Giordano Bruno Page 7
Do not infer that the sufficiency of Chaldaean magic comes from Jewish Kabbalah, because the Hebrews have been convicted of being the excrement of Egypt, and there has never been anyone who could pretend with any appearance of truth that the Egyptians could have taken any principle, worthy or unworthy, from them. Whence we Greeks recognize Egypt, the great kingdom of literature and nobility, as the parents of our myths, metaphors, and doctrines, and not that generation that never had a palm of land that was its own by nature or civil justice; whence one can conclude satisfactorily that they are not naturally, nor have they ever been, by long violence of fortune, part of the world.
It is tempting to read this passage as absolute wisdom passing judgment on the inferiority of Hebrew tradition to the wisdom of ancient Egypt, and many of Bruno’s readers over the years have succumbed to that temptation. Yet Bruno explicitly makes Sophia speak of herself as Greek, to show that she is specifically Greek wisdom rather than wisdom absolute, in a dialogue where the Greek model of the heavens is being systematically swept aside for a more elegant design. And indeed Sophia meets an immediate challenge, from a character, Saulino, who bears the name of Bruno’s maternal family, the Savolino. If any personage in this dialogue can be taken to represent the author’s point of view, it is he—and he will do the same service in the dialogue Bruno wrote shortly after The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, The Heroic Frenzies. Saulino maintains that the Greek wisdom of Sophia is faulty, dictated by the moral shortcomings of the god she serves, that jealous womanizer, Jove, and this faulty wisdom has led her to misunderstand the Jews:
This, O Sophia, is said by Jove out of envy, because [the Jews] are worthily called and call themselves holy, for being more of a celestial and divine generation than a terrestrial and human one, and not having a worthy part of this world, they have been approved by the angels as heirs to that other one, which is so much more worthy because there is no man, great or small, wise or stupid, who by force of choice or fate can acquire it, and certainly can never have it as his own.
Saulino’s reproof is shortly corroborated by the upheaval and renewal of the cosmos, a theme that itself derives from Kabbalah: the great Jubilee in which the universe renews itself every fifty thousand years. Bruno would have known about this great Jubilee from at least two sources: the writings of the fifteenth-century Christian kabbalist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and the early-sixteenth-century Dialogues on Love (Dialoghi d’amore) by the Italian Jewish writer Leone Abarbanel, usually known as Leone Ebreo. Both writers mention the most radical version of this doctrine, in which the universe, upon reaching the Jubilee, is re-created from nothingness; the formulations of both also show the profound influence of Marsilio Ficino’s philosophy.
In prison in Venice, Bruno spoke to his cellmates about this endlessly renewed and re-created universe. As one of them reported, “He said that God needed the world as much as the world needed God, and that God would be nothing without the world, and for this reason God did nothing but create new worlds.”
One of the most important ways in which Bruno himself overturned the conventional cosmos was to make it infinite. He clearly drew his belief in infinite worlds, and a good deal else, from an essay titled On Learned Ignorance by the fifteenth-century German philosopher-priest (and eventual cardinal) Nicholas of Cusa. It is also an idea he could have elaborated from Kabbalah, especially from a medieval text that was collected by Giles of Viterbo both in its original and in a garbled translation, part Spanish, part Italian, part Aramaic. There the author describes riding on a cherub “through a thousand worlds”:
He rides upon a cloud, he rides on a cherub and I flew and I fly through a thousand worlds and they ask of that cherub where is the place of highest honor and I ride over a cloud a thousand worlds beyond the world and the cherub flew through ten thousand worlds; eyes have seen nothing but God alone.
In its multiple worlds, its combinations of Hebrew letters, and its interconnections, in addition to its affinities with the Neoplatonic interplay of darkness and light, Kabbalah bore an uncannily close relationship to the way of thinking that Giordano Bruno came to identify as the Nolan philosophy. Bruno’s was certainly not a Christian Kabbalah; if anything it was more identifiably Jewish. Neither alternative would find any official approval within the walls of San Domenico. As a student, Bruno restricted his energies to a less dangerous pursuit: the mental exercise known as the art of memory.
CHAPTER NINE
Art and Astronomy
A fool’s the only one who would rely
On sense, and not the reasoning behind it.
—The Heroic Frenzies, “Second Response of the Heart to the Eyes”
Remembering would become Giordano Bruno’s chief profession. In his own day he earned his widest reputation, and often his living, by teaching an ancient technique for the enhancement of memory developed in ancient Greece and called the “artificial memory” by the ancient Romans, who included memory as a basic element in rhetorical training. Bruno first learned to use the artificial memory as a boy in Nola—it formed a standard part of grammar-school education—but in Naples the Dominicans had refined the art of recall to the ultimate degree. The Scriptures, sermons, canon law, and theological tractates they committed to memory provided themes for their preaching and exercise for their minds. Thomas Aquinas had so organized his own thoughts that he could dictate four separate books at once to four different secretaries. And like Thomas Aquinas before him, Giordano Bruno proved to excel at memory, phenomenally so. In 1569, when he was still a material student hoping for admission to the Dominican college, the superiors of San Domenico sent him to Rome to perform feats of recall before Pope Pius V and Scipione Cardinal Rebiba, an honor so unusual that the young friar traveled to Rome by coach, like a nobleman (what he most remembered about the trip was the number of corpses lying along the Appian Way, victims of banditry and malaria). After reciting Psalm 86 forward and backward in Hebrew, he gave the cardinal and the pontiff a brief lesson on the fine points of his art. Apparently, therefore, Bruno had already developed his own version of the artificial memory, one that was both novel and teachable to others. Ten years later, he would compare his own improvements on the ancient system to the difference between publishing books with the printing press and primitive carving on trees. Yet despite his claims that the art of memory could be taught and learned as straightforward technique, he treated it as far more than a clever trick or a preacher’s aid. For Giordano Bruno, practicing the art of memory became as deeply symbolic an activity as hunting had been for Giles of Viterbo in the forests of matter and spirit.
The basic principle of the artificial memory was a simple one: to link words with images, and because in fact babies learn to point and speak simultaneously, this association of verbal and visual cues may be deeply rooted in human nature. The ancient Greeks and Romans trained their memories primarily in order to become more persuasive speakers in government and the law courts; we know the details of the artificial memory as they used it from the rhetorical treatises that helped to start ambitious young men on their careers in public service. The advice these treatises impart is mostly practical—speak clearly, organize your thoughts, capture the goodwill of your audience, remember what you mean to say—but ancient rhetoricians used a precise technical vocabulary to pinpoint every trick of persuasion and every moment in a speech. Careful application of the artificial memory enabled ancient orators to deliver speeches of staggering length without a single note on papyrus to interfere with the grace of their gestures or the drape of their togas; good Roman lawyers could hold forth for seven hours of close-packed argumentation in summing up a case. To be sure, some classical orators, of whom Cicero is the most famous, regarded the whole procedure of the artificial memory as too cumbersome to bother with (an opinion Erasmus would share with him fifteen centuries later), but then Cicero must have memorized by simple rote with unusual ease. In the case of people like Giordano Bruno and Thomas Aquinas, who combined exceptional n
atural gifts of memory with the rigorous use of artificial discipline, the resulting mental control was incredible to the audiences who watched them perform, and would doubtless seem still more astounding today.
At the end of the thirteenth century, a Catalan mystic named Ramon Llull (1232–1316) introduced his own variant to the classical art of memory, promoting it in many of the 250 books he wrote in the course of his busy life. Ancient orators built up their memories by creating imaginary buildings in their minds and stocking these buildings with people and statues that represented individual ideas or parts of a speech. Llull’s “Great Art” (Ars Magna), or “combinatory art,” replaced these memory buildings with imaginary concentric wheels, each divided into a series of compartments; every spin of a wheel potentially created new ideas with new combinations. At the same time, however, the system’s abstract simplicity—all the wheels reduced in the end to one perfect circle—lent a simplicity to the overall structure of Llull’s thought, and to Llull’s concept of the God who had created such complexity in nature. Llull declared that his Great Art of memory had a higher spiritual purpose:
We created this Art in order to understand and love God, so that the human intellect can ascend artificially toward the knowledge of God and as a consequence into love, because the intellect can do with artifice what it cannot do without artifice, so long as divine grace and wisdom act as mediators. And because the more God is understood, the more he is loved, therefore this Art brings it about that God is loved as much as possible.
Bruno’s art of memory used both Llullian wheels and the classical system’s imaginary characters set into imaginary architectures. Despite his own ability to store and recall memories, Bruno always emphasized that his skill was a matter of constant exercise as well as natural ability, and he insisted that his system could be taught to anyone of reasonable intelligence. By 1572, he was a well-drilled friar in the Order of Preachers who knew how to back up his words with gestures and who used pictures, emblems, and diagrams to illustrate his method.
Richly decorated, the church of San Domenico Maggiore was one of the places that supplied the young Bruno with suggestive images. Some of these images recur in his later writings, and they reflect a distinctly sixteenth-century taste. A modern visitor to San Domenico cannot help noticing its splendid thirteenth-century frescoes by the great Roman painter Pietro Cavallini, but Bruno seems to have gravitated instead to Renaissance works done in classical style, with classical gods, allegories, and personified ideals; we can imagine that the architectures he constructed in his head as he cultivated the artificial memory were fashionably modern rather than, like San Domenico, imposingly Gothic.
Within the second chapel on the left of the church, the brand-new tomb of the poet Bernardino Rota, created in 1569–71 while its occupant was still very much alive (he died in 1575), bore beautiful marble reliefs of river gods representing the Tiber and the Arno, an attractively erudite way of calling attention to the fact that Rota composed both in Latin and in vernacular (and specifically the Tuscan vernacular of Dante and Petrarch). Bruno would emulate Rota’s versatility, writing Latin hexameter verse and vernacular sonnets, and combine the tomb’s river imagery with Teofilo da Vairano’s symbolic river Jordan to expound his own Nolan philosophy.
Just to the right of the main portal of San Domenico, inserted into the building as a separate unit in itself, a family chapel had been built by Galeotto Carafa da Sanseverino in 1513 whose arches and columns, in the dark gray volcanic stone called piperno, set off a series of marble panels decorated in relief with signs of the zodiac. In the designers’ original scheme, the stars and planets served to demonstrate how astrological forces had helped to determine the greatness of the noble Galeotto; his fame was as natural, as inevitable, as the shape of the heavens. The theme was a popular one in an age when astronomy had not yet separated as a discipline from astrology: the stars and planets all had their distinct personalities, their favorite gems, colors, and stones, and their own days of the week, and few people doubted the profound effect of their movements on earthly events.
Bruno learned astronomy as part of his preparation as a material student, using the classic textbook on the subject, De sphaera (On the Sphere), written about 1230 by a professor at the University of Paris, John of Sacrobosco (who may have been an Englishman). Sacrobosco’s clear presentation of spherical geometry provided a solid introduction for anyone who wanted to read the astronomical works of the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy and those of his Islamic commentators, and he did this so concisely (the whole work was nine thousand words, not quite forty modern pages), and so effectively, that teachers (including Galileo Galilei) continued to use his textbook until the late seventeenth century, adding their commentaries to his thirteenth-century original.
Sacrobosco’s cosmos was a Christian version of the system first presented by Ptolemy in ancient Alexandria: a sphere of fixed stars marked the outer limit of the universe. Nested within it were five more spheres, belonging to Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and Mercury, all of them revolving around Earth. Outside the sixth sphere, nothing existed but God. The personalities of the stars and planets still harked back to the ancient gods, goddesses, animals, and heroes whose names they bore, so that charting their movements was an exercise in social dynamics as much as mathematics.
When the Polish mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus proposed a sun-centered universe in his Little Commentary (Commentariolus) of 1514 and his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) in 1543, his theory had no particular effect on those who regarded the heavens as a place peopled by a set of distinctive characters. If anything, the Copernican cosmos assigned the sun a place more in keeping with its regal nature. Neither did Copernicus conflict significantly with Sacrobosco, for both believed that the universe consisted of spheres in circular motion. As yet there was no prohibition against reading On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, and Bruno certainly read the book, at a moment when his own interests in Plato and Marsilio Ficino made the idea of a universe centered on the sun philosophically appealing.
Bruno’s later writings make it clear that he was not an astrologer in any conventional sense; he regarded the personalities ascribed to the heavenly bodies as fictions, and felt perfect freedom to rewrite their stories in one of his dialogues, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. In his own day, Plato had invented myths to convey his philosophical truths, and so did Bruno; like Plato, Bruno felt the need to replace the old ribald stories about the feckless classical gods with more uplifting tales. The Neapolitan scholar Eugenio Canone was first to propose that Bruno’s initial stimulus for The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast might have come from the astrological reliefs in the Carafa chapel of San Domenico Maggiore. But unlike the pure white marble of those reliefs, the characters and stories that Bruno imagined, both the old and the new, were vibrant with color, ready to be incorporated into his memory as active images, or simply to beguile him as he gazed into the night sky.
At the same time, he could also look at the heavens with the eyes of a natural philosopher in the modern mold. During Bruno’s tenure at San Domenico Maggiore, the Calabrian philosopher Bernardino Telesio had been living off and on in the luxurious palazzo of Alfonso Carafa, Duke of Nocera (a short walk away on the stately Via Medina), promoting his view of the world as driven by two mechanical forces, heat and cold. These, Telesio asserted in conversation and in his large, ambitious treatise On the Nature of Things (printed in 1586 but written over the course of many years), had been brought into the world by God at the moment of creation as the concentrated bodies of the sun and the earth and had been locked in battle ever since. Bruno would praise Telesio as “most discerning” in one of his dialogues, and eventually adapted many aspects of the elder philosopher’s theory of heat and cold to his own view of the universe.
Another view of astronomy met Bruno on his arrival in Rome. By the 1570s, the city had become a center for astronomical studies, especially
in the Jesuits’ small but ambitious Roman College, housed in temporary quarters until their huge new building was completed near Piazza Venezia. The professor of mathematics, a Portuguese-educated German named Christoph Clavius, had quickly made a name for himself as a superb teacher. In 1570, at the age of thirty-three, Clavius published a thousand copies of his own commentary on Sacrobosco’s On the Sphere with the Roman publisher Victor Helianus (the first of an eventual six editions). Shortly after his election in 1572, Pope Gregory XIII would appoint Clavius head of a commission to reform the calendar; the resulting “Gregorian calendar,” implemented in 1582, is the same one we use today.
Bruno’s house in Rome, the Dominican convent of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, stood just across the street from the buildings that were razed to make way for the Jesuit college in 1583. He and Clavius were therefore the closest of neighbors, which does not necessarily mean that they met. Institutional relations between the well-established Dominicans and the upstart Jesuits were wary. On the other hand, both men were unusually open-minded, albeit in their own peculiar ways. Clavius would spend the rest of his life revising his Commentary on the Sphere of Sacrobosco to keep up with the latest developments in astronomy, from Tycho Brahe’s observations of a supernova in 1572 to Galileo’s discoveries with the telescope in 1610; he was, in fact, the first person to invite Galileo to lecture in Rome.
For both of them, astronomy was an excitingly unsettled subject in the 1570s. That excitement stemmed as much from new ways of looking at existing data as from the data themselves, which astronomers like the Danish nobleman Tycho Brahe, only two years older than Bruno, were gathering with great precision. As yet, however, there was no real difference between the huge quadrant that Tycho laid out on the wall of his observatory at Uraniborg and the giant instruments that the Arab astronomer Ibn Yunus had used in his Cairo observatory in the tenth century; both made all their measurements with the naked eye. (The telescope was invented in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century; Galileo began using it in 1610, as noted above, and Campanella at about the same time.) What distinguished Copernicus from Ptolemy in second-century-b.c. Alexandria or Ibn Yunus in tenth-century Cairo was not so much the quality of his data as the form he ascribed to the universe; On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres used careful but conventional astronomical measurements to obtain a radically different model of the heavens. The fact that Bruno was more interested in models of the universe than in the gathering of precise observational data does not make him less “scientific” than colleagues like Brahe—science as we know it did not yet exist, and besides, in its present-day form it still depends as vitally on thought problems as on the gathering of data. His ability to treat models of the universe as just that—models—was an ability that modern scientists still recognize as an essential part of their own discipline. It is indicative of Bruno’s own training in natural philosophy, however, that he could feel free to rewrite the mythology of the constellations at the same time that he could redraw the geometry of the universe—and did so, as a mature philosopher, in a way that modern scientists find much more valid than the universe of Galileo. His mind, in our terms, was both artistic and scientific. In his terms, both casts of mind were philosophical: one derived from Plato, one from Aristotle.