Giordano Bruno Read online

  In that fate, the former Fra Giordano was not alone—far from it. Despite the difficulties that travel posed in the sixteenth century, Europe was full of wanderers. Bruno once described the set of vagabonds he had seen in Rome, gathering around the marketplace near his convent:

  A mixture of desperate souls, of servants disgraced by their masters, of exiles from storms, of pilgrims, of useless and inert persons, of those who have no other pastime than robbery, of those who have just escaped from prison, of those who have a plan to deceive someone … you’ll find as many as you like in Rome, in Campo de’ Fiori.

  In Genoa in 1576, the population of desperate souls also included a large number of refugees from the plague, who brought reports of its spread through the cities of northern Italy. Some brought the plague bacillus as well, traveling along in their rat-infested cargoes. Other travelers were escaping religious persecution. Genoa was a way station for many of the Italian Protestants, would-be Protestants, and dissident Catholics who moved north from the reach of Rome toward what they hoped would be safety, seeking out protection from the Waldensians of Piedmont, the Calvinists of Geneva, the Lutherans of Germany, or the Huguenots of France.

  By and large, however, the moving population of Europe observed the same social distinctions as its settled communities. With his degree from the College of San Domenico Maggiore, Bruno belonged at the very top of an intellectual elite, and everything about him—his way of speaking, the way he carried himself, his pale scholar’s complexion, and his priest’s well-kept hands—identified his place in the world as surely as—for the moment at least—his ragged tonsure and the growing stubble of his scraggly beard. Furthermore, despite their strict conventual rules, individual Dominicans moved from city to city with some regularity, whether they were touring as preachers or advancing their careers as professors or administrators. Making his way as a traveler, not quite resigned to being a fugitive, Bruno continued to depend on the order more than occasionally for lodging and professional connections.

  There is little doubt about what he would have done if he had stayed in Rome, or at San Domenico Maggiore, and survived the Inquisition’s examination with no more than a reprimand; he had trained, perhaps with the greatest rigor in the Western world, to become a professor of philosophy, and that is surely what he would have become. Wherever he went in his new life of wandering, he always tried first to find a place as a university professor. He worked as a teacher because he actively wanted to teach, just as the greatest philosophers had taught before him: Socrates, the teacher of Plato; Plato, the teacher of Aristotle; Aristotle, the teacher of Alexander the Great; Thomas Aquinas, professor at the University of Paris and the College of San Domenico Maggiore. His writings, like theirs, were teachings (only Socrates refused to write, but he had Plato to do the job for him). Like them, he tried to invent new kinds of writing to convey his philosophical message, experimenting over and over with language, style, and presentation.

  Bruno had also developed firm ideas about good and bad teaching. For Fra Teofilo da Vairano, he reserved the word “maestro”—more than a teacher, a master. To most of the rest of the scholarly world he applied the phrase “asini pedanti”—“pedant asses”—the grammarians, schoolmasters, and pious bigots who plagued his life from beginning to end, from his grammar-school teachers in Nola to his cellmates in Venice. What he called asinità, the defining characteristic of these asini pedanti, meant something more than simple “asininity,” although it could mean that too. Asinità, as he developed his thoughts about it, incorporated both the stubborn stupidity of pure ego and the divine simplicity of pure ignorance. A donkey, after all, is unpredictable, both willfully perverse and admirably patient, with a cry that can only be described as laughable. As Bruno began his wanderings, he had more time than ever before to contemplate the ins and outs of asininity at first hand, and he would eventually make it one of the pillars of the Nolan philosophy. Mules and donkeys were the most usual means of transportation for travelers over long distances in sixteenth-century Europe, and Giordano Bruno, refined but hardly rich enough to afford a horse, must have ridden, when he did not walk, on the back of one of these durable creatures. The furry gray tail he saw reverentially displayed in Genoa would come back to haunt his imagination.

  The holy tail also shows up in a popular sixteenth-century ditty, “The Donkey’s Testament.” With its catchy chorus, “Oh my, oh my, oh my, donkey mine, you’re going to die,” and its tale about a peasant on the road with his ancient beast, it was the perfect traveler’s song, although it also echoed the meter of the terrifying medieval poem about the Last Judgment, Dies Irae (Day of Wrath). Before dropping dead and meeting his own Judgment Day, the donkey turns to his master and makes a will:

  Oh my, oh my, oh my,

  donkey mine, you’re going to die, oh my …

  Let the curia have my cross;

  The cardinals my ears I toss.

  Pass my tail on to the friars

  And my hee-haw to the choirs,

  Preachers get my tongue; instead,

  Let the judges have my head;

  To the porters give my back,

  My feet to peddlers with their pack;

  Give my meat to those who fast;

  Cobblers get my hide at last.

  Give my mane to make a brush,

  Give my bones for dogs to crush,

  Let the vultures have my gut,

  Widows get my you-know-what,

  And—why not?—throw in my nuts.

  With his will thus ratified,

  Down the donkey lay and died.

  As for the remaining bit,

  Once the druggist gets his shit

  And the doctors get his bladder,

  Let the priests dispute the matter.

  With its doggerel rhythm and bad jokes, it was the perfect verse to chant on the road. By comparison, Bruno’s own “Sonnet in Praise of the Ass,” penned in 1584, would rank as great literature, with its careful development of asinità in both its senses, as the defining quality of stolid pedants and of holy fools:

  SONNET IN PRAISE OF THE ASS

  Blest asininity, blest ignorance,

  O blest stupidity, pious devotion,

  Able alone to set good souls in motion

  That human wit and study can’t advance;

  Nor will the most laborious vigilance

  Of art or of invention win promotion

  (No more than any philosophic notion)

  To heaven, where you build your residence.

  What can the value of your study be,

  All you who yearn to know how Nature fares,

  If stars are made of earth, or fire, or sea?

  Blest asininity knows no such cares;

  With folded hands it waits on bended knee

  For God to parcel out our fated shares,

  And nothing perseveres

  Except the fruit of infinite repose

  That, once the funeral’s over, God bestows.

  Donkeys also served Europeans as a stereotype of Jews. The Spanish and Italian term for converted Jews may have been marranos, Spanish for “pigs,” but Jews who persisted in their faith were also compared to stubborn donkeys in the period’s more scurrilous literature, down to invidious comparisons between a stereotypical Jewish physiognomy and the long-nosed, big-eared asinine profile. Yet this same imagery could be reversed, as it was by the German writer Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, a great influence on Bruno, who devoted his Digression in Praise of the Ass to explaining why Jesus had, in Agrippa’s own words, chosen as apostles “idiots from the rude crowd, almost entirely illiterate, ignorant asses”:

  Learned Jews explain that the ass is a symbol of extraordinary endurance and strength, of patience and clemency … For its qualities are those that are most necessary in a disciple: it lives on little food and is content with whatever it gets; it tolerates poverty, hunger, work, sores, and neglect well, and is patient with every sort of persecution; it is of simple and humbl
e spirit, so that it can hardly distinguish lettuce from thistles, innocent and pure of heart, free from rancor, at peace with all the animals, bearing every burden patiently on its back … Did not Christ, through the mouths of his apostles and disciples, those simple, rude idiots and asses, conquer and quash the philosophers of the Gentiles and the lawyers and Pharisees of the Jews?

  Asses also had their political aspect, notably for Bruno in a work published in Naples in 1551–52, Giovanni Battista Pino’s Discourse on the Ass. Pino wrote in the aftermath of the riots that erupted in Naples in 1547 when the viceroy Don Pedro de Toledo tried, for the first time, to impose the Spanish Inquisition. (Pino himself was among the delegates sent by the city to explain the events to the emperor Charles V.) In Pino’s Discourse, it is the Inquisition’s champion, Don Pedro, whose long muzzle and long ears reveal his asinità. It is not surprising that the book is now extremely rare—Don Pedro and his successors did their best to suppress it—but in its day it was a great success, passed along eagerly from one Neapolitan reader to the next. As one of the centers of resistance to Spain, San Domenico Maggiore must have had its share of copies.

  Just after Pino’s Discourse on the Ass had begun to circulate in Naples, another book arrived from Spain. In 1554, a Spanish publisher printed the anonymous story of a character named Lazarillo de Tormes, the first of endless editions of what became one of Europe’s bestselling books. In Lazarillo’s wake there followed a whole series of novels about a type of person called, in Spanish, a pícaro. Something about the character struck a chord in Spanish society, and not only there. Naples, as a Spanish dominion, provided its own active public for picaresque novels. By the time the perplexed Neapolitan named Bruno took to the road—Giordano or Filippo?—he was primed to find a world of picaresque adventures around him.

  But Naples was not only a creature of Spain; it was a city with a long history of its own, where ancient aristocracies mingled and clashed with the career builders who were sent out from Madrid to make their way in this most unprovincial of provinces. Life offered at least as many picaresque details in Naples as it did in La Mancha. Good birth, good money, and good behavior counted for everything in good society, but no one, in Spain itself, let alone Naples, quite knew how to distinguish good from bad with absolute accuracy. This was the uncertainty that picaresque novels exploited, delighting readers and disconcerting them at the same time. Pícaros, bad from birth, shameless by nature, but diabolically clever, confounded civility by climbing up and down the social ladder, starting from nowhere, ending nowhere, and managing to travel everywhere in between. They could be blind idealists like Don Quixote de la Mancha or rogues like Lazarillo de Tormes, but the novels tended to observe a rough rule of social conservatism: although pícaros (or female pícaras) might be clever enough to get away briefly with a scheme or two, they were never quite clever enough to carry out their deceptions forever. Before they ended back in the underworld that spawned them, however, they took their readers in imagination along a trail of social ups and downs that the readers of picaresque novels, whether they were learned, aristocratic, or middle-class, normally dared not follow in real life.

  The Spanish novels tend to ascribe the low birth and the cleverness of Spanish pícaros to Jewish ancestry, the obsession of Spaniards ever since the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Lazarillo de Tormes, with his properly Hebraic name Lazarus, set the example for a long anti-Semitic tradition (it still shows up in the figure of the marrano Leporello in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, whose librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, was a convert from Judaism himself). In Naples, however, where many of Spain’s ejected Jews had fled (followed in 1497 by the Jews of Portugal), purity of blood never acquired this same symbolic importance; it was hard to speak of pure ancestry in a city founded by Greeks and settled by Etruscans, Samnites, Oscans, Romans, Arabs, Normans, and French before the Spaniards ever came to town. But Neapolitans certainly warmed to the idea of clever tricksters foiling the rules of society, and created their own version of a pícaro in the rogue Pulcinella, the hero of their local form of drama, commedia dell’arte. Pulcinella, in turn, reached England as the Punch of the Punch-and-Judy shows, which were themselves inspired by Neapolitan street drama. Pícaros and Pulcinella had begun to appear by the time Filippo Bruno arrived in Naples, and he would eventually encounter Punch and Judy in London. The influence of their broad, brutal comedy shows in his vernacular writing, from the biting farce of The Candlemaker to the characters in his philosophical dialogues, most of whom could be played by a troupe of commedia dell’arte actors or, indeed, a set of Punch-and-Judy puppets.

  Picaresque adventures were a natural companion to asinità, and not just because pícaros rode donkeys rather than horses—unless the horse was Don Quixote’s broken-down Rocinante. The ups and downs that defined a pícaro’s life matched popular images of the Wheel of Fortune, shown in contemporary woodcuts and manuscript illuminations as a huge version of a Ferris wheel, with people climbing up its spokes to fame and wealth or plunging down to disgrace. Often, to drive home the point that good luck is random, the human figures riding the wheel have donkeys’ heads—especially those on the way up. The Wheel of Fortune was an image that Bruno would evoke again and again as a writer: turning as steadily and as inexorably as the cycles of the heavens, bringing everything and everybody up, down, and back again. He had seen seashells in the soil of Monte Cicala, proof that the dry land around his house had once been underwater. The changeability of his own life applied equally to the ground under his feet, and to the stars overhead with their endlessly shifting patterns. As his father had said, a wise man “taking good and evil into consideration regards each of them as variable … Therefore he neither despairs nor puffs up his spirit … for him pleasure is no pleasure, because its goal is in the present. Likewise, pain for him is no pain, because by force of reasoning he is mindful of its end.”

  In the same vein, Bruno’s Candlemaker would tell an obscene fable about a lion traveling from Naples in the company of an ass, the noblest of beasts paired with the most ridiculous:

  Once upon a time the lion and the ass were friends, and when they went on a journey together, they promised that when they came to a river each would take turns carrying the other across; that is to say, first the ass would carry the lion, and the next time the lion would carry the ass. Now they had to go to Rome, and because they had neither a boat nor a bridge when they arrived at the river Garigliano, the ass took the lion on its back, and as he swam to the other side, the lion, for fear of falling, sank his claws deeper and deeper into the poor animal’s skin until they penetrated almost to the bone. And the poor thing (who, after all, makes a profession of his patience) endured it as best he could without making a sound; all he did, when they arrived safely out of the water, was shake his back a bit and roll over three or four times in the hot sand, and on they went. Eight days later, as they made their return, it was time for the lion to carry the ass, who, once he had climbed up, in order to keep from falling, gripped the lion’s neck in his teeth, and because that was not enough to keep him in place, he stuck his tool (or as we say, his you-know-what), to be blunt, in the space beneath the tail where there is no fur, so that the lion felt more pain than a woman in childbirth, and cried, “Hey, hey, ow, ow, ow, ouch, hey, traitor!” To which the ass replied with a sober countenance and grave tone: “Patience, patience, my brother; you see, I have no other claw.” And so the lion was compelled to suffer and endure until they had crossed the river. That is to say, “Everything changes places,” and no one is so great an ass that he won’t take the opportunity when it comes along.

  Life on the road forced Bruno into the virtues of asinità: patience, endurance, and, like the ass of his fable, resourcefulness. He applied all his wits (the best “claws” in his own arsenal) to ensuring that he would travel as an itinerant professor, a lionlike virtuoso rather than an asinine pícaro, but the choice was not always his to make. In the beginning, he had no idea which name to use, Filipp
o or Giordano, whether to wear his habit or cast it off, whether to shave like a Dominican or grow the sparse black beard that was all he could manage. When he eventually settled on an identity, it would be a suitably ambiguous combination of his secular and his Dominican past: he kept the name he had chosen for himself, Giordano, and doffed his friar’s habit. But not yet. For the moment, Messer Filippo Bruno was a confused soul for whom the statement “Everything changes places” was a painful, shocking fact rather than a founding principle of the Nolan philosophy.

  Bruno did not stay long in Genoa. Ports, with their rat-infested ships coming in and out from every part of the world, had always been prime breeding grounds for plague. When dead rats began to appear in the streets of the city, the rumors began to fly. Filippo of Nola pressed on beyond the Bay of Genoa until he found the remote little seaside town of Noli, politically independent and surrounded on every side by steep mountains. There he stopped, for the first time since he had left Rome.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Signs of the Times

  NOLI AND VENICE, 1576–1577

  When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather today: for the sky is red and lowering. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?

  —Matthew 16:2–3

  In Noli, as Bruno would tell his Venetian inquisitors, “I stayed four or five months teaching grammar to kids,” and again, “I stayed in Noli, as I said, about four months, teaching grammar to children and reading The Sphere to certain gentlemen; and afterward I left there and went first to Savona, where I stayed about fifteen days, and from Savona to Turin, and when I couldn’t find a situation there to my satisfaction, I came to Venice by the Po.”