Bruno, Giordano

BRUNO, GIORDANO. - Philosopher and man of letters, in the world FILIPPO, b. at Nola (Naples) in 1548, d. at Rome in 1600. Having completed his early studies at Naples, he entered, while still fifteen years old, the convent of St. Dominic, and there, having made his religious profession, he received the sacred Orders in 1572. Those were decisive years for the formation of his culture and of his mind: he read and studied with ardor the philosophers and theologians of antiquity and of the Middle Ages, classical writers and books of the most varied erudition common in the Renaissance, favored in this by an extraordinary memory, equaled only by his extraordinary imagination and the whimsicality of his genius. There contributed above all others to forming his thought, among the ancients, Plotinus, in the diffusion of Neoplatonism that Ficino had made, and Lucretius, the great poet of Democritean atomism; among the medievals Raymond Lull, celebrated author of the Ars magna, a kind of universal logic for solving all questions; and furthermore Nicholas of Cusa (the "divine" Cusa, as B. calls him), from whom he took the idea of the infinity of the universe, and of the coincidence in it of opposites; finally Nicolaus Copernicus, whose work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium had appeared in 1543. But also the first doubts about the dogmas of the faith soon presented themselves to his mind, if, as he himself confessed, from the age of 18 he began to doubt "concerning the name of person of the Son and of the Holy Spirit," and "how this second person was incarnated." He inclined, even then, to a rationalistic interpretation of the dogmas, whereby the Son represented "the intellect of the Father," and the Holy Spirit "the soul and the love of the universe"; and the divinity of Christ was to be understood in the sense, similar to that of Arius, of "such an assistance, by which it could truly be said of this man that he was God." This "philosophizing" on the dogmas is evident proof that even as a young man the intimate, properly religious, sense of Christianity was scanty or null in him: even then, in fact, he began to regard as superstitions, due to ignorance, the practices of worship; and religion, all religions, in the end, configured themselves to him ever more as symbols of intellectual truths, adapted to the unlearned minds of the vulgar, and having value above all practical, as laws for customs and for the government of the masses; he thus anticipated the rationalism and Enlightenment of the following centuries. Very soon therefore, the trials for heresy against him began: two, while he was still in the convent at Naples. Whence in 1576 he fled to Rome. From there, having laid aside the habit, he went to Noli (Savona) for some months, and wandered, then, again to Savona, to Turin, to Venice, to Padua. Here he let himself be persuaded to take up again the Dominican habit, and he betook himself therefore to Lyons. Advised against proceeding in those parts, he turned toward Geneva, hoping to be able there "to live in freedom and be safe." He took off the habit again and enrolled in the Calvinist Church dominant there. But even there he soon came to dispute with one of the professors of theology, whence he was imprisoned and tried. To free himself from it he made an act of amends, and shortly afterward departed.

For some years he was at Toulouse, where he lectured on Aristotle in that then famous studium; then, hoping to find a more favorable audience, at Paris, where he printed the De umbris idearum and the Cantus Circaens, works, predominantly, of a mnemotechnical character (linked to the others, more genuinely Lullian, of combinatorial logic), the De compendiosa architectura et complemento artis Lulli, and the Candelaio, which is among the liveliest (and obscene) comedies of the time. Even at Paris tumults arose, whence, recommended by the king and protected by the French ambassador who was going to London, he passed there, dwelling there from 1583 to 1585. Here he published the three opuscules (which continue the treatment of the Parisian ones): the Ars reminiscendi, the Explicatio triginta sigillorum and the Sigillus sigillorum; and his Italian works, fundamental: La cena delle ceneri, De la causa principio et Uno, De l'infinito universo et mondi (of a character, these three, predominantly physical-metaphysical), and the Spaccio de la bestia trionfante, the Cabala del cavallo pegaseo, De gli heroici furori (of a character, these three, rather moral). Again, because of his scornful character, he ended by falling out even with the dons of London and Oxford, whence, when the ambassador returned to Paris, he followed him. He remained there a short time, for the opposition encountered on account of a fierce polemic against Aristotelianism persuaded him to emigrate, this time to Germany: first to Mainz, then to Wittenberg for a longer stay, then to Prague and to Helmstedt, finally to Frankfurt. During these peregrinations he gave to the press 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 instead 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 the same year 1591 he dictated the Summa terminorum metaphysicorum, which came out later.

He was still at Frankfurt when Giovanni Mocenigo, desirous of learning from him the art of memory, invited him to Venice. B. accepted the invitation, desirous, perhaps, of returning to Italy. But Mocenigo, scandalized, denounced him to the Holy Office as a heretic. The first trial took place, in 1592. It seemed to proceed not badly for B., who openly acknowledged having spoken, in some of his works, "too philosophically, irreverently and not too much like a good Christian," asked pardon, declared himself ready, indeed desirous, of returning to the bosom of the Catholic Church: only, he begged to be freed from the "constraint of regular obedience," that is, from the obligations of conventual life. But Rome avoked the trial to itself, and B. was brought there on 27 Feb. 1593. The trial (whose acts are lost) proceeded slowly: the writings of B. were examined, and a series of heretical propositions was contested against him. Among the inquisitors were various cardinals. B., here too, seemed disposed, as at Venice, to abjure his errors; but at the end, pressed hard, and invited to abandon his heretical principles, in which theology was at stake and not his philosophical system, he stiffened in his denial, protesting that his judges did not well understand his thought. Whence he was abandoned to the secular arm and burned alive on 17 Feb. 1600.

Throughout the 17th century the name of B. is rarely found among scholars (Kepler recalls him for the doctrine of the plurality of worlds). In the 18th century, by contrast, it becomes ever more frequent, especially among the "free thinkers." But the one who finally raised 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 Spinozistic pantheism. And in fact already in B. the idea is explicit of a single, divine principle of the universe as a "natura naturans," which is an immanent and infinite cause, from which proceeds "necessarily" the equally infinite multiplicity of its manifestations in space and time ("natura naturata"), and in every thing reveals through its actuality its infinite power. And common to both is the idea that religions with their theologies have, properly speaking, only an ethical-social office, so that, setting aside dogmatic differences, they should all be reduced to a single religion, to the "natural" one, which is the most consonant with the rational nature of man. Nevertheless, the differences must not be overlooked: not only is there lacking in B. the systematic order and speculative rigor proper to Spinoza (in B. speculative vigor is continually weakened and contaminated by exuberant fantastic representations); but the immanence of the absolute principle is, in B., anything but peaceful, since in him the sense of transcendence proper to Christian Neoplatonism is still alive, while, on the other hand, he still retains from pagan Neoplatonism the doctrine of the world-soul (expanded by him with the rational part as well). 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 later G. Gentile popularized him thus in idealist historiography). By reaction, positivism exalted him for all that it found in him anticipating an absolute naturalism. On the political terrain meanwhile, first the liberals of the Italian Risorgimento, then the democrats of the left took up the name of B. in the spirit of the 18th century to make of it a banner of Freemasonry and of popular anticlericalism (unaware, in their antireligious fury, that B., precisely for the common people, deemed religious faith necessary).

For the historian who, having set aside the preconceived schemas both of absolute idealism and of positivism, today poses the problem 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 revived, from the Presocratics to Neoplatonism, the answer is not easy. At first sight it seems that he takes his ideas from here and there, from the most diverse schools, from Eleaticism as from Heracliteanism, from Pythagoreanism as from the physicalism of Empedocles or Anaxagoras, from Neoplatonism as from atomistic materialism, heedless of contradictions and, above all, of an internal principle of coherence (the extreme poles of his oscillation may be indicated in a naturalism of the idealistic type, as in ancient Neoplatonism, and a naturalism of the materialistic type, modern, such as was that, almost contemporary, of Telesio). In this respect B.'s thought has been defined as a generic "syncretism." It seems, on the contrary, that the most original principle of Brunian thought, from which its historical importance also derives, was that of elaborating Cusanus's intuition (of the infinity of the universe, and of the coincidence in it of opposites), to the point of making of it a true and proper "cosmological idea," as an idea, that is, of the world in its universality: better, as the unity of the totality, which unfolds in the multiplicity of real or possible phenomena in space and time. The denomination and definition of this idea is, as is well known, Kant's, who distinguished it clearly (which B., unfortunately, does not do) from the "theological" idea, of God, and from the "psychological" one, of the I; but it is undeniable that all Brunian speculation aims at it. Which, taking inspiration from the Copernican discovery, extends to the whole universe the revolution that was being wrought in the physical and astronomical field from traditional scholastic-Aristotelian ideas.

Not, then, the world as a collection of particular things or facts, but as reality and at the same time possibility in general of whatever happens or can happen: from a metaphysical point of view, that is (of a metaphysics, it is understood, that is merely physical). That idea (which is the one present to each of us when he speaks of the world as an exterior reality that exists in itself and for itself, independent of him, and does not yet pose the problem of the origin of its existence) naturally comprises the maximally great as the maximally small, all the past as all the future, every matter as every form, every potency as every actuality. Being the absolute unity of everything, it has in itself the capacity or virtuality of everything, though not being circumscribed in anything spatially or temporally determined: an infinite sphere, as B. depicts it, which has its center in every point, though having center or circumference nowhere; and "nature" (this was what his mythological "world-soul" was meant to be) which is, at once, material and formal, efficient and final cause. B. struggles strenuously against the Aristotelianism of those who divide form from matter, potency 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, let him regard and contemplate about the smallest and greatest of contraries and opposites: (for) it is profound magic to know 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 indeed overstep into magic, and B., although to a much lesser degree than Campanella, still believes in the procedures of that art: hence, from another standpoint, his great trust in Lullian logic), defines, in the end, this 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 the whole indifferently, and therefore one, the universe is one". But such indifference should not have overstepped into an absolute indeterminacy! The world is still always something determinate and circumscribed in its actuality: precisely because of the Brunian coincidence of contraries in it, it is infinite, and yet always, at the same time, finite (infinite, we would say, in thought, but still always finite in reality, being the only world present to us, which comprehends every possibility). Not only that: but its unity is also determined, in the idea, by its corporeity, and is therefore unmistakable with that of spirituality. The universe of which we speak is the corporeal universe, the object of science, as the aforementioned categories demonstrate, by which it is known. B., on the other hand, continually confuses the idea of God with that of the world: and therefore oscillates between a mysticism that has no religious sense (it is rather agnosticism: the One is something indistinct, formless, unknowable and indefinable), and a pantheism that identifies God with Nature (Natura sive Deus, Spinoza will say). And the lack of spiritual sense will bring it about that man too, with his consciousness and interiority, is absorbed into the "whole". B.'s ethics, which nevertheless differs from the Neoplatonic one by the greater consideration it gives to social and civil life, concludes like that one, by making the process of the soul's moral ascent coincide with the intellectual one, and by finally identifying, in its supreme degree, the ascent to God with the dispersion of personality within the "divine" of Nature (the "heroic frenzy").

Armando Carlini