Giordano Bruno

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Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher, former Dominican friar, and master of the art of memory who held that the universe is infinite, alive, and filled with innumerable worlds. Born Filippo Bruno at Nola near Naples in 1548, he took the name Giordano on entering the Dominican order as a young man; by his late twenties he had fled the order under suspicion of heresy and begun a restless exile that carried him across Geneva, Paris, London, Wittenberg, Prague, and back into Italy. In 1600 the Roman Inquisition burned him in the Campo de’ Fiori.

What he argued was, for his moment, vertiginous. Where the inherited cosmos was a nested set of finite spheres closed by the stars, Bruno taught a space without edge or centre, strewn with other suns and other earths, each potentially peopled. He embraced the heliocentrism of Copernicus but pressed it past anything Copernicus had claimed, dissolving the fixed sphere of the stars altogether. God, in his account, was not a craftsman outside the world but a presence wholly within it — an infinite cause expressed in an infinite effect, so that the divine and the natural order shade into one another. Later readers have called this position pantheism; the label is a useful approximation rather than his own word.

The other half of his work is harder for modern eyes to place beside the cosmology, and the relation between them is precisely what scholarship disputes. Bruno was a virtuoso of the classical art of memory, devising intricate systems of images and wheels — set out in works such as De umbris idearum — meant not only to store knowledge but to align the mind with the structure of the cosmos. He drew openly on the Corpus Hermeticum, then believed to be Egyptian wisdom older than Moses, and wrote on natural magic and the binding power of images. The historian Frances Yates argued that Bruno is best understood as a Hermetic magus whose infinite universe was a religious vision before it was a physical theory. That reading was enormously influential and is now heavily qualified: later scholars find a sharper philosopher and a more genuine cosmologist than the purely magical portrait allows, without denying the magic its place.

His death made him a symbol, and the symbol has been claimed in incompatible directions. The nineteenth century raised a statue on the spot where he burned and made him a martyr to free thought against the Church; others have stressed that the surviving records turn less on Copernican astronomy than on theological charges — the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the soul, magic. The trial documents are themselves largely lost, which has left the exact grounds of his condemnation a matter of reconstruction. What is not in doubt is that he refused to recant. The recorded report of his sentencing has him answer that his judges pronounced it with greater fear than he received it.

→ In the library: Steiner — Mystics of the Renaissance (1910; ch. on Bruno)

→ Related: Pantheism · Hermes Trismegistus · Neoplatonism · Henry More · Robert Fludd