Giordano Bruno Read online

  In the 1570s, however, neither he nor Clavius had any idea how drastically their ideas about the universe would change in succeeding years. They only knew that astronomy was no less exciting for them than it had been for Sacrobosco, galvanized, in his own thirteenth century, by new contact, in Latin translation, with the works of the medieval Arab astronomers.

  Bruno’s trip to Rome as a master of the art of memory may have marked the high point of his experience as a friar of San Domenico Maggiore. In his closed community, however, this recognition by his superiors may also have marked him out for jealousy and suspicion among his peers.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Trouble Again

  NAPLES AND ROME, 1576

  After his return from Rome, Fra Giordano’s career within San Domenico Maggiore progressed along the usual steps, at the usual pace. He became a subdeacon in 1570, and then a deacon in 1571. For the final step of ordination, the friars of San Domenico Maggiore were normally sent somewhere else in the Kingdom of Naples, to give them a larger view of what it meant to be a priest. Not all of them could expect to stay within the exclusive community of San Domenico Maggiore; most, in fact, would be sent out into a wider and more humble world. For his own ordination, Fra Giordano was assigned to the Dominican convent of San Bartolomeo in Campagna, a beautiful, wealthy little feudal town set among the dramatic volcanic crags behind Salerno. The priors of San Bartolomeo had included some of the most important figures in the Dominican order; as assignments went, his still marked him out for an exceptional future. As Bruno described it, however, Campagna was “far away from Naples.” He performed his first Mass in the convent’s parish church sometime in the spring of 1572, but by the fall he was back in San Domenico Maggiore, ready to start his first ten-month term as a formal student in the college—after he paid the eleven scudi required to secure his place. His studies would keep him in Naples for the next three academic years.

  Bruno passed his three sets of annual examinations without difficulty, and received his license as reader in theology in July 1575, after defending a series of theses, including “Everything that Thomas Aquinas says in the Summa Against the Gentiles is right” and “Everything that the Master of the Sentences [that is, Peter Lombard] says is right.” It was a far cry from Giles of Viterbo’s endeavor to rewrite Peter Lombard’s Sentences “according to the mind of Plato.” The course of study prescribed by the Dominican statutes was called “philosophy,” but it was philosophy of the most narrowly Scholastic kind, firmly rooted in Aristotle and the Middle Ages, conveyed by endless syllogisms: if A and B, then C. Any potential distraction, like the study of Plato, or Greek, or Hebrew, was strictly excluded. Natural philosophy derived from Aristotle; theology followed the Master of the Sentences, stolid, thorough Peter Lombard. The only controversial author in the whole canon of the Order of Preachers was Thomas Aquinas himself. Yet Fra Giordano passed through his three years of theological training at the Dominican college successfully, without a sign of protest.

  And then, early in 1576, after nearly ten years of impeccable conformity to the religious life, Fra Giordano was in trouble once again. For some reason, the Dominican provincial of Naples, Fra Domenico Vita, had begun to investigate him in 1575. Fearing a prison sentence, as he later told his Venetian inquisitors, Bruno moved to Rome and the convent of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, where he may have stayed as long as several months.

  Fra Domenico Vita’s case against Bruno was based on old information, and may have been based, as Saverio Ricci has suggested, on old rancor. Vita dredged up an incident from 1572, when the convent of San Domenico Maggiore had hosted the Tuscan friar Agostino da Montalcino, a professor of philosophy at the Dominican college in Rome—that is, at Santa Maria Sopra Minerva. On that occasion, Fra Agostino seems to have been holding forth, in classic academic style, about methodology, until Fra Giordano, with his brand-new degree in theology, stopped the harangue in its tracks. As he would tell his Venetian inquisitors:

  Conversing with Fra Montalcino, who said that the heretics were ignorant and lacked the Scholastic terms [for their arguments], I replied that, although they might not make their points according to Scholastic discipline, still, they stated their intentions effectively, just as the ancient Fathers of the Church had done. I used the heresy of Arius as an example; the Scholastics say that he understood the conception of the Son as an act of nature and not of will, but you can say the same thing in non-Scholastic terms by quoting Saint Augustine, namely that the Son is not of the same substance as the Father, and he proceeds as the creation of his will. At which point that Father jumped up, along with the others present, and said that I was defending the heretics, and I wanted to claim that they were learned.

  It was the sort of incident that could have been forgotten with a little forbearance on both sides; in 1572 Bruno was, after all, an eager young scholar measuring himself against an older colleague. His own short description of the episode is enough, however, to reveal both the pomposity of Fra Agostino and the sharp sting of his own wit; he may have been more cutting with his colleague than he meant to be. Had he chosen any other example to prove his point than the divinity of Jesus, the incident might have passed eventually into oblivion. Instead, whether inadvertently or deliberately, he had raised the question that had lodged deep in his private thoughts from his first days as a Dominican, and done so forcefully enough for his provincial to remember the occasion three years later.

  His argument with Fra Agostino had arisen over two separate points. The first was a matter of intellectual respect. The elder friar’s proclaimed contempt for “the heretics” expressed a prejudice rather than a reasoned response to individual ideas, and on one level Bruno was clearly offended by the sweeping pronouncement that all heretics were ignorant.

  It was another matter altogether to defend Arius, the early Christian bishop who denied the divinity of Christ and, according to legend, received a box on the ear from none other than Saint Nicholas for having dared to say so. When Bruno told his Venetian inquisitors that he had “never made a public denial” of the Trinity, “nor taught or written anything to that effect,” he may have been sincere; as those records show, he was not the most self-aware of individuals. But in fact the argument against the personhood and incarnation of Jesus that he presented to his inquisitors in Venice was substantially the same argument he had presented years before to Fra Agostino da Montalcino; it was the argument of Arius. Worse still, on both occasions he brought in Saint Augustine to back up the Arian position (and with a friar named Augustine!): the term “person” had been a novelty in the fourth century A.D., and Augustine, at least, was skeptical about its appropriateness to describing the nature of Christ and the Holy Spirit. For a newly minted theologian who had earned his degree by contending that “everything that the Master of the Sentences says is right,” the argument was probably a little too smooth to seem entirely casual. Its point, furthermore, was to prove the Master of the Sentences wrong. Peter Lombard’s “correct” account of the Trinity, its three persons, and the procession from one to the other simply ignored Saint Augustine’s reservations about splitting one God into three persons (not to mention the Orthodox reservation about the Holy Spirit proceeding from both the Father and the Son).

  Three years later, as Fra Giordano took in the sights of Rome, Fra Domenico Vita paid a visit to the Inquisition archives to see what else the friar from Nola might have asserted over the years.

  From the time of Saint Dominic himself, the brothers of his order had been engaged in battling challenges to Christian orthodoxy, initially by investigating individual cases as they arose. These investigations were called “inquisitions,” and initially they involved renegade Christians, like Dominic’s chosen enemies, the Albigensians, or the Catalan mystic Ramon Llull, who claimed to have visions of the Messiah when he practiced what he called his Great Art of memory. Within two generations, however, the growth of Moorish power in Spain and North Africa began to focus Spanish Christians’ attenti
on on a new set of targets: Muslims and Jews. Educated, wealthy, and adaptable, Spanish Jews coexisted with the Moors more easily than their crusading Christian neighbors, who massacred them by the thousands in 1391 and converted the survivors by force, some twenty to twenty-five thousand “new Christians” created virtually at once. In the mid-fifteenth century, with Muslim pirates cruising the Mediterranean and the Ottoman Turks in charge of Constantinople, Spanish Christians once again focused their fears on “Jews and Saracens” (as a papal bull put it in 1451). In 1478, fortified by a bull from Pope Sixtus IV, King Ferdinand of Aragon set up a series of tribunals to be run by Dominican examiners; this was the beginning of the Spanish Inquisition. This new, permanent Inquisition focused relentless attention specifically on converted Jews, charging them with “Judaizing,” returning to their old religious ways. In so doing, the Spanish Inquisition obeyed the Spanish crown more than it obeyed the papacy, and Pope Sixtus IV was swift to complain, although with little effect; King Ferdinand the Catholic and his grand inquisitor, Tomás de Torquemada, continued to behave as they wished.

  Another kind of external threat, the Protestant Reformation, led Pope Paul III to establish a Roman branch of the Inquisition, the General or Holy Office, in 1542. Its targets reflected these new and different fears: it aimed its investigations at Protestants, deviant Catholics, witches, and the content of printed books. No work of theology could go to press in Catholic cities without preliminary scrutiny by an authorized investigator who would award suitably orthodox manuscripts the order “Imprimatur”—“Let it be printed.” Some printed books, even if they did not entirely pass muster, could be sold after minor censorship, by crossing out complimentary references to Protestant scholars as “learned” or “erudite” or by removing one or two passages regarded as objectionable by the Inquisition’s censors. Some authors were banned altogether—not only such evident troublemakers as John Calvin and Martin Luther, but also staunchly Catholic writers like Erasmus of Rotterdam, guilty of excessive paganism and excessive irreverence in the eyes of Church conservatives.

  Public writings were not the only targets of inquisitorial curiosity: the examiners and their informers also probed mercilessly into private life, searching for clues to secret Protestant sympathies, unorthodox beliefs, superstition, or witchcraft. Importantly, however, Rome carried out the Inquisition according to its own protocol, as did the other cities of Italy, Naples included. Despite the best efforts of the Spanish viceroys, the Neapolitan inquisitors continued to take their orders from Rome, where investigators followed ancient Roman law in requiring the independent testimony of two witnesses to obtain a conviction (in Spain, the Inquisition could try and convict on the basis of a single anonymous denunciation). The most recent attempt to impose the Spanish Inquisition, in 1563, had ended, after some street battles and a flurry of pamphlets, with the civic authorities’ promise to expel the Jews. For the time being, unless there were two witnesses to each of Fra Giordano’s transgressions, he was safe from prosecution. Unfortunately, so far he had always taken his aggressive stands before an audience.

  As it turned out, the archives of the Holy Office in San Domenico Maggiore preserved the report of Bruno’s attack on The Seven Joys of the Virgin. Furthermore, although his novice master had torn up the report of his first offense, a number of friars remembered how the young Bruno had cleared his cell of holy images in 1566. Fra Domenico Vita ordered a search of Bruno’s Neapolitan cell without result. But a search of the latrine brought up a copy of the Commentaries of Erasmus with Bruno’s notes in the margins; he had hidden the book there before going off to Rome.

  Neapolitan latrines were not simply holes in the ground, or, as often in Rome, holes in the wall, the balcony, or the stairwell. From ancient Greek times to World War II, Naples was served by a system of interconnecting cisterns carved deep into the city’s volcanic bedrock, sometimes extending hundreds of feet below ground level. This underground system collected both water and sewage and was serviced at regular intervals by a squadron of professional cleaners (who had their own exquisite ways of repaying anyone who refused their ministrations). Only the most determined inquisitor would want to riffle through such evidence. Fra Domenico Vita was evidently a man so determined.

  The normal penalty for reading forbidden books was excommunication. Although Bruno’s later wanderings would show that there were huge gaps in the passage of information from one Dominican house to another, rumors about the developments at San Domenico reached him by letter in Rome. His position at Santa Maria Sopra Minerva seems to have deteriorated as well; as his Venetian host Giovanni Mocenigo would report in 1592: “He told me that he had been arraigned by the Inquisition on 130 counts, and that he fled when his case came up, because he was charged with having thrown his accuser into the Tiber, or at least the person he believed had accused him to the Inquisition.”

  The Venetian inquisitors did not pursue Mocenigo’s insinuation about a murder charge, which suggests that it must have been unfounded. There are no records in Naples or Rome to indicate that Bruno was ever accused of throwing anyone into the Tiber, or arraigned, for that matter, on 130 counts by the Inquisition. On one matter, however, Mocenigo was correct. Bruno did decide to run away. He slipped out of Rome one day in 1576 and headed north.

  The ideal refuge for a man of Giordano Bruno’s independent opinions would have been Venice or its university town, Padua, both of them proud of their political independence. That independence expressed itself on many levels, including sixteenth-century Italy’s closest equivalent to free speech and a free press. But Venice in 1576 was infected with the plague. Bruno chose instead to travel along the coast to the Tuscan cities of Pisa and Livorno, and then on toward Genoa. En route, he abandoned his white Dominican habit, his Dominican name, Giordano, and his clean-shaven face to wander northward as Messer Filippo Bruno, gentleman.

  Dominican friars did not change residence without permission from their superiors. Between his forbidden reading and his forbidden travel, Fra Giordano Bruno risked defrocking as well as excommunication. The inquisitors at San Domenico sent his dossier to the Roman Inquisition at Santa Maria Sopra Minerva. This office, in turn, issued a summons ordering him to appear before the office in Rome, but when the scheduled time arrived, he was long gone. The career of Fra Giordano Bruno da Nola, O.P., had lasted exactly ten years.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Holy Asininity

  GENOA, 1576

  He has said that friars … are all asses, and that our opinions are the teachings of asses.

  —Giovanni Mocenigo, first letter to the Venetian Inquisition, March 23, 1592

  Remarkable that this ass professes himself a doctor.

  —Marginal notation in one of Bruno’s books

  Traveling north from Rome in the spring of 1576, Bruno stopped off in the port of Genoa. He may well have hoped to find work in that large, important city, and perhaps some time to recuperate; Genoa was an independent state, accustomed to resolving its problems independently of Rome, and he was unlikely to be handed over to any Roman authorities there. Bruno was still present in the city on Palm Sunday, April 15, when the Dominican friars of Santa Maria in Castello displayed their most treasured relic to the public, the tail of the donkey that had carried Jesus into Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday, wrapped in silk:

  I myself saw the friars of Castello in Genoa display the veiled tail for a short time, saying: “Don’t touch it, kiss it; this is the holy relic of that blessed ass who was made worthy to carry Our Lord from the Mount of Olives to Jerusalem. Venerate it, kiss it, give an offering; you will receive a hundred times as much in return, and you will have eternal life.”

  The scene took the cult of relics to its absurd extreme—Bruno would later note that it was as easy to display the bone of a dog or a hanged man as the bone of a real saint—but there was also a kind of sublime weirdness to the idea that a donkey could provide the key to heaven. His own life had provided evidence enough that asses enjoyed
special divine protection: the pedantic ass who had started all his troubles, Fra Agostino da Montalcino, was still pontificating in the bosom of the Order of Preachers, whereas Bruno, for all his wit, had become, almost overnight, a wanderer.