the gaudy red hues of the season, that Gaston listened to one, who,
as if with some intentional new version of the sacred event then
commemorated, had a great [138] deal to say concerning the Spirit;
above all, of the freedom, the indifference, of its operations; and
who would give a strangely altered colour, for a long time to come,
to the thoughts, to the very words, associated with the celebration
of Pentecost. The speaker, though understood to be a brother of the
Order of Saint Dominic, had not been present at the mass--the daily
University red mass, De Spiritu Sancto, but said to-day according to
the proper course of the season in the chapel of the Sorbonne, with
much pomp, by the Italian Bishop of Paris. It was the reign of the
Italians just then, a doubly refined, somewhat morbid, somewhat ash-
coloured, Italy in France, more Italian still. What our Elisabethan
poets imagined about Italian culture--forcing all they knew of Italy
to an ideal of dainty sin such as had never actually existed there,--
that the court of Henry, so far as in it lay, realised in fact. Men
of Italian birth, "to the great suspicion of simple people," swarmed
in Paris, already "flightier, less constant, than the girouettes on
its steeples"; and it was love for Italian fashions that had brought
king and courtiers here this afternoon, with great éclat, as they
said, frizzed and starched, in the beautiful, minutely considered,
dress of the moment, pressing the learned University itself into the
background; for the promised speaker, about whom tongues had been
busy, not only in the Latin quarter, had [139] come from Italy. In
an age in which all things about which Parisians much cared must be
Italian, there might be a hearing for Italian philosophy. Courtiers
at least would understand Italian; and this speaker was rumoured to
possess in perfection all the curious arts of his native language.
And of all the kingly qualities of Henry's youth, the single one
which had held by him was that gift of eloquence he was able also to
value in others; an inherited gift perhaps, for amid all contemporary
and subsequent historic gossip about his mother, the two things
certain are, that the hands credited with so much mysterious ill-
doing were fine ones, and that she was an admirable speaker.
Bruno himself tells us, long after he had withdrawn himself from it,
that the monastic life promotes the freedom of the intellect by its
silence and self-concentration. The prospect of such freedom
sufficiently explains why a young man who, however well-found in
worldly and personal advantages, was above all conscious of great
intellectual possessions, and of fastidious spirit also, with a
remarkable distaste for the vulgar, should have espoused poverty,
chastity, and obedience, in a Dominican cloister. What liberty of
mind may really come to, in such places, what daring new departures
it may suggest even to the strictly monastic temper, is exemplified
by the dubious and dangerous mysticism of men like John of Parma and
[140] Joachim of Flora, the reputed author of a new "Everlasting
Gospel"; strange dreamers, in a world of sanctified rhetoric, of that
later dispensation of the Spirit, in which all law will have passed
away; or again by a recognised tendency, in the great rival Order of
Saint Francis, in the so-called "spiritual" Franciscans, to
understand the dogmatic words of faith, with a difference.
The three convents in which successively Bruno had lived, at Naples,
at Città di Campagna, and finally the Minerva at Rome, developed
freely, we may suppose, all the mystic qualities of a genius, in
which, from the first, a heady southern imagination took the lead.
But it was from beyond monastic bounds that he would look for the
sustenance, the fuel, of an ardour born or bred within them. Amid
such artificial religious stillness the air itself becomes generous
in undertones. The vain young monk (vain, of course) would feed his
vanity by puzzling the good, sleepy heads of the average sons of
Dominic with his neology, putting new wine into old bottles, teaching
them their own business, the new, higher, truer sense of the most
familiar terms, of the chapters they read, the hymns they sang; above
all, as it happened, every word that referred to the Spirit, the
reign of the Spirit, and its excellent freedom. He would soon pass
beyond the utmost possible limits of his brethren's sympathy, beyond
the [141] largest and freest interpretation such words would bear, to
words and thoughts on an altogether different plane, of which the
full scope was only to be felt in certain old pagan writers,--pagan,
though approached, perhaps, at first, as having a kind of natural,
preparatory, kinship with Scripture itself. The Dominicans would
seem to have had well-stocked, and liberally-selected, libraries; and
this curious youth, in that age of restored letters, read eagerly,
easily, and very soon came to the kernel of a difficult old author,
Plotinus or Plato,--to the real purpose of thinkers older still,
surviving by glimpses only in the books of others, Empedocles, for
instance, and Pythagoras, who had been nearer the original sense of
things; Parmenides, above all, that most ancient assertor of God's
identity with the world. The affinities, the unity, of the visible
and the invisible, of earth and heaven, of all things whatever, with
one another, through the consciousness, the person, of God the
Spirit, who was at every moment of infinite time, in every atom of
matter, at every point of infinite space; aye! was everything, in
turn: that doctrine--l'antica filosofia Italiana--was in all its
vigour there, like some hardy growth out of the very heart of nature,
interpreting itself to congenial minds with all the fulness of
primitive utterance. A big thought! yet suggesting, perhaps, from
the first, in still, small, immediately practical, voice, a freer way
of taking, a possible modification [142] of, certain moral precepts.
A primitive morality,--call it! congruous with those larger primitive
ideas, with that larger survey, with the earlier and more liberal
air.
Returning to this ancient "pantheism," after the long reign of a
seemingly opposite faith, Bruno unfalteringly asserts "the vision of
all things in God" to be the aim of all metaphysical speculation, as
of all enquiry into nature. The Spirit of God, in countless variety
of forms, neither above, nor in any way without, but intimately
within, all things, is really present, with equal integrity and
fulness, in the sunbeam ninety millions of miles long, and the
wandering drop of water as it evaporates therein. The divine
consciousness has the same relation to the production of things as
the human intelligence to the production of true thoughts concerning
them. Nay! those thoughts are themselves actually God in man: a loan
to man also of His assisting Spirit, who, in truth, is the Creator of
things, in and by His contemplation of them. For Him, as for man in
proportion as man thinks truly, thought and being are identical, and
things existent only in so far as they are known. Delighting in
itself, in the sense of its own energy, this sleepless, capacious,
fiery intelligence, evokes all the orders of nature, all the
revolutions of history, cycle upon cycle, in ever new types. And God
the Spirit, the soul of the world, being therefore really identical
with the [143] soul of Bruno also, as the universe shapes itself to
Bruno's reason, to his imagination, ever more and more articulately,
he too becomes a sharer of the divine joy in that process of the
formation of true ideas, which is really parallel to the process of
creation, to the evolution of things. In a certain mystic sense,
which some in every age of the world have understood, he, too, is the
creator; himself actually a participator in the creative function.
And by such a philosophy, Bruno assures us, it was his experience
that the soul is greatly expanded: con questa filosofia l'anima mi
s'aggrandisce: mi se magnifica l'intelletto!
For, with characteristic largeness of mind, Bruno accepted this
theory in the whole range of its consequences. Its more immediate
corollary was the famous axiom of "indifference," of "the coincidence
of contraries." To the eye of God, to the philosophic vision through
which God sees in man, nothing is really alien from Him. The
differences of things, those distinctions, above all, which schoolmen
and priests, old or new, Roman or Reformed, had invented for
themselves, would be lost in the length and breadth of the
philosophic survey: nothing, in itself, being really either great or
small; and matter certainly, in all its various forms, not evil but
divine. Dare one choose or reject this or that? If God the Spirit
had made, nay! was, all things indifferently, then, matter and
spirit, the spirit and the flesh, heaven and earth, freedom [144] and
necessity, the first and the last, good and evil, would be
superficial rather than substantial differences. Only, were joy and
sorrow also, together with another distinction, always of emphatic
reality to Gaston, for instance, to be added to the list of phenomena
really "coincident," or "indifferent," as some intellectual kinsmen
of Bruno have claimed they should?
The Dominican brother was at no distant day to break far enough away
from the election, the seeming "vocation," of his youth, yet would
remain always, and under all circumstances, unmistakably a monk in
some predominant qualities of temper. At first it was only by way of
thought that he asserted his liberty--delightful, late-found,
privilege!--traversing, in strictly mental journeys, that spacious
circuit, as it broke away before him at every moment upon ever-new
horizons. Kindling thought and imagination at once, the prospect
draws from him cries of joy, of a kind of religious joy, as in some
new "canticle of the creatures," some new hymnal, or antiphonary.
"Nature" becomes for him a sacred term.--"Conform thyself to Nature!
"with what sincerity, what enthusiasm, what religious fervour, he
enounces that precept, to others, to himself! Recovering, as he
fancies, a certain primeval sense of Deity broadcast on things, a
sense in which Pythagoras and other "inspired" theorists of early
Greece had abounded, in his hands philosophy becomes a poem, a [145]
sacred poem, as it had been with them. That Bruno himself, in "the
enthusiasm of the idea," drew from his axiom of the "indifference of
contraries" the practical consequence which is in very deed latent
there, that he was ready to sacrifice to the antinomianism, which is
certainly a part of its rigid logic, the austerities, the purity of
his own youth, for instance, there is no proof. The service, the
sacrifice, he is ready to bring to the great light that has dawned
for him, occupying his entire conscience with the sense of his
responsibilities to it, is the sacrifice of days and nights spent in
eager study, of plenary, disinterested utterance of the thoughts that
arise in him, at any hazard, at the price, say! of martyrdom. The
work of the divine Spirit, as he conceives it, exalts, inebriates
him, till the scientific apprehension seems to take the place of
prayer, oblation, communion. It would be a mistake, he holds, to
attribute to the human soul capacities merely passive or receptive.
She, too, possesses initiatory power as truly as the divine soul of
the world, to which she responds with the free gift of a light and
heat that seem her own.
Yet a nature so opulently endowed can hardly have been lacking in
purely physical or sensuous ardours. His pantheistic belief that the
Spirit of God is in all things, was not inconsistent with, nay! might
encourage, a keen and restless eye for the dramatic details of life
and character [146] however minute, for humanity in all its visible
attractiveness, since there too, in truth, divinity lurks. From
those first fair days of early Greek speculation, love had occupied a
large place in the conception of philosophy; and in after days Bruno
was fond of developing, like Plato, like the Christian Platonists,
combining something of the peculiar temper of each, the analogy
between the flights of intellectual enthusiasm and those of physical
love, with an animation which shows clearly enough the reality of his
experience in the latter. The Eroici Furori, his book of books,
dedicated to Philip Sidney, who would be no stranger to such
thoughts, presents a singular blending of verse and prose, after the
manner of Dante's Vita Nuova. The supervening philosophic comment
reconsiders those earlier, physically erotic, impulses which had
prompted the sonnet in voluble Italian, entirely to the advantage of
their abstract, incorporeal, theoretic, equivalents. Yet if it is
after all but a prose comment, it betrays no lack of the natural
stuff out of which such mystic transferences must be made. That
there is no single name of preference, no Beatrice, or Laura, by no
means proves the young man's earlier desires to have been merely
Platonic; and if the colours of love inevitably lose a little of
their force and propriety by such deflexion from their earlier
purpose, their later intellectual purpose as certainly finds its
opportunity thereby, in the [147] matter of borrowed fire and wings.
A kind of old scholastic pedantry creeping back over the ardent youth
who had thrown it off so defiantly (as if love himself went in now
for a University degree), Bruno developes, under the mask of amorous
verse, all the various stages of abstraction, by which, as the last
step of a long ladder, the mind attains actual "union." For, as with
the purely religious mystics, "union," the mystic union of souls with
one another and their Lord, nothing less than union between the
contemplator and the contemplated--the reality, or the sense, or at
least the name of such union--was always at hand. Whence that
instinctive tendency towards union if not from the Creator of things
Himself, who has doubtless prompted it in the physical universe, as
in man? How familiar the thought that the whole creation, not less
than the soul of man, longs for God, "as the hart for the water-
brooks"! To unite oneself to the infinite by largeness and lucidity
of intellect, to enter, by that admirable faculty, into eternal life-
-this was the true vocation of the spouse, of the rightly amorous
soul. A filosofia è necessario amore. There would be degrees of
progress therein, as of course also of relapse: joys and sorrows,
therefore. And, in interpreting these, the philosopher, whose
intellectual ardours have superseded religion and physical love, is
still a lover and a monk. All the influences of the convent, the
sweet, heady [148] incense, the pleading sounds, the sophisticated
light and air, the grotesque humours of old gothic carvers, the thick
stratum of pagan sentiment beneath all this,--Santa Maria sopra
Minervam!--are indelible in him. Tears, sympathies, tender
inspirations, attraction, repulsion, zeal, dryness, recollection,
desire:--he finds a place for them all: knows them all well in their
unaffected simplicity, while he seeks the secret and secondary, or,
as he fancies, the primary, form and purport of each.
Whether as a light on actual life, or as a mere barren scholastic
subtlety, never before had the pantheistic doctrine been developed
with such completeness, never before connected with so large a sense
of nature, so large a promise of the knowledge of it as it really is.
The eyes that had not been wanting to visible humanity turned now
with equal liveliness on the natural world, in that region of his
birth, where all the colour and force of nature are at least two-
fold. Nature is not only a thought or meditation in the divine mind;
it is also the perpetual energy of that mind, which, ever identical
with itself, puts forth and absorbs in turn all the successive forms
of life, of thought, of language even. What seemed like striking
transformations of matter were in truth only a chapter, a clause, in
the great volume of the transformations of the divine Spirit. The
mystic recognition that all is indeed divine had accompanied a
realisation [149] of the largeness of the field of concrete
knowledge, the infinite extent of all there was actually to know.
Winged, fortified, by that central philosophic faith, the student
proceeds to the detailed reading of nature, led on from point to
point by manifold lights, which will surely strike on him by the way,
from the divine intelligence in it, speaking directly,
sympathetically, to a like intelligence in him. The earth's
wonderful animation, as divined by one who anticipates by a whole
generation the Baconian "philosophy of experience": in that, those
bold, flighty, pantheistic speculations become tangible matter of
fact. Here was the needful book for man to read; the full
revelation, the story in detail, of that one universal mind,
struggling, emerging, through shadow, substance, manifest spirit, in
various orders of being,--the veritable history of God. And nature,
together with the true pedigree and evolution of man also, his
gradual issue from it, was still all to learn. The delightful tangle
of things!--it would be the delightful task of man's thoughts to
disentangle that. Already Bruno had measured the space which Bacon
would fill, with room, perhaps, for Darwin also. That Deity is
everywhere, like all such abstract propositions, is a two-edged
force, depending for its practical effect on the mind which admits it
on the peculiar perspective of that mind. To Dutch Spinosa, in the
next century, faint, consumptive, with a naturally [150] faint hold
on external things, the theorem that God was in all things whatever,
annihilating their differences, suggested a somewhat chilly
withdrawal from the contact of all alike. But in Bruno, eager and
impassioned, an Italian of the Italians, it awoke a constant,
inextinguishable appetite for every form of experience,--a fear, as
of the one sin possible, of limiting, for one's self or another, the
great stream flowing for thirsty souls, that wide pasture set ready
for the hungry heart.
Considered from the point of view of a minute observation of nature,
the Infinite might figure as "the infinitely little"; no blade of
grass being like another, as there was no limit to the complexities
of an atom of earth,--cell, sphere, within sphere. And the earth
itself, hitherto seemingly the privileged centre of a very limited
universe, was, after all, but an atom in an infinite world of starry
space, then lately divined by candid intelligence, which the
telescope was one day to present to bodily eyes. For if Bruno must
needs look forward to the future, to Bacon, for adequate knowledge of
the earth, the infinitely little, he could look backwards also
gratefully to another daring mind which had already put that earth
into its modest place, and opened the full view of the heavens. If
God is eternal, then, the universe is infinite and worlds
innumerable. Yes! one might well have divined what reason now
demonstrated, indicating those endless [151] spaces which a real
sidereal science would gradually occupy.
That the stars are suns: that the earth is in motion: that the earth
is of like stuff with the stars:--now the familiar knowledge of
children--dawning on Bruno as calm assurance of reason on appeal from
the prejudice of the eye, brought to him an inexpressibly
exhilarating sense of enlargement in the intellectual, nay! the
physical atmosphere. And his consciousness of unfailing unity and
order did not desert him in that broader survey, which made the
utmost one could ever know of the earth seem but a very little
chapter in the endless history of God the Spirit, rejoicing so
greatly in the admirable spectacle that it never ceases to evolve
from matter new conditions. The immoveable earth, as we term it,
beneath one's feet!--Why, one almost felt the movement, the
respiration, of God in it. And yet how greatly even the physical
eye, the sensible imagination (so to term it) was flattered by the
theorem. What joy in that motion, in the prospect, the music! "The
music of the spheres!"--he could listen to it in a perfection such as
had never been conceded to Plato, to Pythagoras even.--
Veni, Creator Spiritus,
Mentes tuorum visita,
Imple superna gratia,
Quae tu creasti pectora.+
Yes! The grand old Christian hymns, perhaps [152] the grandest of
them all, seemed to lend themselves in the chorus, to be deepened
immeasurably under this new intention. It is not always, or often,
that men's abstract ideas penetrate the temperament, touch the animal
spirits, affect conduct. It was what they did with Bruno. The
ghastly spectacle of the endless material universe--infinite dust, in
truth, starry as it may look to our terrestrial eyes--that prospect
from which the mind of Pascal recoiled so painfully, induced in Bruno
only the delightful consciousness of an ever-widening kinship and
sympathy, since every one of those infinite worlds must have its
sympathetic inhabitants. Scruples of conscience, if he felt such,
might well be pushed aside for the "excellency" of such knowledge as
this. To shut the eyes, whether of the body or the mind, would be a
kind of sullen ingratitude;--the one sin to believe, directly or
indirectly, in any absolutely dead matter anywhere, as being
implicitly a denial of the indwelling spirit.--A free spirit,
certainly, as of old! Through all his pantheistic flights, from
horizon to horizon, it was still the thought of liberty that
presented itself, to the infinite relish of this "prodigal son" of
Dominic. God the Spirit had made all things indifferently, with a
largeness, a beneficence, impiously belied by any theory of
restrictions, distinctions, of absolute limitation. Touch! see!
listen! eat freely of all the trees of the garden of Paradise, with
the voice of the [153] Lord God literally everywhere!--here was the
final counsel of perfection. The world was even larger than youthful
appetite, youthful capacity. Let theologian and every other theorist
beware how he narrowed either. "The plurality of worlds!"--How petty
in comparison seemed those sins, the purging of which was men's chief
motive in coming to places like this convent, whence Bruno, with vows
broken, or for him obsolete, presently departed. A sonnet,
expressive of the joy with which he returned to so much more than the
liberty of ordinary men, does not suggest that he was driven from it.
Though he must have seemed to those who surely had loved so loveable
a creature there to be departing, like the "prodigal" of the Gospel,
into the farthest of possible far countries, there is no proof of
harsh treatment on their part, or even of an effort to detain him.
It happens most naturally of course that those who undergo the shock
of spiritual or intellectual change sometimes fail to recognise their
debt to the deserted cause:--How much of the heroism, or other high
quality, of their rejection has really been the product of what they
reject? Bruno, the escaped monk, is still a monk; and his
philosophy, impious as it might seem to some, a religion; very new
indeed, yet a religion. He came forth well-fitted by conventual
influences to play upon men as he had been played upon. A challenge,
a war-cry, an [154] alarum, everywhere he seemed to be but the
instrument of some subtly materialised spiritual force, like that of
the old Greek prophets, that "enthusiasm" he was inclined to set so
high, or like impulsive Pentecostal fire. His hunger to know, fed
dreamily enough at first within the convent walls, as he wandered
over space and time, an indefatigable reader of books, would be fed
physically now by ear and eye, by large matter-of-fact experience, as
he journeys from university to university; less as a teacher than a
courtier, a citizen of the world, a knight-errant of intellectual
light. The philosophic need to try all things had given reasonable
justification to the stirring desire for travel common to youth, in
which, if in nothing else, that whole age of the later Renaissance
was invincibly young. The theoretic recognition of that mobile
spirit of the world, ever renewing its youth, became the motive of a
life as mobile, as ardent, as itself, of a continual journey, the
venture and stimulus of which would be the occasion of ever-new
discoveries, of renewed conviction.
The unity, the spiritual unity, of the world:--that must involve the
alliance, the congruity, of all things with one another, of the
teacher's personality with the doctrine he had to deliver, of the
spirit of that doctrine with the fashion of his utterance, great
reinforcements of sympathy. In his own case, certainly, when Bruno
confronted his audience at Paris, himself, his theme, [155] his
language, were alike the fuel of one clear spiritual flame, which
soon had hold of his audience also; alien, strangely alien, as that
audience might seem from the speaker. It was intimate discourse, in
magnetic touch with every one present, with his special point of
impressibility; the sort of speech which, consolidated into literary
form as a book, would be a dialogue according to the true Attic
genius, full of those diversions, passing irritations, unlooked-for
appeals, in which a solicitous missionary finds his largest range of
opportunity, and takes even dull wits unaware. In Bruno, that
abstract theory of the perpetual motion of the world was become a
visible person talking with you.