Chapter VI: Part I: Life of Bruno (4)

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, does not know what he ought to recant." In the fair copy the names of the members of the tribunal are given. At their head was Cardinal Madruzzi, and among them were the fanatical San Severin, embittered by his failure to secure the Papacy (he had gone so far as to choose his name--Clement--when his rival was elected in 1592, and became Clement VIII.), the man who figures in history as having declared St. Bartholomew's "a glorious day, a day of joy for Catholics"; the ascetic Sfondrati; the intolerant Borghese, afterwards Pope Paul V.; and the learned Bellarmino. After hearing Bruno on his defence, it was decided among them that Hippolyte Maria, general of the Dominican order, and Paul of Mirandula, their vicar, "should deal with Bruno, show him what had to be abjured, that he might confess his errors, amend his ways, and agree to abjure; and should try to bring him to the point as soon as possible." Bruno, however, as they reported, stood firm, denying that he had made any heretical statements, and insisting that he had been misunderstood by the ministers of the Holy Office, and by his Holiness; and at the same meeting (20th of January 1600) a memorial from Bruno to the Pope, who was present, having been opened but not read, it was decreed "that further measures be proceeded to, _servatis servandis_, that sentence be passed, and that the said Friar Giordano be handed over to the secular authority." On the 8th of February this decision was carried into effect, and he was placed in the hands of the Governor of Rome, with the usual recommendation that he be punished "with as great clemency as possible, and without effusion of blood"--the formula for burning at the stake. A witness of the passing of the sentence was Gaspar Schopp, a youthful but none the less fanatical convert from the reformed religion to Catholicism. It was a year of jubilee in Rome. Pope Clement was possessed of great diplomatic gifts, he had gained the submission of Henry IV. of France, had united France again with Spain, and detached it from England, and had quieted or lulled numerous disputes within the Church itself. Rome was therefore crowded with visitors, more so than usual even in a year of jubilee. Of the distinguished foreigners paying their homage to Clement, Gaspar Schopp was one; facile of tongue as of pen, he quickly gained the Pope's favour, was made a knight of St. Peter, and a count of the Sacred Palace. This adept at coat-turning sent from Rome a letter to Conrad Rittershausen, which was for long the sole authority for Bruno's death, but was held by Catholic writers on Bruno to be a forgery. In the face of the solid arguments and evidence forthcoming, Catholic reviewers even at the present day deny that Bruno was put to death. It is quite needless at this date to enter into the question of the authenticity of the letter, its assertion of Bruno's punishment being the sole ground on which that was ever doubted.[126] We learn from it that Bruno was publicly reported in Rome to have been burned as _a Lutheran_; and one of the aims of Schopp in writing--which he did on the very day of Bruno's death--was to prove the falsity of this report. He had heard the sentence pronounced, and its damnatory clauses he gives as the following:--(1) Bruno's early doubts concerning and ultimate denial of the Transubstantiation, and of the virgin conception; (2) the publication in London of the Bestia Trionfanti, which was held to mean the Pope; (3) the "horrible absurdities" taught in his Latin writings, such as the infinite number of worlds, the transmigration of souls, the lawfulness and utility of magic, the Holy Spirit described as merely the soul of the world, the eternity of the world, Moses spoken of as an Egyptian working his miracles by magic--in which he excelled other Egyptians--and as having invented the decalogue, the Holy Scriptures a fable, the salvation of the devil, the Hebrews alone descended from Adam and Eve, other peoples from the men created the previous day; Christ not God, but an illustrious magician, who deceived men, and on that account was properly hanged (_impiccato_) and not crucified; the prophets and apostles corrupt men, magicians, who were for the most part hanged. "In fine, I should never have done were I to pass in review all the monstrosities he has advanced, whether in his books or by word of mouth. In one word, there is not an error of the pagan philosophers or of our heretics, ancient or modern, that he did not sustain." The delay at Rome, it is suggested, was due to Bruno's constant promises to retract, but he was only putting off his judges, and the duration of his imprisonment is given (officially?) at "about two years." It is clear that on the occasion of the sentence being read the denouncements of Mocenigo, as well as all later evidences dragged from Bruno's own lips, or picked up from his books, were recited for the benefit, presumably, of the visitors present. When the sentence was pronounced Bruno was degraded, excommunicated, and handed over to the secular magistrates, as we have seen. The whole letter is redeemed by the reply of Bruno to his judges--"Greater perhaps is your fear in pronouncing my sentence than mine in hearing it." These strong words are almost the last we have of Bruno. At the stake he turned his eyes angrily away from the crucifix held before him. And so, adds Schopp, "he was burned and perished miserably, and is gone to tell, I suppose, in those other worlds of his fancy, how the blasphemous and impious are dealt with by the Romans!" It is pleasant to know that when Lord Digby was English ambassador to Spain he caused Gaspard Schopp to be horse-whipped.[127] For the degradation of Bruno, as we learn from the Register of the Depository-General of the Pontificate, two _scudi_ of gold were paid to the Bishop of Sidonia. The memorable words he uttered at the time were reported by another than Schopp, the Count of Ventimiglia, who was a pupil of Bruno, and present at his death (perhaps at the sentence also)--"You who sentence me are in greater fear than I who am condemned"; and before his death Bruno recommended Ventimiglia "to follow in his glorious footsteps, to avoid prejudices and errors."[128]

In the _Avvisi_ and _Ritorni_ of Rome, which represented, however meagrely, the newspapers of the time, two references to Bruno appeared, with short garbled accounts of him. In one he was spoken of as a Friar of S. Dominic, of Nola, burnt alive in the Campo di Fiori, an obstinate heretic, _with his tongue tied_, owing to the brutish words he uttered, refusing to listen to the comforters or others: in another he was reported as saying that he died a martyr, and willingly, and that his soul would ascend with the smoke to Paradise, "but now he knows whether he spoke the truth!" The fullest account, however, of his death, and one which should put to rest all doubts on the subject, is in the reports of the Company of St. John the Beheaded. This company--called also the Company of Mercy or Pity (_della misericordia_)--was instituted for the purpose of accompanying condemned heretics to the place of death, encouraging them to repent, to die with contrition for their sins. The priests bore tablets painted with images, which were presented to the condemned to kiss, from time to time, till the faggots were lit. Even the executioner was called to their aid occasionally, and the cruellest methods adopted to produce at least the appearance of kissing, and so of repentance. In obstinate cases, on the other hand, the tongue was tied, so that the heretic could not speak to the people. When the sufferers repented before death the Company took note of their last wishes, and they were buried in the tombs of the Cloister donated for that purpose by Innocent VIII., but if they were impenitent no will was allowed, and the ashes were abandoned to the winds of heaven. This must have happened in Bruno's case, for there is no mention of will or of burial in the report. Its date is Thursday, 16th February (an error for 17th), and it reads thus:[129]--"At the second hour of the night it was intimated to the Company that an impenitent was to be executed in the morning; so at the sixth hour the comforters and the chaplain met at St. Ursula, and went to the prison of the Tower of Nona. After the customary prayers in the chapel there was consigned to them the under-mentioned condemned to death, viz. Giordano, son of the late Giovanni Bruno, an Apostate Friar of Nola in the Kingdom, an impenitent heretic. With all charity our brethren exhorted him to repent, and there were called two Fathers of St. Dominic, two of the Society of Jesus, two of the new Church, and one of St. Jerome, who, with all affection and much learning, showed him his error, but he remained to the end in his accursed obstinacy, his brain and intellect seething with a thousand errors and vanities. So, persevering in his obstinacy, he was led by the servants of justice to the Campo dei Fiori, there stripped, bound to a stake, and burnt alive, attended always by our Company chanting the litanies, the comforters exhorting him up to the last point to abandon his obstinacy, but in it finally he ended his miserable, unhappy life."

So Bruno passed away; his ashes were scattered, his name almost forgotten. His death was the merest incident amid the great doings of the year of Jubilee. None of the many bishops and cardinals and distinguished visitors in Rome, with the single exception of Gaspard Schopp, makes any mention of the occurrence or of the man; and Schopp did so only because he wished to point a moral from the case. During his seven years' imprisonment, Bruno had almost passed out of the short-lived memory of his fellowmen. Burnings of heretics were not infrequent spectacles, and required no special notice. Three years later (August 7, 1603) all his works were placed upon the Index, and consequently became rare. They were classed with other dangerous works on the black arts, and Bruno's name became one to avoid.

This was the death which in happier days he had foreseen for himself should he ever enter Italy:--"Torches, fifty or a hundred, will not fail him, even though the march be at mid-day, should it be his fate to die in Roman Catholic country." What were the real grounds on which his condemnation and sentence were founded? The alleged grounds we have already seen, but they cannot have formed the actual motive of the Pope and the Inquisition. Neither at Venice nor in Rome can much weight have been laid upon the evidence of the weakling Mocenigo. The Cardinals cannot have imagined that Bruno would ever open his heart or even speak freely to so shallow a nature so utterly different in all things from himself. The mere fact of his having left his order was not enough, nor his refusal to return to it, nor were his heretical opinions--defended as they might be, and as Aristotle's own teaching had to be defended in the Church, by the subterfuge of the twofold truth. Had his chief fault been, as some have thought, his praises of Elizabeth, Henry III., Henry of Navarre, Luther, Duke Julius, and other enemies, real or supposed, of the Church, he would not so long have occupied the prisons of the Inquisition. Probably his earliest biographer, Bartholmèss, was right in suggesting that Bruno was regarded as a heresiarch--he is several times so described in the documents--the founder of a new sect, the leader of an incipient but dangerous crusade against the Church. It was as the apostle of a new religion, founded on a new intuition, a new conception of the universe, and of its relation to God, that Bruno died. Had he been won over to the side of the Church, his mind conquered and his spirit crushed by the long years of waiting, and possibly the days and nights of physical torture, it would have been a signal triumph for the papacy. But the heart which had trembled at the beginning, when the sudden gulf yawned before it, grew more and more steadfast as its trials increased. We can only re-echo Carrière's words, that in the soul of such a man, who after eight years' confinement in the prisons of the Inquisition remained so firm, "the governing motives must have been an eternal and inviolable impulse towards Truth, an unbending sense of right, an irrepressible and free enthusiasm." That for which he died was not any special cult or any special interpretation of Scripture or history, but a broad freedom of thought with the right of free interpretation of history and of nature, which in his own case was founded upon a philosophy, one of the noblest that has been thought out by man.

The fear of death was no part of this philosophy; what we call death, it teaches, is a mere change of state, of "accidents"--no real substance, such as the human spirit is, can ever die. One of the highest values of his philosophy he thought to be this, that it freed man from the fear of death, "which is worse than death itself." Strikingly apposite to his own fate is a passage from Ovid[130] that he quotes--

O' genus attonitum gelidae formidine mortis,
Quid Styga, quid tenebras, et nomina vana timetis,
Materiam vatum, falsique pericula mundi?
Corpora sive rogus flamma, seu tabe vetustas
Abstulerit, mala posse pati non ulla putetis;
Morte carent animae domibus habitantque receptae.

Bruno himself lived within the sphere of which he writes in the _Spaccio_, "surrounded by the impregnable wall of true philosophic contemplation, where the peacefulness of life stands fortified and on high, where truth is open, where the necessity of the Eternity of all substantial things is clear, where nought is to be feared but to be deprived of human perfection and justice." His finest epitaph is to be found in his own words, "I have fought: that is much--victory is in the hands of fate. Be that as it may with me, this at least future ages will not deny of me, be the victor who may,--that I did not fear to die, yielded to none of my fellows in constancy, and preferred a spirited death to a cowardly life."

No end in history is more tragic, when looked at in all its circumstances, than that of Giordano Bruno. First a life of endless, unresting struggle, striving through years of wandering, in many lands, to overcome prejudice and outworn authority, to proclaim and urge on unwilling minds the splendid gospel which inspired himself, and by which for a brief time he may have thought to supplant the old; now admired of kings, and sought after by the highest in the land, at another time a hunted pedlar of literary wares; then eight years in darkness from the world, with shame or death to choose for release. The choice made for the nobler end, the mockeries of religion he had detested and reviled pursued him to the end to--the very stake; and the funeral pyre of this martyr for liberty of thought, for the new light of science, became a spectacle for the gay and thoughtless sight-seers of the Roman Jubilee year, to all of whom, one sad disciple excepted, it was but another "damnable and obstinate heretic" who was on this earth, for that brief spell, foretasting his eternal doom.

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 learnt to love her, and to turn to her rather than to the authority of man for instruction. He believed also, as very few of his age did, in the power of human thought to penetrate the secret nature of things, to reach even to the deepest and highest reality, so far as that can be known by another than itself. Trusting to his own mind, to sense and reason, for his theory of the world, he found himself opposed in all essentials to the general thought of the time.

His purpose from the first was to use his own eyes, to discover truth for himself, and to hold fast whatever seemed to be right, irrespective of the opinions of others. "From the beginning I was convinced of the vanity of the cry which summons us to close or lower the eyes that were given to us open and upward-looking. Seeing I do not pretend not to see, nor fear to profess it openly; and as there is continual war between light and darkness, knowledge and ignorance, everywhere have I met with hatred, abuse, clamour, insult (ay, not without risk to my life) from the brute and stupid multitude; but guided by the hand of truth and the divine light, I have overcome it." Not that he really formed his theory by induction from sense-data, or by deductive reasoning; it was rather an inspiration, or an intuition, springing from his temperament, to which optimism was as necessary as pessimism repellent; and there were numerous suggestions of it both in Bruno's immediate predecessors, Copernicus and the rest, and in earlier thinkers. Bruno himself found it, as he thought, in the more ancient pre-Aristotelian philosophies. But, however obtained, this philosophy satisfied even _his_ boundless enthusiasm, and it became the chief motive of his life to convince others of its truth, inspire them with the same enthusiasm, and endow them with the joyous freedom of life of which it seemed to him to be the source. His philosophy, in other words, became his religion, his inward religion,--Catholicism remaining a mere habit, a set of formulae to which he was indifferent, to most of which he was willing to subscribe because he had not questioned them.

[Sidenote: Authority.]

His perfect self-confidence, and belief in the power of human reason (especially his own reason) to penetrate the mysteries of things, was accompanied by contempt for the argument from authority in philosophy, contempt for humility, submission, obedience in the speculative life. To believe with the many because they were many was the mark of a slave. Bruno, before Bacon, before Descartes, insisted on the need of first of all clearing the mind from all prejudices, all traditional beliefs that rested on authority alone, before attempting the pursuit of truth. They were impediments--burdens that delayed or prevented the attainment of the goal. The whole of the _Cabala_ is a satire on the quietistic attitude, the standpoint of ignorant and ignoring faith, which regards sense and reason as alike misleading and unnecessary guides, for which science and philosophy are mere troublings of the still waters of life. "Oh, holy asinity"! one of the sonnets begins, "oh, holy ignorance, holy folly and pious devotion, which alone makest souls so good that human wit and zeal can no further go; strenuous watchfulness, in whatsoever art, or invention, or contemplation of the wise, arrives not to the heaven wherein thou buildest thy mansion. Of what avail is your study, ye curious ones, your desire to know how nature works, whether the stars are earth, or fire or sea? Holy asinity for that cares not, but with folded hands and bended knees awaits from God its fate."[132]

Having already that touch of vanity in his character which the possession of a quick mind among sluggards or dullards almost inevitably entails, he was thrown, by his attitude towards nature and the Church, more and more back upon himself. At every step he met with a leaden, uncomprehending, but dogged opposition, until he seemed to himself the one seeing man in a world of the blind. At times this belief was expressed only too emphatically; the reader of Bruno must expect to find a passage in almost every work pointing out that that work is the best of its kind, and dispenses with all others on the subject; while his opponents in any theory are bedaubed with epithets to which the amenities of modern party strife are politeness itself.[133] Boundless was his confidence in himself, in his power of discerning truth, and in his ability to overcome all difficulties in the way of its discovery. "Difficulty," he writes in the _Cena_, "is ordained to check poltroons. Things ordinary and easy are for the vulgar, for ordinary people. But rare, heroic, divine men pass along this way of difficulty, that necessity may be constrained to yield them the palm of immortality. Although it may not be possible to come so far as to gain the prize, run your race nevertheless, do your hardest in what is of so great importance, strive to your last breath. It is not only he who arrives at the goal that is praised, but also whoever dies no coward's or poltroon's death; he casts the fault of his loss and of his death upon the back of fate, and shows the world that he has come to such an end by no defect of himself, but by error of fortune."[134]

His outward fortunes left Bruno indifferent; it was the opposition to his philosophy that embittered him, and excited the magnificent invectives scattered everywhere through his works. Of his own mission Bruno had the highest conception: "The Nolan has set free the human mind, and its knowledge, that was shut up within the narrow prison-house of the atmosphere (the troubled air), whence it could only with difficulty, as through chinks, see the far distant stars; its wings were clipped, that it might not fly and pass through the veil of clouds, and see that which is really to be found there.... But he in the eye of sense and reason, with the key of unwearied inquiry, has opened those prison-doors of the truth which man might open, laid bare nature that was covered over and veiled from sight, given eyes to the moles, enlightened the blind ... loosened the tongue of the mute, that could not and dared not express their inmost feelings."[135] It was not to the many that he spoke, however; there was little in his heart of that love for his fellowman that was so charming a trait in Spinoza, with all the latter's desire for solitude, and under all his persecutions. Bruno, whether a son of the people or not, had never the slightest respect for that body. We have already seen what opinion he formed of the English populace, and he held a similar view of the _plebs_ in general--"_Rogatus tumet, Pulsatus rogat, Pugnis concisus adorat_," he quotes (or misquotes)[136] concerning it. Distrust of the natural man he had imbibed along with the teaching of the Church, and doubt as to his capacity for receiving or understanding the truth. Those who have acquired the truth that he has to teach need not, he writes, communicate it to all, "unless they will see what swine can do with pearls, and will gather those fruits of their zeal and labour which usually spring from rash and foolish ignorance, together with presumption and incivility, its constant and trusty companions."[137] Speaking of the doctrine of the necessity of all human events, as determined and foreseen by God, and its coincidence with true liberty, he shows how theologians and philosophers have held it, but have refrained from communicating it to the vulgar, by whom it could not be understood, who would use it as an excuse for giving rein to their passions. "Faith is required for the instruction of the _plebs_, that must be governed; demonstration (truth) for the wise, the contemplative, that know how to govern themselves and others."[138] So speculation as to the future life must be kept from them, for it is "with the greatest difficulty that they can be restrained from vice and impelled to virtuous acts through their faith in eternal punishment: what would become of them if they were persuaded of some lighter condition regulating the rewards of heroic and humane deeds, the punishment of wickedness and sin?"[139] He was an "aristocrat of learning,"--only the wise should have the government of the world; the people were unfit to judge either of truth or of men.

[Sidenote: Pedantry.]

Along with this distrust of the vulgar went a far more intense dislike of the kind of learning they admired, and of the type of scholar, the pedant, that most appealed to them. The minds of the vulgar, it seemed to him, were more readily turned by sophisms, by the appearances on the surface of things, than by the truth that is hidden in their substance, and is indeed their substance itself;[140] and the man--too frequent in the Italian, and generally in the learned world of those days--most apt to veil a real ignorance by a pretended knowledge, by a show of externals, by appeal to authorities with whom he had himself no acquaintance, was _the pedant_. Bruno himself was not without that touch of vanity which led him, like others, to mass together quotations and phrases from Latin and even from Greek writers; to point an argument by forced analogies from classical mythology; to heap up references, in support of his theories, to the Neoplatonists, to the mystics, to the Cabbalah, to the older Greek philosophers: these adornments were quite in the fashion of his time, and looked at in that light they add to, rather than detract from, the peculiar charm and spirit of his writings. The true pedant--such as Polihimnio in the _Causa_ (who has been thought to have suggested Polonius in _Hamlet_), Mamphurio in the _Candelaio_, Prudentio in the _Cena_--is one that for style loves long words, learned phrases, irrespective of their context; who, under pretence of accuracy, delights in trifling, subtle distinctions, sows broadcast mythological or classical allusions without a hint of relevancy. His favourite hunting-ground is, however, philosophy, and it is to philosophy, according to Bruno, that the pedant has done greatest injury. One of the most vigorous descriptions of him which Bruno gives is in the _Causa_,[141] where, no doubt, some of the actual writers of the time are satirised. Curiously, Ramus and Patrizzi, both reformers of philosophy, are mentioned as "arch-pedants"; but men have always criticised most bitterly those who stood nearest to themselves.

Bruno regarded words as the servants of his pen, claimed, and indeed exercised almost too freely, the right of inventing new words for new things. Use and wont, he knew, determined the fate of words as of other things; some which had fallen into decay would rise again, others now honoured would lapse from use. For the teaching of the philosophers of old their own old words were the clearest mirror, but for new theories new words might be sought from the readiest source:--"grammarians are the servants of words, words are our servants; it is for them to study the use to which we put our words."[142]

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 also of his speaking. His imagination runs riot in the pursuit of allegories, metaphors, similes from mythology. Tiraboschi, the historian of Italian literature, defies "the most acute intelligence to penetrate into his system, the most patient of men to endure the reading of it."

So far was this enormous mass of material from blocking up the spring of originality in his mind, however, that the ideas in which he may be said to have "anticipated" modern thought are innumerable. No doubt, in many cases, they came from the earlier Greek philosophers whom he chiefly studied; but Bruno invariably gives them a connection with his own theory, such as precludes us from taking his restoration of them for a happy chance. Such ideas, for example, are those of the evolution or gradual transformation of lower organisms into higher (_De Umbris_, Int. 7), of the part played by _the hand_ in the evolution of the human race (_Cabala_, L. 586. 35), of the gradual changes brought about on the surface of the earth, its seas, its islands, the configuration of the land, the climate of different countries, by the constant, if imperceptible, operation of natural causes (_Cena_, L. 190 ff.): of the true nature of mountains, which are only excrescences as compared with the real mountains, the larger continents that slope upwards from the sea (_e.g._ France): of the true nature of comets, so far at least as that they are perfectly natural bodies allied to planets[143] (_Infinit._ L. 372; _De Imm._ iv. 9. 51); of the identity of the matter of heavenly bodies with that of the earth, the universality of movement (even the fixed stars move, cf. _Infinit._, L. 350, 351, 400), the possibility (he said rather the _certainty_) of other worlds than our own being inhabited by beings similar to or more highly developed than ourselves (L. 360. 27). He "anticipated" also the idea of Lessing that myths may contain foreshadowings of truth, and that they should be interpreted not by their letter, as matters of fact, but by their spirit, as indications of higher "truths of reason." The Bible should be interpreted in the same way: as Spinoza afterwards taught, so Bruno held, that the Scriptures inculcated moral and practical truths, to which their seemingly historical statements were entirely subordinate.

Add to this fermenting thought, power of memory, keenness and sureness of glance, and imaginative force, the fact that Bruno had a deeply poetic nature, fiery, vivid, passionate in defence of what seemed to him true, equally passionate in hatred of what seemed to him false, and the sources of his strength and weakness alike become clear. The Italian writings remain, in spite of their occasional obscurity, the most brilliant of philosophical works in that language, while the Latin works are a monument of learning (too often misapplied or useless), of acute reasoning, and of poetic enthusiasm.

XXI

[Sidenote: 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 very distinct sides to Bruno's philosophical character: on the one side he is a forerunner of modern science, in his love of nature as a whole, in his desire to understand it, in his application of purely "empirical" methods to its analysis. To this side belong his rejection of the orthodox dogmas concerning the Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, and the rest, his theory of an evolution of man, his idea of a natural history of religions, his entire rejection of authority however high as an argument for or against a theory or view of nature. His own religious creed was simple, and he believed it to be the essence of what was true in all the jarring sects that had separated man from man, nation from nation, and race from race--"the law of love--which springs not from the evil genius of any one race, but from God the father of all, and is in harmony with universal nature, which teaches a general love of man, that we should love our enemies even, should not remain like brutes or barbarians, but be transformed into the likeness of Him who makes His sun to rise upon the good and the bad, and pours the rain of His mercies upon the just and the unjust. This is the religion above controversy or dispute, which I observe from the belief of my own mind, and from the custom of my fatherland and my race."[144] On the other side, he had inherited the mysticism of the Neoplatonist school, or at least it called out a responsive echo from his mind so soon as he came under its influence. He was full of enthusiasm, as we shall find, for the divine--in things, in us, in the world, in the universe--a "God-intoxicated man" far more strikingly than the impassive Spinoza. It was because the Copernican theory fitted into his mystical thought of the One, as an identity of the infinitely small, the point, and the infinitely great, the broad, deep, immeasurable universe, that it appeared to him an inspiration of genius. Therefore he defended it, extended it further than its originator dared extend it, and finally died for it and for all that it meant to him. His belief in natural magic belongs again to this side, or rather to the influence of the one side of his nature upon the other; owing to their essential unity in God, natural things have sympathies with one another and with human life, so that a change in one thing--a stone, a tree--may indirectly cause a corresponding change in another, a human being. It was characteristic of him that he sought to give to these beliefs--which, be it remembered, were universal in his time--a rational basis, a connection with his thought-system as a whole.

The two sides or standpoints are never far apart in Bruno: it is often impossible to say to which a given theory or mood should be attributed, but in his earlier life the mystical, in his later the naturalistic, or rationalist standpoint may be said to have predominated. It is with the more metaphysical attitude that a certain vein of optimism in Bruno's philosophy is connected, the familiar conception of evil, natural or moral, as necessary for the good of the whole, like the discords by which a harmony is heightened. No absolute evil, for the consistent Neoplatonist, can possibly exist in a world which flows from the divine and is an outpouring of His nature. But Bruno had little or nothing of the practical optimist in his own character; whatever he thought to be evil, he fought against with all his might; a victim of intolerance, he had himself no toleration for some points of view--those, namely, which he felt might weaken the bonds of civil society and of human brotherhood. "Such evil teachers," he writes in the _Sigillus_ (ii. 2. 182), "succeeding time, and a world wise overlate in its own ill condition, will exterminate as the tares, canker-worms, locust plagues of their age--nay, as scorpions and vipers." Bruno saw only too clearly the evils of the world, and of his age, from the greatest of which--tyranny over the soul, and suppression of mental liberty--he suffered in his own person; and his life, as we have seen, was spent in a ceaseless, and for the time unavailing, struggle against them. But he never lost his faith in the ultimate victory of his own philosophy, based as it was upon his faith in the _essential_ goodness, justice, and truth of the eternal source of things. As all things flow from, so all things tend to return to God. Philosophy goes further than to teach merely that pain and evil are not absolute facts, not grounded in the nature of things; it also frees the believer from the burden they impose:--"the practical test of a perfect philosophy is, when one by the height of his speculation is so far withdrawn from bodily things as hardly to feel pain. And there is greater virtue, as we believe, in one who has come to such a point as not to feel pain at all than in another who feels it but resists. He who is more deeply moved by the thought of some other thing does not feel the pangs of death."[145]

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.[147]

Described by the editor, Eglin, who was with Bruno at Zurich, and afterwards became Professor of Theology at Marburg, as Bruno's "Metaphysical remains." It represents the fruit of the lectures given by Bruno at Zurich in 1591,[148] and is one of the earliest philosophical dictionaries extant. It is on the model of the Fifth Book of Aristotle's _Metaphysics_, now known to have been intended by Aristotle as a separate work, but differs in its choice and arrangement of the terms of philosophy which are discussed. The first part of the work, which was published by itself in Zurich, may best be described as a handbook to philosophy generally, the main reference being to Aristotle's system, as was natural: with it Bruno writes for the most part in agreement. The _second part_, however, which was not published until the Marburg Edition (p. 73 ff. of the State Edition), is an "application" of the several terms already defined to the Neoplatonist philosophy: in its first section (_De Deo seu Mente_) they are applied and illustrated by reference to God as the source of the world, of whom all things are emanations, in a graduated scale of being; in the second (_Intellectus seu Idea_) to the world of Ideas--God in the world, the soul in all things and in everything; and a third section (_Amor seu pulchritudo_) should have followed, dealing with God as the end and goal of things, but is awanting.[149] The document on the Predicates of God which Mocenigo presented to the Court at Venice was probably the second part of the _Summa_, or perhaps only its first section (Brunnhofer, p. 106).

2. _Artificium perorandi traditum a Jordano Bruno Nolano Italo, communicatum a Johan. Henrico Alstedio. In gratiam eorum qui eloquentiae vim et rationem cognoscere cupiunt._ Frankfort, 1612. (Also in Gfrörer, and State Edition, vol. ii. pt. 3, No. 3).--A summary of, or a commentary on, the spurious Rhetoric of Aristotle (_ad Alexandrum_), with the addition of a second part by Bruno, on which he himself lays no great stress, on elocution or adornment; he refers his readers, however, to the orators themselves for complete instruction. It contains chiefly lists of heads of arguments and of synonyms for rhetorical use. Apparently the work is printed from notes of Bruno's lectures in Wittenberg (1587), which came into the hands of the editor, Alsted, in 1610.

3. _Lampas Triginta Statuarum._--First published in the State Edition, vol. iii. pp. 1-258, from MSS. of the Noroff collection at Moscow. This is in the hand of Besler, Bruno's pupil and copyist, and was done at Padua in the autumn of 1591, although Besler had received the original, which he copied, in April 1590 at Helmstadt. Another MS. is in the Augustan Library, and is both more obviously correct and of earlier date than the copy of Besler (1587); in all probability the work was dictated by Bruno at Wittenberg, and is that referred to as _Lampas Cabalistica_ in the letter of dedication prefixed to the _De Specierum Scrutinio_ (Prague, 1588), and as shortly to be published.[150]

It contains a finished study of philosophy from Bruno's standpoint, arranged under thirty and more headings, "Types," "Statues and Images," "Fields," etc. Under each heading are thirty "articles," "conditions," "descriptions," "contemplations." For example, we have first the two triads--Chaos, Orcus, Nox; and Pater, Intellectus Primus, Lux--typifying the lowest and the highest principles of things: the first three are Vacuum, Potency in Appetite, and Matter; the second three Mind or Reason, Understanding or Soul, and Love or Spirit. At the close of the _Statuae_ there follows the practical application of them to the scale of Nature--the outflow of the highest towards the lowest, the gradual transition from lowest to highest; an account of the thirty predicates of Substance and of "Nature" in the universal sense; and a logical or methodological illustration of the uses of the Art under the headings of Definition, Verification, Demonstration. The general purpose of the whole is to give an instrument for discovery ("_Invention_") of truth, after the model of the Lullian Art, just as some of the earlier works (e.g. _De Umbris_) contain a similar instrument for _remembering_ knowledge acquired.[151] Unfortunately the work is entirely marred by the artificial distinctions drawn, and the tying down (or expansion) of the ideas treated therein to the thirty fundamental notions and thirty applications of each. Thus subjects and predicates are thirty in number each, and the modes of predication are in classes of fifteen. It is impossible not to agree with Tocco's verdict, that "However fine the analysis employed in distinguishing the subtlest shades of concepts, however great the number of elevated philosophical thoughts scattered throughout, expounded with vigour and felicity of imagery, the tractate as a whole has little value, just as the _ars inventiva_ itself has little--more fit to blunt than to sharpen the inventive powers."[152] One gladly re-echoes Bruno's words at the close: "_Itaque gratias deo agentes, Artem Inventivam per triginta statuas perfecimus._"

4. _Animadversiones circa Lampaaem Lullianam_ (State Edition, vol. ii. pt. 2).--From the Augustan MSS., dated 13th March 1587. Notes dictated in Wittenberg, on the Lullian art as a universal instrument for the discovery of truth.

5. _Libri Physicorum Aristotelis, a clariss. Dn. D. Jordano Bruno Nolano explanati._--From two codices in the Erlangen Library, the second of which is in the hand of Besler, and was written, presumably, at Helmstadt. The earlier MS. in a German handwriting points to the commentaries having been dictated by Bruno during his stay at Wittenberg.[153] The books of Aristotle treated are the five books of the _Physica_, the _De generatione et corruptione_, the _Meteorologica_, Book IV. There is an introduction on the methods of the sciences, and other matters, by Bruno himself; the remainder follows closely the text of Aristotle, except in the fourth and fifth books, where Bruno is much less exact.

6. _De Magia_, et _Theses de Magia_.--The MS. of this work is in the Erlangen Codex, by Besler, and also in the Moscow (Noroff) collection, by the same hand; the former is a copy of the latter, which was dictated by Bruno in the early part of 1590 at Helmstadt.

It deals with one of the three divisions of Magic, viz. Natural or Physical Magic (the others being Divine, Metaphysical or Supernatural, and Mathematical--that of symbols, numbers, etc.). Physical magic is shown to be a natural consequence, first, of the fact that the same soul, the soul of the world, is in all things, of which the individual finite soul of each thing is a temporary mode or phase; hence all things are linked one with another, through their spiritual identity, in a bond of sympathy; secondly, of the hierarchy of beings--the principle that all finite things are emanations, in increasing degree of imperfection, from the Divine. The Theses represent a summary of the _De Magia_, and in the latter the headings of the former are referred to throughout, except in two episodes or excursus not strictly connected with natural magic (on spirit-charms and spirit-analogies): the work is referred to in the _De Minimo_, i. 3. 210 (_re_ the magical influences of bodies newly dead; "the soul everywhere recognises the matter of its own body, as we have shown in the book on physical magic").

7. _De Magia Mathematica._--Merely a collection of excerpts from writers on Magic--Tritemius, Agrippa, Pietro Di Abano, the (Pseudo-) Albertus Magnus. (Noroff MSS. The title is that of the Italian editors.)

8. _De Rerum Principiis et Elementis et Causis._--(Noroff MSS. The writing was begun on the 16th of March 1590, in Helmstadt, by Besler, to Bruno's dictation.)

It contains the theory of the natural and material elements or principles of things--light and fire, wind or air, water or vapour or darkness, and earth or the dry, with their "forms," time and place--leaving the metaphysical and the immaterial principles (spirit and soul) for consideration elsewhere. It is not of great scientific value. Bruno makes use of abstract terms even more readily than Aristotle (e.g. "_lux seminaliter est ubique, et in tenebris_," p. 514). The chief aim of the work is to illustrate the magical applications of the different elements[154] (cf. pp. 516, 525, etc.). Its value mainly lies in the light it throws on Bruno's atomic theory, and on one or two other minor points of his philosophy--the harmony, co-ordination, and sympathy between all natural things, the doctrines of liberty and necessity, etc.

9. _De Medicina Lulliana, partim ex mathematicis, partim ex physicis principiis educta._--Written immediately after the above (_de rerum principiis_), to which it occasionally refers: merely a collection of abstracts from works of Lully on medicine, as a practical application of the system of magic contained in the three previous writings. It is accordingly of the astrological type of mediæval medicine.

10. _De Vinculis in genere._ Noroff MSS.--A first sketch in Bruno's own hand, dating probably from Frankfort; and a later, much more detailed, in Besler's, copied at Padua. It in a sense completes the tractates on Magic, by dealing with "attraction" in general, of which the attractions and sympathies of natural and mathematical magic are special cases. As it stands, however (for neither sketch is finished: Bruno's covers wider ground than Besler's, the latter breaks off abruptly before the natural end is reached), it is a psychological essay on the human passions, and more especially on human love, from a purely objective, matter-of-fact standpoint. In it the most grossly material and the highest spiritual sources of love are placed side by side; and to love, including self-love, are reduced all passions, all effects, even _hate_, which is an outcome, a reversion of love.