Bruno, Giordano (1548–1600)

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BRUNO, GIORDANO (1548–1600)

BRUNO, GIORDANO (1548–1600), Italian philosopher. Born to a military father, in Nola near Naples, in 1548, Bruno was baptized Filippo. He became Giordano in 1565 on entering the Dominican monastery in Naples. He was ordained a priest in 1573, but was soon in trouble for reading forbidden books. Bruno was forced to flee from Naples, and later from Rome, to escape an official enquiry.

Discarding his monk's habit, Bruno traveled north through Genoa and Venice, giving private lessons on cosmology. In 1579, he left Italy for Geneva, where he found work with the printers. Bruno repudiated John Calvin's radical concept of predestination, and was soon obliged to leave Geneva after publishing a libel, no longer extant, criticizing one of the city's most distinguished professors of philosophy. He fared better in France where, after two years teaching philosophy at the University of Toulouse, he arrived in Paris in 1581.

Bruno was soon noticed by the French king, Henry III, for his art of memory which linked the classical art, considered as a part of rhetoric, with the use of memory icons as a part of logic proposed by the thirteenth-century mystic, Ramon Lull. Appointed as one of the royal lecturers, Bruno published in Paris in 1582 his first surviving work, De Umbris Idearum, which explains his art of memory. In the same year, Bruno published in Italian the comedy Candelaio, which paints a vividly realistic picture of the corrupt activities of plebeian Naples. It is thought by some to have influenced major Elizabethan dramatists such as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.

In the spring of 1583, Bruno left Paris for London, where he became a gentleman attendant on the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau, who was secretly supporting the cause of the Catholic Mary, queen of Scots. With the ambassador, he visited the court of Queen Elizabeth I and the University of Oxford, where he later returned to lecture on cosmology. His attempt to propose Copernicus's heliocentric astronomy was a disaster. Accused of plagiarism and treated with contempt, Bruno returned to London where, between 1584 and 1585, he wrote and published his six Italian dialogues, which argue for a post-Copernican, infinite universe in which each star is a sun, giving rise to an infinite number of solar systems similar to our own.

After returning to Paris in autumn 1585, Bruno wandered through central Europe teaching and publishing his philosophy in Wittenberg, Prague, Helmsted, and Frankfurt. In 1591, he published his Latin masterpiece, known as the Frankfurt Trilogy, prefixing his cosmological picture (De Immenso) with the first systematic modern treatise proposing an atomistic conception of matter (De Triplici Minimo). The second volume of the trilogy (De Monade) on Pythagorean number symbolism announces Bruno's final works, left unpublished at his death, which show an increased attention to magical and mystical themes in a Neoplatonic and Hermetic perspective.

Bruno returned to Italy in summer 1591, invited by a Venetian nobleman, Giovanni Mocenigo, to teach him his art of memory. In May 1592, Mocenigo denounced him to the Inquisition for heretical opinions. Bruno was arrested and tried in Venice until February 1593, when he was extradited to Rome. Refusing to recant, Bruno was burnt at the stake in Campo dei Fiori in Rome on 17 February 1600.

At the center of Bruno's philosophy lies his new picture of an infinite, homogeneous, atomistically articulated cosmos, full of infinite life. From this idea derives his concept of God as Monad, or the ineffable One whose seal or shadow is the infinite world; his refusal of the Christian incarnation on the basis that the whole universe, filled with the divine spirit, is an incarnation of God; his search for that God through a logical hunt that follows the traces of divine order observable within the natural universe; his idea of magic as filling the gap that opens up between the infinite whole and the finite mind of the philosopher, entrapped in time and space; his search for new mathematical and mnemonic arts capable of comprehending the infinite, universal whole.

Considered a precursor of major philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza or Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Bruno was appreciated in the nineteenth century above all for his contribution to the scientific revolution and in the twentieth for his Hermetic magic and interest in the occult. The agenda for the new century appears oriented toward a more balanced and complete view of him as a thinker who amalgamated apparently conflicting doctrines of knowledge in a complex but rich oeuvre that Bruno himself referred to as "the Nolan philosophy."

See also Academies, Learned ; Cosmology ; Magic ; Philosophy ; Scientific Revolution ; Spinoza, Baruch.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Bruno, Giordano. The Ash Wednesday Supper (1584), edited and translated by E. A. Gosselin and L. S. Lerner. Hamden, Conn., 1977. Reprint: Toronto, 1995.

——. The Cabala of Pegasus (1585). Edited and translated by S. L. Sondergard and M. U. Sowell. New Haven and London, 2002.

——. Cause, Principle and Unity (1584) and Essays on Magic. Edited and translated by R. J. Blackwell and Robert de Lucca. Introduction by Alfonso Ingegno. Cambridge, U.K., 1998.

——. The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (1584). Edited and translated by A. D. Imerti. New Brunswick, N.J., 1964.

——. The Heroic Frenzies (1585). Edited and translated by P. E. Memmo. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1964.

——. His Life and Thought, with Annotated Translation of his Work, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (1584). Edited and translated by D.W. Singer. New York, 1950.