Renaissance philosopher, born in Nola, S Italy. At first a Dominican, his unorthodox interests in hermeticism caused him to leave the order, and he travelled widely throughout Europe. His philosophy was an extreme pantheism, and he was sympathetic to Copernicus's theory of the universe. This led to his arrest by the Inquisition and, after a 7-year trial, he was burned in Rome. He published dialogues in Italian and many Latin treatises on a vast range of topics in philosophy, science, mathematics, religion, and magic.
Giordano Bruno (Nola, 1548–Rome, February 17, 1600) was an Italian philosopher, priest, cosmologist, and occultist. Bruno is known for his system of mnemonics based upon organized knowledge and as an early proponent of the idea of an infinite and homogeneous universe. Burned at the stake as a heretic, Bruno is seen by some as a martyr to the cause of free thought .
Early life
Born in Nola (in Campania, then part of the Kingdom of Naples) in 1548, he was originally named Filippo Bruno. His father was Giovanni Bruno, a soldier. At 15, Bruno entered the Dominican Order, taking the name of Giordano.
He was interested in philosophy and was an expert on the art of memory;
While the Hermetic Tradition was a major influence on Bruno, he also absorbed and developed the heliocentric ideas of Copernicus. Other significant influences included Thomas Aquinas, whose works he had to study in depth as a novice and for whom he always expressed a curiously deep admiration (), Averroes, whose idea of a universal mind resonates through Bruno's work, Duns Scotus, the Renaissance Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino, and, last but certainly not least, Nicholas of Cusa's ideas on infinity and indeterminacy . Bruno developed a pantheistic hylozoistic system, essentially incompatible with orthodox Christian Trinitarian beliefs.
In 1576 he left Naples to avoid the attention of the Inquisition. After Bruno apologised his excommunication was revoked, but in autumn 1579, deeply disappointed by Calvinist intolerance, he left for France.
He went first to Lyon, but he could not find work there and in late 1579 he arrived in Toulouse, at that time a Catholic stronghold, where he obtained a position as lecturer of philosophy. Bruno's feats of memory were based, at least in part, on his elaborate system of mnemonics, but some of his contemporaries found it easier to attribute them to magical powers. In 1582 Bruno also published a comedy summarizing some of his philosophical positions, titled "Il Candelaio" ("The Torchbearer").
Travel years
In April 1583, he went to England with letters of recommendation from Henry III, working for the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau. His views spurred controversy, notably with John Underhill, Rector of Lincoln College and from 1589 bishop of Oxford, and George Abbot, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury, who poked fun at Bruno for supporting “the opinion of Copernicus that the earth did go round, and the heavens did stand still; During that time Bruno completed and published some of his most important works, the "Italian Dialogues", including the cosmological tracts "La Cena de le Ceneri" (The Ash Wednesday Supper, 1584), "De la Causa, Principio et Uno" (On Cause, Prime Origin and the One, 1584), "De l'Infinito Universo et Mondi" (De l'Infinito Universo et Mondi, 1584) as well as "Lo Spaccio de la Bestia Trionfante" (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, 1584) and "De gl' Heroici Furori" (On Heroic Frenzies, 1585). Some of the works that Bruno published in London, notably the "The Ash Wednesday Supper", appear to have given offense. It was not the first time, nor was it to be the last, that Bruno's controversial views coupled with his abrasive sarcasm lost him the support of his friends.
In Germany he failed to obtain a teaching position at Marburg, but was granted permission to teach at Wittenberg, where he lectured on Aristotle for two years. He went on to serve briefly as a professor in Helmstedt, but had to flee again when he was excommunicated by the Lutherans, continuing the pattern of Bruno's gaining favor from lay authorities before falling foul of the ecclesiastics of whatever hue.
He went first to Padua, where he taught briefly, and applied unsuccessfully for the chair of mathematics, that was assigned instead to Galileo Galilei one year later. Bruno accepted Mocenigo's invitation and moved to Venice in March 1592. When Bruno announced his plan to leave Venice to his host, the latter, who was unhappy with the teachings he had received and had apparently developed a personal rancour towards Bruno, denounced him to the Venetian Inquisition, that had Bruno arrested on May 22, 1592. Bruno defended himself skillfully, stessing the philosophical character of some of his positions, denying others and admitting that he had had doubts on some matters of dogma. After several months and some quibbling the Venetian authorities reluctantly consented and Bruno was sent to Rome in February 1593.
Trial and death
In Rome he was imprisoned for seven years during his lengthy trial, lastly in the Tower of Nona. The numerous charges against Bruno, based on some of his books as well as on witness accounts, included blasphemy, immoral conduct, and heresy in matters of dogmatic theology, and involved some of the basic doctrines of his philosophy and cosmology.
Bruno continued his Venetian defensive strategy, which consisted in bowing to the Church's dogmatic teachings, while trying to preserve the basis of his philosophy. In particular Bruno held firm to his belief in the plurality of worlds, although he was admonished to abandon it. His trial was overseen by the inquisitor, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, who demanded a full recantation, which Bruno eventually refused. Consequently, Bruno was declared a heretic, handed over to secular authorities on February 8, 1600.
In 1885 an international committee for a monument to Bruno on the site of his execution was formed, including Victor Hugo, Herbert Spencer, Ernest Renan, Ernst Haeckel, Henrik Ibsen and Ferdinand Gregorovius(),().
All his works were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1603. Four hundred years after his execution, official expression of "profound sorrow" and acknowledgement of error at Bruno's condemnation to death was made, during the papacy of John Paul II.
Some authors have claimed Bruno as a "martyr of science". They see a parallel between his persecution and the Galileo affair, asserting that even though, unlike Galileo, Bruno's theological beliefs were a factor in his heresy trial, Bruno's Copernicanism and cosmological beliefs were also a factor.
The Vatican webpage about Bruno's trial provides a different perspective: " In the same rooms where Giordano Bruno was questioned, for the same important reasons of the relationship between science and faith, at the dawning of the new astronomy and at the decline of Aristotle’s philosophy, sixteen years later, Cardinal Bellarmino, who then contested Bruno’s heretical theses, summoned Galileo Galilei, who also faced a famous inquisitorial trial, which, luckily for him, ended with a simple abjuration."
The cosmology of Bruno's time
In the second half of the 16th century, the theories of Copernicus began diffusing through Europe. Although Bruno did not wholly embrace Copernicus's preference for mathematics over speculation, he advocated the Copernican view that the earth was not the center of the universe, and extrapolated some consequences which were radical departures from the cosmology of the time.
According to Bruno, Copernicus's theories contradicted the view of a celestial sphere, immutable, incorruptible, and superior to the sublunary sphere or terrestrial region. Bruno went beyond the heliocentric model to envision a universe which, like that of Plotinus, in the third century A.D., or like Blaise Pascal's nearly a century after Bruno, had its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere.
Few astronomers of Bruno's generation accepted even Copernicus's heliocentric model. Bruno himself was not an astronomer, but one of the first to embrace Copernicanism as a world view, rejecting geocentrism. In works published between 1584 and 1591, Bruno enthusiastically supported Copernicanism.
According to Aristotle and Plato, the universe was a finite sphere.
Copernicus conserved the idea of planets fixed to solid spheres, but considered the apparent motion of the stars to be an actual motion of the earth;
Bruno's cosmology
Bruno believed, as is now universally accepted, that the Earth revolves and that the apparent diurnal rotation of the heavens is an illusion caused by the rotation of the Earth around its axis.
However, Digges considered the infinite region beyond the stars to be the home of God, the angels, and of the holy.
In 1584, Bruno published two important philosophical dialogues, in which he argued against the planetary spheres. (Two years later, Rothmann did the same in 1586, as did Tycho Brahe in 1587.) Bruno's infinite universe was filled with a substance -- a "pure air", aether, or spiritus -- that offered no resistance to the heavenly bodies which, in Bruno's view, rather than being fixed, moved under their own impetus. God, according to Bruno, was as present on Earth as in the Heavens, an immanent God, the One subsuming in itself the multiplicity of existence, rather than a remote heavenly deity.
Bruno also affirmed that the universe was homogeneous, made up everywhere of the four elements (water, earth, fire, and air), rather than having the stars be composed of a separate quintessence.
Under this model, the Sun was simply one more star, and the stars all suns, each with its own planets. Bruno saw a solar system of a sun/star with planets as the fundamental unit of the universe. According to Bruno, infinite God necessarily created an infinite universe, formed of an infinite number of solar systems, separated by vast regions full of Aether, because empty space could not exist. (Bruno did not arrive at the concept of a galaxy.) Comets were part of a synodus ex mundis of stars, and not -- as other authors sustained at the time -- ephemeral creations, divine instruments, or heavenly messengers.
Bruno's cosmology is marked by infinitude, homogeneity, and isotropy, with planetary systems distributed evenly throughout. This animism (and a corresponding disdain for mathematics as a means to understanding) is the most dramatic respect in which Bruno's cosmology differs from what today passes for a common-sense picture of the universe.
During the later 16th century, and throughout the 17th century, Bruno's ideas were held up for ridicule, debate, or inspiration.
Bruno's overall contribution to the birth of modern science is still controversial. Some scholars follow Frances Yates stressing the importance of Bruno's ideas about the universe being infinite and lacking structure as a crucial crosspoint between the old and the new. Others yet see in Bruno's idea of multiple worlds instantiating the infinite possibilities of a pristine, indivisible One a forerunner of Everett's Many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics . Four centuries after his ashes were dispersed, Bruno is still talking as loud as ever.
In film and fiction
Biographical dramatic film Giordano Bruno directed by Giuliano Montaldo (1973) Ægypt, a four-volume novel by John Crowley, includes a major storyline following the adventures of Giordano Bruno, positing among other things two meetings between Bruno and Dr. John Dee. More Light (1987), a play by British playwright Snoo Wilson, has Giordano Bruno as its protagonist and includes Queen Elizabeth I of England and a female Shakespeare among its characters. The Last Confession by Australian author Morris West (The Devil's Advocate, The Shoes of the Fisherman, The Ambassadors) is a fictional account of Giordano Bruno's imprisonment before he is convicted of heresy and burned at the stake during the Inquisition in 1600. Czesław Miłosz's poem "Campo di Fiori" interweaves the Italian masses indifference to the burning of Giordano Bruno with the Poles' indifference to the Germans' suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Robert Ashley's "Perfect Lives" also mentions Giordano Bruno. The movie The Ninth Gate partially attributes the book The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows to Bruno. The interstellar ship featured in the novel Children of God (1998) by Mary Doria Russell is named for Bruno. James Joyce mentions Bruno the Nolan towards the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and has a passage largely about his trial and execution in Finnegans Wake. Margaret Gabrielle Long, writing as Marjorie Bowen, used a fictionalized version of Bruno ("Brother Felipe Bruno") as the protagonist of the novel The Triumphant Beast (1934).Giordano Bruno, from the Vatican summary of Bruno's trial ().
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