Although he made no scientific discoveries, his ideas had much influence on later scientists and philosophers. Giordano Bruno was born at Nola in southern Italy.
His baptismal name was Filippo, but he took the name Giordano when he entered a Dominican monastery in Naples in During his stay in different monastic houses in southern Italy, he acquired a vast knowledge of philosophy, theology, and science. Because he developed unorthodox views on some Catholic teachings, Bruno was suspected of heresy and finally fled the monastic life in This experience reveals much about Bruno's personality.
His love for knowledge and hatred of ignorance led him to become a rebel, unwilling to accept traditional authority. The price he paid for this independence was persecution and condemnation in many countries.
In , he settled in Geneva and began teaching at the University. However, due to certain publications against Protestantism, he was soon arrested. He then moved to France, where he began conducting lectures on various subjects and garnered the support of various influential patrons.
He lived in France for the next seven years. In , Bruno moved to London, and lived at the house of the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau. During this period, he encountered some of the prominent and influential members of the Hermetic circle, including the poet Philip Sidney who influenced Bruno so much that he dedicated two of his books to him.
In , he enrolled in school at the Monastery of Saint Domenico, best known for its famous member, Thomas Aquinas. Around this time, he took the name Giordano Bruno and within a few years had become a priest of the Dominican Order. Giordano Bruno was a brilliant, albeit eccentric, philosopher whose ideas rarely coincided with those of the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, he entered the Dominican convent of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples in where he assumed the name Giordano.
His outspoken and heretical beliefs were noted by his superiors, but he was nevertheless ordained as a priest in and sent back to Naples to continue his studies. While in Naples, Bruno discussed his heretical views aloud, including the Arian heresy which stated that Christ was not divine. These actions led to steps being taken toward a trial for heresy.
He fled to Rome in and fled again in after some of his forbidden writings were uncovered. Leaving the Dominican order in , Bruno wandered Europe as a traveling philosopher, lecturing in various universities. Bruno's memory enhancement techniques, including mnemonics, are described in his book, "The Art of Memory" and are still used today.
In , Bruno moved to London and then to Oxford, where he presented lectures discussing the Copernican theory of a sun-centered universe. His ideas were met with a hostile audience, and, as a result, he returned to London where he became familiar with the major figures of the court of Elizabeth I. While in London, he also wrote a number of satirical works as well as his book, "Dell Infinito, universo e mondi" "Of Infinity, the Universe, and the World".
Bruno continued his travels, writing and lecturing in England and Germany through During this time, Bruno both intrigued and angered local scholars. Its stability, which contrasted so favorably with the flux of form, had led the heterodox scholastic philosopher David of Dinant d. Divine though it might be, Bruno did not identify Universal Matter with God. This supersubstantial principle was the God of whom the Egyptians Hermes and Moses had spoken.
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. This was not as provocative as it might seem. 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, — He was the One Being, the unchanging ens unum , of which Xenophanes and his pupil Parmenides had spoken.
True philosophers, those, that is, who understood that the universe was infinite, could discover more than this. The first of these analogies, that of painting, Bruno developed as follows. Plotinus inspired the analogy Enneads , III. 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.
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. 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 mentioned in his account of the nativity, being located in what the Roman Empire at the time knew as Syria.
Countless theologians and philosophers had proclaimed over the centuries that the perceptible world announced the glory of God. Bruno turned the topos to advantage. In God and the universe all possibilities were actualized. 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.
God had two aspects, one wholly aloof from the universe, the other in communion with it. The Christian God, or more exactly the Word, remained unaltered even as he became miraculously incarnated as Jesus Christ. 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.
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.
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. 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.
Two unconventional conclusions followed. First, the form that this single cognitive power took depended on the bodily shape that it inhabited. 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. 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.
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.
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. Nicholas of Cusa probably inspired the formula.
It was, however, only on sufferance that he engaged with Platonism. All things were accidents of the One Being, intelligibilia included, and hence all things engaged with matter in some respect.
In what sense could they be outside an infinite universe? Not even the separate intelligences were, in fact, separate absolutely. 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. Matter and form were inseparable BOL I.
We arrive, then, at the intriguing conclusion that Nature, in this second sense, was God in his extrinsic aspect. 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. 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. 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. 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.
The universe was perfect. It could not be otherwise. It was, essentially, a bodily manifestation of God. Philosophers through the ages had said much the same, as had scholastic authors. Then Thomas added a qualification. The cosmos provided the setting for human beings to demonstrate that they merited everlasting salvation.
They were, as for Spinoza Ethics , pt IV, prop. Human beings, understood as combinations of body and soul, perished. But what of their souls? Death was an illusion, no more than the dissolution of an ephemeral conjunction of soul and matter. 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, , — 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, —, , — 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.
It may have been, he had remarked, the incarnation of a former friend of his Firpo , , doc. 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, — 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. Or rather, given that infinite space was replete with souls, it expanded into the aether or spiritus diffused throughout space.
Scripture, as always, supported his view. Well it is said, too, in Holy Scripture [ Ecclesiastes ] that the body dissolves into dust, that is to say, atoms [see again Section 3 ], and that the spirit returns to its source [God].
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.
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. God as the One Being, both in his inner and external aspect see Section 5 , remained unknowable. 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 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.
Le incisioni nelle opere a stampa , ed. Gabriele, Milan, , pp. 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. 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.
To be virtuous was to strive against adversity, to embody a coincidence of opposites. 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, —? 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. 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, , A true religion, like that of the ancients, extolled men of action, strength of body and mind and worldly glory BOI II, — Similar comments on clerical duplicity, glory and religion occur in Machiavelli, whose works Bruno probably read.
Nevertheless, religion had a role to play. 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.
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