BRUNO, GIORDANO. – Philosopher and man of letters, named FILIPPO, born at Nola (Naples) in 1548, died at Rome in 1600. Having completed his early studies in Naples, he entered the convent of S. Domenico at the age of fifteen, and there, after making his religious profession, received Holy Orders in 1572. Those were decisive years for the formation of his culture and mind: he read and studied with ardor the philosophers and theologians of antiquity and the Middle Ages, classical writers, and books of the most varied learning commonly found in the Renaissance, aided in this by an extraordinary memory, matched only by his extraordinary imagination and the eccentricity of his intellect. Among the ancients, Plotinus, in the version in which Ficino had disseminated Neoplatonism, and Lucretius, the great poet of Democritean atomism, contributed above all to the formation of his thought; among the medievals, Raimondo Lullo, celebrated author of the Ars magna, a kind of universal logic for
resolving all questions; and, in addition, Niccolò Cusano (the “divine” Cusano, as B. calls him), from whom he took the idea of the infinity of the universe and of the coincidence of opposites within it; finally, Niccolò Copernico, whose work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium had appeared in 1543. But the first doubts concerning the dogmas of the faith soon appeared in his mind, since, as he himself confessed, from the age of eighteen he began to doubt “concerning the name of person of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” and “how this second person became incarnate.” From that time he inclined toward a rationalistic interpretation of the 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 sense similar to that of Arius, as “such an assistance that one could truly say of this man that he was God.” This “philosophizing” about the dogmas is clear evidence that from his youth the intimate, properly religious sense of Christianity was weak or entirely absent in him: from that time, in fact, he began to regard the practices of worship as superstitions arising from ignorance; and religion, all religions, increasingly took shape for him as symbols of intellectual truths, adapted to the uneducated minds of the multitude, and possessing above all a practical value, as laws for the morals and government of the plebs; he thus anticipated the rationalism and Enlightenment of the following centuries. Consequently, proceedings for heresy against him began quite soon: two of them while he was still in the convent in Naples. Hence in 1576 he fled to Rome. From there, having laid aside the habit, he went to Noli (Savona) for several months, and then wandered to Savona, Turin, Venice, and Padua. Here he was persuaded to resume the Dominican habit, and then went to Lyons. Advised not to continue in that direction, he turned toward Geneva, hoping there to be able to “live in freedom and be safe.” He again removed the habit and enrolled in the Calvinist Church then dominant there. But there too he soon came into conflict with one of the professors of theology, and was consequently imprisoned and tried. To secure his release he made an act of recantation, and shortly afterward departed.
For several years he was in Toulouse, where he read Aristotle at the then famous university; then, hoping to find a more receptive audience, he went to Paris, where he printed the De umbris idearum and the Cantus Circaens, works chiefly of a mnemotechnical character (connected with the others, more genuinely Lullian, on combinatory logic), the De compendiosa architectura et complemento artis Lulli, and the Candelaio, one of the liveliest (and most obscene) comedies of the period. Tumults also arose in Paris, and, recommended by the king and protected by the French ambassador who was going to London, he went there, residing from 1583 to 1585. Here he published the three treatises (which continue the treatment of those produced 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 chiefly physical and metaphysical in character), and Spaccio de la bestia triorfante, Cabala del cavallo pegaseo, De gli heroici furori (these three rather moral in character). Once again, because of his contemptuous character, he ended by falling out with the scholars of London and Oxford as well, and when the ambassador returned to Paris, he followed him. He remained there only a short time, since the opposition he encountered because of a fierce polemic against Aristotelianism persuaded him to emigrate, this time to Germany: first to Mainz, then for a longer period to Wittenberg, afterward to Prague and Helmstädt, 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 exalts 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, De innumerabilibus immenso et infigurabili universo et mundis (Frankfurt 1591); and in that same year, 1591, he dictated the Summa terminorum metaphysicorum, which appeared later.
He was still in Frankfurt when Giovanni Mocenigo, wishing to learn from him the art of memory, invited him to Venice. B. accepted the invitation, perhaps wishing 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 be proceeding favorably for B., who openly acknowledged that in some of his works he had spoken “too philosophically, dishonestly, and not quite as a good Christian,” asked forgiveness, and declared himself ready, indeed desirous, to return to the bosom of the Catholic Church; he only begged to be freed from the “constraint of regular obedience,” that is, from the obligations of conventual life. But Rome assumed the case, and B. was transferred there on 27 February 1593. The trial (whose records have been lost) proceeded slowly: B.’s writings were examined, and a series of heretical propositions was charged against him. Several cardinals were among the inquisitors. Here too B. seemed willing, as in Venice, to abjure his errors; but in the end, pressed hard and invited to abandon his heretical principles, in which theology, and not his philosophical system, was at stake, he hardened in his refusal, protesting that his judges did not properly understand his thought. He was therefore handed over to the secular arm and burned alive on 17 February 1600.
Throughout the seventeenth century, the name of B. is rarely found among the learned (Kepler recalls him for his doctrine of the plurality of worlds). In the eighteenth century, however, it becomes increasingly frequent, especially among the “free thinkers.” But the man who ultimately brought him to the forefront as a philosopher was Jacobi with his famous Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza, in which he pointed to B. as a clear precursor of Spinozian pantheism. And in fact, already in B. there is an explicit idea of a single, divine principle of the universe as a “natura naturans,” which is an immanent and infinite cause, from which there proceeds “necessarily” the equally infinite multiplicity of its manifestations in space and time (“natura naturata”), and which in everything reveals, through its actuality, its infinite power. Common to both thinkers, too, is the idea that religions, with their theologies, have as their proper function only an ethical and social one, so that, setting aside dogmatic differences, they ought all to be reduced to a single religion, the “natural” one, which is most in conformity with man’s rational nature. The differences, however, 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 imaginative representations); but the immanence of the absolute principle is, in B., anything but peaceful, since the sense of transcendence proper to Christian Neoplatonism is still alive in him, while, on the other hand, he retains from pagan Neoplatonism the doctrine of the world-soul (which he expanded by including the rational part as well). In any case, after Jacobi the name of B. entered the history of philosophy with great honor: Schelling first, and then Hegel, regarded him as a precursor of their absolute idealism (in Italy, B. Spaventa and then G. Gentile disseminated this interpretation in idealist historiography). In reaction, positivism exalted him for everything it found in him that anticipated an absolute naturalism. In the political sphere meanwhile, first the liberals of the Italian Risorgimento, and then the left-wing democrats, revived the name of B. in the spirit of the eighteenth century, making it the banner of Freemasonry and popular anticlericalism (unaware, in their antireligious fury, that B. considered religious faith necessary precisely for the common people).
For the historian who, today, setting aside the preconceived schemes both of absolute idealism and of positivism, addresses the question of the importance of B.’s thought, and seeks its most proper and original motive historically—considering it, that is, at the conclusion of that great movement of ideas which was the Renaissance, when, in reaction against traditional scholastic teaching, all the ancient doctrines, from the pre-Socratics to Neoplatonism, were revived—the answer is not easy. At first sight, it seems that he takes his ideas here and there, from the most diverse schools: from Eleaticism as from Heracliteanism, from Pythagoreanism as from Empedoclean or Anaxagorean physical theory, from Neoplatonism as from atomistic materialism, heedless of contradictions and, above all, of any internal principle of coherence (the extreme poles of his oscillation may be indicated as an idealist type of naturalism, such as that of ancient Neoplatonism, and a modern materialist type of naturalism, such as that of the almost contemporary Telesio). In this respect B.’s thought has been defined as a generic “syncretism.” It seems, instead, that the most original principle of Brunian thought, from which its historical importance also derives, was that of developing Cusanus’s intuition (of the infinity of the universe and the coincidence of opposites within it) until it became a genuine “cosmological idea,” that is, an idea of the world in its universality; better still, as the unity of the totality unfolding in the multiplicity of real or possible phenomena in space and time. The name and definition of this idea are, as is well known, Kant’s; he clearly distinguished it (something B., unfortunately, does not do) from the “theological” idea of God and the “psychological” idea of the self; but it is undeniable that all Brunian speculation is directed toward II. This speculation, drawing inspiration from the Copernican discovery, extends to the entire universe the revolution that was taking place in the physical and astronomical field with regard to traditional scholastic-Aristotelian ideas.
Not, therefore, the world as an aggregate of particular things or facts, but as reality and, at the same time, the general possibility of whatever happens or may happen: that is, from a metaphysical point of view (of a metaphysics, needless to say, that is merely physical). This idea—which is the one present in each of us when we speak of the world as an external reality existing in and of itself, independent of us, without yet raising the question of the origin of its existence—naturally embraces both the greatest and the smallest, the whole past and the whole future, every matter as well as every form, every potentiality as well as every actuality. Being the absolute unity of everything, it contains within itself the capacity or potentiality of everything, while not being circumscribed by anything spatially or temporally determinate: an infinite sphere, as B. depicts it, whose center is everywhere, while it has neither center nor circumference anywhere; and “nature” (this was what his mythological “world-soul” was intended to be), which is at once material and formal, efficient and final cause. B. vigorously combats the Aristotelianism of those who divide form from matter and potentiality from actuality, and seeks to grasp their absolute, original unity, in order to derive and deduce from it all possibilities: “In conclusion, whoever wishes to know nature’s greatest secrets should look upon and contemplate …
concerning the smallest and greatest of contraries and opposites: (for) profound magic is knowing how to draw forth 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, precisely, overstep into magic—and B., although to a much lesser degree than Campanella, still believes in the procedures of that art: hence, moreover, his great confidence in Lullian logic), ultimately defines such unity as absolute indifference: “it is so much form that it is not form, it is so much matter that it is not matter, it is so much soul that it is not soul: because it is everything indifferently, and therefore one; the universe is one.” But such indifference must not overstep into absolute indeterminacy! The world is nevertheless something determined and circumscribed in its actuality: precisely because of the Brunian coincidence of contraries within it, it is infinite, and yet at the same time always finite (infinite, we would say, in thought, but nevertheless finite in reality, since it is the only world present to us, encompassing every possibility). Not only that: its unity is also determined, in the Idea, by its corporeality and is therefore distinct from that of spirituality. The universe of which he speaks is the corporeal universe, the object of science, as the aforementioned categories demonstrate, through which it is known. B., however, continually confuses the idea of God with that of the world: and thus oscillates between a mysticism that has no religious meaning whatsoever (it is rather agnosticism: the One is something indistinct, formless, unknowable, and indefinable), and a pantheism that identifies God with Nature (Natura sive Deus, as Spinoza would say). And the lack of spiritual sense will cause man too, with his consciousness and inwardness, to be absorbed into the “whole.” B.’s ethics, although distinguished from Neoplatonic ethics by the greater consideration it gives to social and civic life, concludes, like the latter, by making the process of the soul’s moral ascent coincide with its intellectual ascent, and by ultimately identifying, at its highest degree, ascent to God with the dissolution of personality within the “divine” of Nature (the “heroic furor”).
BIBLI: Editions: the Opere italiane are included in Laterza’s Classici della filosofia moderna collection (I. Dialoghi metafisici. II. Dialoghi morali: edited by G. Gentile; III. Candelaio: edited by V. Spampanato). Bari 1907–1909; the Opera latine conscripta, published at the expense of the State, appeared between 1879 and 1891, edited by F. Fiorentino. — For his life: D. Berti, La vita di G. B., Turin 1868; V. Spampanato, Vita di G. B., Messina 1921; from this work the Documenti della vita di G. B., Florence 1933, are extracted; A. Mercati, Il sommario del processo di G. B., Vatican City 1942; L. Firpo, Il processo di G. B., Naples 1949. — Among the most important studies on B.: B. Spaventa, Principi della filosofia pratica di G. B., in Saggi di filosofia civile, Genoa 1851; F. Tocco, Le opere latine di G. B. esposte e confrontate con le italiane, Florence 1889; on positivism, E. Troilo, La filosofia di G. B., I. Turin 1907; II. Rome 1914; on idealism, G. Gentile, G. B. e il pensiero del Rinascimento, Florence 1920; L. Olschki, G. B., Bari 1927 (strongly critical); A. Guzzo, I dialoghi del B., Turin 1932 (emphasizes the sense of transcendence that remained in B.); E. Fenu, G. B., Brescia 1938 (from a Catholic point of view); A. Corsano, Il pensiero di G. B. nel suo svolgimento storico, Florence 1940 (ultimately presents him as a religious reformer). — For further references, V. V. Salvestrini, Bibliografia delle opere di G. B. e degli scritti ad esso attinenti, Pisa 1926 (excellent). Armando Carlini