Giordano Bruno Read online

  Furthermore, the Dominicans of San Domenico Maggiore found themselves in an especially awkward position in the 1560s, caught between pressure from Spain to impose the Spanish Inquisition and pressure from Rome to impose a new set of decrees resulting from the Council of Trent. Convoked unsuccessfully in the 1530s as a response to the Protestant Reformation, seated only in 1545, the council was so riven by conflict among its delegates that it dragged on for nearly two decades, issuing its final decrees only in 1563. Its initial aim, guided by the Venetian cardinal Gasparo Contarini and the Neapolitan Girolamo Seripando, had been to attempt reconciliation with the Protestants by facing up to, and righting, the real problems within the Roman Church. Instead, the council moved toward a fierce defense of the Church’s established hierarchies and traditions, especially during the pontificate of Pope Paul IV (reigned 1555–59). The most combative of all the council’s traditionalists, Paul, a Neapolitan and the former cardinal Giovanni Pietro Carafa, pinned his own hopes for reforming the Church on a strengthened Inquisition for Catholics, hostility for the Protestants, and ghettos for the Jews. His demands for absolute obedience reflected his upbringing in a grand old baronial family, one of whose chapels stands just to the right of the entrance to the church of San Domenico Maggiore.

  Arrogant and cruel, Pope Paul also had his opponents, centered, like the cardinals Contarini and Seripando, in Venice and Naples. Though they may have emerged battered from the Council of Trent, the more conciliatory Catholic reformers continued as a powerful intellectual force, their social status and political weight comparable to those of Carafa and his allies. In Naples, figures like the aristocratic poet Vittoria Colonna (a close friend of Michelangelo’s) and a pair of Augustinian cardinals, Giles of Viterbo and Girolamo Seripando, had brought Naples into the reforming currents of the Roman Church, especially Cardinal Seripando, whose personal library in the Augustinian church of San Giovanni a Carbonara had become an important place to read and discuss philosophy and theology.

  It is no wonder, under such circumstances, that in San Domenico, Fra Eugenio Gagliardo alerted his colleagues in the Inquisition to Filippo Bruno’s strange ideas. If they had come from the young man’s own head, the Dominicans faced a simple problem; if, however, they reflected a larger trend in local thought, the problem was more serious—not necessarily for Bruno, but certainly for the Dominican Order in Naples.

  In fact, Bruno’s private thoughts were far more radical than the novice master knew. After having rid his room of every image except a crucifix, he had begun to wonder seriously about the crucifix as well. When he faced the Inquisition in Venice thirty years later, he claimed that he had begun to doubt the divinity of Jesus at the age of eighteen:

  I have, in effect, harbored doubts about the term [“person”] for the Son and the Holy Spirit, as I have never understood them as persons distinct from the Father … I have held this opinion from the time that I was eighteen years old until now, but I have never made a public denial, nor taught or written anything to that effect, but only doubted to myself, as I have said.

  But, as Fra Eugenio clearly feared, Bruno’s ideas also reflected contacts he had made with other people in Naples. The most important of these people was an Augustinian friar from the convent of San Giovanni a Carbonara, a protégé of Cardinal Seripando’s who shared many of his mentor’s ways of thinking about God, faith, and the world.

  Still, despite his personal doubts about the personhood of Jesus, his studies with a member of another order, and his tendencies toward disobedience, now a matter of record, Filippo da Nola, after a year’s novitiate, pronounced his final vows as a friar in the Order of Preachers and began to prepare for his ordination as a priest. The advantages of life at San Domenico Maggiore apparently outweighed the restrictions, and his behavior, though unruly, was not unruly enough for Fra Eugenio to question the young man’s fitness for the Order of Preachers. Like several other novices in 1566, Filippo da Nola took the name Fra Giordano in homage to the convent’s former prior, Fra Giordano Crispo.

  Acceptance into the convent of San Domenico Maggiore and the Dominican Order was only the beginning of Bruno’s preparation for the priesthood. His next aim was far more ambitious: admission to the College of San Domenico Maggiore to take a degree in theology. Young men throughout the Kingdom of Naples entered the order by the dozens every year, but the College of San Domenico had only ten places for what were called “formal students.” These ten were the most select and privileged students of any institution in the realm, including the famous Medical School of Salerno, the other Dominican colleges, the other religious colleges, and the Royal University of Naples. The history of the College of San Domenico stretched back to the very beginnings of university education in Europe; only Salerno could make a similar claim.

  As for San Domenico’s prestige, the faculty had once boasted Thomas Aquinas himself, lured back to Italy from his professorship at the University of Paris. The secular Royal University of Naples rented rooms in the Dominicans’ convent, basking in the college’s reflected glory.

  Formal students were usually admitted to the College of San Domenico, after an extensive period of preparation, as what were called “material students.” Material students took private lessons from a variety of teachers; most professors were eager to earn extra money by tutoring on the side. Material students studied without limits on their time or curriculum, but formal students, once admitted to the Dominican college, were required to complete a rigorous course in academic theology within three years. If they did so successfully, they earned the degree of lector, “reader.” Slower progress meant expulsion. It would take Giordano Bruno eight years to obtain, in 1571, an offer to become a formal student at the Dominican college at Andria, a small city near the Adriatic coast. He passed it up; Andria stood at the opposite end of the kingdom, far from anything Bruno knew and far from the centers of intellectual life, Naples and Rome. He chose instead to continue in Naples as a material student at the College of San Domenico, and his gamble paid off: he was accepted as a formal student in Naples one year later, in May 1572. For all his intelligence, his wide reading, and his phenomenal memory, it had taken him nine years of study to earn admission. He was twenty-four years old.

  What we know about Bruno’s student days is painfully limited, but the huge church of San Domenico preserves the same general form, despite its remodelings over the centuries. It is fairly easy to imagine the tall, stout aristocrat Aquinas or the burly Calabrian peasant Tommaso Campanella booming out a sermon under San Domenico’s lofty vaults, but it must have been a real achievement for little Fra Giordano to project his voice to the very ends of the high, long nave. But project he must have; the Order of Preachers took their mission seriously. The immense church was only the first of many venues where Bruno would make himself heard, learning to carry his ideas not only on his voice but also on the extravagant gestures for which Italian preachers were famous. Here, in silence, students and professors also practiced linking their powers of observation to the development of their memories, scrutinizing every colorful chapel for its statues and paintings, each work of art for its story, saving the whole treasury in their heads for future sermons.

  Here the friars must also have spent hours making and listening to music; indeed, as young Bruno grew to adulthood in the convent of San Domenico, one of the era’s greatest musicians was growing into his troubled adolescence just next door in the Palazzo Sansevero. Don Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, would eventually write piercing love songs in strange, dissonant harmonies, and one of the most sublime of all sacred motets, a setting, for Good Friday, of Lamentations 1:12: “Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.” He was no more comfortable than Bruno in his gilded cage, and it is no accident that they both identified themselves with this biblical verse.

  Above all, however, Bruno’s studies sharpened his appetite for philosophy. Philosophy was a broad field in the sixteenth century,
embracing the natural sciences as well as disciplines like logic and metaphysics. Philosophy at the Dominican college, however, hewed to a more narrow definition: it continued diligently in the tradition of its titanic thirteenth-century professor, Thomas Aquinas, whose lecture hall and apartment had become—and still are—carefully preserved shrines. A man as imposing in body as he was in mind (the convent’s refectory table had a half-moon cut out of it to accommodate his prominent belly at meals), Thomas was also a great organizer, of people, institutions, and ideas. His lucid, systematic account of Christian theology garnered Bruno’s unending respect, as he would emphasize repeatedly to his inquisitors when the time came.

  Aquinas himself had drawn inspiration for his system building from Aristotle, whose works on every subject from animal behavior to literary criticism to metaphysics began to appear in Latin translation during the thirteenth century, passed on to the Christian world by Arab merchants. Three hundred years later, Bruno’s program of study at San Domenico still included both the ancient Greek sage and his medieval Italian admirer, two prodigiously analytical minds whose writings left virtually no phenomenon of heaven or earth unaccounted for. Their style of argumentation by syllogism and the precise Latin vocabulary that Aquinas and his contemporaries devised for their needs took the name “Scholasticism,” and it was as eminently scholarly as any system of thought before or since.

  The only drawback with such majestically systematic thinkers as Aristotle and Aquinas was their tendency to dryness; the beauty of their thought lay in its structure rather than in its expression. By Bruno’s day, the Dominican program of education and its Scholastic vocabulary had become distinctly old-fashioned; the emphasis on precision and order had been swept away in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries by a revival of interest in Plato, the passionate, dramatic prophet of philosophy as a rapture beyond words. Neither Aristotle nor Aquinas spent much time writing descriptions; Plato reveled in them. As a young man, he had hoped to become a writer of tragedy, but when his teacher Socrates was arrested and condemned to death on trumped-up charges, he withdrew from their native Athens, its democracy, and its state-sponsored dramatic festivals to promote his own elaboration of Socrates’ philosophy. There is no question that Plato would have been a tragedian of genius; his philosophical dialogues are equally inspired works of literature in an entirely new medium. His skill as a dramatic writer creates vividly real personalities, above all Socrates, and awakens his readers’ senses: lingering on the sensation of walking barefoot in soft, shady grass, or lying next to a handsome, tipsy, and decidedly amorous swain, he slyly shifts his focus to ideas, turning philosophy, irresistibly, into the ultimate erotic pursuit. Like the biblical Song of Songs, his dialogues combined torrid reading with uplifting content, and through their echoes in the Gospel of Saint John, the letters of Saint Paul, and the writings of Saint Augustine, they had captured Christian imaginations from the very beginning. In Naples, thanks to Thomas Aquinas, the center for Scholastic education had always been San Domenico Maggiore. For the study of Plato, however, beginning in the fifteenth century, it was the Augustinian convent of San Giovanni a Carbonara, and there Bruno found his own way to Platonic philosophy.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “I came into this world to light a fire”

  NAPLES, BEFORE 1566

  Our Lord says that he inflames his people, where he says in Luke 12: “I came into this world to light a fire: what should I want but that it burn?” … for he who gives love is God.

  —Fra Teofilo da Vairano, On the Grace of the New Testament, 163v

  From the thirteenth century onward, the most influential members of the Hermits of Saint Augustine had gathered, not at Sant’Agostino in the center of Naples, but at the convent of San Giovanni a Carbonara on the city’s eastern edge. Dramatically set into a precipitous volcanic slope along the city wall (which conveniently blocked the sight and smells of the city ditch below it), San Giovanni a Carbonara became the chosen burial place of the last Angevin king, Ladislas II. When the Angevin heirs of Ladislas were expelled by Alfonso of Aragon in 1442, San Giovanni a Carbonara lost the privilege of royal burials to San Domenico Maggiore, and changed its politics from pro-French to pro-Spanish. By the last decades of the fifteenth century, the congregation had also decided to trade its reputation for the love of good food and drink for something more actively spiritual.

  In keeping with their self-transformation, these reformed Augustinians introduced a new style of religious oratory. Although they spoke in Latin, they tried to emulate popular preachers like the Franciscan saint Bernardino of Siena, who used humor, empathy, and pithy Tuscan vernacular to reach huge congregations. At the same time, in order to give their own sermons a more sophisticated polish, they studied the principles of ancient rhetoric. Ancient oratory had been a practical art; its primary aim was to teach lawyers how to persuade a jury no matter how weak their case. Hence the ancient rhetorical manuals put supreme emphasis on clarity—and, when clarity was likely to fail, on shamelessly manipulating jurors’ emotions. Bernardino was a master of emotional appeals (although he kept his language simple, he had studied ancient rhetoric himself): he brought his congregations to laughter, pity, terror, and, on one occasion, hysterical eagerness, when he promised, with huge fanfare, to give every person present a relic straight from Jesus Christ. (When he crowed, “It’s the Gospel!” they all groaned in disappointment.)

  The Augustinians found their own version of Saint Bernardino in their prior general, Fra Mariano da Genazzano. Even in Italy, where effusive speech was commonplace, Fra Mariano’s sweeping gestures and the dramatic rise and fall of his voice made a striking impression on his listeners. So did the literary quality of his language and the images he conjured up for his hearers to contemplate. Compared with the Franciscans’ homespun homilies and the Dominicans’ sophisticated logic chopping, his oratory was both elegant and moving; he had cut an unforgettable figure when he preached in San Giovanni a Carbonara. But Fra Mariano’s reputation was swiftly eclipsed in the very first years of the sixteenth century by that of his closest protégé, Fra Egidio Antonini da Viterbo (Giles of Viterbo), whose sojourns in Naples were longer and, in the end, still more influential than those of his mentor.

  Giles of Viterbo was one of the great preachers of his age. At the beginning of his career, he drew criticism for imitating Fra Mariano too closely, from the austere black robe to the full black beard they both affected, but that line of criticism stopped once the younger man developed a full command of his own powers. Giles was, above all, an enthusiast; this is what captivated most of his listeners still more than the elaborate language and the intricate formal structure of his homilies. His black eyes sparkled and snapped, his hands waved, his voice soared and plummeted as he told stories and shouted exhortations; he drew forth laughter, tears, and battle cries, not to mention money from his hearers’ pockets. He made Plato (another brilliant demagogue) seem not only easy to understand but urgently important, an ancient pagan so divinely inspired that he could cast light on Christian doctrine and pressing current events. Furthermore, in an age of rampant anti-Semitism, Giles spoke with deep respect for the Jews. He studied Plato and the Hebrew tradition of Kabbalah as if their mystic doctrines were needed complements to Christian theology, and to his mind they were: he believed that the ancient religions of the world had formed part of a grand divine plan for humanity’s gradual and universal enlightenment. Now that we can no longer see or hear him, but only read his writings, Giles’s most lasting legacy is a series of word-pictures, images of indelible clarity created to illustrate the abstract reaches of his thought, pictures so clear, in fact, that painters like Michelangelo and Raphael adopted them as their own. When Mariano da Genazzano died in 1506, Giles of Viterbo succeeded him as prior general of their eight-thousand-man order, advancing in 1517 to the position of cardinal protector. He was a strong if unsuccessful candidate for the papacy in 1521 and 1523.

  In Naples itself, Giles of Viterbo was
known not only as a preacher and reformer but also, and importantly, as a literary figure. He had been a close friend of the city’s best writers, Giovanni Gioviano Pontano, who named one of his dialogues after the affable Augustinian (Aegidius, 1498), and Jacopo Sannazaro, who undertook his religious epic on the birth of Christ, On the Virgin’s Childbirth (De partu Virginis, 1521), at Giles’s explicit suggestion. The friar’s influence also extended to less solemn works, like Sannazaro’s pastoral novel Arcadia (1504) and his book of poems about fishing (Eclogues), both of which expressed deep Christian devotion as they entertained. Giles himself wrote at least one vernacular poem, “Love’s Beautiful Hunt” (“La caccia bellissima dell’amore”).

  Giles of Viterbo met his closest Neapolitan associate within the walls of San Giovanni a Carbonara. The austere young aristocrat Fra Girolamo Seripando studied closely with Giles during the latter’s term as prior general of their order, absorbing his mentor’s devotion to Plato and his driving commitment to reforming the Church. He also began to gather a substantial collection of Giles’s writings. Eventually Seripando returned to San Giovanni a Carbonara to head the congregation, until, like Giles of Viterbo before him, he became prior general, and then cardinal protector of the Augustinian Order. In those positions of authority, he would follow the interminable efforts toward Catholic reform at the Council of Trent, whose tormented proceedings dragged on for eighteen years from 1545 to 1563, the year of Seripando’s own death. During his years at San Giovanni a Carbonara, he shared his splendid personal library with the friars, setting it up in a separate reading room above his family chapel in the church under the care of his brother Antonio; perhaps only San Domenico Maggiore boasted a richer collection in the sixteenth century than these two Augustinian libraries combined. Its visitors included the friar who would become Giordano Bruno’s most beloved mentor, Fra Teofilo da Vairano.