Giordano Bruno Read online

  As for the footprints themselves, Giles of Viterbo described these traces in the Forest of Matter as qualities: beauty, order, number. His Diana was destined to rush about the Forest following the tracks of beauty and light until they added up to a specific sum.

  God … created this external and secondary world according to the divine archetype, for which reason the whole world itself is a footprint of God, and all the things contained in it should be called divine footprints … we must pursue the tracks by which human hunting brings back the Trinity as its prize.

  At this point, enraptured, Diana, like the human soul, would rise above the Forest to become one with the Moon, lifted far above the Forest of Matter to the realm of Ideas, which Giles as a good Christian associated with the realm of the angels:

  The nature of intelligent creatures is split in two, for in part it pursues the tracks of divinity, but in part, clinging to heaven’s palace, it has no desire to hunt down sensible things. Thus nature has prepared companions for our spirits, heavenly minds, and calls one Diana in the Forest, the other the Moon in heaven … defined now not in terms of number, or species, but by kind. These kinds of minds that are called by the name of the Moon have an image that is so superior to our own that they love to improve ours, and bathe the shadows of our Forests with their limpid rays. On Mount Latmos the Moon is said to have loved Endymion, kissing him at night when he was asleep, and this story is not without its point.

  The point of Giles’s story was a radical claim that the classical gods were nothing more or less than guardian angels: to Endymion and the Moon he added Ulysses and Minerva, Aeneas and Venus, treating the ancient heroes as if they had really existed, and the eros of the gods, as in the case of the Moon and Endymion, was proof that the God of Abraham and Jesus Christ was the same God of love. Thus Giles managed to make both the Forest of Matter and the soul’s progress through it compellingly erotic, for he envisioned the world as shot through with a divine love whose joys could best be described for mortal readers in sensual terms. He used the myth of Diana and her lover Endymion to describe the loving care that guardian angels lavished on their human charges. He also returned time and again to the Hebrew love lyrics in the Song of Songs, read in his own day as the romance not only of man and woman but of God and Israel, of Christ and the Church, of Christ and the human soul. His ultimate vision saw the Forest of Matter transformed into a bank of the river Jordan, where pure souls gathered to join forever with Christ the King:

  Those blessed souls drink deep, whom the King caresses like brides with the kisses of his mouth, whom he inundates with the wine that delights human hearts, and the brides, drunk on joyous abundance, sing, as in the nuptial mysteries, “His kisses are sweeter than wine, and more powerful by far.”

  This was the vision of Giles of Viterbo, less profoundly philosophical than the vision of Marsilio Ficino but also more visually compelling. When Giordano Bruno created his own image of the forest, it would be as vivid as Giles of Viterbo’s, and there were few other forests of such ravishing suggestiveness. Furthermore, one of them, the forest of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia, was created under Giles’s direct influence.

  Giles also used the image of Diana in the forest for an allegorical poem, “Love’s Beautiful Hunt,” in which he contrasted the pursuit of sexual love unfavorably with the pursuit of divinity. Here he resorted to a mythological figure, Actaeon, the hunter who spied a naked Diana bathing in the forest and as punishment was transformed into a stag; his dogs turned on him and tore him to death. The protagonist of Giles’s “Beautiful Hunt” has been undone by passion, but because the object of his pursuit is a mere mortal, he, unlike Actaeon, cannot escape his confinement in the Forest of Matter. He complains about his horned forehead and lacerated flesh:

  I bear what I’ve become upon my brow

  Depicted better than my pen can say;

  Awareness of my error’s been bestowed

  By giving me to my own hounds as prey.

  Torn and destroyed by my own weapons now,

  I taste the fruits of all that I assayed;

  But worst of all the torments that I face,

  I cannot see my way out of this place.

  Now some would claim that mine’s a lesser grief

  Than Actaeon’s, who turned into a stag;

  Yet unlike my misfortune, his was brief,

  Despite the fact that he was torn to rags.

  By suffering at last he gained relief;

  Long as I live, my pain will never flag.

  To my annoyance, Death’s rejected me,

  And thus in living I die constantly.

  All these images—the forest, the lover, and Actaeon—would appear in Bruno’s work, where he connected them, like Giles of Viterbo before him, with the pursuit of God and associated them, like Giles, with the biblical Song of Songs.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A Thousand Worlds

  Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: But in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him.

  —Acts 10:34–35

  God is no respecter of persons, for he is prepared to give everyone the same grace, and if he has not given it, it is because you have put up an obstacle.

  —Teofilo da Vairano, On the Grace of the New Testament, 106–107r

  Officially, the Kingdom of Naples expelled all Jews from its territory in 1563, part of an attempt to keep the city’s Spanish overlords from imposing their Inquisition. Many of these people descended from Spanish and Portuguese Sephardim who had been driven from Spain in 1492 or Portugal in 1497 and escaped to Italy. Other families, however, must have been present since ancient Roman times. Rome itself boasted the oldest Jewish community in Europe, and southern Italy had important yeshivas in the fifteenth century, one of which produced the great Jewish convert to Christianity known as Flavius Mithridates. By the sixteenth century, Naples was one of the Italian centers for publication in Hebrew, a fact that implies that the kingdom hosted a substantial reading public.

  For the Jews threatened with expulsion, the only alternative was baptism, and this was the choice that many people made, whether as families or as individuals. Expulsion meant automatic confiscation of property; acceptance of baptism might mean the ability to retain most of it, especially in conditions of mass conversion. As a result, despite drastic measures like forced exile and the creation of ghettos by a papal decree in 1555, Italy retained a significant Jewish presence, especially in regions with a policy of tolerance. Most of these refuges were in the north—Venice, Ferrara, Mantua, Pesaro—or along the borders between the Papal States and Tuscany. But even in the Spanish-dominated areas of southern Italy, Jews never disappeared entirely. Some families dispersed into the hinterlands, others took precarious places in a society where the line between Jew and Gentile could never be drawn with total precision. Forced conversions in Spain and Portugal, and then in Italy itself, had created a whole class of “new Christians” who preserved many of their Jewish traditions; compulsory mass baptisms did not make for a secure grounding in the Christian life.

  And despite a general climate of hostility, interactions took place between Christians and Jews, especially in the first half of the sixteenth century; the very ubiquity of this contact prompted the Neapolitan pope Paul IV to create ghettos in the first place. For a period in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, many Christian theologians actively sought out rabbis for enlightenment about their shared biblical texts; Jews attended Christian sermons out of interest rather than coercion.

  These were the circumstances in which a series of Christian scholars came into contact with the Hebrew mystic tradition known as Kabbalah, which gave rise to a whole literature of biblical interpretation as well as a discipline that involved using the letters of the Hebrew Bible for purposes of divination. Christian thinkers from Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin at the end of the fifteenth century to Athan
asius Kircher in the seventeenth tried to reconcile the Kabbalah’s path toward the knowledge of God with the demands of their own religion, courting controversy as they did so but drawn irresistibly to the kabbalistic literature’s powerful imagery of light and darkness, wisdom and ignorance, and unabashed eroticism, a shared legacy from Plato and his early followers. However vocally sixteenth-century Christians at every social level might denounce their Jewish neighbors, the rejection was never complete, just as many new Christians never entirely abandoned their Jewish past.

  The year 1563 was also when the reforming Council of Trent issued its final decrees and disbanded, leaving the Catholic Church in a more intransigent position on a whole series of hotly debated questions than the council’s original conveners could ever have imagined, and the rift with the Protestants more drastic than ever. Among the council’s harsh new provisions, one of the most startling, in an era of careful textual scholarship, imposed the Vulgate text of the Bible as the definitive version of Scripture. Most of the council’s delegates knew perfectly well that Saint Jerome’s Latin furnished an imperfect translation of the Bible’s original Greek and, especially, Hebrew texts; hence the council’s decree knowingly flew in the face of the whole Renaissance scholarly tradition of emphasis on original texts. What adoption of the Latin Bible did, however, was put Scripture and its interpretation firmly in the hands of Rome and Latin Catholic culture, ruling out the authority of the Orthodox Greeks and the rabbis.

  The council’s decree could not, however, suppress demand for knowledge of Greek and Hebrew; it stood too violently against every standard that humanist scholarship had built up so carefully over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As part of his theological education, Giordano Bruno learned Hebrew at San Domenico and became so proficient that his superiors decided to send him to Rome to perform in that language before Pope Pius V in 1569. He recited Psalm 86, and then, in an early display of his astonishing memory, he recited it backward. During his stay, he also came to know the convert Andrea de Monte, professor of Hebrew at the University of Rome, and noted years later how impressed he had been by de Monte’s learning and eloquence.

  Ironically, Bruno’s performance before the pope came in a period when the Neapolitan branch of the Holy Office, spurred on by this sternly pious pontiff, had prosecuted a large number of converted Jews for alleged reversion to their original faith. When his own turn before the Inquisition came, Bruno, baptized a Catholic, would be subjected to questioning about heresy, not about “Judaizing.” He did not volunteer information about his readings in Kabbalah, nor was he asked about them, and hence our chief source for his biography says nothing about how he came into contact with Jewish wisdom. He surely did so in Naples, however, and one likely source for such contact would have been his teacher of logic, Teofilo da Vairano, whose monastic library at San Giovanni a Carbonara included a number of works on Christian Kabbalah collected by the order’s former prior general, Giles of Viterbo. Giles, indeed, ranked as one of the chief exponents in the sixteenth century of Christian Kabbalah as well as Platonic philosophy. He had corresponded eagerly with Reuchlin, and learned Hebrew and Aramaic well enough to read both and to annotate his collection of manuscripts in the appropriate language. Through his protégé Girolamo Seripando, he bequeathed some works on Kabbalah to the Seripando library alongside his Neoplatonic treatises. And through Seripando, Giles of Viterbo also gave voice to the ecumenical line of Catholic thinking that suffered the most resounding defeat at the Council of Trent.

  Despite the hardening doctrinal positions of his own time, Teofilo da Vairano seems to have shared something of Giles of Viterbo’s ecumenism, at least to judge from his one surviving work, On the Grace of the New Testament, in which he declared that a truly Catholic Church was bound by definition to include all humanity without exception because “all are elected by God.”

  As proof of that universal election, Teofilo incorporated the Jews into his view of the universal Church by insisting that both Christians and Jews had been called into the same divine covenant, noting that God’s pledges to Abraham and Moses were as integral a part of the divine plan as the Gospels:

  Let no one think that the people of God who wandered in the desert as exiles from Egypt were not the Church of God.

  I do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, of the fact that all of our fathers were beneath the pillar of cloud, so that all could cross the sea, and all were baptized by Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all of them ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank from the spiritual rock that contained them—for the rock was Christ, the very one.

  Conversely, he insisted that Christians could also, and rightfully, be included among what he called “children of the promise,” asking Jewish readers rhetorically “to show me a single proof by which you can prove that we are not of the Church and that you are.” Although he regarded the Gospels’ revelation as the most complete fulfillment of God’s plan, Teofilo differs from his contemporaries in his insistence on inclusion of the Jews in that divine plan rather than their division from it, marshaling the testimony of the earliest Church to insist that charity should guide religion above all other principles. If Teofilo da Vairano is the person who encouraged the young Bruno to read Kabbalah, he would have done so from a position of unusual tolerance.

  Bruno had already decided in his private thoughts that Jesus of Nazareth could not have been the son of God incarnate in human flesh. When, thirty years later, he told his Venetian inquisitors that he had, “in effect, harbored doubts about the term ‘person’ for the Son and the Holy Spirit,” both he and his inquisitors realized that doubting the validity of the term “person” was an oblique way of expressing doubts about the divinity of Jesus. His examiners then pressed him on that point to see whether he would state it more explicitly. Bruno duly detailed his doubts, but he insisted that these were only doubts in discussing philosophy, not Catholic theology or Christian faith. Still, it must have been clear to these Christian inquisitors that Bruno was no longer defending a Christian position:

  To get to the individual point about which I have been asked concerning the divine persons, that wisdom and that son of the mind whom the philosophers call the intellect and the theologians the Word, if one ought to believe that this took on human flesh, then, philosophically speaking, I have never understood this, but have doubted it and held the belief with inconstant faith.

  Pressed further, he continued:

  As for the second person, I declare that in reality I have held it to be one in essence with the first, and likewise the third … I have only doubted how this second person could be incarnate, as I have said above, and suffered, but I have never openly denied this or taught it, and if I have said something about this second person, I have done so by referring to the opinions of others.

  One of these “others” whom Bruno summoned in support of his arguments was none other than Saint Augustine, one of the four “Fathers” of the Western Church; Bruno said he could not understand the Trinity “if not in the way that I have explained before speaking philosophically, and designating the Father’s intellect as the Son and his love as the Holy Spirit, without recognizing the term ‘person,’ which Saint Augustine says is not an ancient term but a new one of his own time.” This command of theological literature and theological argumentation must have been what made Bruno such an extraordinarily difficult defendant; however outrageous his claims may have seemed to Christian orthodoxy, his uncanny ability to put orthodoxy itself into a historical context made the certainties of dogma look uncertain.

  In exchange for the dogma he could not accept, Bruno willingly supplied his inquisitors with his own version of the Trinity:

  In the divinity I understand that all the attributes are one and the same thing, together with theologians and the greatest philosophers; I understand three attributes: power, wisdom, and goodness, or mind, intellect, and love.

  In my philosophy, moreove
r, I understand that from this spirit proceed the life and soul of every creature that has a soul and life, which I therefore understand to be immortal, as is also the case with bodies. As for their substance, they are all immortal, for there is no other death but division and congregation, which doctrine, it seems to me, is expressed in Ecclesiastes, where it says, “There is nothing new under the sun: What is? What was. What was? What is,” and so on.

  In this oral testimony as in his writing, Bruno drew his theology from the Hebrew Bible: the Psalms, the Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes. Despite his wide-ranging skepticism about so much of received religion, these were passages of Scripture that he never called into question. Nor was he alone in this preference for the oldest parts of the Bible; the Holy Office in Naples heard at least three cases in the late sixteenth century of freethinking Catholics who explicitly identified themselves with Judaism, thus taking a step beyond Bruno’s own resolutely independent agenda.

  Many of the remarks made about the Jews in Bruno’s surviving writings are not complimentary, and they have often been taken as evidence that he shared the anti-Semitic prejudice common to most citizens of Spanish-dominated Naples. These aspersions, however, are cast not by Bruno himself but by his various characters, speaking in character. The most damning of all these denunciations comes in his dialogue Spaccio della bestia trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast), which extols ancient Egyptian religion as it proceeds to redesign the cosmos, arguing that the brawling gods and heroes of ancient Greece are hardly suitable for the glorious order of the heavens. Here the divinity Sophia, whose name is the Greek word for “wisdom,” denounces the Jews ferociously, along with their Kabbalah: