Part 3

Brave is the flourish, how over-brave we realize with unexpected intensity as we follow this solemn trial to its last scene. Having recounted the episodes of his life, Bruno proceeds to the explanation and defense of his teachings. At first the new philosophy is presented with no little boldness and confidence, its difference from the formal teaching of Christianity admitted and even pointed out. But always with a certain reserve, as of one who would say, “Yes, I have broken the frame and melted the flesh of your religion, but if you will let me, I will show how much more nobly its divine spirit dwells in the new body I have made for it.” Now this new body differs in no important way from the physical universe as we see it today, so that Bruno’s problem has been the problem of all Christian thought since his time. What Aquinas had done in the way of making the spirit of Christianity at home in the finite heaven-enclosed world of Aristotle, that Bruno felt must be done over again, now that the world was no longer finite and the distinction between Heaven and Earth had vanished. This is the thought that pervades the first days of Bruno’s account of himself before the Venetian tribunal, but as one by one the accusations of Mocenigo’s letter fall on him, he seems to lose hope and confidence in himself. He denies, and denies, and denies!

I am not convinced that he is telling the truth in these denials. I am not convinced that Mocenigo’s account of him, barring a few obvious misunderstandings, is false in spirit. No more am I convinced that Bruno has been frightened into lying himself out of danger. He seems to me to say, “Alas! if these matters on which you question me are of the essence of Christianity, then have I been wrong in supposing that the old wine can be put in the new bottle.” Driven and perplexed, he has to decide which lies nearest to his heart, the new bottle or the old wine. Remember him fleeing in his early manhood from his Father’s House, ostensibly in childish fear and unwillingly, but really perhaps because he needed space, endless space, through which to follow the new idea. Remember him coming back to Italy sixteen years later, ostensibly because he realized that his manner of living and thinking had hurt no man and so ought to bring down no judgment on his head, but really perhaps because the craving for the old wine was deeper in him than the enthusiasm for the new bottle. Perhaps then we can understand the closing scene of his trial at Venice. “It may be,” he cries, “in the long time that has passed I have committed other sins and departed from the Church in other ways than those which I have explained, and that I have not cleansed myself of all matters of censure, but although I have thought much over these things, I can recall nothing more. I have confessed, and I now confess anew my errors, and I am here in the hands of Your Most Illustrious Lordships to receive punishment for the saving of my soul. My soul cannot express the depth of its contrition for my fault.” And falling on his knees, he said, “I humbly ask pardon of the Lord God and of Your Most Illustrious Lordships for all the errors which I have committed and which I now stand ready to expiate in such wise as your wisdom may think proper and judge expedient for my soul. And moreover, I beg that you give me a punishment which shall exceed in severity rather than set any public example which may throw dishonor on the sacred religious habit I have worn. And if by God’s mercy and the mercy of Your Most Illustrious Lordships, life shall be spared me, I promise to make such notable reform of my life as shall pay for the scandal I have given with equal and greater edification.”

In this unhappy posture I leave Bruno the man to take up the story of his great idea. We shall see him once more indeed, at the moment when, eight years later, he calmly dies for the idea he now so abjectly abandons; but no understanding of the alternating enthusiasm and despair that filled this life can afford to neglect the qualities of the gospel it stood for, forsook, then died for in the end.

* * * * *

Like all very great ideas, this one is of the simplest. It begins with the observation that the flame of a candle grows bigger as we approach it, smaller as we recede from it. Nothing very new in this, you say, nor very imposing. No, it is the next step that was so new in Bruno’s day, and of such tremendous destructive and creative power. Yet it is just as simple as the first. What is true of a candle flame must be true of a sun and of a star. Is it not indeed simple? Yes, but in all the long while the world had lasted it had occurred to no one before Bruno to seize upon this simple idea and to follow whither it led. It led far, wonderfully far. It led Bruno to journey in imagination out and out toward those most distant stars that were then called fixed, and were indeed supposed to be fixed in one great sphere that enclosed all things, beyond which was nothing, and not even nothing, for there was no beyond; space ended where matter ended, at the walls of the world. But Bruno as he journeyed saw this great sun of ours growing smaller and smaller as he receded from it, and yonder star growing larger and larger as he approached it, until the most wonderful thing happened. The sun began to look more and more like a star, and the star more and more like a sun. There was now no escaping the conclusion--the stars that had been called fixed are other suns, our sun but a near-lying star.

A child might have grasped this idea which brought a world to an end. Do I say a child? It may be that Bruno was that child, for his mind throughout had much of the waywardness, something of the random and tumultuous association of a child’s mind. The past might interest him, might even inspire him; it never had the power of capturing and holding him. But childish as it was, this idea did destroy the old world, for if stars were in no wise different from the sun we know, nor the sun from a star, evidently there was at least one star that was not fixed to the ethereal sphere that contained all things. There could then be no longer any motive for supposing these other suns to be all at the same distance from the center. They might be anywhere, they might even (Bruno had this very modern idea) be moving with respect to each other. Inevitably Bruno must come to look upon the stars as suns sprinkled irregularly throughout the regions of infinite space.

Nor was this all. Coming after Copernicus as he did, Bruno had from the first grasped with enthusiasm Copernicus’ idea that not the Earth but the Sun was the center of the sphere. I say the center of the sphere, for we must remember that Copernicus never touched the boundary of the world, but only changed its center from Earth to Sun. In Copernicus’ thought we still lived within a star-spangled heaven. But now that Bruno had shattered this heaven and sprinkled these stars through space, he could not well help surrounding those other suns with planets, until not merely an infinity of suns but an infinity of solar systems spread themselves out before his imagination. But could he stop here? When one has once destroyed the distinction between Heaven and Earth, when one has once begun to think of nature as everywhere alike, it is not easy to stop. Was not one of the planets making its journey around our sun inhabited with manifold forms of life? Then why should they not all be? And is it likely that one solar system should be a scene of life and the infinity of others not? So it was that Bruno, looking out into space, saw as many inhabited globes as there were “hundreds of thousands of stars.”

* * * * *

These are the matters which Bruno brought back with him from his journey to the stars and beyond the confines of the world. I have told them simply, for eloquence is wasted in describing such feats of the imagination. They are of themselves eloquent. And we recall with what enthusiasm Bruno himself recounted his journey. Is it not possible, however, that when he returned to earth and told his journeyings to men, he came to perceive, as these men at once perceived, that his new vision was not all made of beauty? Is there not in this infinite cosmos that which may depress and even terrify?

In his “Garden of Epicurus,” Anatole France has put the two worlds side by side. One has only to do this to feel that Bruno, who at first held out his hands to the new vision, may afterwards have snatched them back again to shut it out.

“We have some trouble,” says France, “in imagining the state of mind of a man in olden times who firmly believed that the Earth was the center of the Universe, and that all the stars turned round it. He felt under his feet damned souls writhing in flames, and perhaps he had seen with his own eyes, and smelled with his own nostrils the sulphurous fumes of Hell escaping from some fissures in the rocks. Lifting his head he contemplated the spheres, ... those bearing the Moon, Mercury, Venus--the one that Dante visited on Good Friday of the year 1300--the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, then the incorruptible firmament from which the stars were suspended like lamps. Beyond, his mind’s eye discerned the Ninth Heaven to which the saints were rapt, the Primum Mobile or Crystalline; and finally Empyrion, dwelling of the blessed, toward which, he firmly hoped, two angels robed in white would bear away, as it were a little child, his soul washed in baptism and perfumed with the oil of the last sacraments. In those days God had no other children than man, and all his creation was ordered in a fashion at once childlike and poetic like an immense cathedral. Thus imagined, the universe was so simple that it was represented in its entirety with its true figure and motions in certain great clocks run by machinery and appropriately painted.”

(From Hearnshaw’s Mediaeval Contributions to Modern Civilization.)]

But now! “We are done with the spheres and the planets under which one was born lucky or unlucky, jovial or saturnine. The solid vault of the firmament is shattered. Our eye and our thought plunge into infinite abysses of heaven. Beyond the planets we discover no longer the Empyrion of the elect and of the angels, but a hundred millions of rolling suns escorted by their cortège of obscure satellites invisible to us. In the midst of this infinity of worlds our own Sun is but a bubble of gas and our Earth but a fleck of mud.”

The contrast speaks for itself and needs no comment. It is enough to point out the effect it must have had upon the ethical and religious notions of him who first realized it. What in such a world are we to make of the central episode of Christianity? Bruno’s imagination that had swept through space and sped by the stars had found these worlds inhabited by beings “perhaps better, perhaps worse than we are.” If there was no evidence that these dwellers in distant solar systems were so much better than we as to need no saving, neither was there any evidence that they were so much worse as to deserve none. We were no longer the only children of God. What then? Are we to suppose that the drama of Redemption is being enacted over and over again throughout the infinity of worlds? Is the Son of God being sacrificed over and over again for the sake of His other children? Is He at this moment perhaps redeeming with His life the dwellers on some star in the night yonder?

But destruction did not stop here. Not only the gentler aspects which Christianity had given to the sterner religion of pagandom were threatened. That older religion itself, with its well-thought-out theory of the relation between God and man, must either be rejected or remodeled. For Aristotle as well as for Aquinas, God and man had formed the real plot of the universe. God, revealing himself most clearly in the turning of the enclosing heaven, set thereby the rest of nature in motion and stirred things down to their very center. So that in the region of earth, water, air and fire there came to be composed bodies mixed of all these. They were the living beings we know, which, holding their ingredients in proper proportion for a while, fell apart again and passed away.

These living beings differed in power. As we pass from the vegetable through the animal to the human they show themselves increasingly able to control the matter in which and of which they are. Highest of all is the human male. It is for the sake of producing him that the mechanism which fills the region between Heaven and Earth exists and is operated. One might almost say that Nature is God’s workshop for producing man. But why should God be thus interested in producing this particular kind of animal? Aristotle’s answer comes less clearly than one could wish, yet it comes. It is because man differs from the animals not only in degree but in kind. He is not altogether animal. In his superior body there is contained a soul which is not only of God’s making, but of God’s very substance. That is why man alone can know God. It is as though God needed to be known, recognized, reflected as in a mirror. As for man, he is a bit of divinity momentarily estranged from his home and dwelling, but with the privilege of returning thither can he but free his soul from earthly and sensuous entanglements and interest himself in knowing his Father which is in Heaven.

And now that Bruno has destroyed this difference between Heaven and Earth, has he not destroyed along with it the distinction between God and man? Has not his infinite homogenous world left man a mere mite shivering on his fleck of mud as it rolls around its bubble of gas? Man is no longer the center of interest; he no longer plays an important part in any thinkable plot. “Man is no more than an ant in the presence of the infinite,” cries Bruno. “A star is no more than a man.”

We can understand that Bruno’s awakening, with however great an enthusiasm it may have been heralded, can be no pleasant awakening for the sleeper. The world of his dreams was infinitely fairer and warmer than that reality to whose garish light his eyes have been opened. It cannot be expected that the awakened should feel any gratitude, and he did not. But what is less obvious is the matter of Bruno’s own feeling as the consequences of his new idea gradually unfold themselves to him. Can that first enthusiasm be sustained to the end, or must he too shrink before the fuller vision of what he has done?

* * * * *

If we were to classify men in terms of their reactions to new ideas, I think we should all hit upon these three types. Let me call the first the radical. He is easy to initiate into a new truth, bold to accept it at all costs, loses at once all perspective and sees in the past only a bundle of errors without beauty and with no other interest than to furnish matter for jest. And then there is the conservative. The hold that the past has on such a mind is sometimes enormous. He is capable of clinging to it at the expense of all the rest of his science and experience. If it has enthralled his heart and imagination, he falls into a mood which the Renaissance called the acceptance of “two-fold truth.” He believes against all evidence. He believes as Tertullian had it, just because the thing is absurd. He insists with Pascal, that the heart has its reasons which the reason cannot understand. He is a creature of faiths and of mysticisms. Finally there is the philosopher, the only one of the three completely made for unhappiness. He gets no thrill from novelty. He has followed human thought through too many revolutions to expect the most violent of cataclysms to change things much. He struggles to keep his perspective as he would keep his reason, and the views of older humanity do not lose their beauty because their expression has been proved wrong. Required to readjust his thought of yesterday to the new fact of today, he undertakes the task cheerfully enough as part of the day’s work. That is what yesterdays, todays, and if it may be, tomorrows are given to him for. He measures his success by the extent to which he can mold new thought to the satisfaction of old desire, to old desire newly instructed.

And Bruno--to which of these classes does he belong? Is he the radical who would light-heartedly take his place on the fleck of mud and watch it roll around its bubble of gas, while he laughs at his neighbors, who in the face of such a universe charm themselves into a continued faith that they are somehow divine souls in whom a God of Heaven is interested? Or will he, on the other hand, become one of those thus held by the past? Will the awakener, now himself fully awakened, try to snatch at the fading dream and somehow manage to keep his faith in what he knows can’t be true? Or will he set laboriously to work, as a philosopher should, to find that interpretation of the new facts which lies closest to the meaning, though it may differ from the verbal expression of world-old desires and longings?

Alas! if Bruno would but make up his mind to be any one of these three, the task of his biographer would be easy. But the real Bruno, the Bruno who mocked, who thought, who recanted, and who died, was not a type. He was a man, and as he was the most human of men, he gathered the greatest possible number of inconsistencies to his heart. Yes, he was a radical who mocked and jeered. Yes, he was a philosopher who labored and thought. And yes, finally, he was a mystic who could hold as a splendid if inexplicable possession of his faith, all the things his reason showed to be impossible. I have shown you Bruno’s mockery reflected in the somewhat muddy and turbid medium of Mocenigo’s denunciation. I have shown you Bruno the mystic, kneeling before the Inquisition, completely abandoning the great idea. It remains for me to show Bruno the philosopher, Bruno the Pantheist, Bruno the unacknowledged inspiration of much that is recognized as great in Spinoza and Leibnitz, the acknowledged and highly honored forerunner of much we take to be greatest in the German Idealism that centers about 1800.

* * * * *

We left the great idea at the moment, when, having pierced the heavens, it had come to realize the consequences of its act. The gentle meaning of Christ, the sterner pagan wisdom of God and man had been lost in an infinity that knew no enclosing heaven, in a dreary waste of sameness that knew no distinction, not even that between man and God. Bruno the philosopher was not one to let this work of scientific devastation go on unchallenged. What if there were a God who could dwell just as clearly in a heaven that was everywhere as in a Heaven that was above? What if man could have an interest for and could serve this God, not because he was different in kind from the ant, but because he was, or rather in proportion as he was, different in degree? Does not the life that quickens an animate thing pervade that thing? Is it not the same life which in me beckons with my finger, beats with my heart, thinks with my brain? What then if this infinite world of ours were one great living thing made up of other living things, as our body is made up of finger, and heart, and brain, each of which in doing its own work does consciously or unconsciously the work of the whole? “Natura est Deus in rebus.” This is one of the phrases Bruno found in trying to express his philosophy. Nature is God in things, or let us put it--God is the life; suns and planets, men and ants, falling rain and mounting mist are but the gestures of this life. Each thinks it does what it does for its own sake, but those who think clearest realize that the joy of their doing as well as the solace of their undoing is the part they play in working out the ideal of the whole. “And He lives in me as I live in my hand”--the phrase is Von Hofmannsthal’s, the thought is Bruno’s, and it is the whole thought of Bruno the Pantheist.

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The end of this life is told in a letter written by one Gaspard Schopp (a converted Lutheran) to his friend Rittershausen, rector of the University of Altdorf:

“If I write to you now, it is because this very day Giordano Bruno was publicly burned for heresy in the Field of Flowers in front of the theater of Pompey.... If you were in Rome, you would learn from each and every Italian that a Lutheran was burned, and so you would be not a little strengthened in your opinion of our savage hatred. But you must know, my Rittershausen, that our Italians do not draw a sharp line between heretics and heretics, nor do they know fine distinctions, but if any one is a heretic they take him for a Lutheran, in which simplicity I pray that God may continue them....

“Now Bruno was that Nolan ... a professed Dominican who some twenty-three years agone began to doubt of Transubstantiation ... then forthright to deny it, and likewise the virginity of the Blessed Mary. He migrated to Geneva, ... whence, not approving himself altogether sound in his Calvinism (than which, nevertheless, nothing leads straighter to atheism), he was driven to Lyons, whence to Toulouse, from whence he passed on to Paris, where he was a professor, but extraordinarius, as he found that the professor ordinarius was obliged to attend Mass. Thence to London, where he published a little book called the ‘Beast Triumphant,’ meaning thereby the Pope, whom your party is wont to honor with the name of beast. From here to Wittenberg, where, if I am not mistaken, he lectured publicly for two years. Having gone on to Prague, he published there the works, ‘On the Boundless,’ ‘On the Innumerable Worlds,’ and yet one other, ‘On the Shadows of Ideas,’ in which he taught horrible and moreover most absurd things, as that there are innumerable worlds, that the soul passes from one body into another, ... that magic is a good thing and permissible, the Holy Spirit is nothing but the soul of the world, and that this was what Moses meant when he wrote, ‘The spirit of God moved on the face of the waters,’ that the world is eternal.... In a word, whatever is asserted by the Pagan philosophers, whatever by our older or newer heretics he (Bruno) maintained.