Giordano Bruno Read online

  Reconciliation was no less impossible in the world outside between French Catholics, loyal to King Henri III, and Protestant Huguenots, who had found a champion in Henri IV, king of Navarre. In the spring of 1581, the city of Toulouse imprisoned emissaries sent from the Catholics of southern Provence to negotiate with Henri IV. When the city council refused to release the Provençal delegates, Henri III, from Paris, threatened to send in his army.

  Shortly thereafter, Giordano Bruno, the new professor of philosophy at the University of Toulouse, set out for Paris, intent on obtaining a place at the Sorbonne. Ever since his arrival in Geneva, if not long before, he had hoped to find a place to live in “liberty and safety.” With Toulouse threatening to explode, he seems to have hoped that such a refuge might be waiting for him in the only other European city to rival Naples for size, complexity, and political turmoil.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Gifts of the Magi

  PARIS, 1581–1583

  There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day; And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores … And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried; And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame. But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented. And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence. Then he said, I pray thee therefore, Father, that thou wouldest send him to my Father’s house; For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment. Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them. And he said, Nay, Father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent. And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.

  —Luke 16:19–31

  By the time he arrived in Paris, in the summer of 1581, Giordano Bruno had been moving across Italy and France for six years, and if we are to believe his description of himself, the strain had begun to show:

  If you knew the Author, you would say that he has the look of a lost soul; he seems always to be contemplating the punishments of hell, he seems to be pressed flat as a beret, someone who laughs only to fit in; for the most part you’ll see him irritated, recalcitrant, and strange, content with nothing, stubborn as an old man of eighty, skittish as a dog that has been whipped a thousand times, a weepy onion eater.

  Whipped and skittish he may have felt, but he continued to move with the aristocratic confidence of a friar from San Domenico Maggiore. For when Giordano Bruno reached the French capital, he headed straight for the Sorbonne and the court of King Henri III, offering to earn his keep by teaching king, courtiers, and professors the art of memory. At the same time, he also hinted at a certain expertise in magic, though Bruno’s idea of magic, as individual as the rest of his thought, had more to do with ancient wisdom than with either superstition or conjuring tricks. The three Magi who brought their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the Christ Child were the kinds of magicians with whom Bruno felt a kinship, not the charlatans and mountebanks who performed stunts from the backs of their carts and sold miraculous unguents in the marketplace. Real Magi were wise men, not tricksters, and their art derived its power from understanding how the world worked.

  Like most people of his time and place, however, Giordano Bruno did believe in demons. As a child in Nola, he had known them as evanescent creatures who threw stones and snatched cloaks in the night, especially in the forest near his house. They continued throughout his life to play practical jokes, misplacing things more for the sheer mischief of it than out of real malevolence. When he described them in On the Immense and the Numberless, his great sober poem about the structure of the cosmos, he did so with his best efforts at philosophical rigor:

  Certainly in the interior regions of this [earth] there are living creatures of more subtle body, lively, not terribly rational, that have little in common with us; and [in the night air] there are daemons, neither terribly friendly to human beings nor terribly unfriendly, but nonetheless mockers and liars. They may have no more wit than we, but they excel in this: because their bodies are as ductile as the bodies of clouds, they can fuse and contract themselves into various shapes, and enter into our dreams, and announce things to us that they have seen more rapidly than we. Hence they are thought to see the future, when in fact they are a good deal less discerning than we.

  Like Jesus and his apostles, experts at casting out spirits, the Church maintained a corps of exorcists to keep control over the demonic population. As inquisitors, some of Bruno’s fellow Dominicans kept special watch on the sorcerers and witches who tried to use demons rather than drive them away. The difference between sorcery and witchcraft was largely a difference in the social standing of their practitioners. Witches were poor and unlettered people, vagabonds, local eccentrics, or purveyors of home remedies. Their “magic” involved the occult business of casting or lifting the evil eye, mixing love potions, or predicting the future. This was the magic for desperate people, the magic to call upon when medicines failed, lovers strayed, enemies prospered, children died. It was practiced disproportionately by people on the margins of society: by women, especially old women, by traveling sages, foreigners, Muslim slaves; surprisingly, the people who seemed to have power over the unseen world were conspicuously powerless in the world of everyday, as powerless as the customers who turned to them as a last resort. The roots of their folk magic ran deep. Many of its rituals were already common among the ancient Greeks who colonized southern Italy. Like their Greek forebears, Italian women in Bruno’s day told fortunes by “throwing the beans”: casting dried fava beans and other objects in order to read the future from the way they fell. In other ancient rituals, they floated drops of oil on a dish of water to test for the evil eye, read palms, and prepared love philters.

  Sorcerers and magicians stood at the other end of the social spectrum; their education in the magic arts came from books, most of them in Latin. Their clients were often more curious than desperate. Rather than solving individual problems, this magic looked for general principles to explain the workings of the world. In many ways, the discipline that Bruno and his contemporaries called “natural magic” was just another branch of natural philosophy: a discipline that focused its attention on nature’s many and baffling shortcuts. Phenomena like magnetism, meteors, phosphorescence, and gunpowder were surpassingly strange, but they behaved with a certain consistency, and natural magic aimed to understand them as well as control them. In a sense, every kind of magic tried to turn nature’s powers to personal advantage, but natural magic tried to do so more systematically than its folk counterpart: superstitious sixteenth-century lovers wore magnets to become more magnetically attractive, but sixteenth-century magicians might also want to know what magnetism was.

  All magic, whatever its level of sophistication, worked on the principle of analogy. The analogies at the base of popular magic were literal-minded—wearing magnets to become irresistibly attractive, sticking pins into wax dolls to harm an enemy, or more elaborate rituals, like this cure performed on a seventeenth-century Knight of Malta (typically, the healers were foreigners): “A Greek who healed spleens … made me put my left foot on a prickly-pear leaf, and then cut it around my foot as his wife said ‘what are you doing?’ and he replied ‘I’m cutting Fra Paolo’s spleen,’ and they repeated these words three times.”

  The ideas behind natural magic could be equally l
iteral, as in the fifteenth-century Florentine philosopher and physician Marsilio Ficino’s regimen outlined in On Living the Heavenly Life (De vita coelitus comparanda), with its recommendations to drink the milk of young women or eat sweets to preserve youth, and carefully place stones, gems, and colors associated with each planet in strategic places around the house to focus their benevolent influence and scatter the bad.

  Although Bruno readily acknowledged Ficino’s influence on the Nolan philosophy, his own version of natural magic seems to have borne little resemblance to the Florentine’s sweet life. For one thing, Bruno had been constantly on the move; in temporary quarters it was harder to place stones, find the right food, and persuade young mothers to give up their milk to middle-aged men. Appropriately to his situation, his magic had become more abstract, more intellectual, more portable; rather than arranging external objects around him, he arranged ideas inside his head and held them there fast.

  The ancient Greeks and Romans often described magical operations as capturing, binding, or chaining their object—“fascination,” the Roman word for the evil eye, was another word for “binding,” derived from fascia, a strip of cloth. Bruno preferred the image of chains or bonds; one of his magical treatises would eventually be called On Bonds in General. The fundamental key to Bruno’s natural magic, however, was neither strips nor chains but the art of memory; by storing and manipulating the knowledge within his own mind, he declared, he could gain power over the entire universe. This was what he seems, at least implicitly, to have promised to teach to the king of France.

  What could the art of memory do for a king like Henri III? For a monarch, more than for most people, memory really was a source of power, especially if the monarch were directly involved in government, as Henri certainly was. If he could remember what he had to do, what he meant to do, what he had already done, it was obvious that he would govern his state more efficiently. Bureaucratic records were kept in large paper books, and however well these might be organized (usually they were organized very well indeed), the best way to search them quickly was to know, and to remember, what they contained. If Bruno professed a particularly powerful art of memory, and his public performances certainly suggest that he did, a king could make use of those same talents to do much more than astonish the learned. To an extent not permitted to most of his contemporaries, Henri really could control the world around him.

  Bruno told his inquisitors how he first attracted the king’s attention:

  I gave a course as adjunct professor to make myself known and show what I was about. I gave thirty lectures, taking thirty attributes of divinity from the first book of Saint Thomas; and then I stayed on, because I was asked to give a regular course, but I did not want to accept it, because the public professors in that city ordinarily go to Mass and the other services. And I have always avoided doing this, knowing that I had been excommunicated for having left religious life. And by lecturing as an adjunct professor, I acquired such a reputation that King Henri III summoned me one day, examining me to find out whether the memory I used and taught was natural or a magical art. I gave him satisfaction, and from what I told him and had him try on his own, he understood that it worked not by magic arts but by knowledge. After this I published a book on memory under the title On the Shadows of Ideas, which I dedicated to His Majesty, and on that occasion he made me an adjunct professor with a living.

  Bruno’s initial series of lectures (the ones by which he made himself known in Paris) must have concerned logic and metaphysics. They were drawn from the first book of Thomas Aquinas’s masterwork, the Summa theologiae; the first book was sometimes treated as a treatise in its own right, On the One God. Bruno cannot have been unaware that he was lecturing in the same city where Aquinas had been a student, and where the great Dominican, a Neapolitan nobleman, had first established his own reputation. The Nolan philosopher’s choice of subject, then, was peculiarly appropriate to his situation. Alongside Aquinas, Bruno probably used Aristotle’s Metaphysics as a textbook, just as he had in Toulouse. Ten years later, when he lectured on the same subjects in Zurich, he devoted special attention to the vocabulary associated with this branch of philosophy and how it might connect to the study of natural philosophy; it seems likely that he did the same in Paris. As his ideas about the structure of the universe developed, they spurred him to think about how this infinitely expanded physical world might affect his concept of God, and of the significance of human life.

  For the first time, we also have a report from one of Bruno’s students about his success as a teacher. Johann von Nostitz, writing in 1615, would recall: “It was thirty-one years ago in Paris that I first heard Jordano Bruno make a magnificent presentation of himself in the arts of Ramon Llull and mnemonology or memory, attracting many private students and auditors.” Through those auditors Bruno came to the attention of King Henri III. Three years younger than Bruno, with an Italian mother, Catherine de Médicis, Henri was Catholic, but not militantly so; he did his best to mend the tensions between Catholics and Huguenots rather than suppress the Protestants altogether. Furthermore, as the Spanish ambassador to France informed his king, Philip II, Henri spent “three long hours a day listening to philosophy.” He was a monarch after Bruno’s own heart.

  Henri, in turn, was impressed enough by the Nolan philosopher to appoint him a lecteur royale, or royal reader, part of a group of professors that met outside the Sorbonne at the Collège de Cambrai. The appointment was temporary, but illustrious. Bruno’s plan to “make [him]self known” had worked to perfection; as von Nostitz reveals, the Nolan had cleverly used a standard course on logic and metaphysics as an opportunity to introduce his art of memory. He made equally shrewd use of the printing press to spread his reputation.

  The earliest of Bruno’s printed memory manuals, The Great Key, has been lost. We do not know where or when he wrote it. He published the next three in Paris in a single year, 1582, dedicating them to Henri III and two members of the royal court. These three works, On the Shadows of Ideas (De umbris idearum), The Song of Circe (Cantus Circaeus), and On the Compendious Architecture and Complement to the Art of Ramon Llull (De compendiosa architectura et complemento artis Lullii), prove how emphatically Bruno regarded his version of the artificial memory as an art, which in the sixteenth century implied a divinely inspired creation. Like the paintings of the “divine” Raphael or the sculpture of the “divine” Michelangelo, Bruno’s art of memory brought heaven down to earth by capturing sublime ideas in physical form. Although he often compared his art to painting and writing, he called it architecture, an internal mental architecture where the imagination, rather than painter’s brush or writer’s pen, acted as the tool: “Just as painting and sculpture use tools to shape their material, so, too, this art has no lack of tools to make its pictures.”

  Bruno’s first surviving work on the art of memory, On the Shadows of Ideas, is in fact the first of his works on any subject to survive to the present day. It was printed in Paris by a distinguished publisher, Gilles Gourbin, who may have regretted his association with the volatile Italian from the first moment type met paper. Bruno was an inveterate corrector, and he stood next to Gourbin’s press through the whole run: correcting, revising, changing his mind so often that the hundred-odd surviving copies of On the Shadows of Ideas differ significantly from one another—and every single one bears penned corrections in Bruno’s own hand. Dedicated to Henri III in person, and addressed to readers already armed with a copy of The Great Key, On the Shadows of Ideas sets out to liberate the art of memory from every gloom of misunderstanding that has clouded it since ancient times—little Bruno never thought small.

  In this first book, he describes the practice of artificial memory as “clever application of thought” to “presenting, modeling, noting, or indicating in the likeness of painting or writing, in order to express or signify.” In other words, the art of memory isolated individual sense perceptions from the stream of consciousness and endowed these percepti
ons with special characteristics that transformed them into thoughts; the thoughts thus singled out for attention could then be put into what Bruno called “a distilled and developed order of conceivable species, arranged as statues, or a microcosm, or some other kind of architecture … by focusing the chaos of imagination.” Like files, these statue collections or architectures of imagination were designed to store thoughts in a way that made them easily accessible, easy to recall. The stored thoughts could be recalled because they were in themselves memorable, first, because of their vivid individual detail and, second, because of the rigorous order in which they were kept within their architectures of memory.

  Bruno himself ordered all manner of thoughts and perceptions by means of these mental architectures. He describes one system in detail for the king, which works by storing words as their individual component syllables: the first syllable as an “agent” who is a mythological figure (the Egyptian Apis bull, Apollo, the witch Circe); the second syllable as an action (sailing, on the carpet, broken); the third syllable as an adjective (ignored, blind, at leisure); the fourth as an associated object (shell, serpent, fetters); the fifth as a “circumstance” (a woman dressed in pearls, a man riding a sea monster). Hence the “NU” in “NUMERO”—“number”—is the Apis bull, “ME” is “on the carpet,” “RO” is “neglected.” “NUMERATI” is “the Apis bull (NU) on the carpet (ME), lamented (RA rather than RO ‘neglected’), with a snake (TI).” Bruno, clearly influenced by Ramon Llull, advises envisioning these stored sets of syllables and their imagery on concentric wheels, each with thirty compartments corresponding to the various combinations of letters. The outermost wheel in the system stores the agents (or first syllables of words), the second wheel stores the actions (or second syllables), the third wheel stores adjectives (or third syllables), and so on inward to the fifth wheel. A single sentence thus becomes a pageant of mythological characters set in strange places, engaged in strange actions in strange company. A speech stored in this way could contain the population of a small city.