the 1st of July 1586, Petrus Nigidius, Doctor of Law and Professor of Moral Philosophy, was elected Rector of the university at Marburg. In the roll of students matriculated under his rectorship stands as eighth name that of "_Jordanus Nolanus_ of Naples, Doctor of Roman Theology," with the date July 25, 1586, and the following note by the rector:--"When the right of publicly teaching philosophy was denied him by me, with the consent of the faculty of philosophy, for weighty reasons, he blazed out, grossly insulting me in my own house, protesting I was acting against the law of nations, the custom of all the universities of Germany, and all the schools of humanity. He refused then to become a member of the university,--his fee was readily returned, and his name accordingly erased from the album of the university by me." The name could still be read through the thick line drawn across it, and some later rector, when Bruno had become more famous, re-wrote the name above, and cancelled the words "with the consent of the faculty of philosophy" in Nigidius' note.[90] The "weighty reasons" for which Bruno was driven from Marburg may have been merely his description of himself as a Doctor of "Roman Theology" at a Protestant university; or perhaps an attack upon Ramus at a place where the Ramian Logic had many adherents; or the Copernican system taught by him, which was as firmly opposed by Protestants as by Catholics. In any case "the Knight-Errant of Philosophy" departed sorrowfully and came to Wittenberg, where he found, for the third time, a respite from his journeyings. On the 20th August 1586 he matriculated at the university,[91] and there remained for nearly two years. Then, as now, the Protestant Church in Germany was divided into two parties, the Lutheran and the Calvinist or Reformed Churches. Melanchthon's attempt to unite the two--he himself belonged to the latter--brought upon his head the "formula of concord," better known as the "formula of discord," because of the disputes it caused. Among other things it condemned the views of the Calvinists on the person of Christ, their denial of his "Real Presence" in the bread and wine of the communion table, and their doctrine of predestination. When Bruno arrived in Wittenberg, Lutherans were still in power, as they had been under the old Duke Augustus. His son Christian I., however, under the influence of John Casimir, his brother-in-law, of the Palatinate, had gone over to the Calvinist faction, and was trying with the aid of the Chancellor, Krell, to supplant the reigning faith and authority. At the university the philosophical faculty was, in the main, Calvinist, the theological Lutheran; and among the latter party was an Italian Alberico Gentile, the father of International Law, whom Bruno had perhaps known in England as a professor at Oxford. Through him Bruno found favour with the Lutheran party, and received permission to lecture, on the condition that he taught nothing that was subversive of their religion. For two years, accordingly, he lectured on the _Organon_ of Aristotle, and other subjects of philosophy, including the Lullian art, which he had for a time discarded. The excellent terms on which he stood with his colleagues is shown by the dedication of a Lullian work, _De Lampade Combinatoria_, to the senate of the university. He speaks gratefully of their kind reception of himself, the freedom of access and residence which was granted not only to students but to professors from all parts of Europe. In his own case "a man of no name, fame, or authority among you, escaped from the tumults of France, supported by no princely commendation, with no outward marks of distinction such as the public loves, neither approved nor even questioned in the dogmas of your religion; but as showing no hostility to man, rather a peaceful and general philanthropy, and my only title the profession of philosophy, merely because I was a pupil in the temple of the Muses, you thought me worthy of the kindliest welcome, enrolled me in the album of your academy, and gave me a place in a body of men so noble and learned that I could not fail to see in you neither a private school nor an exclusive conventicle, but as becomes the Athens of Germany, a true university." In this introduction a large number of the professors are invoked by name, among them the enlightened Grün, a professor of philosophy, who taught that theology cannot be detached from philosophy--that they are necessary complements one of the other.

[Sidenote: Works published.]

[Sidenote: _De Progressu_, 1587.]

In Wittenberg was published (1587), the _De Lampade Combinatoria Lulliana_, the second of the commentaries on Lully's art, and representing perhaps the _clavis magna_ of the _De Umbris_ and other Parisian publications. It was dedicated to the senatus of the University of Wittenberg. A reprint, however, appeared in Prague in the following year with a new frontispiece, a dedication to William of St. Clement, and the addition of a small treatise.[92] The chief purpose of the work was to furnish the reader with means for "the discovery of an indefinite number of propositions and middle terms for speaking and arguing. It is also the sole key to the intelligence of all Lullian works whatsoever," Bruno writes with his sublime confidence, "and no less to a great number of the mysteries of the Pythagoreans and Cabalists." As in the earlier work, so in this also, the root ideas are that thought is a complex of elements, which are to it as the letters of the alphabet are to a printed book; but thought and reality or nature are not opposed to one another--they are essentially one. The elements of thought when discovered will accordingly give us the constitutive elements of nature and the connections in, and workings of, nature will be understood from the different complications of these simple elements of thought. In the same year appeared the _De Progressu et Lampade Venatoriâ Logicorum_, "To enable one to dispute promptly and copiously on any subject proposed." It was dedicated to the Chancellor of the University of Wittenberg, and was mainly a commentary, without special references, on the _Topics_ of Aristotle, and doubtless formed part of the lectures on the _Organon_, given in Bruno's first year at Wittenberg. The simile of the hunt--_i.e._ the idea that the solution of a problem or the finding of a middle term is like a quarry that has to be stalked and hunted down--is a favourite one with Bruno.

[Sidenote: 1588.]

[Sidenote: _Oratio Valedictoria._]

[Sidenote: Luther.]

Unfortunately for Bruno, the Duke's party in Wittenberg soon gained the upper hand--only for a time, it is true[93]--and the party to which Bruno himself belonged fell out of power. As a Copernican, Bruno must in any case soon have fallen foul of the Calvinists, by whom the new theory had been declared a heresy. He therefore left Wittenberg in the beginning of 1588, after delivering on the 8th of March an eloquent farewell address to the university (_Oratio Valedictoria_). By the fable of Paris and the three Goddesses, he indicated his own choice of Wisdom (Minerva) over riches or fame (Juno), and over worldly pleasure or the delights of society (Venus):--"Wisdom is communicated neither so readily nor so widely as riches or pleasure. There are not and there never have been so many Philosophers as Emperors and Princes; nor to so many has it been granted to see Minerva robed and armed, as to see Venus and Juno even in naked simplicity. To see her is to become blind, to be wise through her is to be foolish. They say Tiresias saw Minerva naked, and was struck blind; who that had looked upon her, would not despise the sight of other things?--'man shall not see me and live.' ... Wisdom, Sophia, Minerva, beautiful as the moon, great as the sun, terrible as the marshalled ranks of armies; like the moon in her fair gracefulness, like the sun in her lofty majesty, like armies in her invincible courage.... The first-born before all creatures, sprung from the head of Jove--for she is a breath from the virtue of God, an emanation of omnipotent brightness, sincere and pure, clear and inviolate, honourable, powerful, and kind beyond words, well pleasing to God, incomparable:--pure, because nothing of defilement can touch her; clear, because she is the brightness of eternal light; inviolate, because she is the spotless mirror of the majesty of God; honourable, because the image of goodness itself; powerful, because being one she can do all things, being permanent in herself, she renews all things; kind, because she visits the nations that are sacred to her and makes men friends of God, and prophets; pleasing to God, because God loves only him that dwells with wisdom; incomparable, for she is more beautiful than the sun and brighter than the light of all the stars. Her have I loved and sought from my youth, and desired for my spouse, and have become a lover of her form--and I prayed that she might be sent to abide with me, and work with me, that I might know what I lacked, and what was acceptable to God: for she knew and understood, and would guide me soberly in my work and would keep me in her charge: ... But wisdom in the highest sense, in its essence as the thought of God, is incommunicable, incomprehensible, apart from all things. Wisdom has three phases or aspects or 'mansions'--first, the mind of God the eternal, then the visible world itself which is the first-born, and third, the mind of man which is the second-born of the highest, the true wisdom unattainable by man. Here among men wisdom has built herself a house of reason and of thought (which comes _after_ the world), in which we see the shadow of the first, the archetypal and ideal house (which is _before_ the world), and the image of the second, the sensible and natural house, which _is_ the world. The seven columns of the house or temple are the seven Arts--Grammar, Rhetoric (with poetry), Logic, Mathematics, Physics, Ethics, and Metaphysics, and the temple was built first among the Egyptians and Assyrians, viz. in the Chaldeans, then among the Persians, with the Magi and Zoroaster, third the Indians with their Gymnosophists; ... seventhly, in our time, among the Germans." So far has Bruno come from taking the Germans as mere beer-bibbers, as he had written of them in England.[94] "Since the empire (of wisdom) devolved upon you there have risen amongst you new arts and great minds, the like of which no other nations can shew." In the category of German temple-builders are Albertus Magnus, Nicolas of Cusa, Copernicus, Palingenius, Paracelsus; "among humanists many, apt imitators of the Attic and Ausonian muses, and among them one greater than the rest who more than imitates, rather rivals, the ancient muses" (Erasmus). It is not unnatural that, in his own Wittenberg, Luther should be praised, as among the temple-builders or priests of truth: but Bruno's words have a ring of sincerity, proving that his sympathy was really aroused for the Lutherans. "When the world was infected by that strong man armed with key and sword, fraud and force, cunning and violence, hypocrisy and ferocity,--at once fox and lion, and vicar of the tyrant of hell,--infected with a superstitious worship and an ignorance more than brutal, under the name of divine wisdom and of a God-pleasing simplicity; and there was no one to oppose or withstand the voracious beast, or dispose an unworthy and abandoned generation to better and happier state and condition,--what other part of Europe or the world could have brought forth for us that Alcides, stronger than Hercules himself, in that he did greater things with less effort and with fewer instruments,--destroying a greater and far more deadly monster than ever any of the past centuries had to suffer? Here in Wittenberg he dragged up that three-headed Cerberus with its threefold tiara from its pit of darkness: you saw it, and it the sun. Here that dog of Styx was compelled to vomit forth its poison. Here your Hercules, your country's Hercules, triumphed over the adamantine gates of hell, over the city girt about with its threefold wall, and defended by its nine windings of the Styx."

To this temple Bruno, eager in his pursuit of the ever-eluding Truth, had come,--"a foreigner, an exile, a fugitive, the sport of fortune, meagre in body, slender of means, destitute of favour, pursued by the hatred of the multitude and the contempt of fools and the base," and could on leaving say to its people that he had become an "occasion, or matter, or subject in whom they unfolded and demonstrated to the world the beauty and wealth of their virtues of moderation, urbanity, and kindness of heart." It was the last, or nearly the last, spell of happiness that life had in store for him.

XII

[Sidenote: Prague: 1588.]

[Sidenote: June 10, 1588.]

[Sidenote: January 13, 1589.]

[Sidenote: Helmstadt.]

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 now turned in the hope of settled quarters, introducing himself, as was his frequent habit, with a Lullian work, which he caused to be printed soon after his arrival, and dedicated to the Spanish Ambassador.[95] The introductory letter is dated from Prague, June 10, 1588, and is in praise of Lully, whose importance to philosophy Bruno values much more highly than his successors have done: it promised at the same time a future work, the _Lampas Cabalistica_, in which the inner secrets of Lullism were to be more fully revealed. This, so far as we know, never appeared, and Bruno tried to obtain the Emperor's patronage by a mathematical work dedicated to him, of somewhat revolutionary type--"One hundred and sixty articles against the mathematicians and philosophers of the day." The Emperor, however, had few funds to spare for any but the professed astrologists and alchemists in whom lay his real interest--not at all scientific, although Tycho Brahé and Kepler profited themselves and the world by it. With three hundred dollars, which the Emperor gave in recognition of his powers, Bruno left about the close of the year, and on January 13, 1589, matriculated in the Julian university of Brunswick at Helmstadt. This, the youngest university in Germany at the time, of only twelve years' standing, had been founded for the Protestant cause by the reigning Duke Julius, a breezy and popular prince, who loved theologians little, Catholics not at all, and founded a model university on liberal principles. It was not, however, an unqualified success. Bruno received some recognition from the university, or from the Duke, and when the latter died in May 1589 he obtained permission to give a funeral oration some days after the official programme had been carried through (on the 1st of July)--the _Oratio Consolatoria_.[96]

Bruno professes as his reason for wishing to speak that he must express his gratitude to one who had made the university he founded free to all lovers of the Muses, even to strangers such as Bruno himself was:--an exile from his Italian fatherland for honourable reasons and zeal for the truth, here he had received the freedom of the university: in Italy he was exposed to the greedy maw of the Roman wolf--here he was in safety: there he had been chained to a superstitious and absurd cult--here he was exhorted to more reformed rites. What is remarkable in this speech is the bitterness of Bruno's personal attack upon Rome, and "the violent tyranny of the Tiberine beast." The constellations are allegorically treated as symbols of the virtues of Julius, or of the vices which he attacked and repressed: among them "the head of the Gorgon, on which for hair there grow venomous snakes, representing that monster of perverse Papal tyranny, which has tongues more numerous than the hairs of the head, aiding and serving it, each and all blasphemous against God, nature, and man, infecting the world with the rankest poison of ignorance and vice." It was indeed strange that Bruno should have thought of entering Italy after publishing words like these.

[Sidenote: Excommunication of Bruno in Helmstadt.]

[Sidenote: Oct. 6, 1589.]

[Sidenote: 1590.]

However, he was not to find the Protestants much more tolerant than the Catholics. In the university archives there is extant a letter from him to the prorector of the academy, appealing against a public excommunication of himself by the first pastor and superintendent of the church at Helmstadt, Boethius. According to this letter, Boethius had made himself both judge and executioner, without giving the Italian a hearing at all: and the letter appealed to the senate and rector against the public execution of an unjust sentence, privately passed; it demanded a hearing, so that if any legal derogation were to be made from his rank and good name, he might at least feel it to be justly made, and demanded that Boethius be summoned to show he had not fulminated his bolt out of private malice, but in pursuance of the duty of a good pastor on behalf of his sheep. The date of the letter is October 6, 1589. No further records of the affair have been found, so that the appeal was probably rejected. The meaning of the excommunication is not quite clear: Bruno does not seem to have been a full member of either the reformed or the Lutheran church, although attending services; and in all probability the sentence was a formal one, which, however, carried serious social inconveniences with it. The prorector, Hofmann, was not one to sympathise either with Bruno or with his philosophy; he was unhappy unless attacking some other person's opinions: philosophy in general fell under his condemnation, although he professed knowledge of it. A few years after he drove Bruno from Helmstadt he himself was dethroned from his place of authority, "ordered to stick to his last," and had to leave Helmstadt in the end (1601). No doubt it is against him that the invectives in _De Immenso_,[97] are directed:--"This scholarch, excelling director of the school of Minerva: this Rhadamanthus of boys, without a shadow of an idea even of ordinary philosophy, lauds to the skies the Peripatetic, and dares to criticise the thoughts of diviner men (whose ashes are to be preferred to the souls of such as these)." Later Boethius also had to be suppressed by the consistory.[98] The young Duke, with whom no doubt Bruno stood in favour, since he presented him with eighty _scudi_ after the funeral oration, was of the opposite party to Hofmann, but even with this support the Italian could not struggle against his enemies, and towards the middle of 1590 he left for Frankfort, "in order to get two books printed."

XIII

[Sidenote: Frankfort.]

[Sidenote: Zürich, 1591.]