Giordano Bruno Read online

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  To Professoressa Hilary Gatti and Avvocato Dario Guidi Federzoni

  A Note on Translation

  The translations are all my own. I have rendered vernacular verse in equivalent English iambics, matching Bruno’s rhyme scheme wherever possible and also matching his short lines. Latin hexameters are rendered in a rough English equivalent (as in “The Charge of the Light Brigade”) that bases meter on stress accent rather than vowel quantity.

  Prologue: The Hooded Friar

  February 17 marks a peculiarly Roman holiday whose ritual centers on the bronze statue of a hooded friar. Just over life size, clutching a book in manacled hands, he glowers over the marketplace of Campo de’ Fiori, the “Field of Flowers” that was also, for many years, one of the city’s execution grounds. The statue was meant to point in the opposite direction, facing the sun, but a last-minute decision by the City Council of Rome in 1889 turned it around to face the Vatican, which had complained that the original placement was disrespectful. Because of this change in position, the friar’s face is always shadowed, so that he looks more melancholy than defiant. But then, he is a man condemned to die by burning at the stake; he has every reason to be melancholy.

  For at least five hundred years, Roman statues have been champions of free speech; three blocks from the Campo de’ Fiori, an ancient marble wreck of two torsos and a noseless head named Mastro Pasquino has been papered with acid comments on Roman life ever since the first years of the sixteenth century. From satires of the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, he has moved on to hurling invectives against the current prime minister, and for many years a spray-painted feminist graffito on his base proclaimed him Pasquina.

  Down the street in the other direction, a togaed ancient Roman called Abbot Luigi (Abate Luigi) has been talking nearly as long as Pasquino; the removal of his grizzled old head by a thief in the 1970s failed to stop his chatter, and he has long since been recapitated with the portrait of some other stern old senator, one no less pleased to speak his mind without inhibition to latter-day Romans. The friar in the Campo de’ Fiori makes a worthy companion to this vocal pair, and to their more distant colleagues Madama Lucrezia and Marforio, both of whom, sadly, have been dumbstruck by modern life: Madama Lucrezia may have begun as the cult image of Isis in ancient Rome’s most elaborate Egyptian temple, but she now lords it over a bus stop in Piazza Venezia, while handsome Marforio, a strapping Roman river god, is shut up in the Capitoline Museum, where no one can reach him any longer to give him a paper voice. Instead, Giordano Bruno, the friar of Campo de’ Fiori, must now speak for them both. And he does, in letters of bronze on his granite pedestal: “To Bruno, from the generation he foresaw, here, where the pyre burned.”

  That generation, the first student generation of the newly created Italian state, commissioned the statue in the 1880s from the sculptor Ettore Ferrari, supported by an international subscription campaign. Italy’s formation had hinged on seizing political control of Rome and its territories from the governmental dominion of the papacy, and hence the monument to Bruno thumbed its nose at the pope with spectacular impudence by paying tribute to one of the Inquisition’s most illustrious victims—and reminded the Vatican just why this new Italy had chosen so eagerly to become a secular state.

  The Roman students chose Bruno as their patron martyr not only for his bravery but also for his ideas; more boldly than anyone in his age, including Kepler and Galileo, he had declared that the universe was made of atoms and that it was infinite in size. His violent, public death for those convictions showed the Catholic Church in its most cruelly repressive light, for Bruno had not been a political man, nor had he committed any crime except to speak his mind. For the students of a new Italy and a newly independent Rome, the statue was meant to prove that ideas can and must prevail over the attempt to stifle them.

  To this day, then, on the morning of February 17, a contingent from City Hall places a wreath at the bronze Bruno’s feet, its laurel leaves draped in red and gold ribbons, the initials “SPQR” embossed in gold letters. By laying a wreath at Bruno’s feet, the mayor of Rome continues to assert the modern city’s independence from a temporal Church. The process usually displaces an early drinker or two, and as floral offerings pile up around the wreath, together with poems, candles, and invectives, they stay displaced. Late in the afternoon, when the market stalls have been taken down and squirreled away in side streets, the Italian Association of Free Thinkers sets up a microphone at Bruno’s feet; meanwhile, the atheists and the pantheists, carefully separated from each other, lay out their tables of books and leaflets on opposite sides of the piazza. In between them, the Free Thinkers guard their microphone jealously, wresting it in turn from the man in the sandwich board who claims to be Giordano Bruno incarnate, from the tipplers who use the statue’s base as a convenient perch, from the students, artists, and enthusiasts who think—wrongly, as it turns out—that free thought implies free speech. This microphone is only for organizations, the Free Thinkers declare to all their competitors for the space beneath Giordano’s lowering gaze: the Masons, the atheists, and the pantheists, all of whom claim the hooded friar as their very own spiritual leader. Brooding and silent above the fray, steadfast above the dispute between the believers in no god and the believers in all gods, the bronze Giordano Bruno glares at the distant Vatican, which put the real Giordano Bruno to death here in the Campo de’ Fiori on February 17, 1600, for obstinate and pertinacious heresy.

  By evening, Ettore Ferrari’s statue will be covered with offerings, as if Giordano Bruno were a miracle-working saint rather than a condemned heretic.

  Since the statue’s dedication, Bruno’s reputation has undergone several new transformations. If late-nineteenth-century Italians saw him as an apostle of modern science, a pair of mid-twentieth-century scholars at the Warburg Institute in London, Frances Yates and D. P. Walker, recast him as a religious reformer, a mystic, and a practitioner of magic; Giovanni Aquilecchia, their younger contemporary in London, waited years to see Bruno the magician give way to more general acceptance of his own view of Bruno as a philosopher. However diverse their portraits of Bruno, Yates and Aquilecchia were both remarkable writers and teachers who drew a surprisingly wide range of new readers to the Italian heretic. In the mid-1980s, Bruno was still regarded as a marginal figure, and only a handful of books had been dedicated to him since the great burst of interest in the late nineteenth century; a decade later, Giordano had acquired his own periodical, Bruniana & Campanelliana, several institutions (including a convent of Dominican nuns in Utrecht) bearing his name, and a remarkable degree of public interest that culminated in widespread commemorations of the four hundredth anniversary of his death—which coincided, by a four-hundred-year-old design, with the great jubilee proclaimed for the Catholic Church by Pope John Paul II. (Bruno’s burning had been deliberately set by Pope Clement VIII for the jubilee of 1600.) In recent years, the people who leave flowers on the statue in Campo de’ Fi
ori (and not only on February 17) come from around the world. Their interests in Bruno range as widely as his own writings, from pragmatic observation to rapturous mysticism, from appreciation of his complex prose to uncomplicated admiration for his courage in the defense of free thought.

  Ferrari’s heroic, imposing Bruno is anything but realistic: Bruno had not worn a Dominican habit for twenty-four years when he was marched off to the stake; indeed, as a final indignity, he was stripped naked before he burned. There are no surviving portraits of the gaunt little man who by that time had spent eight years in inquisitorial prison, only a report of his fierce expression; Ferrari’s robust image reflects the man’s spirit, not his body. And its placement obeys the laws of urban design rather than historical accuracy: Bruno died in the southwest corner of the piazza, toward Piazza Farnese, not its center, despite the statue’s declaration “Here, where the pyre burned.” Somber as it is, Ferrari’s hooded friar has succeeded so well because he captures the sheer challenge that Bruno posed for his times, a challenge that has lost none of its power since 1600, or 1889. The devout Galileo has been rehabilitated by the church that condemned him to silence in 1633; his offending Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was reprinted with papal approval as early as 1712, and he was officially pardoned by Pope John Paul II in 1983. But as the anniversary of Bruno’s death loomed over the Roman jubilee year of 2000, John Paul declared, through two cardinals, Angelo Sodano and Paul Poupard, that Bruno had deviated too far from Christian doctrine to be granted Christian pardon. The inquisitors who put the philosopher to his gruesome death, the cardinals added, should be judged in the light of their gruesome times. As Sodano noted, in what was obviously a carefully worded document: “It is not our place to express judgments about the conscience of those who were involved in this matter. Objectively, nonetheless, certain aspects of these procedures and in particular their violent result at the hand of civil authority, in this and analogous cases, cannot but constitute a cause for profound regret on the part of the Church.”

  * * *

  As a child of those same gruesome times, Giordano Bruno asserted that in the end even the devils would be pardoned and that religious strife, with its human claim to see through God’s eyes, was the most misguided strife of all. Despite the optimism of the Roman students who erected his monument in Campo de’ Fiori, in many respects the generation he foresaw still belongs to the future.

  Bruno poses no less formidable a challenge to historians of science. Working without instrumentation, posing thought problems that reflected both ancient and modern ideas about natural philosophy, he fits uncomfortably into any scheme that aims to trace scientific thought in a neat line from Copernicus through Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein. He was, perhaps, more of a poet than an empirical observer. Yet his intellectual contradictions, his blind spots, and his insights serve as a reminder that scientific investigation has always depended on inspiration as well as investigation, on mistakes as well as triumphs.

  Above all, Giordano Bruno defies any kind of summary judgment; his life, his ideas, and his personality are as complex as his times are distant from our own. He could be charming or infuriating, charismatic or repellent. For all his faults, however, he was brave and brilliant, and, as these pages aim to show, he was a splendid writer.

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Most Solemn Act of Justice

  CAMPO DE’ FIORI, ROME, FEBRUARY 17, 1600

  If you will not accompany [the Nolan] with fifty or a hundred torches—which shall certainly not be lacking should he come to die in Roman Catholic territory—at least give him one; or, if even this seems too much for you, press upon him a lantern with a tallow candle inside.

  —The Ash Wednesday Supper, dialogue 5

  For a public execution, it was a strangely rushed affair. In the feeble light of a winter dawn, the parade of officials, inquisitors, and priests could hardly be seen as it pulled away from the prison of Tor di Nona. Not many people were about to see it in any case; shops and market stalls were only beginning to set up for the day. Nothing blocked the procession’s brisk progress down the Via Papale to Campo de’ Fiori, the “Field of Flowers” that served Rome as both marketplace and execution ground.

  As tradition demanded, a mule carried the prisoner. Tradition had its roots in practicality; by the time they had been sentenced to death, many of the condemned could no longer walk on their own. Some, indeed, were already dead, garroted before their bodies were ceremonially burned at the stake. But this prisoner, Giordano Bruno, was physically healthy, and when he reached the Campo de’ Fiori, he would be burned alive. There was no other suitable punishment for the heresies he had continued to proclaim during his eight days in Tor di Nona, and for eight previous years in the prisons of the Inquisition. For more than a week, day and night, teams of confessors had tried to change his mind; Dominican, Augustinian, and Franciscan friars succeeded each other in shifts, begging him to save his soul by recanting—because for his body, as they knew, there was no longer any hope. That morning, however, the last team of religious had given up. They handed over their charge once and for all to the black-hooded lay brothers of the Confraternity of Saint John the Beheaded, volunteers who carried out one of their faith’s seven works of mercy by providing last-minute companionship for prisoners condemned to death. After offering Bruno the traditional breakfast of almond biscuits dipped in dense brown Marsala wine, the brothers of Saint John prayed over him as the jailers stopped his tongue with a leather gag and set him on his mule. When the procession began to move down the Via Papale, they held high a painting of the crucifix, hoping to catch the gagged man’s eye with their gold-framed image of the suffering Christ.

  The records for that morning—February 17, 1600—report that Bruno “was led by officers of the law to Campo de’ Fiori, and there, stripped naked and tied to a stake, he was burned alive, always accompanied by our company singing the litanies, and the comforters, up to the last, urging him to abandon his obstinacy, with which he finally ended his miserable and unhappy life.”

  The inquisitors who ordered this strangely ambivalent execution were afraid of what they were doing, and Bruno knew it. Eight days earlier, when they read him his verdict, an eyewitness reported that “he made no other reply than, in a menacing tone, ‘You may be more afraid to bring that sentence against me than I am to accept it.’” Sixteen hundred was a jubilee year, when pilgrims from all over the Catholic world came to Rome to earn reprieves from purgatory by visiting seven churches on one day, but not every visitor came to collect the indulgence. Protestant troublemakers had already disrupted services several times this Holy Year, crying “Idolatry!” as the priest held up the Host for consecration, or murmuring and jostling among the congregation until completing the Mass became all but impossible. Bruno himself had spent years in Protestant countries, almost always moving at the highest levels of society, among kings, ambassadors, dukes, and electors. No one knew what political connections he might still have or who might object to the sight of him burning alive. His execution had already been aborted once, as an agent for the Duke of Urbino had reported earlier in the week:

  Today we thought we would see a most solemn act of justice, and we don’t know why it was stopped; it was a Dominican friar from Nola, a most obstinate heretic, whom they sentenced Wednesday in the house of Cardinal Madruzzi as the author of various terrible opinions which he obstinately continued to maintain, and is still maintaining them. Every day theologians visit him. They say that this friar was in Geneva two years, and then he went on to lecture at Toulouse, and afterward at Lyon, and from thence to England, where they say that his opinions were not at all well received. For that reason he went on to Nuremberg, and from there returning to Italy he was captured, and they say that in Germany he disputed with Cardinal Bellarmine on several occasions, and all told, if God doesn’t help the wretch, he wants to die obstinate and be burned alive.

  The agent’s factual information, like most Roman gossip, w
as not quite correct (Bruno had never met Cardinal Bellarmine in Germany), but he grasped the essentials of the case and the inquisitors’ fears: Bruno’s ideas terrified them as much as his possible political clout, and they were desperate to find an alternative to public immolation. It was a violent age, and the reigning pope, Clement VIII, had approved some horrific executions in the recent past, like the burning of a Scottish heretic in 1595, dutifully reported to the Duke of Urbino by the same agent who would report on Bruno:

  The execution was carried out in Campo de’ Fiori, where to terrify him a huge pile of firewood, charcoal, kindling, and more than ten cartloads of pitch had been prepared, and for the occasion a shirt of pitch was made for him that extended from his waist to his feet, black as coal, and then it was put over his naked flesh so that he would not die as quickly, and his life would be consumed in the fire as painfully as possible. He was conducted to the scaffold with a large escort, and made to sit on an iron chair next to the fire, which had already been lit. The usual protest was made on his behalf, as one does for good servants of God, in order to see him repent: that there was still time to obtain grace, but, as soon as he had mounted the iron chair, he threw himself with a great hurry into the burning flames, and buried in them, he died in these earthly flames to spend an eternity in those other flames of hell.

  Giordano Bruno’s execution, by contrast, would be quick and quiet, a pageant to be forgotten. There must have been some fear that the show would be seen as barbaric, if one of its witnesses, the Catholic convert Gaspar Schoppe, could rush home to reassure the Lutheran Conrad Rittershausen, his onetime mentor, that it had all been perfectly civil:

  This very day prompts me to write, in which Giordano Bruno, because of his heresy, was publicly burned in Campo de’ Fiori before the Theater of Pompey … If you were in Rome now, you would hear from many Italians that a Lutheran had been burned, and thus you would find no small confirmation for your opinion of our savagery.