BRUNO, GIORDANO
(1548–1600)

Giordano Bruno, the most famous of the Italian philosophers of the Renaissance, was born at Nola, near Naples. At an early age he entered the Dominican order and became an inmate of the Dominican convent in Naples. In 1576 he was accused of heresy and fled, abandoning the Dominican habit. Thereafter he wandered through Europe. After visiting Geneva, and lecturing on the Tractatus de Sphaera Mundi of Sacrobosco at Toulouse, Bruno reached Paris in 1581. Here he gave public lectures that attracted the attention of King Henri III, and published two books on the art of memory that reveal him as greatly influenced by that textbook of Renaissance magic, the De Occulta Philosophia of Henry Cornelius Agrippa, from which he quotes lists of magic images of the stars, incantations, and other occult procedures. Bruno as a Renaissance magus, in line of descent from the learned philosophical magic inaugurated by Marsilio Ficino, is already present in these books. The title of one of them, De Umbris Idearum (Shadows of Ideas), is taken from the necromantic commentary on the Sphere of Sacrobosco by Cecco d'Ascoli, whom Bruno mentions admiringly in other works. It may be inferred that the lectures at Toulouse were probably based on this commentary.

Early in 1583 Bruno went to England with letters of recommendation from Henri III to the French ambassador in London. He lived in the French embassy during the two years he spent in England, and the ambassador protected him from the tumults aroused by his writings, which were clandestinely printed in London. These included the Triginta Sigilli (Thirty seals), an extremely obscure work on his magic art of memory; those who manage to reach the end of it find an advocacy of a new religion based on love, art, magic, and mathesis. It is dedicated to the vice-chancellor and doctors of the University of Oxford in high-sounding terms in which Bruno announces himself as "the waker of sleeping souls, tamer of presumptuous and recalcitrant ignorance, proclaimer of a general philanthropy."

In June 1583 the Polish prince Albert Alasco (Laski) visited Oxford and was entertained with public disputations. Bruno was in his train, and, according to a recently discovered account by George Abbot, afterward archbishop of Canterbury, Bruno returned to Oxford after the party had left and delivered, uninvited, lectures that were largely a repetition of Marsilio Ficino's work on astral magic, the De Vita Coelitus Comparanda (On drawing down the life of heaven), although he also maintained Nicolas Copernicus's opinion "that the earth did go round and the heavens did stand still." Abbot says that Bruno was induced to discontinue the lectures when the plagiarism from Ficino was pointed out to him.

While in England, Bruno published five dialogues in Italian. In La cena de le ceneri (The Ash Wednesday supper; 1584) he defends his version of the Copernican theory against Oxford "pedants," a reflection of his visit to Oxford. In De la causa, principio e uno (1584) he apologizes for the storms aroused by his attack on Oxford, but makes matters worse by defending the friars of pre-Reformation Oxford, whom he prefers to their Protestant successors. The De l'infinito, universo e mondi (1584) is an exposition of his vision of an infinite universe and innumerable worlds. The Spaccio de la bestia trionfante (The expulsion of the triumphant beast; 1584) envisages a universal moral and religious reform and is dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. The Cabala del cavallo pegaseo (Cabal of the horse Pegasus; 1585) indicates Bruno's adaptation of the Jewish kabbalah. The De gli eroici furori (On heroic enthusiasms; 1585) also dedicated to Sidney, is in the form of a sonnet sequence with commentaries expounding the philosophical and mystical meanings of the poems. It is upon this series of most striking and brilliant works, in which Bruno appears as the propagator of a new philosophy and cosmology, a new ethic and religion, that his fame largely rests. They are all full of Hermetic influences and are bound up with a complex religious, or politico-religious, mission for which Bruno believed he had the support of Henri III, and which cannot have been uncongenial to the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau de Mauvissière, to whom three of the books are dedicated. Sidney's reactions to Bruno are unknown.

Late in 1585 Bruno returned to Paris, where he delivered an address on his philosophy in the Collège de Cambrai, arousing strong opposition, and where he had a curious controversy with Fabrizio Mordente about the compass that Mordente had invented. Paris was in a disturbed state, on the eve of the wars of the League, and Bruno's activities added to the "tumults," from which he fled in 1586 and began his travels through Germany. He was favorably received at the University of Wittenberg, and during his stay there he wrote a number of works, particularly on the art of Ramón Lull, to which he attached great importance and which he believed he understood better than Lull himself. From Wittenberg he went to Prague, where he tried to obtain the favor of Emperor Rudolph II with his Articuli Adversus Mathematicos (1588), in which he states that he is strongly against mathematics, which he regarded as a "pedantry" lacking in deep magical insight into nature. His objection to Copernicus as a "mere mathematician" had been on similar lines. The work is illustrated with magical diagrams, representing what he called his mathesis, and its preface outlines a movement of tolerance and general philanthropy that is to replace sectarian bitterness. He next spent some time at Helmstedt, where he enjoyed the favor of the reigning duke, Henry Julius of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, and made a speech in praise of the late duke in which he outlined his program of moral reform in language similar to that used in the Spaccio de la bestia trionfante. It was probably while at Helmstedt that Bruno wrote the De Magia and other works on magic unpublished in his lifetime.

With the money Henry Julius gave him for the oration, Bruno went to Frankfurt to have printed the Latin poems he had written during his wanderings. These were the De Innumerabilibus, Immenso et Infigurabili, the De Triplici Minimo et Mensura, and the De Monade Numero et Figura, all of which were printed by John Wechel in 1591. In these Latin poems, written in a style imitating Lucretius, Bruno expresses his philosophical and cosmological speculations in their final form. Like the Italian dialogues on these themes, the Latin poems are full of Hermetic influences, particularly of the mathesis, or magical numerology, which Bruno had been further developing during his travels. He also published the last of his books on his magical arts of memory at Frankfurt.

Trial and Death

In August 1591, Bruno returned to Italy at the invitation of a Venetian nobleman who wished to learn the secrets of his art of memory. There can be little doubt that Bruno was encouraged to take this step by the hopes of greater religious toleration aroused by the conversion of Henri IV of France. Bruno had in his baggage the manuscript of a book he intended to dedicate to Pope Clement VIII. It is strange that one who had stated in his published works that Christ was a magus and that the magical religion of the Egyptians was better than Christianity should have felt that he could place himself with impunity within reach of the Inquisition. Bruno seems, however, always to have sincerely believed that his religious and moral reform could take place within a Catholic framework. He was arrested in Venice and thrown into the prisons of the Inquisition. At the end of the Venetian trial he recanted his heresies, but was sent to Rome for another trial. Here he remained in prison for eight years, at the end of which he was sentenced as a heretic (having refused, this time, to recant) and was burned alive on the Campo de' Fiori.

Although the actual processo stating on what grounds he was condemned is not extant, it seems most probable that Bruno was burned as a magician, as an "Egyptian" who had been propagating throughout Europe some movement the nature of which remains mysterious, although it may well be connected with the origins of Rosicrucianism and of Freemasonry. His philosophical views in themselves can have had little to do with the condemnation, unless insofar as they, too, were associated with the movement.

Later Interpretation

In the seventeenth century there was a conspiracy of silence about Bruno and his reputation. Where the silence was broken, he usually appeared in the character of a diabolical magician. It was rumored that he had made a speech in praise of the devil at Wittenberg (Pierre Bayle and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz heard this story). In the eighteenth century he was interpreted by John Toland as a deist. The nineteenth century rediscovered Bruno and read its own beliefs and attitudes into his works. It was then that he appeared as the martyr for modern science and the Copernican theory, and statues were erected in his honor by anticlericals in Italy. The crudity of this approach was modified in later philosophical studies of Bruno, but the attempt to isolate a philosophy or a metaphysics from his works and to discuss his thought in a context of straight history of philosophy meant that large areas in his writings must be disregarded as unimportant or unintelligible. Moreover, no coherent philosophical system could be extracted in this way, as Leonardo Olschki saw when he criticized Bruno as a confused thinker. But when Bruno is placed in the context of the Renaissance Hermetic tradition, his philosophy, his magic, and his religion can all be seen as forming part of an outlook on nature and on man which, however strange, is nevertheless perfectly coherent within its own premises.

Hermetic Philosophy

The extraordinary prestige of the Hermetica in the Renaissance was encouraged by the belief that they were the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, an Egyptian sage who foretold Christianity and whose wisdom had inspired Plato and the Platonists. The Hermetic core in Renaissance Neoplatonism was an important factor in the revival of magic. Christian magi, like Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, used some caution in their approach to the magical passages in the Hermetic Asclepius, which is the basis of the astral magic described by Ficino in his De Vita Coelitus Comparanda. These safeguards were largely abandoned by the magician Cornelius Agrippa and totally abandoned by Bruno, who adopted the position that the Hermetic magical religion was the true religion, the religion of nature in contact with its powers. The cure for the wars, persecutions, and miseries of contemporary Europe was a return to the magical religion of the Egyptians—hence the long quotations in the Spaccio de la bestia trionfante from the passages in the Asclepius describing the religious practices of the Hermetic pseudo Egyptians, ecstatically interpreted by Bruno as their worship of "God in things," and as a "profound magic" by which they were able to draw down cosmic powers into the statues of their gods. The lament for the Egyptian religion in the Asclepius was interpreted by Bruno as a lament for a better religion, destroyed by Christianity. Since Augustine had condemned these passages as referring to the wicked demon worship of the Egyptians, it is easy to see how Bruno's "demonic" reputation arose. Bruno's "Egyptian" religion included belief in metempsychosis, which he also derived from the Hermetic writings.

Bruno's views on religion are organically related to his philosophy, for the philosophy of the living Earth moving around the divine sun and of the innumerable worlds, moving like great animals with a life of their own in the infinite universe, is the animist philosophy of a magus who believes he can establish contact with the divine life of nature. The sun is frequently mentioned in the Hermetic writings as a god, and it is the chief of the astral gods worshiped in the religion described in the Asclepius. Ficino's use of the astral magic of the Asclepius was chiefly directed toward the sun, whose beneficent influences he sought to draw down through solar talismans and incantations.

Bruno's Copernicanism

That Bruno thought of the Copernican sun in the context of the magic of Ficino's De Vita Coelitus Comparanda is indicated in the report of his lectures at Oxford, in which he is said to have repeated the Ficinian text while also maintaining the opinion of Copernicus. This report fits in with passages in Bruno's works in which the sun appears in a magical context, and particularly with his defense of the Copernican opinion against the Oxford doctors in La cena de le ceneri, where he describes Copernicus as "only a mathematician" who has not seen the true meaning of his discovery as he, Bruno, has seen it. When a speaker in these dialogues asks what is the cause of Earth's movement around the sun, the reply is an almost verbatim quotation from Corpus Hermeticum XII, in which Hermes Trismegistus explains that the energy of life is movement and that therefore nothing in the living universe is immobile, not even Earth. Bruno applied these words as an explanation of the cause of Earth's movement around the sun. The Copernican opinion had, for him, confirmed the "Egyptian" philosophy of universal animation. He also repeated from the same Hermetic treatise one of his most characteristic doctrines: that there is no death in nature, only change.

Thus Bruno's acceptance of Copernican heliocentricity did not rest on Copernicus's mathematical arguments. On the contrary, Copernicus as a mere math-ematician was despised by him as a superficial person who had not understood the true meaning of his discovery. Bruno was always "against" mathematics. Although he had some acquaintance with the scientific basis of the Copernican theory, it was not on mathematical grounds that Bruno defended Copernicanism from reactionary Aristotelians, but on animist and magical grounds. In fact, when the passages on the sun in the different works are compared, it becomes apparent that Copernican heliocentricity was for Bruno a kind of celestial portent of the approaching return of "Egyptian" philosophy and religion. "Aristotelianism" was for Bruno a symbol of all that is dead and dry—or, as he would say, "pedantic"—in philosophy and religion (the two were for him inseparable), compared with his own philosophy and religion—in contact, so he believed, with living, divine nature.

New Vision of the Universe

The essence of the Hermetic writings is that they give a religious impulse toward the world. It is within the setting of the universe, not through any divine mediator, that the Hermetic gnostic achieves his religious experience. The closest parallel to Bruno's imaginative leap upward through the spheres is the description in the Hermetic Pimander of how man "leant across the armature of the spheres, having broken through their envelopes." So did Bruno break through the spheres in his ecstatic ascent to his new vision of the universe. The immediate source of his vision of infinite space and innumerable inhabited worlds was Lucretius's poem De Rerum Natura, But Bruno transformed the Epicurean and Lucretian notions by imparting animation to the innumerable worlds—a feature totally absent from Lucretius's universe—and by imparting the function of being an image of the infinite divinity to the infinite. The godless universe of Lucretius turns in the Brunian vision into a vast extension of Hermetic gnosis; in order to receive this within himself, man, that "great miracle," as he is defined in the Asclepius, must expand himself infinitely. The magnum miraculum est homo passage is quoted from Trismegistus near the beginning of the De Immenso as a preliminary to the new vision of the world to be revealed in the poem.

This infinitely extended All was nevertheless One. The unity of the All in the One is a basic theme of the Hermetic writings and also of Bruno's. The unity of the All in the One is for Bruno "a most solid foundation for the truths and secrets of nature. For you must know that it is by one and the same ladder that nature descends to the production of things and the intellect ascends to the knowledge of them; and that the one and the other proceeds from unity and returns to unity" (De la causa, principio e uno, in Dialoghi italiani, edited by Giovanni Aquilecchia, p. 329).

This is the philosophy conducive to magic—that the magus can depend on the ladders of occult sympathies running through all nature. When this philosophy is not only a magic but also a religion, it becomes the religion of the Hermetic pseudo Egyptians who, as Bruno says in the Spaccio de la bestia triofante, "with magic and divine rites … ascended to the height of the divinity by that same scale of nature by which the divinity descends to the smallest things by the communication of itself" (Dialoghi italiani, p. 777). Bruno's philosophy and religion are one and the same, and both are Hermetic. This accounts for the main aspects of his philosophy, his panpsychism and his monism, and also for the magic and the references to magical practices with which his books are filled.

Like all Renaissance magi, Bruno was a syncretist and drew from his vast reading many philosophies which had accreted to the Hermetic core. The pre-Socratics, Plato and the Platonists, the Scholastics (Bruno revered Thomas Aquinas as a great magus), Nicholas of Cusa—all were incorporated into the central theme. Bruno's chief textbook of magic was Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia ; he also used the conjuring books of Trithemius and admired, and perhaps practiced, the Paracelsian medicine.

Art of Memory

The side of Bruno's work that he regarded as the most important was the intensive training of the imagination in his occult arts of memory. In this he was continuing a Renaissance tradition that also had its roots in the Hermetic revival, for the religious experience of the Hermetic gnostic consisted in reflecting the universe within his own mind or memory. The Hermeticist believed himself capable of this achievement because he believed that man's mens is in itself divine and therefore able to reflect the divine mind behind the universe. In Bruno, the cultivation of world-reflecting magic memory becomes the technique for achieving the personality of a magus, and of one who believes himself to be the leader of a religious movement. Strange though these beliefs and practices are, Bruno had some profound things to say in his books on memory concerning the imagination, which he made the sole cognitive power (sweeping away the divisions of the Aristotelian faculty psychology by a kind of inner anti-Aristotelianism), and on the mental image in relation to the psychology of the "inspired" personality. When the magical aspect (which includes such practices as the use of talismans or images of the stars as mental images) is discounted or allowed for, Bruno's bold explorations of the inner world may become important to the historian of psychology.

Significance and Influence

The emphasis on the Hermetic and magical side of Bruno's thinking does not discredit his significant contribution to the history of thought. He exemplifies the Hermetic religious impulse as a motive force behind the imaginative formulation of new cosmologies. From within his own frame of reference, this highly gifted man made guesses that may have given hints to seventeenth-century thinkers. A notable example is his transformation of the Democritean atoms, of which he read in Lucretius, into magically animated monads; this may well have been a stage leading to Leibniz's monadology, and there are other curious links between Bruno and Leibniz. Although Bruno was obviously not in the line leading to the mathematical advances, his extraordinary vision of an immensely expanded universe, ruled by the laws of magical animism, may be said to prefigure, on the Hermetic plane, the new cosmology of the seventeenth century. Drained of its animism, with the laws of inertia and gravity substituted for the psychic life of nature as the principle of movement, Bruno's universe would turn into something like the universe of Isaac Newton, moving under laws placed in it by a God who is not a magician but a mathematician and a mechanic. In the Hermetic phase of European thought, which was the immediate prelude to the seventeenth-century revolution, Bruno is an outstanding figure. Regarding him in this light, the old legend of the martyrdom of the advanced thinker becomes almost true again, although not in the old sense.

See also Hermeticism.

Bibliography

Additional works by Bruno in Italian are Dialoghi italiani, edited by Giovanni Gentile and revised by Giovanni Aquilecchia (Florence, 1957), which contains all the Italian dialogues in one volume, and Il candelaio, a comedy, edited by Vincenzo Spampanato (Bari, 1923). In Latin, see Opera Latine, edited by Francisco Fiorentino, Vittorio Imbriani, C. M. Tallarigo, Felice Tocco, and Girolamo Vitelli, 3 vols. (Naples: Morano, 1879–1891), issued in eight parts; there is also a facsimile reprint (Naples and Florence, 1962).

Translations include The Heroic Enthusiasts, translated by L. Williams (London: Redway, 1887); Des Fureurs héroïques, translated by P.-H. Michel (Paris, 1954); Giordano Bruno's The Heroic Frenzies, translated by P. E. Memmo Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964); The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, translated by A. D. Imerti (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1964); "On the Infinite Universe and Worlds," in D. W. Singer, Giordano Bruno, His Life and Thought (New York: Schuman, 1950), pp. 227ff.; and "Concerning the Cause, Principle and One," translated by D. W. Singer in S. Thomas Greenberg, The Infinite in Giordano Bruno (New York: King's Crown Press, 1950), pp. 77ff.

Documentary sources on Bruno's life are Vincenzo Spampanato, ed., Documenti della vita di Giordano Bruno (Florence, 1933), and Angelo Mercati, ed., Il sommario del processo di Giordano Bruno (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1942). A biography is Vincenzo Spampanato, Vita di Giordano Bruno (Messina: Principato, 1921). On his trial, see Luigi Firpo, "Il processo di Giordano Bruno," in Rivista storica italiana 60 (1948): 542–597, and 61 (1949): 5–59.

For a bibliography of Bruno's works and of books and articles on him up to and including 1950, see Virgilio Salvestrini and Luigi Firpo, Bibliografia di Giordano Bruno 1582–1950 (Florence, 1958).

Studies of Bruno include Felice Tocco, Le opere latine di Giordano Bruno (Florence: Sansoni, 1889), and Le fonti più recenti del Bruno (Rome, 1892); J. L. McIntyre, Giordano Bruno (London: Macmillan, 1903); Giovanni Gentile, Giordano Bruno e il pensiero del Rinascimento (Florence, 1920); Leonardo Olschki, Giordano Bruno (Halle, 1924), which has also been translated into Italian (Bari, 1927); Ernst Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance (Leipzig: Teubner, 1927), translated by Mario Domandi as The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy (New York: Harper, 1963); Antonio Corsano, Il pensiero di Giordano Bruno (Florence: Sansoni, 1940); Eugenio Garin, La filosofia (Milan, 1947); Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957); Paolo Rossi, Clavis Universalis (Milan, 1960); P.-H. Michel, La cosmologie de G. Bruno (Paris: Hermann, 1962); and Paul O. Kristeller, Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964). Also see Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).

other recommended titles

Byrum, Stephen C. "A Proposal for Considering Giordano Bruno's Influence on Descartes." Philosophy Research Archives 9 (1983): 303–336.

Calcagno, Antonio. Giordano Bruno and the Logic of Coincidence: Unity and Multiplicity in the Philosophical Thought of Giordano Bruno. New York: Peter Lang, 1998.

Decker, Kevin S. "The Open System and Its Enemies: Bruno, the Idea of Infinity, and Speculation in Early Modern Philosophy of Science." American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 74 (4) (2000): 599–620.

Dynnik, M. A. "Man, Sun, and Cosmos in the Philosophy of Giordano Bruno." Soviet Studies in Philosophy 6 (1967): 14–21.

Gatti, Hilary. Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Gatti, Hilary, ed. Giordano Bruno: Philosopher of the Renaissance. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2002.

Gatti, Hilary. "The Natural Philosophy of Giordano Bruno." Midwest Studies in Philosophy 26 (2002): 111–123.

Granada, Miguel A. "Aristotle, Copernicus, Bruno: Centrality, the Principle of Movement and the Extension of the Universe." Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 35a (1) (2004): 91–114.

Maiorino, Giancarlo. "The Breaking of the Circle: Giordano Bruno and the Poetics of Immeasurable Abundance." Journal of the History of Ideas 38 (1977): 317–327.

Massa, Daniel. "Giordano Bruno's Ideas in Seventeenth-Century England." Journal of the History of Ideas 38 (1977): 227–242.

Paris, Paul-Henri. The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno. Translated by R. E. W. Maddison. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973.

Paterson, Antoinette Mann. The Infinite Worlds of Giordano Bruno. Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1970.

Voise, Waldemar. "Bruno on the Morality of the Inhabitants of the Infinite Universe and on the Cognitive Passion of Copernicus." Dialectics and Humanism 6 (1979): 115–123.

White, Michael. The Pope and the Heretic: The True Story of Giordano Bruno, the Man Who Dared to Defy the Roman Inquisition. New York: Morrow, 2002.

Yates, Frances A. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Frances A. Yates (1967)

Bibliography updated by Tamra Frei (2005)