Part 13

A little later it transpired that the Sacred Congregation of the Supreme Tribunal of the Holy Office, in Rome, desired to assume all further responsibility for the process against so distinguished a heretic. Accordingly the machinery of the Church was put in motion to this end. Negotiations with the Venetian Republic, somewhat tedious and complicated, which need not detain us now, were at last concluded. January 7, 1603, the Venetian procurator reported of Bruno that "his faults were exceedingly grave in respect of heresies, though in other respects he was one of the most excellent and rarest natures, and of exquisite learning and knowledge," (McIntyre) but that the case was of unusual gravity, Bruno not a Venetian subject, the Pope most anxious, etc. It was then decided to remit him to the Tribunal of the Inquisition at Rome; whereat it is duly reported, the Pope was deeply gratified.

To Rome then he went and here he was lost, so far as documentary records go, for a period of six years. How to explain this fact and this apparent clemency has bothered the biographers not a little. Whether this time was spent in an examination of his voluminous writings, which would seem incredible, or whether the Dominicans labored so long to procure his more absolute recantation in order to prevent scandal in and reflection on their order, or whether Pope Clement himself regarded kindly--in some degree-- the great scholar who was so anxious to dedicate to him a magnum opus;--to these queries history answereth not. The Dominicans pretended--years later--to doubt if he ever had been put to death, or whether he had ever really belonged to their order. These statements are too characteristic to provoke more than a sad smile.

Finally matters were hastened to an end by the efforts of Fathers Commisario and Bellarmino; the latter being the zealous bigot who decided that Copernicanism was a heresy, who later laid the indictment against Galileo. Through their machinations Bruno was, in February, 1599, decreed on eight counts as a dangerous heretic, who might still admit his heresies, and he was to be granted forty days in which to recant and repent. But this period was stretched out some ten months, until December, when it was reported that Bruno refused to recant, having nothing to take back. Among the Tribunal at this time was San Severino, fanatical, bitter because of his failure to secure the papacy, who had declared that St. Bartholomew's was "a glorious day, a day of joy for Catholics." It was decided that the high officers of the Dominicans should make one last effort to compel or coax Bruno to abjure. This he declined to do, Whereupon, January 20th, 1600, it was decreed that "further measures be proceeded to, servatis servandis, that sentence be passed, and that the said Friar Giordano be handed over to the secular authority." A few days later Bruno was degraded, excommunicated and handed over to the Governor of Rome, with the usual hypocritical recommendation to "mercy," and that he be punished "without effusion of blood," which meant of course burning at the stake.

Bruno's reply to his judges deserves to be printed in letters of gold whenever it can be recorded;--"Greater perhaps is your fear in pronouncing my sentence than mine in hearing it."

Let us spare ourselves a too minute account of his execution. Some reports are to the effect that his tongue was tied, because he refused to listen to the exhortations of those members of the Company of St. John the Beheaded, better known as the Brothers of the Misericordia, who accompanied the condemned to the scaffold or the stake, resorting to the most cruel methods in order to provoke at least some appearance of recantation or repentance during the last moments of life.

Right here let it be said of Bruno that whatever may have been his weaknesses before the Inquisition at Venice, he stood firmly by his creed when put to the final test, and died an ideal martyr's death because his creed did not agree with that of his persecutors.

And so terminated the life of one of Italy's greatest ornaments and scholars. The occasion had not then the importance we assign it now. The burning of a heretic was a frequent spectacle, and the year 1600 was the year of Jubilee, in which the death of one unbeliever more was but the incident of a day. He had himself foreseen it, saying, "Torches, fifty or a hundred, will not fail me, even though the march past be at mid-day, should it be my fate to die in Roman Catholic Country."

There remains yet to comment on his character and to analyze his views.

The greatest blot upon the former is his attitude before the Venetian Tribunal. Here he was at first defiant, even polemical, strong in his asserted right to use the natural light of sense and reason. Under greater stress he modified this to one of absolute and indignant denial, and finally became submissive to the last degree, cringing and finally begging for pardon on bended knees. That this attitude changed with his better realization of his predicament is undeniable. Moreover what keen and sensitive natures may do under the influence of torture is never to be predicated. How many of us could resist the persuasiveness of the rack when it came to modifying our beliefs? But whatever may have been his weakness at that time, he completely rehabilitated himself before his end, for were not his ashes scattered to the winds as a token that he completely failed to recant? Surely no martyr to science or dogma ever died a more dignified death, for the edification or example of others.

What shall be said of his persecutors and prosecutors? Let us here be charitable; let us be just. Have we yet that absolute knowledge of right and wrong which can enable us to pass final judgment on men of the past, their motives and actions? Moral perceptions are the product of the race, the age and the environment; they vary greatly with the times. There is no crime in or out of the Decalogue which has at all times and by all peoples been regarded as such. The Church during several centuries enjoyed a monopoly of wisdom or learning as well as of opportunities for acquiring them. Zealotry, bigotry, intolerance, fanaticism, were the natural products of such conditions. So were cruelty and disregard of human life. Join the mind of a bigot to the body of one who knows not fear, and the result will be a Loyola, or a St. Louis of France, who held that the only argument a layman should engage in with a heretic should be a sword thrust through the body. If then heresy was a crime, punishable by a cruel death in all the capitals of Europe, let us blame less the men who were trained and grew up with these notions, but rather more the Church which preached them, whether Catholic or Protestant. Only if one of these really were, as it still claims to be, infallible, then what has become of its infallibility? Or if heresy be held still a crime then what shall we say of the Church's ethics? If one were God-given the other is un-Christ-like. But no free thinker can engage in theological polemics, or with jesuitical sophistries, without letting his reason excite his emotions; and when the emotions enter the door logic flies out of the window.

Let us say then that Bruno was in some respects so far ahead of his day and generation that they understood him not. And yet he was a torch bearer, save at his own last funeral pyre, shedding forth a light which illumed the centuries to come, and helping to make the period of the Italian Renaissance one of the most important and glorious in the world's history. If better known and more widely studied, he would be by English and American students placed on that pinnacle which he deserves in the Hall of Fame.

What shall be said of Bruno as a philosopher? He, first of all men in the middle ages, taught that Nature was lovable and worthy of study. Loving her, trusting, confiding in her, he found himself at outs with all the mental processes of his fellow scholars. In this way the natural method was brought into direct opposition with the ponderously artificial and strained methods of his day. He held that our eyes were given us that we might open and look upward. "Seeing, I do not pretend not to see, nor fear to profess it openly," he says. His philosophy was rather a product of intuition than of ratiocination, which became his real religion, for which Catholicism was a cloak, because in those days one was compelled to wear a cloak or live but a short life, and that within prison walls. What the medieval church, Catholic and even Protestant, has to answer for, as to the suppression of truth and provocation of hypocrisy, is beyond the mensuration of man. For the argument from authority he had the greatest contempt, and herein he set the world of thinkers a valuable lesson. "To believe with the many because they were many, was the mark of a slave," (McIntyre). Before Bacon, before Descrates, he saw the necessity of "first clearing the mind of all prejudice, all traditional beliefs that rest on authority." He thus begins one of his sonnets:--

"Oh, holy assinity! Oh, holy ignorance, holy folly and pious devotion; which alone makest souls so good that human wit and zeal can go no further," etc.

By the independence of his mental processes he was thrown quite upon his own resources, and his nature, already dignified and reserved, was made more introspective and self-conscious. In this way he developed strains of vanity and egotism which led him at times to the bombastic self-laudation of a Paracelsus. He had nothing but disgust for the common people and the sort of scholars (pedants) whom they admired. The vulgar mind was more influenced by sophisms, by appearance, by failure to distinguish between the shadow and the substance. Take but two or three of Bruno's conceptions:--

He perhaps first during the middle ages taught the transformation of lower into higher organisms, following the Greeks who first enunciated the doctrine of evolution, which it remained for Darwin and Wallace to edit and illustrate as that law of the organic continuity of life, which we call evolution. He further wrote of the human hand as a factor in the evolution of the human race, in a way which should have commended him to the author of the Bridgewater treatise. He wrote of the changes on the earth's surface brought about by natural processes, which have changed not only the external configuration of the same but the fate and destiny of nations; of the identity of matter throughout the universe; of the universal movement of matter. Long before Lessing he showed how myths may contain the germs of great truths, and should be regarded as indications thereof. In this way, he told us, the Bible was to be regarded, holding its more or less historical statements to be quite subordinate to its moral teachings.

When we realize how to such highly developed reasoning powers as Bruno possessed, were added a phenomenal memory, a tremendous power of assimilation, a developed imagination, a poetic nature, the gift of easy and accurate speech and a temperament easily excited to fervor in attack or defense, we may the better appreciate his dominating greatness as well as his trifling weakness; the former being entirely to his own credit while the latter are ascribed largely to the faults of his time, and the fact that he was really living far ahead of his day and generation. He was not only the forerunner of modern science, he was the prototype of the modern biblical critic, foreshadowing the modern higher criticism, albeit in veiled terms, and as a matter of esoteric teaching; because the biblical critic of those days was burned at the stake, while to-day he is barely ostracized by the shallow and narrow minded, with whom he has at best nothing mentally in common. So much have four centuries of labor and vicarious suffering accomplished for the emancipation of the human mind.

Bruno had a creed, but it was too simple for his times. He rejected certain orthodox dogmas, (e. g. the Trinity, the Immaculate Conception) which commend themselves still less to the emancipated and cultivated minds of to-day. He absolutely rejected authority, which was a step toward reason comparable to the freeing of the slaves or serfs. He evolved a theory of evolution from a priori concepts, which it remained for Darwin to complete and demonstrate. He believed in the natural history of religions. His motives were of the loftiest, though his methods were not always those of to-day. He believed that the essence of truth inhered in those differences which kept men apart, and still sever them. He believed the law of love and that it sprang from God, which is the Father of All, that it was in harmony with nature, and that by love we may be transformed into something of His likeness. As Bruno himself says:--"This is the religion, above controversy or dispute, which I observe from the belief of my own mind, and from the custom of my fatherland and my race." (McIntyre, p. 110).

And yet this sublime man was burned as a heretic! Let us stop when we hereafter pass through the Campo dei Fiori, as I have done many a time, and take off our hats to the memory of this great man, who, while small in some human traits, yet was the greatest thinker in Italy during the sixteenth century, whose memory may help us to forget some of the hypocrisies and cant so generally prevalent during the age which and among the men who condemned him. Let us also thank God that there is no Tribunal of the Inquisition to-day, to pass misguided judgment upon us for having gone further than Bruno ever dreamed, though along the same lines, and to condemn us therefore to the Flames.

This paper has already been prolonged, perhaps tiresomely, nevertheless I cannot refrain from quoting a few paragraphs from that most versatile student of this period, Symonds, whose estimate of Bruno is as follows:--(Renaissance in Italy; Catholic Reaction, II Chap. ix).

"Bruno appears before us as the man who most vitally and comprehensively grasped the leading tendencies of his age in their intellectual essence. He left behind him the mediaeval conception of an extra-mundane God, creating a finite world, of which this globe is the center, and the principal episode in the history of which is the series of events from the Fall, through the Incarnation and Crucifixion, to the Last Judgment. He substituted the conception of an ever-living, ever-acting, ever-self-effectuating God, immanent in an infinite universe, to the contemplation of whose attributes the mind of man ascends by the study of Nature and interrogation of his conscience.

"Bolder even than Copernicus, and nearer in his intuition to the truth, he denied that the universe had "flaming walls" or any walls at all. That "immaginata circonferenza," "quella margine immaginata del cielo," on which antique science and Christian theology alike reposed, was the object of his ceaseless satire, his oft-repeated polemic. What, then, rendered Bruno the precursor of modern thought in its various manifestations, was that he grasped the fundamental truth upon which modern science rests, and foresaw the conclusions which must be drawn from it. He speculated boldly, incoherently, vehemently; but he speculated with a clear conception of the universe, as we still apprehend it. Through the course of three centuries we have been engaged in verifying the guesses, deepening, broadening and solidifying the hypotheses, which Bruno's extension of the Copernican theory, and his application of it to pure thought suggested to his penetrating and audacious intellect."

Bruno was convinced that religion in its higher essence would not sufferer from the new philosophy. Larger horizons extended before the human intellect. The soul expanded in more exhilarating regions than the old theologies had offered.

"Lift up thy light on us and on thine own, O soul whose spirit on earth was as a rod To scourge off priests, a sword to pierce their God, A staff for man's free thought to walk alone, A lamp to lead him far from shrine and throne On ways untrodden where his fathers trod Ere earth's heart withered at a high priest's nod, And all men's mouths that made not prayer made moan. From bonds and torments, and the ravening flame, Surely thy spirit of sense rose up to greet Lucretius, where such only spirits meet, And walk with him apart till Shelley came To make the heaven of heavens more heavenly sweet, And mix with yours a third incorporate name."

VIII

STUDENT LIFE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

An Address given before the Chas. K. Mills Society of Students of the University of Pennsylvania, February 19, 1902.

I assume that every university student of today realizes that his possibilities and his opportunities are better in every way than were those enjoyed by students of bygone times. I take it, also, that you would not be averse to listening to an account of the habits, the surroundings, the privileges, and the disadvantages which surrounded students at a time when universities were young and when customs in general, as well as manners, were very different from those of to-day. With all this in view, I shall ask your attention to a brief account of Student Life in the Middle Ages, with especial reference to that of the medical student. Measured by its results, the most priceless legacy of mediæval times to mankind was the university system, which began in crude form and with an almost mythical origin, but which gradually took form and shape in consequence of many external forces. It represented an effort to "realize in concrete form an ideal of life in one of its aspects." Such ideals "pass into great historic forces by embodying themselves in institutions," as witness, for instance, the case of the Church of Rome.

The use of words in our language has undergone many curious perversions. Take our word "bombast," for instance. Originally it was a name applied to the cotton plant. Then it was applied to any padding for garments which was made of cotton. Later it was used as describing literary padding, as it were, as when one filled out an empty speech with unnecessary and long words, and, at last, it came to have the meaning which we now give it. So with the word "university." "Universitas" in the original Latin meant simply a collection, a plurality, or an aggregation. It was almost synonymous with "collegium." By the beginning of the thirteenth century it was applied to corporations of masters or students and to other associated bodies, and implied an association of individuals, not a place of meeting, nor even a collection of schools. If we were to be literal and consistent in our use of terms, for the place where such collections of men exercise scholastic functions the term should be "studium generale," meaning thereby a place, not where all things are studied, but where students come together from all directions. Very few of the mediæval studia possessed all the faculties of a modern university. Even Paris, in its palmiest days, had no faculty of law. The name universitas implies a general invitation to students from all over the world to seek there a place for higher education from numerous masters or teachers. The three great studia of the thirteenth century were Paris, transcendent in theology and the arts; Bologna, where legal lore prevailed; and Salernum, where existed the greatest medical school of the world's history. In spite of the fact that these, like all the other studia of the Middle Ages, were under the influence of the Church, from them sprang most of the inspiration that constituted the mainspring of mediæval intellectual activity, although how baneful such influence could be may be illustrated by the Spanish--that is, the ultra-Catholic University of Salamanca, where not until one hundred years ago were they allowed to teach the Copernican system of astronomy.