Part 2

VII. Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900 183

VIII. Pragmatism 213

IX. Progress 249

X. Royce on Love and Loyalty 283

XI. Retrospect and Prospect 303

GIORDANO BRUNO

1548-1600

The straightest way to the heart of old matters is an old letter. Here is one written on the twenty-third of May, 1592, by a gentleman of Venice to the Father of the Venetian Inquisition.

“Very Reverend Father and Most-to-be-observed Sir:

“I, Gioanni Mocenigo, son of the Clarissimo Messer Marcoantonio, compelled by my conscience and ordered by my confessor, denounce to Your Very Reverend Paternity Giordano Bruno of Nola, whom I have heard say on various occasions when he was conversing with me in my own house, that Catholics do but blaspheme when they hold the Bread to be transubstantiated into the Flesh; that he is against the Mass; that no religion satisfies him; that Christ was a charlatan who, since he resorted to tricks to fool people, might well enough have foreseen that he would die a criminal’s death; that there is no distinction of Persons in God; ... that the world is eternal and that there are an infinite number of worlds, and that God is continually making an infinity of them because He wants as many as He can have; that Christ performed specious miracles; that he was a magician and the apostles were magicians too.”...

The letter runs on in breathless denunciation, but already one begins to make out the image of Bruno reflected in the average mind of his time. The limited intelligence of Mocenigo has honestly misunderstood some of Bruno’s utterances, his malice has distorted others; but the perversity of the whole is not due to these faults of detail. Lost in this jumble of stock heresies lies hidden a great idea, the greatest perhaps that has ever been contributed by a single mind to the cause of our science. “And he says the world is eternal and that there are an infinity of worlds.” This sentence has brought the old world to an end, has shattered the heavens under which Christendom was then living, yet it falls on the ear of its time with no more meaning or portent than a doubt respecting the doctrine of transubstantiation or the authenticity of miracles. Bruno, throughout the course of his driven life and up to the moment of his tragic death, knew most forms of martyrdom. He bore none of these meekly, for his was a lusty soul that did not love to suffer. But neither the hatred nor the cruelty of his world seems to have hurt him so to the quick as did its stupidity. Doubt him and hate if you will; but value him you must! He was master of a great idea and unacquainted with modesty.

Meanwhile Mocenigo has more to say of this sinner: “He has expressed the intention of making himself the founder of a new sect under the name of the new philosophy. He has said that the Virgin could not have brought a child into the world, and that our Catholic faith is full of blasphemies against the majesty of God; that it would be better to suppress the largesses of wrangling friars because they befoul the world; that they are all asses and that our common opinions are the teaching of asses; that we have no proof that our faith has merit with God; that the simple rule of not doing unto others what we would not have done unto us is sufficient for right living.”... Perhaps I may stop here. Evidently one who could be guilty of all these follies would be ingenious in inventing others, and Mocenigo’s letter may run endlessly on.

While this letter was writing, Bruno lay locked in a room of Mocenigo’s house. “I had thought to learn from him,” Mocenigo explains, “not knowing him to be the wicked man he is, and having noted all these things to lay before your Very Reverend Paternity, and fearing that he would take his departure as he said he wished to do, I have locked him in a room at your disposal. As I think him possessed of the devil, I hope you will decide quickly what is to be done with him....”

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It has sometimes been wondered how Bruno came to accept the invitation of Mocenigo to take up his residence in Venice. Italy was for him a place of such peril that it seems incredible he should have ventured to set foot in it. “Tell me one thing more,” concludes a letter written in this same year 1592 by a gentleman of Bologna to a friend in Padua, “tell me one thing more. Giordano Bruno, whom you knew at Wittenberg, the Nolan, is said to be living among you just now at Padua. Is it really so? What sort of man is this that he dares to enter Italy, which he left in exile as he himself used to confess? I wonder, I wonder. I cannot yet believe the rumor, although I have it on good authority. You shall tell me whether it is true.” And history has wondered all the more seeing that Bruno himself had long before prophesied the result. “Torches,” he had written, “fifty or a hundred, will not fail me though the march be at noonday should it be my fate to die in a Catholic country.”

So far as documents furnish any answer to this question, it lies suggested in a second letter written by Mocenigo to the Holy Inquisition two days after the denunciation. “In the course of the day that I kept Giordano Bruno locked up, I asked him whether the things that he would not teach me, as he promised to do in return for the many kindnesses I had done him and the many gifts that I had given him, whether he would not consent to teach me them if I abstained from denouncing him for all the criminal things he had uttered to me against our Lord Jesus Christ and against the Holy Catholic Church. He answered that he did not fear the Inquisition, for he had harmed no one by living in his own way, and moreover he could not recall having said anything sinful, but that if he had said such things he had said them only to me, and he need not fear that I would do him harm in the way I suggested.” Those who can may believe that Bruno is here telling the truth about himself. Those who can may believe that he who eight years before and at a safe distance from Italy had so clearly seen the torches that awaited him there, had since grown blind to them or indifferent.

The next document of the trial is brief enough. Under date of the following day--that is, Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of May--is found this entry: “Clarissimo Dom Aloysius Fuscari presiding. Presented himself Dom Matheus de Avantio, Captain of the Constabulary, and reported as follows: Sabbath at three o’clock of the night, I arrested Giordano Bruno of Nola, whom I found in a house over against Saint Samuels, in which dwells the Clarissimo Ser Gioanni Mocenigo, and I have imprisoned him in the Prisons of the Holy Office, and this I have done by order of this Holy Tribunal.”

The doors of the prison closing on Bruno bring to an end the story of his life, but from behind these doors there come to us fragments of the story itself as Bruno retells it to his judges. For on the very day of his arrest he is examined by a tribunal composed of the Apostolic Nuncio, the Patriarch of Venice, the Very Reverend Father Inquisitor. Before these, as the clerk of the tribunal records it, was brought a certain man of ordinary height with a chestnut beard, who, when he had been admonished to speak the truth, and before any question could be put to him, burst out of his own accord: “I will tell the truth. Several times have I been threatened with being brought before this Holy Office, but I have always taken the threat for a joke, because I am ever ready to give account of myself.” Whereupon he tells how, having found himself at Frankfurt the previous year, he received there two letters from Gioanni Mocenigo, inviting him to come to Venice to instruct Mocenigo in the art of memory and the art of invention, for which this Venetian gentleman had promised to pay him well and treat him in a way that should content him. And so Bruno had come to Venice seven or eight months before, living first in lodgings, then for a brief space in Padua, until some two months prior to his arrest he had taken up his residence in Mocenigo’s own house. We already know how, “compelled by his conscience and ordered by his confessor,” Mocenigo finally disposed of his guest.

Then Bruno questioned by the tribunal, laid before it a formal account of his life. “My name is Giordano Bruno, of the family of the Bruni, of the city of Nola, twelve miles from Naples. In this place I was born and raised, and my profession was and is letters and the sciences. My father was named Gioanni, and my mother Fraulissa Savolina, and my father’s calling was that of a soldier. He is dead since, and my mother too.

“I am about forty-four years of age, and I was born, so far as I have heard from my people, in the year 1548. I remained in Naples learning the humanities, logic, and dialectics until fourteen years of age ... and then I took the habit of Saint Dominic in the monastery or convent of Saint Dominic in Naples, and was invested by a Padre who was then prior of that convent, called Maestro Ambrosio Pasqua. When the year of probation was passed, I was admitted by him to profession, which was solemnly made in the same convent.... Later I was promoted to holy orders and at the usual season to the priesthood. I sang my first mass in Campagnia, a city of the same state at a distance from Naples, residing the while in a convent of the order, the San Bartholomeo, and continued in the religious habit of Saint Dominic, celebrating masses and the divine offices, obedient to the superior of the Order and to the priors of the monasteries and convents where I was stationed until 1576....”

I have not wanted to interrupt Bruno, nor to hurry him in his story, tedious as it is in the telling. Little event after little event of his secular and of his religious life befalls with the trivial monotony of dropping rain. But is it not just so that these little events and endless others like them must have fallen on the soul of the living Bruno, soaking in, soaking in, unnoticed as rain, until his very humors ran with their humor? Now their humor was the spirit of the old world, the spirit of his Father’s House. Would it not be curious if, having pulled down this ridiculous old dwelling and in the very act of dancing among its ruins, Bruno should suddenly come to see that it was the only house his soul, being such a soul as it was, could dwell in? If something of this kind did not happen at a moment of his life we are fast approaching, then only the gods know what did happen. But I am anticipating, or rather laying up reflections against our hour of need. For the moment we have no more than come to the day in Bruno’s life when he stepped out of his Father’s House to make his way ins Freie hinaus.

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Fifty years ago, before Berti had unearthed the documents of this trial, it was difficult to trace the life of Bruno. Since then it has become well-nigh impossible. Documents are a great embarrassment to the conscientious historian. They are there, these documents, and have to be put in the text; the truth about the case must be relegated to the foot-notes. Now the text runs in this wise: “In 1576 ... I was in Rome at the Convent of Minerva, obedient to the orders of Maestro Sisto de Luca, Procurator of the Order. Thither I had gone to present myself because at Naples two processes had been instituted against me, the first for having given away certain images of the saints and retaining only a crucifix, it being thought that this showed a lack of respect for the images of the saints; and the other for having said to a novice who was reading a story of the Seven Beatitudes in verse, What did he think he was doing with a book like that?--why didn’t he throw it away and read rather some other book, as the lives of the Holy Fathers? This process was renewed at the time I went to Rome, with other articles added to it which I do not know, for I abandoned the order and threw aside the habit and went to Noli in the region of Genoa, where I supported myself four or five months teaching grammar to young boys.”

This is indeed the text, but is not a comment inevitable? What! Bruno would have us believe that in 1576 he is of such fearful mood and timid temper that, having no more on his conscience than the events recited, he abandons church and country, peace and security at the mere frown of his Order, but that in 1592, having in the meanwhile upset, smashed, and abused the Christian world, he can look upon the Inquisition without fear, bethinking him that he had harmed no man in living in his own way?

However, flee he did. What followed on this flight he recounts to his judges as his trial proceeds. Sixteen years of as hard-driven a life as one could wish for one’s dearest foe, from Italy to Switzerland (to the Geneva of Calvin’s day, where one may imagine that Bruno was as much at home as fire on an iceberg), then across to France, from Lyons to Toulouse, from Toulouse to Paris, from France to England, from London back to Paris, then hastily to Germany, through many German and Bohemian cities! Sixteen years of homeless, friendless poverty, now teaching small boys, now lecturing at great universities, now living with fine gentlemen, received by a king or a queen, now gathering a few curious students about him, who somehow confused the promise of the great idea with old mysteries and the arts we call black. Until at last we find him at Frankfurt receiving Mocenigo’s letters promising him a home in Italy, his native land, and a treatment that should content him.

Yet these years of travail were those in which his works were written, the Italian dialogues in England, the Latin poems in Germany. The great idea had received full expression, the “Excubitor,” as Bruno called himself, the Awakener of sleeping minds, had blown his trumpet and the walls of the world had fallen. Splendid is the enthusiasm with which Bruno first announces this new vision of the morning: “Lo! here is one who has swept the air, pierced the heavens, sped by the stars and passed beyond the bounds of the world, who has annihilated the fantastic spheres with which foolish mathematicians and vulgar philosophers had closed us in. The key of his diligent curiosity has opened to the view of every sense and every power of reason such closets of truth as can be opened by us. He has stripped nature of her robe and veil. He has given eyes to the mole, vision to the blind.... No longer is our reason imprisoned within the confines of imaginary heavens.... We know that there is but one heaven, one immense ether, where magnificent fires maintain their proper distances by reason of that eternal life in which they have part. These flaming bodies are the ambassadors which announce the excellence of God’s glory and majesty.”

This is indeed the voice of an Awakener. But, alas for awakeners! the vision of the morning is never fair to those just shaken out of their dreams. In an introductory letter to the last of the dialogues we catch an echo of the sleeper’s complaint: “If I shoved a plow, if I kept a flock, if I cultivated a garden, if I mended old clothes, no one would notice me, few would consider me, not many would find fault with me, and I could easily please everybody. But for having been studious of the field of nature, solicitous for the pasture of the soul, enamored of the cultivation of the mind, a very Daedalus fashioning raiment for the intellect, every passer-by threatens me, every one who sees me attacks me, who comes upon me rends me, who lays hold on me devours. It is not one, it is not a few; it is many, it is almost all. If you would know why this is, I will tell you the reason of it--I despise the crowd, I hate the mob, the multitude contents me not. One thing I love, one thing for whose sake I am free in bondage, content in pain, rich in poverty, alive in very death. One thing for whose sake I envy not those who are slaves in their liberty, troubled in their pleasure, poor in their riches, dead in their life. Their body is the chain that binds them, in their mind is the hell that tortures them, in their spirit the falsehood that makes them sick, in their soul the lethargy that kills. Not theirs the greatness of mind which frees, the breadth of view which ennobles. Not theirs the splendor which illumines, nor the science which gives life.” It is a brave, even an over-brave flourish with which Bruno ends this proemial epistle: “And so the gods deliver me from all those who unjustly hate me, and my God be always propitious unto me!... The stars let my sowing fit the field and the field my sowing, that the world be made content with the useful and glorious fruits of my labors!... And if I err, I truly do not believe myself to err; whether speaking or writing, I do not dispute for the love of victory.... For love of true wisdom and desire for true insight I exhaust, I crucify, I torture myself....”

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