BRUNO, Giordano. — Philosopher and man of letters, born Filippo at Nola (Naples) in 1548, died at Rome in 1600. After completing his early studies in Naples, he entered, still a fifteen-year-old, the convent of S. Domenico, and there, having made his religious profession, he was ordained in 1572. Those were decisive years for the formation of his culture and mind: he read and studied with ardour the philosophers and theologians of antiquity and the Middle Ages, classical writers and books of the most varied learning current in the Renaissance, aided in this by an extraordinary memory, matched only by his extraordinary imagination and the eccentricity of his intellect. Among others who helped to shape his thought were, from antiquity, Plotinus, in the dissemination of Neoplatonism by Ficino, and Lucretius, the great poet of Democritean atomism; from the medievals, Ramon Lull, celebrated author of the Ars magna, a kind of universal logic.
He resolved all questions; moreover, he drew from NICHOLAS OF CUSA (the “divine” Cusanus, as B. calls him), the idea of the infinity of the universe and the coincidence of opposites within it; and finally NICHOLAS COPERNICUS, whose work *De revolutionibus orbium coelestium* had appeared in 1543. Yet even the first doubts about the dogmas of the faith soon arose in his mind, for, as he himself confessed, from the age of eighteen he had begun to doubt “concerning the personal name of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” and “how this second person is incarnate.” From that time he inclined toward a rationalistic interpretation of dogmas, according to which the Son represented “the intellect of the Father” and the Holy Spirit “the soul and love of the universe”; and the divinity of Christ was to be understood, in a manner similar to that of ARIUS, as “such an assistance that one could truly say of this man that he was God.” This “philosophizing” about dogmas is clear evidence that from his youth he had little or no genuine religious sense of Christianity: from that time he began to regard as superstitions, due to ignorance, the practices of worship; and religion, all religions, in the end appeared to him as symbols of intellectual truths, adapted to the untutored minds of the common people, and having value chiefly as practical laws for morals and the governance of the masses. Thus he traversed the rationalism and Enlightenment of the following centuries.
Soon, therefore, proceedings for heresy were instituted against him: two while he was still in the convent at Naples. Hence in 1576 he fled to Rome. From there, having laid aside his habit, he went for a few months to Noli (Savona), and then wandered to Savona, Turin, Venice, and Padua. At Padua he was persuaded to resume the Dominican habit and then went on to Lyons. Advised not to remain in that region, he turned toward Geneva, hoping to be able to “live in freedom and be safe there.” Again he laid aside his habit and enrolled in the Calvinist church that dominated the city. But there too he soon came into conflict with one of the professors of theology, so that he was imprisoned and tried. To free himself he made an act of submission, and shortly afterward he departed.
For some years he was at Toulouse, where he lectured on Aristotle in that then-famous studium; then, hoping to find a more receptive audience, he went to Paris, where he published the *De umbris idearum* and the *Cantus Circaeus*, works mainly mnemonic in character (connected with his other, more purely Lullian, works on combinatory logic), the *De compendiosa architectura et complemento artis Lulli*, and the *Candelai*, which is among the liveliest (and most obscene) comedies of the time. Even in Paris disturbances arose, so that, recommended by the king and protected by the French ambassador who was going to London, he crossed to England, residing there from 1583 to 1585. In London he published the three treatises (continuing the discussion begun in Paris): the *Ars reminiscendi*, the *Explicatio triginta sigillorum*, and the *Sigillus sigillorum*; and his fundamental Italian works: *La cena delle ceneri*, *De la causa principio et Uno*, *De l'infinito universo et mondi* (these three mainly physical-metaphysical in character), and *Lo Spaccio de la bestia trionfante*, the *Cabala del cavallo pegaseo*, and *De gli heroici furori* (these three rather moral in character). Again, because of his scornful character, he ended by alienating even the scholars of London and Oxford, so that when the ambassador returned to Paris he followed him. He remained there only briefly, for opposition aroused by a fierce polemic against Aristotelianism persuaded him to emigrate, this time to Germany: first to Mainz, then for a longer stay at Wittenberg, then to Prague and Helmstedt, and finally to Frankfurt. During these wanderings he published various expository and critical writings on Peripatetic philosophy (the *Camoeracensis Acrotismus* is the most important), the *Articuli adversus Mathematicos*, Lullian works (*De lampade combinatoria* and *De lampade venatoria logicorum*), the *Oratio valedictoria* and the *Oratio consolatoria* (in which he extols the figure of Luther and inveighs against the Roman Church); finally, the great Latin poems *De triplici minimo et mensura*, *De monade numero et figura*, and *De innumerabilibus immenso et infigurabili universo et mundis* (Frankfurt, 1591); and in the same year 1591 he dictated the *Summa terminorum metaphysicorum*, which appeared later.
He was still in Frankfurt when Giovanni Mocenigo, desirous of learning from him the art of memory, invited him to Venice. B. accepted the invitation, perhaps desiring to return to Italy. But Mocenigo, scandalized, denounced him to the Holy Office as a heretic. The first trial took place in 1592. It seemed to go not badly for B., who openly acknowledged that in some of his works he had spoken “too philosophically, dishonestly, and not very like a good Christian,” asked pardon, declared himself ready and indeed eager to return to the bosom of the Catholic Church, and only begged to be freed from “the strictness of regular obedience,” that is, from the obligations of convent life. But Rome took the case to itself, and on 27 February 1593 B. was brought there. The trial (whose acts are lost) proceeded slowly: his writings were examined and a series of heretical propositions were laid to his charge. Among the inquisitors were several cardinals. B., as at Venice, seemed ready to abjure his errors; but in the end, pressed hard and invited to abandon his heretical principles—principles in which theology, not his philosophical system, was at stake—he hardened in refusal, protesting that his judges did not understand his thought. Hence he was abandoned to the secular arm and burned alive on 17 February 1600.
Throughout the seventeenth century the name of B. is rarely found among scholars (Kepler recalls him for his doctrine of the plurality of worlds). In the eighteenth century, however, it becomes ever more frequent, especially among free-thinkers. But it was Jacobi who finally elevated him to the forefront as a philosopher, in his famous *Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza*, in which he pointed to B. as a clear precursor of Spinoza’s pantheism. And in fact in B. the idea of a single divine principle of the universe as a “natura naturans,” an immanent and infinite cause from which “necessarily” proceeds the equally infinite multiplicity of its manifestations in space and time (“natura naturata”), is already explicit, and in every thing reveals by its own nature its infinite power. And common to both is the idea that religions with their theologies have only an ethical-social function, so that, once dogmatic differences are set aside, all should be reduced to a single “natural” religion, the one most in accord with man’s rational nature. Yet differences must not be overlooked: not only is the systematic order and speculative rigor proper to Spinoza lacking in B. (in B. speculative vigor is continually weakened and contaminated by exuberant fanciful representations), but the immaculateness of the absolute principle is by no means unproblematic in B., for in him the sense of transcendence proper to Christian Neoplatonism is still alive, while on the other hand he retains from pagan Neoplatonism the doctrine of the world-soul (amplified by him to include also the rational part). In any case, after Jacobi the name of B. entered with great honors into the history of philosophy: Schelling first, and then Hegel, regarded him as a precursor of their absolute idealism (in Italy, B. Spaventa and then G. Gentile made him widely known in idealist historiography). In reaction, positivism exalted him for whatever it found in him anticipating an absolute naturalism. Meanwhile, on the political terrain, first the liberals of the Italian Risorgimento and then left-wing democrats took up B.’s name in the spirit of the eighteenth century to make it a banner of Freemasonry and anticlericalism.
In their unconscious, anti-religious fury, they did not realize that B. himself, precisely for the common people, deemed religious faith necessary.
For the historian who, having set aside the preconceived schemas of both absolute idealism and positivism, now poses the question of the importance of B.’s thought and seeks its most proper and historically original motive—considering it, that is, at the conclusion of that great movement of ideas which was the Renaissance, when, in reaction to traditional scholastic teaching, all the ancient doctrines were exhumed, from the pre-Socratics to Neoplatonism—the answer is not easy. At first glance, it seems that he draws his ideas from the most diverse schools: from Eleaticism as from Eclecticism, from Pythagoreanism as from Empedoclean or Anaxagorean physicalism, from Neoplatonism as from atomistic materialism, indifferent to contradictions and, above all, to an internal principle of coherence (the extreme poles of his oscillation can be indicated in an idealistic type of naturalism, as in ancient Neoplatonism, and a materialistic type of naturalism, modern, such as that of Telesio, nearly contemporary). For this reason, B.’s thought has been defined as a generic “syncretism.” It seems, however, that the most original principle of Bruno’s thought—from which his historical importance also derives—was that of developing the intuition of Cusanus (of the infinity of the universe and the coincidence of opposites within it) to the point of making it a true “cosmological idea,” that is, an idea of the world in its totality: better yet, as the unity of the whole, which unfolds in the multiplicity of real or possible phenomena in space and time. The naming and definition of this idea is, as is well known, Kant’s, who distinguished it sharply (which B., unfortunately, does not do) from the “theological” idea of God and the “psychological” idea of the self; yet it is undeniable that this is the focal point of all Bruno’s speculation. Drawing inspiration from the Copernican discovery, he extends to the entire universe the revolution that was taking place in the physical and astronomical fields against traditional Scholastic-Aristotelian ideas.
Not, therefore, the world as a collection of particular things or facts, but as a reality and, at the same time, the possible totality of all that happens or can happen: that is, from a metaphysical standpoint (of a metaphysics, to be sure, that is only physical). This idea—which is what we all have in mind when we speak of the world as an external reality that exists in itself and for itself, independently of us, without yet posing the question of the origin of its existence—naturally includes the greatest as well as the smallest, all the past as well as all the future, every matter as well as every form, every potentiality as well as every actuality. Being the absolute unity of all things, it possesses within itself the capacity or potentiality for everything, even though it is not circumscribed by anything spatially or temporally: an infinite sphere, as B. conceives it, which has its center in every point, yet has no center or circumference anywhere; and “nature” (this was to be the content of his “world-soul” mythology), which is at once material and formal, efficient and final cause. B. strenuously combats the Aristotelianism of those who divide form from matter, potentiality from act, and aims to grasp their absolute, original unity in order to derive, deduce from it all possibilities: “In conclusion, whoever wishes to know the greatest secrets of nature should look to and contemplate the minima and maxima of contraries and opposites (for) profound magic is knowing how to draw out the contrary after having found the point of union.” But this is not the task of the idea! He himself, seeing the impossibility of such a deduction (which would, in fact, border on magic—and B., though to a far lesser extent than Campanella, still believed in the procedures of this art; hence, in another respect, his great confidence in Lullian logic), ultimately defines this unity as absolute indifference: “it is so much form that it is not form, so much matter that it is not matter, so much soul that it is not soul: because it is all indifferently, and thus one; the universe is one.” But should not such indifference lead to absolute indeterminacy? The world is still something determined and circumscribed in its actuality: precisely because of the coincidence of contraries within it, it is infinite, and yet, at the same time, finite (infinite, we might say, in thought, but still finite in reality, being the only world accessible to us, which encompasses all possibility). Moreover, its unity is also determined in the idea by its corporeality, and is therefore not to be confused with that of spirituality. The universe in question is the corporeal universe, the object of science, as demonstrated by the aforementioned categories through which it is known. B., however, continually confuses the idea of God with that of the world: hence his oscillation between a mysticism devoid of any religious sense (it is rather agnosticism: the One is something indistinct, shapeless, unknowable, and indefinable) and a pantheism that identifies God with Nature (Nature, or God, as Spinoza would say). And this lack of spiritual sense will ensure that even man, with his consciousness and interiority, is absorbed into the “whole.” B.’s ethics, though distinguished from Neoplatonic ethics by its greater consideration of social and civil life, concludes—like the latter—by equating the process of the soul’s moral ascent with that of its intellectual ascent, and ultimately identifies, at its highest degree, the ascent to God with the dissolution of personality within the “divine” of Nature (the “heroic frenzy”).