## 1. Life



Filippo Bruno was born in January or February 1548, son of Giovanni
Bruno, a soldier of modest circumstances, and Fraulissa Savolina, at
Nola, about 17 miles north east of Naples. At the unusually late age
of seventeen, beguiled perhaps by the prospect of a life dedicated to
learning, he entered the Dominican convent of San Domenico Maggiore in
Naples, assuming the name Giordano. In 1572 he became a priest and
later that year began to study theology formally, obtaining his
doctorate in July 1575. That year he was investigated by his
Provincial for his views on the Trinity, a delicate topic in
Reformation Europe. This was not the first occasion on which he had
scandalized his fellow friars and, exasperated with the constraints of
the religious life, he fled the convent in early 1576. He went first
to Rome and then, taking off his habit, proceeded to northern Italy.
He was now a fugitive from his order and excommunicate. Over the next
fourteen or so years he moved from one town or city to another, first
in Italy and then in France, Switzerland, England, Germany and
Bohemia. In 1591 he returned, fatefully, to Venice. It was during
these unsettled years that Bruno composed those Italian and Latin
works of his that survive today.



Without family, connections or means of his own, Bruno relied on his
wits. For example, at Noli, between Nice and Genoa, he taught Latin to
schoolboys and elementary astronomy to "certain gentlemen"
(Firpo 2000: 45). In Geneva, he worked in a printer's shop,
correcting proofs. He aspired to greater things. His goal was to teach
philosophy without the trammels of revealed truths, preferably at a
university. On several occasions, a position of this kind seemed
within his grasp. Two factors, however, conspired to thwart his
ambitions. The first was the unsettled circumstances of Reformation
Europe. At Toulouse, for example, he taught philosophy at the
university for nearly two years (1579-81), but renewed conflict
between Catholics and Huguenots in the summer of 1581 forced him to
leave the city. His notoriety further complicated matters. In a
dispatch dated 28 March 1583, the English ambassador in Paris, Henry
Cobham, alerted Queen Elizabeth's principal secretary, Francis
Walsingham, to Bruno's impending arrival: "Il Sr Doctor
Jordano Bruno Nolano, a professor in philosophy, intendeth to pass
into England; whose religion I cannot commend" (Aquilecchia
1995: 22, 24). Not by chance does Bruno have the distinction of being the
only known sixteenth-century philosopher to have been excommunicated
from all three major confessions: Roman Catholic (Naples, 1576),
Calvinist (Geneva, 1579) and Lutheran (Helmstedt, 1589). The second
factor was his temperament. Intolerant of those whom he deemed fools,
Bruno repeatedly caused offence. In *The Ash Wednesday Supper*,
the first and best known of the six philosophical dialogues in Italian
that he published while living in London, he decried the ignorance and
pomposity of English men of learning and cast aspersions on the London
commoner. He compared himself, "a Neapolitan born and bred under
a more benign sky", with a hapless antagonist at Oxford
University, whom he described as a discourteous "pig" (BOI
I, 535). Such was the offence that the work caused that he began his
next dialogue, *On the Cause, the Principle and the One* with
an elaborate apology in which he retracted his comments while
simultaneously justifying them. It was a ploy that he would use again,
ill-advisedly, during his trial.




Bruno's wanderings came to an abrupt end shortly after he
returned to Italy in late August 1591. After a brief stay in Venice,
he moved to Padua for three months or so and then returned to Venice
to take up lodgings with the Venetian patrician Giovanni Mocenigo, to
whom he divulged the "secrets" of his mnemotechnics and
philosophy. Alarmed at some of Bruno's views, Mocenigo denounced
him to the Venetian Inquisition on 22 May 1592. Events took a decided
turn for the worse when, on 12 September 1592, the Papal Nuncio in
Venice, on behalf of the Holy Office in Rome, requested Bruno's
extradition. The Venetian authorities dilly-dallied, before eventually
acceding to the request in January 1593. At Rome, the trial proceeded
slowly. Eventually, on 14 January 1599, the Congregation of the Holy
Office approved a list (now lost) of eight heretical propositions
assembled by Robert Bellarmine, S.J., and Alberto Tragagliolo, O.P.,
from the trial records and copies of Bruno's works. Bruno was
invited to consider "whether he wished to abjure the
propositions as heretical" (Firpo 2000: 411, 413, doc. 55). Four
days later, he was brought before the Congregation and ordered to
abjure the propositions within six days. Bruno conceded, with
qualifications, and then submitted a written defence of his views.



The trial proceeded, with Bruno abjuring the heresies of which he was
accused, while at the same time taking issue, in written depositions,
with aspects of the accusations. It was not, as mentioned above, the
first time that Bruno had used this ploy, turning concession into a
springboard for reasserting his position. On this occasion, however,
the stakes were higher, as he surely knew. On 21 December 1599, the
die was cast when he retorted to the Inquisitors that



> 
> 
> he neither needed nor wished to recant, that he had nothing to recant,
> that he did not have views to recant, and did not know about what he should
> recant. (Firpo 2000: clxxvi, 463, doc. 65)
> 
> 
> 



The Congregation made a final attempt the same day, sending the
Dominican General and the Procurator, two of the most distinguished
members of the order that he had deserted almost twenty four years
previously, to plead with him, in vain. On 20 January 1600, the
Congregation, with Pope Clement VIII presiding, ordered that all of
Bruno's works be placed on the Index of Prohibited Books and
that he should be consigned to the secular authorities of Rome for
punishment as an impenitent, pertinacious and obstinate heretic.
Bruno's final written deposition, addressed to the pope,
"was opened but not read" (Firpo 2000: 471, 475, doc. 65a-b). At dawn
on 17 February 1600, he was led out onto the Campo de' Fiori.
With a metal plate clamped over his tongue, Bruno was stripped, tied to a
stake and, accompanied by the chants of the Confraternity of the
Beheading of St John, burned alive.


## 2. The Wisdom of the Ancients



Bruno's philosophy--despite its inconsistent terminology,
intricacies, eclecticism and willful contrariness--has an inner
coherence. Indeed, he can claim to be the first thinker since
antiquity to integrate a metaphysics, physics, psychology and ethics
into an original, if unsystematically presented, philosophy, one that
aspired to go beyond the reelaborations of Platonism, Aristotelianism
or scepticism within a Christian context that had hitherto prevailed.
The outcome was a radical alternative to medieval and Renaissance
interpretations of human nature, the cosmos and God. His philosophy
remained, however, in one decisive respect a creation of the
Renaissance: neither celestial nor terrestrial mechanics were
reducible to mathematical abstractions. His treatment of
Copernicus's heliocentric hypothesis, discussed in the following
section, exemplifies his approach in this respect.



The coherence stems from his interpretation of ancient learning. From,
principally, the fifteenth-century Christian Platonist Marsilio
Ficino, he learned of the gentile tradition of wisdom, the
"ancient philosophy", that had allegedly originated with
sages such as Zoroaster in Persia and Hermes Trismegistus in Egypt.
Orpheus, Pythagoras and other early Greek thinkers had imbibed this
wisdom and transmitted it to Plato, among many others. Through innate
powers of mind, divine inspiration or direct or indirect knowledge of
Jewish lore, these sages and philosophers had acquired intimations of
many, indeed most, of the essential tenets of Christianity. Hence,
concluded Ficino, the study of ancient Greek philosophy, especially
Platonism, could rightfully serve as a handmaiden to the Christian
faith. Bruno denied any such notions of progress. Human knowledge,
like all natural things, observed the rule of vicissitude (see
 Section 3),
gradually oscillating from one extreme to the other. Greek philosophy
from Plato onwards was a debased version of the true wisdom known to
ancient sages such as Hermes Trismegistus among the Egyptians and
Pythagoras, Parmenides and Empedocles among the early Greeks. The
task, then, was to restore an authentic ancient philosophy by
elaborating upon what could be discerned in the few surviving Egyptian
and Pythagorean records of it with the help of vestigial truths
preserved in Greek philosophy. Even Aristotle, "the stupidest of
all philosophers", who had done his best to "pervert the
opinions of the ancients and oppose the truth" (BOI I, 182,
730), sometimes included, despite himself, valuable ideas gleaned from
his predecessors. The many other philosophical sources that Bruno
eclectically pressed into service--Presocratic, Platonic,
Aristotelian, Stoic, Epicurean, medieval, Arabic, scholastic and
Renaissance--had the same purpose: the articulation of a
philosophy true to the principles of an ancient wisdom all but
obliterated by Aristotle and his followers.



His approach towards Scripture followed suit. Patristic, medieval and
Renaissance authors, including again Ficino, held that Hermes
Trismegistus had lived at the same time as or shortly after Moses.
This explained the many similarities between the Old Testament and
Hermes's writings. Bruno reversed the chronology. He was not the
first Renaissance author to do so, but he was the first to draw out
the implications. The daughter of the Pharaoh had taken Moses into her
household as "her son" (Exodus 2:10, KJV), and he had
become "learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians" (Acts
7:22, KJV; BOI II, 369). This "wisdom of the Egyptians"
was the wisdom recorded in Hermes's works. In other words, the
Pentateuch, which conventionally was believed to have been composed by
Moses, and hence Scripture as a whole were tributaries of Egyptian
lore, rather than vice versa. Bruno made this point circumspectly, as
well he might. Sometimes he disguised his interpretation by referring
to Scripture as the "Kabbalah". Such wisdom, he declared,
as there was in the Kabbalah of the Jews "derived from the
Egyptians, by whom Moses was educated" (BOI II, 362; 369).
Read literally, this statement was uncontroversial. Though purportedly
Mosaic in origin, the Kabbalah was not an authoritative repository of
Christian doctrine. By "Kabbalah", however, Bruno
surreptitiously meant Jewish lore as recorded not only in the
originally oral tradition of the Kabbalah, but also in the parallel
written tradition, that is, the Pentateuch, and hence in the Old and
New Testaments generally. The crucifixion was a "Kabbalistic
tragedy" (BOI II, 263).



Travesty though it therefore was for the most part, Holy Scripture,
like Plato's and Aristotle's philosophies, had inherited
some truths from pre-Mosaic wisdom. Bruno duly quoted from Scripture
on many occasions--examples feature in the following
sections--to support his metaphysical, cosmological and ethical
ideas. The Book of Job was especially valuable in this respect. Job
had lived in the Land of Uz and so recorded, not Jewish lore, but
"profound mysteries of the Chaldeans" (BOL I.2, 390, 418),
ones that, like the wisdom of the Egyptians, the Magi, Orphics and
Pythagoreans, constituted a strand of "the ancient
philosophy" (BOI I, 460). Chaldean wisdom, like that of the
Egyptians, owed nothing of importance to the "Jewish
Kabbala", which had been composed by a people, the
"excrement" of Egypt, who had never governed a land
of their own (BOI II, 377). Whether these and other aspersions 
(see also BOI II, 438, and
 Section 7), 
stereotypical by his day, represent prejudices discredited by
objections voiced by other interlocutors or ones that he shared is a
moot point. One way or the other they served to convey his conviction
that what truths there were in scripture derived from a philosophical
tradition that had originated in ancient Egypt.



Medieval and Renaissance philosophers and theologians had,
disastrously, held the opposite view. Philosophically, they looked to
Plato, Aristotle and Averroes as authorities, rather than to Hermes,
the Chaldeans, Pythagoras and other early Greek sages. Exegetes had
consequently misinterpreted those parts of Scripture that touched on
philosophical matters, incorrectly reading literally passages that
described nature and the universe figuratively and vice versa.
This did not dissuade Bruno from adopting scholastic ideas when it suited his
purposes. He acknowledged the Dominican Thomas Aquinas as an important
influence, praised the metaphysical speculations of thirteenth-century
Oxford Franciscans (e.g., Duns Scotus) and extolled Averroes as a
better commentator on Aristotle than any late Greek commentator,
despite the Arab philosopher's ignorance of the Greek language.
It was contemporary scholasticism that bore the brunt of Bruno's
animosity, above all for its emphasis on Latin style at the expense of
intellectual substance--a vice contracted from Renaissance
humanism, for which he had no patience.


## 3. Cosmology: The Universe and the Atom



How and when Bruno began to develop what he called his "new
philosophy" is uncertain (Granada 1990). His earliest surviving philosophical
work, *On the Shadows of the Ideas*, dated 1582, hints at a few
of its propositions, including heliocentricism (BOL II.1, 7-8). The first detailed
statement, however, came in *The Ash Wednesday Supper*,
published at London in 1584, in which he set out his interpretation of
Copernicus's heliocentric hypothesis, as explained in *On the
Revolutions* (1543). Dismissing contemporary claims that
Copernicus's hypothesis was merely a convenient computational
device, Bruno announced that it disproved the traditional
Aristotelian-Ptolemaic picture of the cosmos. In the first place, it
disproved Aristotle's doctrine that each sublunary element had a
fixed "natural place" at the centre of the
cosmos--the earth's globe at the very centre, water in the
sphere immediately surrounding it, followed by the air and fire
spheres--and that particles of the elements, if displaced from
these natural spheres, had an intrinsic impulse to regain them. On the
contrary, since the earth, Bruno explained, was a planet circling the
sun, the elemental spheres of which it was constituted were
continuously in motion. The elements did not have absolute
"natural places"; and an elemental part, whether displaced
from a whole or chancing to be near a whole, sought to attach itself
to it because a whole was the place where it would be best preserved.
Once united with a whole, elemental parts were no longer heavy or
light and revolved with it naturally, that is, without resistance.
This doctrine of gravity drew on Ficino's Neoplatonic ideas of
elemental motion, Copernicus's doctrine of gravity,
Lucretius's comments on the weightlessness of parts in their
wholes and scholastic notions of self-conservation (Knox 2002).



![Woodcut showing cosmos as concentric spheres](apian.png)
  

Peter Apian, *Cosmographicus liber* (1524, p. 6). The woodcut
typifies the medieval and Renaissance picture of the cosmos that Bruno
sought to discredit. At the centre lies the terraqueous globe,
understood as a combination of the earth and water
spheres. Surrounding them are the concentric spheres of the other two
sublunary elements, air and fire. Beyond the fire sphere is the
superlunary region, which comprises: a) seven spheres, each of which
carries a planet--the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars,
Jupiter and Saturn--around the centre of the cosmos; and b) four
outer spheres, namely, the firmament (i.e. the sphere of fixed
stars), the crystalline sphere, the *primum mobile* and the
empyrean. Reproduced by permission of UCL Library, Special
Collections. 





Commendable though his achievement had been, Copernicus had remained
unaware of the full implications of his heliocentric hypothesis. It
was left to Bruno, the philosopher, to accomplish the full revolution
of thought, pass beyond the quantitative sensible realm that,
important stepping stone though it was, had unduly preoccupied
mathematicians like Copernicus and proceed to knowledge of what could
be discerned by reason alone (BOI I, 448-454). Copernicus's most egregious
shortcoming in this respect was his failure to recognize that his
heliocentric hypothesis disproved Aristotelian and scholastic
arguments that the cosmos, or rather universe, was finite and
unique. If the heavens were infinite, these arguments ran, then their
outermost regions would --impossibly-- revolve infinitely
fast around the earth at centre of the cosmos. Nor could there be more
than one cosmos, because, if there were, then a displaced particle of
an element would --no less impossibly--have two or more
natural places to which it should return. These objections carried no
weight in a heliocentric world. The apparent daily rotation of a
firmament or "sphere of fixed stars" around the earth was
an illusion created by the earth's rotation around its axis as
it circled the sun. The universe was not, Bruno insisted, a finite
globe composed of concentric spheres, "like an onion" (BOL
I.2, 261), to use a common simile. Instead it was an infinite,
homogeneous expanse populated by an infinite number of solar systems
like our own. How far his achievement surpassed that of Columbus, who
had discovered just one continent on one earth (BOI I, 451-452)!
Lucretius, Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64) and counterfactual
scholastic discussions concerning the plurality of worlds are evident
influences. The authority that Bruno particularly liked to invoke,
however, was Scripture. The infinite number of celestial bodies
corresponded to "those so many hundreds of thousands [of
angels]"--an allusion to Daniel 7:10--"that
assist in the ministry and contemplation of the first, universal,
infinite and eternal efficient cause" (BOI I, 455).




The celestial or, as Bruno called them, "principal" bodies
glided weightlessly within an infinite "receptacle" or
"expanse" of aether (BOI II, 110) like specks of dust in
the sunlit air (BOL I.1, 262; I.2, 91). What made them move? Their
souls. They were animate and, as their orderly patterns of motion
attested, intelligent too. Aristotle had suggested this among other
possible explanations for celestial motion. Most patristic and
scholastic authors, anxious to discourage polytheism, had rejected the
idea. Ficino's revival of Platonism, however, had given a new
lease of life to the idea that the celestial bodies were animate.
True to form, Bruno, though indebted to Ficino on this as on many
other scores, quoted the Book of Job (28:20-21) as his
authority. In each solar system or, in Bruno's terminology,
"synod" the suns and earth regulated their motions
autonomously to their mutual advantage. From the earths, the suns
absorbed vaporous exhalations. In exchange the sun produced the light
and heat that the earths, as "animals", needed in order to
host living things. No part of them remained forever barren thanks to
the several approximately circular revolutions that they performed.
Nature, for Bruno no less than for Aristotle, did nothing in vain (BOL
III, 108).



In keeping with these ideas, Bruno populated the principal bodies with
life-forms of every kind. Each region of each principal body comprised
matter which, circumstances permitting, became a plant or animal, even
a rational animal. This last category included human beings and also
demons, in other words, rational beings with rarefied bodies made of
pure aether or combinations of aether with air, water or earth. The
latter, to judge by the demons frequenting the elemental regions of
our globe, were generally, but by no means invariably, more
intelligent than human beings. Within the mountains were dim-witted
troglodytes jealously guarding the earth's mineral veins (BOL I.2, 61, 282; III, 431).
Long-living but of feeble intelligence, they had little commerce with
human beings. Stone-throwing demons, another species of earthy demon,
of the kind described by the Byzantine author Michael Psellos, had
lairs in the vicinity of Nola and habitually pelted those who passed
nearby at night, as Bruno knew from personal experience (BOL III, 431). Nymphs with
predominantly aqueous bodies lived secluded in grottos (BOL I.2, 282; III, 181). The variety of
demonic life was such that it "far surpassed that of sensible
things" (BOL III, 427, 429). A comparable diversity was evident
among human beings, who differed in skin colour and stature from region
to region (BOL I.2, 282, 284). The variations reflected their diverse habitats. When
extinguished by a cataclysm of some kind, they regenerated
spontaneously (BOL I.2, 282), in the manner that Avicenna and, if only as a
philosophical possibility, some Christian authors had described. The
novelty in Bruno's interpretation was the idea that spontaneous
generation explained the variety of life in an infinite and infinitely
varied universe rather than the survival of a privileged species on
this earth.



The principal bodies, human beings and demons were the three genera of
rational animal inhabiting the universe. In one important respect,
however, principal bodies were unique. Like accomplished
musicians--here Bruno adapted an analogy used by Plotinus and
many others to illustrate how nature operated non-discursively
according to a final cause--they did not think rationally,
proceeding from one thought to the next as they executed their roles.
Their intellects dominated their animal bodies, enabling them to move
intuitively in accordance with the ends proper to them. Unlike human
beings, too, the celestial "animals" were eternal and
hence did not reproduce, grow or decay. Though corruptible
intrinsically, they were, as the Chaldeans and Plato had taught,
sustained by divine providence (for providence, see 
 Section 5). 
This is, at least, what Bruno tended to think even if
he conceded, uncharacteristically, that he was uncertain on this point
(Granada, 2000). In all other respects, the principal bodies were
animals like any other. Stones and other parts of our earth, for
example, might seem inanimate but, as parts of a principle body, they were, like the bones, nails and hair of an
animal, alive, if only vestigially. Like animals, too, the principal
bodies fed and excreted. They expelled stray particles from the
surrounding aether and in compensation emitted others, an idea
inspired by Lucretius's concept of *simulacra* (*On
the Nature of Things*, IV.54-268).



This picture was incompatible with traditional doctrines of the
elements. Aristotelian, Neoplatonic and scholastic cosmology distinguished neatly
between the super- and sublunary regions. The superlunary region and
the celestial bodies within it were composed entirely of aether. This
"fifth element" or quintessence was devoid of all change
other than that of perfect, unending, circular motion. The sublunary
region comprised the remaining four elements, fire, air, water and
earth, which by nature observed finite linear motion upwards or
downwards. In addition to finite local motion, bodies composed of the
sublunary elements continuously underwent generation and
corruption. In these respects the superlunary region was superior to
the sublunary one. Indeed, even within the sublunary region, according
to many authors, the four elements were organized hierarchically, with
earth as the dullest and grossest element at the centre of the cosmos
and fire as the nimblest and subtlest sublunary element, akin to the
neighbouring celestial region.



No such hierarchy could obtain in a homogeneous universe populated by
animate suns and earths of the kind that Bruno imagined. Fire, air,
water and earth, as they were commonly conceived, were present in each
and every celestial body, indeed all four were present in each part of
every celestial body. Just as in a syllable, each letter was equally
important--an Aristotelian analogy that Bruno turned to his own
purposes (BOL I.2, 118; Aristotle *Metaphysics*, VII.17,
1041b11-33)--so too were the elements in the composition of
a body. Timely support came from contemporary accounts of the 1572
supernova and theories about comets proposed by Tycho Brahe and others
(Tessicini 2007, 112-150). The birth of a new star proved that
generation did, after all, occur in the superlunary region. As for
comets, they were indeed, as Aristotle and others held, composed of
the same elements as other sublunary things but they were not, as they
had concluded, sublunary phenomena peculiar to the air and fire
spheres. Their trajectories proved that were superlunary objects or,
more exactly, planets which, owing to the incline at which they
revolved around the sun, only intermittently reflected the sun's
light towards the earth. The supposedly sublunary elements occurred in
the superlunary region! In short, not only reason but also observation
disproved the notion of a cosmos divided into two finite regions of
contrasting properties (BOL I.1, 219-221). This was a vivid
example of Bruno's constant refrain that the senses, regulated
by reason, could be used to advantage (BOI II, 10, 136-137;
BOL I.2, 196, 218; II.2, 78; Firpo 2000, 57, doc. 11).


 Bruno's alternative theory of the elements drew on Pythagoreanism,
ancient atomism, medieval discussions, pro and contra, of indivisible
minims and Nicholas of Cusa's elemental doctrines (BOL III,
510-536). Corporeal things comprised two material principles,
earth and water, and two immaterial ones, spirit and soul. By
"earth" Bruno meant the discrete, identical, irreducible
spheres of which physical things were made. He often called them
"atoms" to emphasize their indivisibility. The
circumferences and centres of these spherical atoms coincided. Hence,
as some medieval authors had proposed, atoms were dimensionless
bodies, unlike the atoms imagined by Democritus and other ancient
atomists. They were, as Bruno said, the principles of spatial
contraction, of solidity. Water, by contrast, was a continuum and the
principle of corporeal extension. Two or more atoms, though
dimensionless, bonded by water constituted a determinate body in
space, just as two or more dimensionless points, in Bruno's
Pythagorean geometry, constituted a line. "The minimal body or
atom was the substance of all things" (BOL I.3,
140). Observation confirmed this theory: dry, dusty, earth congealed
with the addition of water.



The two non-material principles, spirit and soul, related to each
other analogously. Soul, the principle of motion, aggregated atoms and
thereby determined the identity of a body. Spirit--the
*spiritus* popularized by Ficino--was the incorporeal
medium through which soul connected with body. Soul accounted for the
existence of fire. In its purest form, fire was the combination of
water and light, which, as others, including Ficino, had explained,
was the physical analogue of the intellectual soul governing all
things (for soul and light, see further
 Section 4).
This explained why flame resembled water flashing in sunlight: in the
former, soul predominated, in the latter, water. The Egyptians Hermes
Trismegistus and Moses corroborated this idea. Both had understood
fire to be essentially water (BOL I.1, 376; Genesis 1:6-7;
Hermes Trismegistus, *Pimander*, I.5). Again, in Genesis
1:1-3 Moses had spoken of earth, the water (the
"abyss"), spirit and light but ignored fire and air,
precisely because they were not true elements. Similarly air was a
derivative rather than, as conventionally believed, an element in its
own right. Heat generated by fire vaporized water to produce the air
of the kind that we breath, and this vaporous air merged seamlessly
into the empty, dimensionless, space beyond the atmosphere surrounding
a celestial body. This space was the aether, though not the aether of
conventional cosmology. It was the continuum spread throughout the
universe and through the corporeal things contained in it, binding
them together--not unlike the Stoic *pneuma* interpreted as
*hexis*--without, however, moving them. It was, in other
words, *spiritus*, the motionless immaterial medium through
which soul, the principle of motion, operated. As such,
*spiritus* or aether was the container--non-terminated
space--in which all things were located.



Bruno's elemental theory disproved outright the dominant
Aristotelian view that the universe was finite but infinitely
divisible. It also disproved ancient atomism. Democritus, Epicurus,
Lucretius and others had, it is true, correctly surmised that the
universe was infinite and comprised an infinite number of finite,
indivisible, atoms. But their atoms were solids, although
imperceptible ones, of various shapes, weights and sizes floating in a
vacuum, a conclusion that led to a mechanistic view of the universe,
which Bruno did not countenance. Correctly understood, atoms were
incorporeal spheres with spatial locations. Soul, working through the
intermediary of aether or spirit, joined these incorporeal, identical,
spheres to make a body. Indeed, they were not so much components as
instances of the universe. Intrinsically dimensionless, their centres
coincided with their circumferences. Conversely, since the universe
was an infinite, indivisible (*atomus*) sphere, its centre was
omnipresent. Both were absolute physical monads, indivisible unities,
the centres and circumferences of which coincided. They differed
inasmuch as the *maximum* was the "unfolding" of
the *minimum* and a *minimum* was the
"enfolding" of the *maximum*.


## 4. The Universal Soul, Universal Intellect and Universal Matter



The soul that Bruno identified as one of the four principles of
corporeality was the World or Universal Soul. The universe was an
organism in which each principal body and the life sustained on it
participated in a common animating principle, in the same way as the
many parts of the human body were vivified by one and the same soul.
Even supposedly inanimate things had a vestigial presence of life.
Rocks, for example, were alive to the same degree as the bones or
teeth of animals were. The Universal Soul was
"all-in-all", that is, present wholly and indivisibly in
each and every thing to the degree that it was capable of receiving
it, just as, to borrow Plotinus's analogy
(*Enneads*,VI.4.12), a single voice was audible to everyone in
a room, however great the audience. Bruno, like others before him,
attributed the doctrine of "all-in-all", in a
dematerialized version, to Anaxagoras. He also adduced several
scriptural witnesses, notably the Book of Wisdom (1:7), thereby
identifying the Universal Soul implicitly with the Holy Spirit:
"For the Spirit of the Lord filleth the world: and that which
containeth all things hath knowledge of the voice". No matter
that the Council of Sens (1140) had anathematized this
association.



The Universal Soul combined with Universal Matter to produce the
universe; the former was the active power, form, and the latter its
passive subject. Bruno conceived Universal Matter as indeterminate
space, that is, the receptacle of Plato's *Timaeus*
(52A-B) or more exactly Aristotle's interpretation of it
(*Physics*, IV.2, 209b6-17; IV.6, 214a12-19). In
this respect, it was the motionless aether or spirit, devoid of any
"specific quality" of its own (BOI II, 159-160; BOL
I.2 78-79), that served as the medium through which soul acted
on the two corporeal principles, earth atoms and water (see
 Section 3). Some philosophers, noted Bruno, called
this space or container "vacuum" (BOI II,
160-161). All Universal Matter was "accompanied" by
form, that is, the Universal Soul (BOI I, 665-666). This simple
picture was complicated by Bruno's interpretation of the
Universal or, synonymously, First Intellect. Like the Neoplatonic
Intellect, Bruno's Universal Intellect comprised the Ideas; but,
unlike its Neoplatonic counterpart, it was not a hypostasis distinct
from, and ontologically prior to, the Universal Soul. Instead, it was
"the inner and most essential and characteristic faculty"
of the Universal Soul, operating immanently from within Universal
Matter like "an internal craftsman" (BOI I, 652-654;
BOL I.2, 312-313, 426; I.4, 107). It did so by articulating its
effects through division: a seed of a tree became a stem, from which
grew branches, from which grew twigs, from which grew buds and so
on--to the point of generating a new specimen through separation
or discharge of some kind.



![Bruno's Ontology: This is an svg file so the full text should be readable. Graphically the major parts are 'God' at the top with a brace enclosing what is below. On the left side of all is 'active principle/cause' and on the right side of all is 'passive principle' and on the bottom 'the living matter or Nature in a second sense'. In the interior on the left is 'Universal Soul/Intellect' with arrows point to 'Separate Intelligences', 'forms that ... by using sense data' ('Separate Intelligence' has a dotted arrow to this also), and 'forms...without using sense data'. In the interior on the right is 'Universal Matter' with arrows pointing to 'intelligible matter' (that also braces 'Universal Soul/Intellect' and 'Separate Intelligences') and to 'Sensible Matter' (this braces the two types of forms).   ](bruno-ontology.svg)


The Universal Intellect was, however, simultaneously separate from the
corruptible things that it engendered in that it was immutable.
Spatial language--"above",
"within", "separate" and so forth--was,
as Bruno recognized, inappropriate when describing intelligible
realities. By definition, something intelligible had no location or
dimensions. To clarify what he meant by the immanent and transcendent
roles of the Universal Soul and its faculty, the Universal Intellect,
Bruno appropriated a distinction formulated in Thomas Aquinas's
*On the Principles of Nature*. Principles were constituents of
something. The marble of the statue and its form were constituents;
hence, they were principles, the marble being the material, the form
the formal principle. Causes, by contrast, were extrinsic. A sculptor
was the efficient cause of a statue, and he made it with an end, a
final cause, in mind. Neither the sculptor nor his purpose were
constituents of the finished piece. Analogously the Universal Soul and
Universal Matter were the two principles immanent in all things,
whereas the Universal Intellect was the efficient cause of all things
and so extrinsic to them. It also operated in accordance with a final
and therefore extrinsic cause: the perfection of the universe.



The Stoics, as Bruno knew, had similarly proposed that the cosmos
comprised two mutually dependent principles, the World Soul or
*pneuma* and matter, active and passive respectively, with the
former accommodating Mind. Indeed, when introducing his account of the
Universal Soul and Universal Matter in *On the Cause, the Principle
and the One* (1584), he included the Stoics among the several
schools and authors who had identified the World Soul and matter as
the active and passive principles of the physical world. Stoic
philosophy also contributed to Bruno's doctrine in surreptitious
ways. In the *Pimander* (chaps 10-12) Hermes Trismegistus
had declared that the cosmos was composed of matter and soul and that
the latter included Mind. Again, Virgil (*Aeneid*,
VI.724-727) had described the super- and sublunary regions as
animated from within by *spiritus*, which Bruno identified in
this context with the Universal Soul, and added that they were moved
by a Mind diffused throughout their vast mass. Hermes Trismegistus and
Virgil were, according to conventional wisdom, reporting the wisdom of
the ancient Egyptians and the Pythagoreans respectively. As such,
Bruno considered them authorities for his interpretation. Neither,
however, was authentic. The comments in the *Pimander* are just
one of many Stoic borrowings that reflect the eclectic intellectual
ambient of Alexandrian Egypt in which Hermetic works of this kind were
composed. And unbeknown to Bruno, Virgil's lines drew on Stoic
rather than Pythagorean thought (Knox 2013).



Bruno's two universal principles resembled Stoic doctrine in
another respect. For the Stoics, "first matter" was an
unqualified substance (*ousia*). For Bruno, too, Universal
Matter was a substance and in act, not a *prope nihil*
("almost nothing") of the kind imagined by Aristotle. The
similarities, however, cease at this point. For the Stoics, whatever
existed, even soul and matter, was corporeal, capable of acting on or
being acted upon by another corporeal entity. By contrast, neither of
Bruno's principles was corporeal. The Universal Soul was an
intelligible reality; and Universal Matter was not corporeal in the
Stoic sense. Inherently qualityless, dimensionless, impassive and
inactive, Universal Matter was a medium that had the potentiality to
become all things. To explain why Universal Matter conceived in this
manner was a substance, Bruno drew on Thomas Aquinas's
commentary on Aristotle's reportage of ideas proposed by
"ancient philosophers" (*Commentary on Aristotle's Physics*, II,
*lectio* 2, SS1). Wood was a substance in act because it
was that from which a bed, stool or image could be made, not because
it was any one of those things; and the same was true of Universal
Matter. It was not so much the effects elicited from Universal Matter
by the Universal Soul's faculty, the Universal Intellect, which
were in act, but rather Universal Matter itself. It was in act by
virtue of the unexplicated forms that the Universal Intellect could
incite from within it, not by virtue of the explicated material forms
that it produced. Nicholas of Cusa supplied the language of
explication and implication.



Universal Matter was present in incorporeal as well as corporeal
things. It was the genus of two types of matter, corporeal and
intelligible. The former was the substrate of corporeal objects, as
described above. The latter, Plotinus's version of Plato's
Indefinite Dyad as reported by Aristotle, was instead the
substrate--the principle of indeterminacy or
potentiality--of intelligible realities. Bruno quoted two of
Plotinus's arguments for the existence of intelligible matter.
First, the plurality of Ideas in the Intellect presupposed something
common to each of them, this commonality being intelligible matter.
Second, since the sensible world imitated the intelligible world and
the sensible world comprised matter, so too must the intelligible.
Plotinus, like other ancient Neoplatonists, considered the two matters
ontologically distinct, as Bruno noted. Intelligible matter, as the
matter of unchanging intelligible realities, did not change,
Plotinus had explained. It "possessed" all things simultaneously. By
contrast, the matter of sensible things possessed all things only
inasmuch as parts of it assumed all possible forms sequentially. Bruno
added a differentiation of his own, applying again Nicholas of
Cusa's distinction between explication and implication:
intelligible matter was informed but unexplicated, sensible matter was
informed but explicated. Nevertheless, Bruno insisted that corporeal
and intelligible matter were, ultimately, two species of the genus
Universal Matter. He was not the first to do so. The eleventh-century
Jewish philosopher, Ibn Gabirol or, in Latinized form, Avicebron, as
Bruno mentioned, had made the same move. Just as importantly, even if
Bruno did not say so, so too had Ficino in accordance with
Augustine's Plotinian exegesis of Genesis 1:1-3. All
distinctions, Bruno concluded, presupposed something indefinite:
potentiality, matter. Hence the distinction between the two matters
presupposed an absolute Universal Matter. No doubt he knew of Thomas
Aquinas's objections. Avicebron was wrong, Thomas had written,
to say that species were the actualization of a genus's
potentialities and so attribute existence to what was a purely
theoretical relationship between genus and species.



Like Avicebron, Bruno sometimes went as far as to elevate Universal
Matter above Universal Form. Nothing was "constant, fixed,
eternal and worthy of being esteemed a principle apart from [Universal]
Matter" (BOI I, 686). Form, that is, the Universal Soul, was
"under the constant control of [Universal] Matter" (BOI I,
722). Its stability, which
contrasted so favorably with the flux of form, had led the heterodox
scholastic philosopher David of Dinant (d. 1215) "who had been
poorly understood by some" to call matter "divine"
(BOI I, 601, 723; BOL III, 695-696). Divine though it might be,
Bruno did not identify Universal Matter with God. Indeed, he
criticized Avicebron, misrepresenting him on the by, for having held
that matter alone was "stable", "eternal" and
hence "divine" and for vilifying all substantial form,
including the Universal Soul, as "corruptible" and
ephemeral (BOI I, 687, 696). For Bruno, the Universal Soul was
"mutable", rather than "corruptible", in
relation to Universal Matter and only in this sense inferior to
it (ibid.).


## 5. God and Nature



The two substances, Universal Soul and Universal Matter, were not
antagonistic, Manichean. Though opposites, they were aspects of one
and "the same principle" (BOI I, 698; BOL I.2, 344) or
"supersubstantial substance" (BOI I, 557). Since this
supersubstantial substance reconciled these and indeed all other
opposites, it was a "plenitude" without a counterpart
"non-being" (BOL III, 40). To explain its unity, Bruno
turned to Nicholas of Cusa's doctrine of the "coincidence
of opposites". Universal Matter and Universal Soul/Intellect
coincided in an undifferentiated unity just as the circumference of an
infinite circle and an infinite straight line, though distinct
entities, coincided. Not for nothing did Bruno acknowledge that
Nicholas's doctrine had provided him with the means for reviving
the ancient philosophy that had long been "defunct" (BOL
I.3, 272). This supersubstantial principle was the God of whom the
Egyptians Hermes and Moses had spoken. During his trial Bruno asserted
that God had created all things from the two principles, "the
World Soul and prime matter", from which all things derive.
"They depend with respect to their whole being on God, and they
are eternal" (Firpo 2000, 381 [doc. 51, SS252]). In his
written works, too, he identified them with, respectively, the primordial darkness
and light described in the first three verses of Genesis (BOL II.3,
117). This was not as provocative as it might seem. Origen, St
Augustine and many other theologians had identified God's first
two creations on the First Day, "heaven" and
"earth", with, respectively, intellective beings--the
angels--and matter.



This first principle and cause of all things, given its
supersubstantiality, was unknowable. We cannot understand God as we
can, say, abstract mathematical or metaphysical truths, let alone
experience him directly through our senses. Nevertheless, the
universe, mere vestige of him though it is, teaches us a few
incontrovertible truths. We know, first, that he exists. We can deduce
that a sculptor exists when we see a statue, even though we know
nothing else about him. Similarly, we know from the existence of the
universe that there must be a first principle and cause of all things,
whom we call God (BOI I, 646-650). "He is who *is*"--a pun on
God's response to Moses's plea that he describe himself
(Exodus 3:14)--"for besides him nothing *is"*
(BOL III, 41; similarly BOL I.3, 26). Furthermore, since the universe
is one, we can tell that God, too, is absolutely simple and the
"monad of monads" (BOL I.3, 144 , 146). He was the One
Being, the unchanging *ens unum*, of which Xenophanes and his
pupil Parmenides had spoken. All other things were his accidents or
contingent "modes" (BOI I, 733), just as in arithmetic
numbers were composed of, and therefore accidents of, the number one,
and physical objects were composed of, and therefore accidents of, the
atom. Even the substances Universal Soul and Universal Matter, given
they engaged in the flux of things, were accidents of God's
supersubstantial unity.



True philosophers, those, that is, who understood that the universe
was infinite, could discover more than this. The numberless,
magnificent, blazing, celestial bodies revealed, to paraphrase Psalm
19:1 (KJV), many things about "the infinite excellence and
majesty of their first principle and cause" (BOI I,
649-650). Together they formed a "picture, book and mirror
in which we could gaze upon, read and contemplate the vestige, law and
simulacrum" of God (BOL I.1, 203; BOI II, 27). The first of these analogies,
that of painting, Bruno developed as follows. A masterpiece relied on
using appropriately a range of colours, not just "gold and
finest purple" (BOL I.1, 310, 312). Plotinus inspired the
analogy (*Enneads*, III.2.11), but Bruno, as ever, gave
it a distinctive twist. For Plotinus, it illustrated how the hierarchical
arrangement of all things necessarily entailed a descent from perfect
being to the absence of being, from the absolutely good to the
not-good. In Bruno's philosophy, no such hierarchy existed. Something
abject was like a splodge of paint which, drab though it appeared on
the palette, once applied, lent a painting the desired effect (BOL
I.1, 312). In other words, accidents that they all were, things
acquired ontological significance only insofar as they were part of
God's "perfect" image, the universe. As such, the
latter was an epiphany incomparably more splendid and revelatory than
that proferred by any individual, whether "Egyptian, Syrian,
Greek or Roman" (BOL I.1, 205). The Syrian that Bruno had in
mind was Jesus Christ, who was born in Bethlehem and bought up in Nazareth,
both towns, as St Luke (2:2) mentioned in his account of the nativity,
being located in what the Roman Empire at the time knew as Syria. It was the
universe, not the first Adam or, as St Paul had called Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:45), the second Adam (Genesis 1:26; 2 Corinthians 4:4; Colossians 1:5; Hebrews 1:3), that was made in God's "image".



Countless theologians and philosophers had proclaimed over the
centuries that the perceptible world announced the glory of God. Bruno
turned the topos to advantage. Only a universe infinite in time
and extent could fittingly embody what the Apostles' Creed
designated as his primary attribute, omnipotence. In God and the
universe all possibilities were actualized. Both were infinite and
"all that can be" (BOI I, 602). They differed in that,
whereas in the universe all possibilities were at any given moment
actualized somewhere, in the supersubstantial being, in which form and
matter, being and existence, act and potentiality were
undifferentiated, all possibilities were actualized absolutely without
distinctions of time and place. This argument contradicted two
scholastic convictions: 1) that what was in act physically could not
be infinite since infinity was indeterminacy and that consequently an
infinite body in act, that is, an infinite universe and specifically
an infinite animate universe, was an impossibility; and 2) that
God's absolute and ordained power were distinct, that there was,
in other words, a distinction between: a) the unlimited possibilities,
apart from self-contradiction, available to God by virtue of his
absolute power; and b) the limited range of possibilities, that is,
those of a finite cosmos, that he freely chose to entertain in his
dealings with creation (Granada 1994). These arguments, Bruno replied, besides being philosophically incoherent, belittled God's powers and so undermined "laws, religions, faith and morality" (BOI II, 46)



These two modes of defining God, as the One Being and through his
accidents, mirrored an important distinction in Bruno's
metaphysics. God had two aspects, one wholly aloof from the universe,
the other in communion with it. Precedents were the Neoplatonic
distinction between the One "unparticipated" and
"participated" and the Christian distinction between
"God hidden" and "God manifest" (BOI II, 43;
BOL I.4, 79; III, 41; Isaiah 45:15; Romans 1:19-20). The
Christian God, or more exactly the Word, remained unaltered even as he became miraculously
incarnated as Jesus Christ. Similarly, Bruno's supersubstantial God
produced the universe, through his supernatural reconciliation of
necessity and free will (BOL I.1, 242-247), as Christ-like and
as his "only begotten" nature (BOI I, 693; BOL III,
58-59; I John 4:9). Bruno used several analogies to clarify the
relationship, one of which derived from a passage in Plotinus (BOI I,
731-732; Plotinus, *Enneads*, II.6.1) clarifying the
relationship of the intelligible and sensible worlds. A single
sperm--here he followed a common belief--was a complete
homunculus, a "substance", comprising virtually the arms,
legs and every other bodily attribute of a fully grown human being in
an undifferentiated unity. This substance, this DNA so to speak,
remained intact with the advent of the body, determining its
"qualities, differences, accidents and organization" as it
developed, matured and decayed. Similarly, converting temporal into
ontological priority, the One Being, God, contained intrinsically the
attributes of the universe in a virtual, unexplicated, mode and, while
remaining undifferentiated in this mode, also determined in a second
extrinsic, yet still undifferentiated, mode the differentiations of
the explicated universe.



To explain how God, in his external aspect, articulated these
differentiations, Bruno used Platonic concepts and themes.
Ficino's Christian Platonism was especially influential. God
was a unity or undifferentiated plenitude of Ideas existing in him
virtually. In this sense he was Mind. Dependent on him as Mind were:
(a) the discrete Ideas unified in the Universal Intellect (see
 Section 4); 
and (b) the vestiges of the Ideas, that
is, forms, which, in combination with sensible matter, produced
corporeal things. Further, as Mind, he was also the supersubstantial
principle of intelligence, contemplating the undifferentiated
plenitude of Ideas within him in one timeless act. Dependent on him in
this respect were intelligences of various kinds: (a) the Universal
Intellect, which contemplated the discrete Ideas simultaneously as a
unity; (b) disembodied intelligences, known conventionally as
"separate intelligences", which contemplated just one Idea
absolutely; (c) embodied intelligences, a category that included the
"principal bodies", which, though embodied, contemplated
God intellectively without the use of sense data and ratiocination,
demons and human beings, both of whom used sense data and reason to
attain intellection, and all other animals, even the
simplest. Proof of this were animal instincts, as Ficino, too, had
noted. Instincts were the presence of God as Mind working within them
rather than, as scholastics typically held, powers that the stars
instilled in them extraneously.



Bruno's next step was Presocratic rather than Platonic. All
cognitive acts, in whatever animal or indeed separate intelligence,
were instantiations of a single cognitive power deriving from the
Universal Intellect and ultimately, therefore, from God as Mind. Bruno
cited Presocratic philosophers to support this idea and related it to
Parmenides's concept of the One Being and the accidental nature
of all things dependent on it. Two unconventional conclusions
followed. First, the form that this single cognitive power took
depended on the bodily shape that it inhabited. For example,
contradicting Aristotle (*On the Parts of Animals*, IV.10,
687a7-23), Bruno observed that the hands determined the kind of
intelligence that human beings enjoyed. Second, no particular bodily
shape, human, demonic or otherwise, was a privileged outlet for the
expression of the single cognitive power. Just as some animals had a
better sense of smell or sight than others, so, too, some were more
intelligent than others in certain respects. Ants were more
intelligent than human beings in the way in which they organized their
communal lives (BOL I.4, 119). By means of their individual cognitive powers all
things identified how best to preserve themselves and acted
accordingly. Even supposedly inanimate things observed this principle
and so showed traces of intelligence. "Whatever exists in some
way knows in some way" (BOL I.4, 112, 118). A stone held aloft
sought to return downwards to the earth because that was where it was
in its optimal condition. It observed the law of gravity (see
 Section 3).
Collectively the individual cognitive acts of the infinite number of
things were the means whereby the Universal Soul/Intellect bound the
universe to its source, God. This impulse to adhere to him--Love
on a cosmic scale--ensured that the universe, having gone forth
from God (his *exitus*), preserved themselves by their impulse to return to him (his
*reditus*).



Bruno's Platonic interpretation of God's *exitus*
accounts for his celebrated dictum "Nature is God in
things" (BOI II, 354; BOL I.2, 151; I.4, 101). Nicholas of Cusa
probably inspired the formula. In a work that Bruno knew, Nicholas
identified Plato's World Soul with Aristotle's concept of
Nature, before concluding that "the World Soul or Nature was no
less than God operating in all things" (*The Layman: On the
Mind*, XIII.145). Bruno's comments on God and Nature
independently of the dictum agree with this sense. "God
determined and ordered; Nature executed and produced" (BOL I.3,
136; similarly BOI II, 660). Nature was the Universal Soul/Intellect
acting as the efficient cause (see
 Section 4)
"within natural things" (BOI I, 598; BOL II.2, 176). It was the act
of generation that "divided" matter (BOI II, 147), operating within it non-discursively, unlike art, as Ficino (*Platonic Theology*, IV.1) had observed, which operated discursively on material from without (BOI I, 680-682: BOL I.2, 312). The idea that plants and animals were the "living effects
of Nature", that "Nature was God in things", had led
the ancient Egyptians to worship images of the gods in the form of
animals. Each living thing, in addition to its intrinsic being,
incorporated something divine from the gods "according to its
capacity and measure" (BOI II, 354-355). The
"Egyptian" inspiration for Bruno's comments in this
instance was a passage in Ficino's paraphrase of *On the Mysteries of the Egyptians*
(VII.1-3) in which Iamblichus distinguished God as the cause of
generation, Nature, from God in himself.




These and other Platonic borrowings sometimes obscure Bruno's
overarching idea of God as the One Being in which two substances of
equal ontological status, the Universal Intellect and Universal
Matter, were reconciled. It was, however, only on sufferance that he
engaged with Platonism. Repeatedly he suppressed Neoplatonic
distinctions between one ontological entity and another (BOI I,
651-653; BOL II.2, 178) or used them instrumentally rather than
in the conviction that they were philosophically valid (BOL I.4,
103). Philosophy must aim at "simplicity" (BOL I.3, 236);
hence his contempt for Francesco Patrizi (1529-97), the most
eminent Platonist of the day (BOI I, 676-677). All things were
accidents of the One Being, intelligibilia included, and hence all
things engaged with matter in some respect. Accordingly he denied,
with a good dose of sarcasm, Platonism's central tenet: that the
Ideas and the intelligences apprehending them were transcendent
realities (BOI I, 720-721; BOL I.2, 118, 304, 309-313, 483). In what
sense could they be outside an infinite universe? Not even the
separate intelligences were, in fact, separate absolutely. They
constantly illuminated us whether or not we were conscious that they
were doing so (BOL II.2, 173)--hence the existence, for example,
of instincts (BOI II, 455-456). On these grounds, too, Bruno
discounted the notion, in both its original medieval formulation (see
the illustration in
 Section 3) and the revised version proposed by the
mysterious Renaissance thinker known as Marcello Palingenio Stellato
(c. 1500-c. 1543), that an empyrean--an
"infinite" extent of intelligible light, devoid of all
material connotations-- surrounded a finite, geocentric
cosmos. Matter and form were inseparable (BOL I.2,
303-304). Abstract things, wholly separate from matter, were
"chimera", no more than logical fictions (BOL I.2, 257,
309-310). This led Bruno to speak, not of the Universal
Soul/Intellect shaping Universal Matter, that is, of two distinct
principles or causes, one active, the other passive, but of Universal
Matter as having the forms inherent within it. To denote them as an
integrated unity, he sometimes used the term "Nature" (BOL
I.4,155; BOL III, 266-267, 319). "Nature works within
Matter, or rather it is Matter itself" (BOL I.2, 312). It
contained "the origins of forms of all things within its womb,
from which it brings forth and discharges all things" (BOL III,
694; also BOI I, 716-717). The universe was like a
"gastropod", a living mass endlessly changing in
configuration (BOL I.2, 313).



We arrive, then, at the intriguing conclusion that Nature, in this
second sense, was God in his extrinsic aspect. "Nature is either
God or the divine virtue manifested in things themselves" (BOL
I.4, 101). Given, moreover, that God, despite having an inner and
outer aspect, was one being, in some sense he must as a whole be
within things. God was separate from us in one respect
but, "as the nature of Nature", was "more
intimate" to His effects than Nature itself (BOI II,
363; similarly BOL I.4, 73; III, 41). Or conversely, God was
"separate from all things" in the sense that "he was
present in them in a more exalted mode", not in the sense that he was
"absent" from them (BOL III, 51). Bruno was, as we have
 seen (see Section 4), wary of applying spatial
metaphors to intelligibilia, which were by definition
dimensionless. Yet, like many a philosopher or theologian before him,
he was happy to use them when it suited. God or Mind or Nature was
both "outside" and "within" all things,
"above" them and "beneath" them,
"extrinsic" and "intrinsic", and so forth (BOL I.2, 342;
I.3, 147; III, 40-41, 509).



The question of whether Bruno's philosophy was pantheistic
preoccupied nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars. Most
concluded, often ruefully, that his God remained theistic and
retained, even if only minimally, an element of the transcendental.
Regrettably, therefore, he could not be declared unequivocally the
founder of modern philosophy, the precursor of Spinoza and Hegel.
During his trial Bruno himself, hoping to reassure his inquisitors,
emphasized the theistic features of his philosophy. Divine Providence
was twofold. It was present in all things, animating them "in
the manner that the soul was present in the body ... and this I
call Nature, the shadow and vestige of the Divinity". It was
also in essence, existence and power "in everything and above
everything, not as a part, not as a soul, but in an inexplicable
way" (Firpo 2000, 67, 303). In his works, too, he emphasized
that God governed over all things providentially. Whether his
philosophy is pantheistic depends, needless to say, on how we define
the term. It shares with Stoicism, which is conventionally considered
pantheist, the view that there was a providential principle, God,
operating within the universe, that was more than just the
sum of its parts. Nor does Bruno's view differ radically from
Spinoza's distinction between God as *natura naturans*
and the universe as *natura naturata*, a distinction,
incidentally, that Bruno knew in its original medieval formulation but
did not avail himself of (BOI I, 702). Indeed, it might be argued that
Bruno's philosophy is more authentically "pantheist"
than Spinoza's, given that the term implies that the cosmos or
universe is divine. Bruno's philosophy, unlike Spinoza's
(Nadler 2016, SS2.1), makes this claim in no uncertain terms. The universe
as the embodiment of God was an object of awe, veneration and
aesthetic delight (BOI I, 453-456; BOL I.1, 203).


## 6. The Individual Soul and its Perfection



The universe was perfect. It could not be otherwise. It was,
essentially, a bodily manifestation of God. Nothing in the universe, however
"mean", was "unconducive to the integrity and
perfection of what is excellent". There was "nothing that
is bad for some things in some place that is not good and optimal for
something elsewhere" (BOL I.3, 272). Philosophers through the
ages had said much the same, as had scholastic authors. "The
death of a fly", wrote Thomas Aquinas (*Super
Sententiis*, lib. 1, d. 39, q. 2 a. 2 co.) "is sustenance
for a spider". Then Thomas added a qualification. Creatures
nobler than the irrational animals, for example, human beings, have a
will, which, the more closely it cleaved to God, was "the more
free from the necessity of natural causes" (ibid.). The cosmos
provided the setting for human beings to demonstrate that they merited
everlasting salvation. For Bruno, however, they were, no less than
anything else, transient modes or "corruptible
substances", in essence, "accidents" of the One
Being (BOI I, 664, 729; II, 125, 181-182). They were, as for Spinoza (*Ethics*, pt IV, prop. 4), part of nature, not a privileged species for which, as Christian doctrine maintained, nature had been created.



Human beings, understood as combinations of body and soul, perished.
But what of their souls? Bruno stated unequivocally that they were
individual, that is to say, that they were indestructible,
"atomic". Death was an illusion, no more than the
dissolution of an ephemeral conjunction of soul and matter. We should
await mutation serenely, not fear death, as Pythagoras, or more exactly Ovid's 'Pythagoras', had
rightly observed (Ovid, *Metamorphoses*, 15.153-175; BOI I, 665). Bruno's doctrine of metempsychosis required
him to uphold the soul's immortality, even though, as he noted,
he interpreted the doctrine differently from Pythagoras, Pythagoreans,
Plato, Platonists, the Sadducees, Scripture (Psalm 36:6 [KJV]), Origen
and the Druids. Souls of the dead did not endure a shadowy existence
in some other world before reincarnation in the manner that the
"Pythagorean" Virgil (*Aeneid*, VI.743-751)
and others had described (BOI II, 511-515). That is to say, on
the death of one body, a soul did not retain the personality that it had accrued and commandeer another body, like a
helmsman changing ships. Rather, we should understand that the soul
turned its operative powers to forming a new body, the limitations of
which were determined by Providence (BOL III, 257,
429-430). What made ancient accounts worthy of close
consideration was the underlying idea that souls were punished or
rewarded for their conduct. The One Being, as Providence or Fate,
ensured that, by means of the perpetual change or vicissitude which it
imposed on natural things, retributive justice prevailed (BOI II,
180-185, 197, 457-459). A soul that behaved like a pig had
been a pig in a previous incarnation or, on account of its conduct,
was doomed to become a pig in the next. Bruno's patron in
Venice, Giovanni Mocenigo, reported to the Inquisition that Bruno had
once admonished him for killing a spider. It may have been, he had
remarked, the incarnation of a former friend of his (Firpo 2000, 341,
doc. 51, SS22.179). In keeping with these convictions, Bruno, inspired
by Erasmus or perhaps Agrippa von Nettesheim, condemned the
aristocratic obsession with hunting and the customs that it nurtured
(BOI II, 388-389).



His doctrine of minims (see
 Section 3) 
explained the individual soul's survival of bodily
death. A soul was an incorporeal centre of animation governing the
atoms conglomerating around it as the body grew and flourished. As the
body grew older and decayed, the soul contracted its powers inwardly,
eventually dissociating itself altogether from the body. It remained,
nevertheless, an individual centre of animation capable of forming
another body. Insofar, however, as it was disengaged from dimension,
it "expanded" seamlessly into the infinite space of the
universe. Or rather, given that infinite space was replete with souls,
it expanded into the aether or *spiritus* diffused throughout
space. Hence, in the *Kabbala of the Pegasean Horse* (1585),
one of his most irreligious works, Bruno described an ass who, on his
death, passed into the underworld and noticed there "that all
spirits are from the sea of one spirit and that all return to that
spirit" (BOI II, 450-451). This interpretation of
*spiritus* as the unity of discrete individual souls, distinct
from the undifferentiated unity of the Universal Soul, conformed with
Bruno's elemental theory and definition of space in relation to Universal
Matter (see
 Section 3).
Scripture, as always, supported his view.



> 
> 
> Well it is said, too, in Holy Scripture [*Ecclesiastes* 12:7]
> that the body dissolves into dust, that is to say, atoms [see again
>  Section 3], and that the
> spirit returns to its source [God]. (BOL III, 256)
> 
> 
> 



How could an individual soul endowed with human body, one that encouraged the development of its rational and intellectual potential, ensure a prosperous reincarnation? By turning, as many before Bruno had urged, from the world of sense data
to the intelligible principles underlying it. From sensibilia the soul
composed intelligibilia by virtue of the intelligible light of the
Universal Intellect, in which all souls, as indeed all other things to
some degree (see Section 5),
participated. These intelligibilia were "shadows of the
Ideas" rather than the Ideas of the Universal Intellect
themselves. The philosopher's soul yearned to pass beyond these
shadows to the Ideas of which the Universal Intellect was the unity
and so "attune its thoughts and deeds to the symmetry of the law
inscribed in all things" (BOI II, 557). The final step that he
could take was to understand the Ideas, not discretely, but as a
unity. He came, in other words, to understand the Universal
Intellect. Given that, following an almost universally accepted
principle going back to Aristotle, intellection entailed the
identification of the intellectual subject with the object of
intellection, the philosopher at this juncture lost his individual
intellectual identity. He was taken out of himself and, identified
with Nature (in the first of the senses mentioned in
 Section 5),
knew himself as part of the divine presence in the universe. Beyond
this, he could not pass. He could discover God's
"shadow", an allusion to Corinthians (I 13:12; II 3:18),
that is, "the world, the universe and Nature that is in
things", the "monad" that "proceeds from the
monad that is divinity". He could gaze upon this "image of
 him", but not his "absolute light" (BOI II,
694-697). God as the One Being, both in his inner and external
aspect (see
 Section 5), remained unknowable.
The few who aspired to perfection in this way were
"divine", "heroic", "rare" men,
inspired by "a superior light" (BOI I, 453, 475, 525; II,
595). These aspirations inspired Bruno's doctrine of 
"love" in his prose-poem masterpiece, *The Heroic Frenzies* (Nelson, 1958), and his interpretation of creative genius (BOI II, 528).
His art of memory and Llullism, in their
theoretical applications, were additional resources in this pursuit of
self-fulfillment. By constructing a memory palace that mirrored the
hierarchical structure of the intelligible universe, the soul could
move from the accidental multiplicity of the universe to the unity of
the Universal Intellect and vice versa (Sturlese 1994). With the same purpose in mind,
Bruno designed and cut the wood engravings of ontological realities
that feature, like proto-Jungian mandala, in several of his works.



![a diagram of concentric circles and hexagons](concentric.png)
  

Giordano Bruno, "Figura intellectus", discussed in
*Corpus iconographicum. Le incisioni nelle opere a stampa*, ed. M.
Gabriele, Milan, 2001, pp. 374-379; and reconstructed by
Raymond Kotty at
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAw8thcZsgU




## 7. Religion



Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (in one phase of his
career) and other Renaissance authors had held similarly
"Pelagian" views that philosophy led to self-perfection
and "deification". Yet they had stopped well short of
denying the integrity of Christianity. Philosophy and religion were,
so to speak, two parallel paths, suited to different audiences. Bruno
had no such scruples. Philosophy--Bruno's philosophy of God
as immanent in an infinite universe as announced in *The Ash
Wednesday Supper*--was the true bread of life. It
"illuminated the blind", "loosed the tongue of the
dumb", "cured the lame", so that the human spirit
could once again "progress" (BOI I, 454). Its powers, that
is, were miraculous, Christ-like, salvific. By contrast, Christianity
was fraudulent. Under a thin veil of irony, all the while denying the
irony, Bruno praised the various guises under which Christianity
taught that ignorance of the natural world led the soul to God. Among
its many deceits were: scriptural injunctions to acknowledge our
ignorance, notably, the Pauline theme of folly; the ascetic mysticism
of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and mystics generally; claims that
the light of faith and revelation were superior to human knowledge;
Augustine's emphasis on the fallen nature of mankind,
particularly the corruption of knowledge innate to it; injunctions to
be childlike and meek; and the humility and obedience that the
Christian clergy sought to instill among its flock (BOI II,
381-384, 415, 418, 422-430, 443-448; BOL I.2,
316). The philosopher should ignore these "foolish dreams"
(BOL I.3, 200)--in practical as well as in intellectual
endeavor. To be virtuous was to strive against adversity, to embody a
coincidence of opposites. "Where opposites meet, there is order,
there resides virtue" (BOI II, 549). Who deserved praise the
more: someone who healed a worthless cripple, or a man who liberated
his homeland or who reformed, not a mere body, but a mind (BOI II,
264-267)? In other words, who was the true savior: Christ or
Bruno?



Simultaneously, with the same indignation that Spinoza and Nietzsche
would later voice, Bruno impugned the clerical caste. Living
parasitically off the labors of others and affecting "a
foul-smelling melancholy", i.e., *accidia* (BOL
II.2,189-190; BOI II, 238-239), they advocated the
solitary life and renunciation of this world for the next. Such men
had extinguished the divine light that had made the souls of the
ancients "heroic and divine", those very men whom they
condemned for their pride (BOI I, 453). If we followed the counsel of
these clerics, we would have no temples, no chapels, no hospices, no
hospitals, no colleges, no universities (BOI II, 238, 267). Of all
peoples, the ancient Romans had best understood the value of
"glory" for establishing and maintaining civilization. A
true religion, like that of the ancients, extolled men of action,
strength of body and mind and worldly glory (BOI II,
267-268). Similar comments on clerical duplicity, glory and
religion occur in Machiavelli, whose works Bruno probably read.



Nevertheless, religion had a role to play. The "uneducated
populace" (BOI I, 525; II, 514-515) could not aspire to philosophical
perfection. They needed laws and sanctions to keep their conduct in
check. Religion, with its promises of reward and punishment in an
afterlife, served this purpose. When Moses had led the Israelites from
captivity, they were no more than an uneducated rabble. To govern
them, he established laws and enforced them with terrifying accounts
of an almighty, wrathful God who administered retribution in an
afterlife. Scripture, whether Jewish, Islamic or Christian, had been
composed with this practical goal in mind (BOI I, 522-528). Admittedly, Bruno conceded,
Scripture did sometimes record philosophical truths. Genesis and the
Book of Job were conspicuous repositories. This was only to be
expected, given that Scripture was a tributary of "the ancient
philosophy" (see
 Section 2).
For the most part, however, it simplified. Several passages of
Scripture (e.g., Ecclesiastes, 1:5-6; Joshua 10:12-13)
implied that the sun circled the motionless earth. This was a
simplification made for the benefit of the uneducated. Disquisitions
based on a true, heliocentric, interpretation of celestial motion
would have, at best, confused them and, at worst, led them,
counterproductively, to dismiss Scripture's tales of divine
retribution (BOI I, 522-525).



To claim that Scripture made allowances for the weak understanding of
most men and women was conventional. Patristic, Catholic and
Protestant theologians acknowledged that Moses had addressed an
ignorant, slavish people and that Scripture spoke in a way that the
uneducated could understand. All agreed, too, that it focused on moral
and spiritual issues and refrained from intricate philosophical
arguments. Bruno's appeal to these positions disguised his
heterodoxy. The crucial deviation was his denial of miracles, the most
important of all testimonies to the Christian faith. Given that the
laws of nature were, essentially, "God in things", they
were inviolable (BOL I.2, 316). Repeatedly Bruno mocked, allusively,
the miracles reported in the Old and New Testament, including those
performed by Moses and Christ. Christ's were *bagatelle*,
"sleights of hand" (BOI II, 383). They were no
more than natural magic, effects produced by manipulating
"occult", that is, natural, though imperceptible, forces (BOL III, 427).
Or, indeed, they may have been the fruits of demonic magic, a comment
which implied that Christ had commerce with demons. Christ began to
perform miracles, Bruno noted, only "after his struggle with the
devil in the desert" (BOL II.2, 181). The allusive style in
which Bruno disguised his views only served to accentuate his
blasphemies, mixing as they did ridicule and contempt with heresy.
Handwritten annotations in copies of his works show that
contemporaries or near contemporaries recognized his intentions easily
enough.



Philosophers, "heroes", did not need Scripture's
bogus threats of retribution and promises of future rewards to cajole
them into behaving morally. They understood the "pattern"
(*istoria*) of Nature inscribed within [them]' (BOI II,
24-25), that God, in other words, was with and within them (BOI
I, 455-456; II, 658), and governed their actions
accordingly. Those who considered the matter carefully, "truly
religious men", "men who were good by nature", would
see that Bruno's philosophy, more than any other, "not
only contained the truth but also favoured religion" (BOI I,
528). They did not need rituals involving some "food and
drink" to revere the divine (BOL I.1, 205). On diverse
occasions, he covertly mocked the eucharist, despising as he did the
"subtleties" of scholastic accounts of transubstantiation
(Spampanato 1933, 40). Instead, it was the majesty of Nature, the
infinite animate universe, that inspired the wonder and reverence of
truly divine men and led them to search for its cause (see
 Section 5). In so doing they became
themselves "greater than those gods whom blind commoners
worship" (BOI II, 24). Stripped, in short, of its false claims,
Christianity could be seen for what it was, a "foolish faith and
blind credulity" (BOI II, 386, 398), "a wretched
story" (BOL I.2, 172), "a worthless, pernicious
fable" (BOI II, 400), a continuation of Judaism, a religion
invented by that "pestilent, leprous and wholly
pernicious" race, the Jews (BOI II, 314-315; for similar
stereotypical anti-Jewish comments, see Section
2 and the caveat there regarding the extent to which they reflect
Bruno's views). With its threats that the world would end and
its stories of a God who wrought miracles at whim, it had cowed a
"stupefied" world into despising Nature--"God
in things"--and, "having smashed the tables of
Nature" (cf. Exodus, 32:19), looked forward joyfully to the ruin
of all things (BOL I.2 123).



Bruno's several clashes with ecclesiastical authorities testify
to his impatience with Christianity of whatever shade. The sectarian
violence that plagued the sixteenth century plainly showed that it had
done the very opposite of what religion should do, "bind"
men and women together, an allusion to an etymological derivation of
the Latin word *religio* from *religo*, "I
bind", commonly invoked by Latin authors of all periods (BOL
II.2, 181). There are, however, many indications that Bruno found
Protestantism the more irksome variant. Above all Protestants'
denial of the efficacy of "good works" and free will and,
conversely, their emphasis on the inner spirit, predestination and
justification through "faith alone", were unconducive to
civil order, political stability and material prosperity. At several
points Bruno's turn of phrase suggests that his attack on
Protestant theology was directed in the first instance against
Luther's *On the Bondage of the Will* (1525) and that, in
formulating his riposte, he drew on Erasmus's *On Free
Will* (1524), the work that had prompted Luther to write his
treatise in the first place.


## 8. Bruno's Afterlife



Bruno's philosophy, his views on religion and his execution
earned him notoriety. "It is reasonable to denounce
Bruno", wrote the French mathematician, philosopher and
theologian Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), "as one of the most
evil men that the earth has ever borne" (Mersenne 1624
[2005, 173]). What perturbed Mersenne and many others, including
Descartes, was not so much Bruno's doctrines concerning the
earth's mobility, the elemental homogeneity of the universe, the
plurality of worlds and other cosmological innovations, but rather the
underlying doctrine of the World Soul and its perceived corollaries:
pantheism, demonology, magic, metempsychosis, the claim that
God's absolute power necessitated an infinite product, the
essential identity of human, plant and animal souls, the elimination
of individual responsibility, denial of miracles--in short,
"atheism".



Demonizing Bruno lent him, however, a certain fascination. To his
dismay, Mersenne observed that some of his compatriots amused
themselves by reading his *On the Cause, the Principle and the
One*. During the course of the seventeenth century, his ideas
continued to appeal to libertines, Rosicrucians and other unorthodox
thinkers, despite, or perhaps because of, the censures of conventional
theologians and philosophers. In his *Oculus sidereus*
(*Starry Gaze*), published at Danzig in 1644, the Rosicrucian
Abraham von Franckenberg (1593-1652), a pupil of Jacob
Bohme, included a synopsis, the first to be printed, of *De
immenso* (originally published in 1591) relating its ideas to
those of ancient and Renaissance authors. Bruno's space, wrote
Franckenberg, was the Kabbalists' "God as space",
their Ensoph, the first of the ten Sephiroth (Ricci 1990,
137-152). In England and on the Continent, John Toland
championed Bruno's philosophy, incurring the disapproval of
Leibniz and others. Leibniz's early enthusiasm for Bruno had worn off; and the striking similarities between aspects of Leibniz's monadology and Bruno's doctrine of minims are probably attributable to the sources and philosophical interests that they shared in common, rather than direct influence (Brown 2002). Among the seventeenth-century champions of
heliocentricism, Johannes Kepler, averse though he was to
Bruno's suggestion that the universe was infinite and his
apparent conflation of God and matter, engaged circumspectly with his
cosmological ideas on several occasions, particularly through the
intermediary of the Imperial Counsellor to Rudolph II, Wacker von
Wackenfels, an enthusiast of Bruno's cosmology (Ricci 1990,
68-79; Granada 2008). In private conversation, Kepler, the newly
appointed Imperial Mathematician, chided Galileo for not having
acknowledged the contribution that others, including Bruno and
himself, had made to the novelties recorded in his
*Starry Messenger*, published in 1610 (Hasdale 1610).



Interest in Bruno's philosophy remained, nevertheless, sporadic.
Copies of his works were hard to come by and, for the most part, the
ideas in them remained curiosities, outlined in encyclopedias and
histories of philosophy, such as those of Pierre Bayle and J. J.
Brucker, with cautionary remarks about his extravagant, wayward,
genius. More than any other philosopher, Bruno proved "that
often the greater the power of intellect, the less judgement there
is" (Brucker 1776-77: IV.2, 30). "Gold" there
was to be discovered, but it lay concealed within the
"dung" of his confused thinking (ibid., 31). What changed
Bruno's fortunes decisively was the advent of
"Spinozism". The similarities between Bruno's and
Spinoza's substance monism had long been noticed. Bayle, no
admirer of Spinoza, pointed them out, as did Mathurin Veyssiere
de Lacroze by way of denigrating Bruno as an "atheist"
(Veyssiere de Lacroz 1711, 284-325). Brucker conceded that
there were some resemblances but concluded that Bruno did not merit
the charge of "Spinozism" (ibid., 52), arguing that, for
Bruno, the universe emanated from, rather than was identical with, God
(see
 Section 5).
Then, spectacularly, in the second half the eighteenth century Bruno
passed from being a heinous atheist to, in Herder's estimation,
someone comparable to, indeed "undoubtedly still more
divine" than St John (McFarland 1969, 77). The key moment was
the publication in 1785 of F. H. Jacobi's *On the Doctrine of
Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn*, in which Jacobi,
without Mendelssohn's consent, published an exchange of letters
between them concerning Lessing's alleged
"Spinozism" and Spinoza's philosophy more generally.
Jacobi, an opponent of Enlightenment rationalism, praised
Spinoza's philosophy, in the "purified" form
proposed by some exponents, as an exemplary manifestation of what pure
reason, left to its own devices, could achieve. Equally, however, it
manifested the limitations of reason, more specifically rational
theism. It led essentially to materialism, fatalism and atheism. In
1789, Jacobi issued an expanded edition of his work, which included,
in a new preface, a brief discussion of Bruno and his monism and, in
an appendix, a German paraphrase of *On the Cause, the Principle
and the One* together with an extended quotation from the second
dialogue in the original Italian. His purpose in combining Spinoza and
Bruno was to provide "a summa of the philosophy of the
en kai pan", a reference
to Lessing's "pantheist" theology as well as an
allusion to Heraclitus's monism. "It was difficult to give
a purer or better explained summary of pantheism" than that
provided by this "dark man", Giordano Bruno (Jacobi 1789,
IX, XI).



In the ensuing intellectual uproar, the *Pantheismusstreit*
("Pantheism controversy") that dominated late eighteenth-
and early nineteenth-century German philosophy, Bruno emerged as the
great precursor of Spinoza and a major philosopher in his own right.
Spinoza and Spinozists had followed in Bruno's footsteps,
concluded F. W. J. Schelling, who thereupon wrote a dialogue,
*Bruno or On the Divine and Natural Principle of Things*
(1802), setting out a Platonized form of Spinozism. Goethe, writing to
Schiller, while expressing reservations, confided that what he
understood or thought he understood of the dialogue was in tune with
his "innermost convictions" (McFarland 1969, 247). Many
others concurred, among them Hegel, who, in his *Lectures on the History of Philosophy* (1827-28), praised Bruno's
writings, fantastic and confused though they might be, for displaying
"a sense of indwelling spirit". Coleridge was a steadfast
admirer, even in later life, when his philosophical and religious
views were less consonant with Bruno's. "This man",
he wrote in 1819, "though a pantheist, was religious"
(Gatti 2011, 203). This new found enthusiasm led to the publication of
editions of Bruno's Italian and Latin works in Germany by Adolph
Wagner (1830) and August Friedrich Gfrorer (1836) respectively,
the first editions of his works in their original languages since the
mid-seventeenth century.



This European revival was the setting for Bruno's rehabilitation
in Italy. Hegel, Michelet and others had portrayed the period that we
now know, thanks to Michelet, as the Renaissance and Reformation as
the birthplace of modernity. This was manifest above all, though not
exclusively, through the artistic, literary and philosophical
achievements of the period, which had broken the Roman Catholic
Church's dominance in spiritual and cultural concerns. For many,
the most conspicuous being Jacob Burckhardt in *The Civilization of
the Renaissance in Italy* (1860), the honor for this rupture
belonged principally to the Italians, "the first born among the
sons of modern Europe" (pt 2, ch. 1). Sentiments of these kinds were welcome
in Italy. Pride in its cultural achievements fed into the crescendo of
nationalist fervour--the "Risorgimento", leading
eventually to the proclamation of Italy as an independent kingdom in
1861--and mounting hostility in some circles towards the Roman
Catholic Church. The Church had been blamed for the peninsula's
political fragmentation and intellectual atrophy ever since the
Counter-Reformation.



Circumstances could scarcely have been more propitious for heterodox
Renaissance thinkers such as Telesio, Campanella, Galileo Galilei and,
above all, Bruno. For many Italians, his philosophy, heroic defiance
of ecclesiastical authority and execution exemplified the long
struggle to free philosophy from the trammels of revealed
religion. Popular versions of Bruno's life and death likened him
to Socrates, Christ or, nearer home, martyrs of the Risorgimento. This
adulation found its most visible expression in the monumental bronze
statue, designed by the sculptor Ettore Ferrari, a mason and later
Grand Master of the masonic lodge, the Grande Oriente d'Italia,
located in Rome. In 1889, in the face of tooth-and-nail opposition
from the Vatican, the statue was erected, glaring directly towards the
Holy See, on the very spot in the Campo dei Fiori where Bruno was
believed to have been burned at the stake. For nineteenth-century
Italian intellectuals such as Vincenzo Gioberti, Bertrando Spaventa
and Francesco Fiorentino, he was, as he had been for Enlightenment
thinkers, a "Spinozist" in many respects or more broadly,
a secular humanist, someone who had liberated the human spirit from
the suffocating confines of religious orthodoxy and paved the way for
modern philosophy and natural science. Catholic apologists rose to the
Church's defence, belittling this "Brunomania", as
they dubbed it, and on occasion denying that Bruno had been executed.
Amid the turmoil, Bertrando Spaventa, Felice Tocco, Francesco
Fiorentino and other Italian scholars produced critical editions of
Bruno's Latin and Italian works or wrote studies on them,
thereby laying the foundations of modern Bruno scholarship and
appreciation of him as a philosopher. During the twentieth century
Bruno enjoyed a reputation among orthodox historians of the Soviet
Union as the first modern genius of a materialist philosophy; those
who, like Lev Karsavin, presented a philosophically and historically
contextualized interpretation of his thought, were persecuted for
their "bourgeiois" views. Comparatively recent attempts to
establish magic or mnemotechnics as the key to his philosophy such as
those of Frances Yates, valuable though they remain for incidental
details and insights, obscure Bruno's stated intention to
articulate a "new philosophy", *tout court*.