BRUNO
It has been said (and with a good deal of reason) that the Great War was
a war of non-commissioned officers.
While the generals and the colonels and the three-star strategists sat in
solitary splendor in the halls of some deserted château and contemplated
miles of maps until they could evolve a new bit of tactics that was to
give them half a square mile of territory (and lose some thirty thousand
men), the junior officers, the sergeants and the corporals, aided and
abetted by a number of intelligent privates, did the so-called “dirty
work” and eventually brought about the collapse of the German line of
defense.
The great crusade for spiritual independence was fought along similar
lines.
There were no frontal attacks which drew into action half a million
soldiers.
There were no desperate charges to provide the enemy’s gunners with an
easy and agreeable target.
I might go even further and say that the vast majority of the people
never knew that there was any fighting at all. Now and then, curiosity
may have compelled them to ask who was being burned that morning or who
was going to be hanged the next afternoon. Then perhaps they discovered
that a few desperate individuals continued to fight for certain
principles of freedom of which both Catholics and Protestants disapproved
most heartily. But I doubt whether such information affected them beyond
the point of mild regret and the comment that it must be very sad for
their poor relatives to bear, that uncle had come to such a terrible end.
It could hardly have been otherwise. What martyrs actually accomplish for
the cause for which they give their lives cannot possibly be reduced to
mathematical formulae or be expressed in terms of amperes or horsepower.
Any industrious young man in search of a Ph.D. may read carefully through
the assembled works of Giordano Bruno and by the patient collection of
all sentences containing such sentiments as “the state has no right to
tell people what to think” or “society may not punish with the sword
those who dissent from the generally approved dogmas,” he may be able to
write an acceptable dissertation upon “Giordano Bruno (1549-1600) and the
principles of religious freedom.”
But those of us no longer in search of those fatal letters must approach
the subject from a different angle.
There were, so we say in our final analysis, a number of devout men who
were so profoundly shocked by the fanaticism of their day, by the yoke
under which the people of all countries were forced to exist, that they
rose in revolt. They were poor devils. They rarely owned more than the
cloak upon their back and they were not always certain of a place to
sleep. But they burned with a divine fire. Up and down the land they
traveled, talking and writing, drawing the learned professors of learned
academies into learned disputes, arguing humbly with the humble country
folk in humble rustic inns, eternally preaching a gospel of good will,
of understanding, of charity towards others. Up and down the land they
traveled in their shabby clothes with their little bundles of books and
pamphlets until they died of pneumonia in some miserable village in the
hinterland of Pomerania or were lynched by drunken peasants in a Scotch
hamlet or were broken on the wheel in a provincial borough of France.
And if I mention the name of Giordano Bruno, I do not mean to imply that
he was the only one of his kind. But his life, his ideas, his restless
zeal for what he held to be true and desirable, were so typical of that
entire group of pioneers that he will serve very well as an example.
The parents of Bruno were poor people. Their son, an average Italian
boy of no particular promise, followed the usual course and went into a
monastery. Later he became a Dominican monk. He had no business in that
order for the Dominicans were the most ardent supporters of all forms of
persecution, the “police-dogs of the true faith,” as their contemporaries
called them. And they were clever. It was not necessary for a heretic
to have his ideas put into print to be nosed out by one of those eager
detectives. A single glance, a gesture of the hand, a shrug of the
shoulders were often sufficient to give a man away and bring him into
contact with the Inquisition.
How Bruno, brought up in an atmosphere of unquestioning obedience,
turned rebel and deserted the Holy Scriptures for the works of Zeno and
Anaxagoras, I do not know. But before this strange novice had finished
his course of prescribed studies, he was expelled from the Dominican
order and henceforth he was a wanderer upon the face of the earth.
He crossed the Alps. How many other young men before him had braved the
dangers of those ancient mountain passes that they might find freedom in
the mighty fortress which the new faith had erected at the junction of
the Rhone and the Arve!
And how many of them had turned away, broken hearted when they discovered
that here as there it was the inner spirit which guided the hearts of
men and that a change of creed did not necessarily mean a change of heart
and mind.
Bruno’s residence in Geneva lasted less than three months. The town was
full of Italian refugees. These brought their fellow-countryman a new
suit of clothes and found him a job as proof-reader. In the evenings he
read and wrote. He got hold of a copy of de la Ramée’s works. There at
last was a man after his own heart. De la Ramée believed too that the
world could not progress until the tyranny of the medieval text-books
was broken. Bruno did not go as far as his famous French teacher and did
not believe that everything the Greeks had ever taught was wrong. But
why should the people of the sixteenth century be bound by words and
sentences that were written in the fourth century before the birth of
Christ? Why indeed?
“Because it has always been that way,” the upholders of the orthodox
faith answered him.
“What have we to do with our grandfathers and what have they to do with
us? Let the dead bury the dead,” the young iconoclast answered.
And very soon afterwards the police paid him a visit and suggested that
he had better pack his satchels and try his luck elsewhere.
Bruno’s life thereafter was one endless peregrination in search of
a place where he might live and work in some degree of liberty and
security. He never found it. From Geneva he went to Lyons and then to
Toulouse. By that time he had taken up the study of astronomy and had
become an ardent supporter of the ideas of Copernicus, a dangerous step
in an age when all the contemporary Bryans brayed, “The world turning
around the sun! The world a commonplace little planet turning around the
sun! Ho-ho and hee-hee! Who ever heard such nonsense?”
Toulouse became uncomfortable. He crossed France, walking to Paris. And
next to England as private secretary to a French ambassador. But there
another disappointment awaited him. The English theologians were no
better than the continental ones. A little more practical, perhaps. In
Oxford, for example, they did not punish a student when he committed an
error against the teachings of Aristotle. They fined him ten shillings.
Bruno became sarcastic. He began to write brilliantly dangerous bits of
prose, dialogues of a religious-philosophic-political nature in which the
entire existing order of things was turned topsy turvy and submitted to a
minute but none too flattering examination.
And he did some lecturing upon his favorite subject, astronomy.
But college authorities rarely smile upon professors who please the
hearts of their students. Bruno once more found himself invited to
leave. And so back again to France and then to Marburg, where not so
long before Luther and Zwingli had debated upon the true nature of the
transubstantiation in the castle of pious Elisabeth of Hungary.
Alas! his reputation as a “Libertine” had preceded him. He was not
even allowed to lecture. Wittenberg proved more hospitable. That old
stronghold of the Lutheran faith, however, was beginning to be overrun by
the disciples of Dr. Calvin. After that there was no further room for a
man of Bruno’s liberal tendencies.
Southward he wended his way to try his luck in the land of John Huss.
Further disappointment awaited him. Prague had become a Habsburg capital
and where the Habsburg entered, freedom went out by the city gates. Back
to the road and a long, long walk to Zürich.
There he received a letter from an Italian youth, Giovanni Mocenigo,
who asked him to come to Venice. What made Bruno accept, I do not know.
Perhaps the Italian peasant in him was impressed by the luster of an old
patrician name and felt flattered by the invitation.
Giovanni Mocenigo, however, was not made of the stuff which had enabled
his ancestors to defy both Sultan and Pope. He was a weakling and a
coward and did not move a finger when officers of the Inquisition
appeared at his house and took his guest to Rome.
As a rule, the government of Venice was terribly jealous of its rights.
If Bruno had been a German merchant or a Dutch skipper, they would have
protested violently and they might even have gone to war when a foreign
power dared to arrest some one within their own jurisdiction. But why
incur the hostility of the pope on account of a vagabond who had brought
nothing to their city but his ideas?
It was true he called himself a scholar. The Republic was highly
flattered, but she had scholars enough of her own.
And so farewell to Bruno and may San Marco have mercy upon his soul.
Seven long years Bruno was kept in the prison of the Inquisition.
On the seventeenth of February of the year 1600 he was burned at the
stake and his ashes were blown to the winds.
He was executed on the Campo dei Fiori. Those who know Italian may
therein find inspiration for a pretty little allegory.