concerning the miracles, the sacraments and the incarnation, his
praise of heretics and heretic princes and his familiarity with the
magic arts. He finally made a formal solemn abjuration of all the
errors he had ever committed, and the heresies he had ever uttered, or
doubts expressed or believed, praying only that the Holy Office would
receive him back into the Church where he might rest in peace. Further
examinations were held and the earlier processes against him in Naples
and Rome recalled. After this there was a period of apparent quiet save
that he remained in prison. It is not known to what tortures he may
have been subjected, but it is recorded that he knelt before his judges
asking their pardon, and God's, for all his faults, and professed
himself ready for any penance, apparently not yet realizing the fate
in store for him.
A little later it transpired that the Sacred Congregation of the
Supreme Tribunal of the Holy Office, in Rome, desired to assume all
further responsibility for the process against so distinguished a
heretic. Accordingly the machinery of the Church was put in motion to
this end. Negotiations with the Venetian Republic, somewhat tedious
and complicated, which need not detain us now, were at last concluded.
January 7, 1603, the Venetian procurator reported of Bruno that "his
faults were exceedingly grave in respect of heresies, though in other
respects he was one of the most excellent and rarest natures, and
of exquisite learning and knowledge," (McIntyre) but that the case
was of unusual gravity, Bruno not a Venetian subject, the Pope most
anxious, etc. It was then decided to remit him to the Tribunal of the
Inquisition at Rome; whereat it is duly reported, the Pope was deeply
gratified.
To Rome then he went and here he was lost, so far as documentary
records go, for a period of six years. How to explain this fact and
this apparent clemency has bothered the biographers not a little.
Whether this time was spent in an examination of his voluminous
writings, which would seem incredible, or whether the Dominicans
labored so long to procure his more absolute recantation in order
to prevent scandal in and reflection on their order, or whether
Pope Clement himself regarded kindly--in some degree-- the great
scholar who was so anxious to dedicate to him a _magnum opus_;--to
these queries history answereth not. The Dominicans pretended--years
later--to doubt if he ever had been put to death, or whether he
had ever really belonged to their order. These statements are too
characteristic to provoke more than a sad smile.
Finally matters were hastened to an end by the efforts of Fathers
Commisario and Bellarmino; the latter being the zealous bigot who
decided that Copernicanism was a heresy, who later laid the indictment
against Galileo. Through their machinations Bruno was, in February,
1599, decreed on eight counts as a dangerous heretic, who might still
admit his heresies, and he was to be granted forty days in which to
recant and repent. But this period was stretched out some ten months,
until December, when it was reported that Bruno refused to recant,
having nothing to take back. Among the Tribunal at this time was San
Severino, fanatical, bitter because of his failure to secure the
papacy, who had declared that St. Bartholomew's was "a glorious day,
a day of joy for Catholics." It was decided that the high officers of
the Dominicans should make one last effort to compel or coax Bruno to
abjure. This he declined to do, Whereupon, January 20th, 1600, it was
decreed that "further measures be proceeded to, _servatis servandis_,
that sentence be passed, and that the said Friar Giordano be handed
over to the secular authority." A few days later Bruno was degraded,
excommunicated and handed over to the Governor of Rome, with the
usual hypocritical recommendation to "mercy," and that he be punished
"without effusion of blood," which meant of course burning at the stake.
Bruno's reply to his judges deserves to be printed in letters of
gold whenever it can be recorded;--"_Greater perhaps is your fear in
pronouncing my sentence than mine in hearing it._"
Let us spare ourselves a too minute account of his execution. Some
reports are to the effect that his tongue was tied, because he refused
to listen to the exhortations of those members of the Company of St.
John the Beheaded, better known as the Brothers of the Misericordia,
who accompanied the condemned to the scaffold or the stake, resorting
to the most cruel methods in order to provoke at least some appearance
of recantation or repentance during the last moments of life.
Right here let it be said of Bruno that whatever may have been his
weaknesses before the Inquisition at Venice, he stood firmly by his
creed when put to the final test, and died an ideal martyr's death
because his creed did not agree with that of his persecutors.
And so terminated the life of one of Italy's greatest ornaments and
scholars. The occasion had not then the importance we assign it now.
The burning of a heretic was a frequent spectacle, and the year 1600
was the year of Jubilee, in which the death of one unbeliever more
was but the incident of a day. He had himself foreseen it, saying,
"Torches, fifty or a hundred, will not fail me, even though the march
past be at mid-day, should it be my fate to die in Roman Catholic
Country."
There remains yet to comment on his character and to analyze his views.
The greatest blot upon the former is his attitude before the Venetian
Tribunal. Here he was at first defiant, even polemical, strong in his
asserted right to use the natural light of sense and reason. Under
greater stress he modified this to one of absolute and indignant
denial, and finally became submissive to the last degree, cringing
and finally begging for pardon on bended knees. That this attitude
changed with his better realization of his predicament is undeniable.
Moreover what keen and sensitive natures may do under the influence
of torture is never to be predicated. How many of us could resist the
persuasiveness of the rack when it came to modifying our beliefs?
But whatever may have been his weakness at that time, he completely
rehabilitated himself before his end, for were not his ashes scattered
to the winds as a token that he completely failed to recant? Surely no
martyr to science or dogma ever died a more dignified death, for the
edification or example of others.
What shall be said of his persecutors and prosecutors? Let us here be
charitable; let us be just. Have we yet that absolute knowledge of
right and wrong which can enable us to pass final judgment on men of
the past, their motives and actions? Moral perceptions are the product
of the race, the age and the environment; they vary greatly with the
times. There is no crime in or out of the Decalogue which has at all
times and by all peoples been regarded as such. The Church during
several centuries enjoyed a monopoly of wisdom or learning as well as
of opportunities for acquiring them. Zealotry, bigotry, intolerance,
fanaticism, were the natural products of such conditions. So were
cruelty and disregard of human life. Join the mind of a bigot to the
body of one who knows not fear, and the result will be a Loyola, or a
St. Louis of France, who held that the only argument a layman should
engage in with a heretic should be a sword thrust through the body.
If then heresy was a crime, punishable by a cruel death in all the
capitals of Europe, let us blame less the men who were trained and
grew up with these notions, but rather more the Church which preached
them, whether Catholic or Protestant. Only if one of these really
were, as it still claims to be, _infallible_, then what has become of
its infallibility? Or if heresy be held still a crime then what shall
we say of the Church's ethics? If one were God-given the other is
un-Christ-like. But no free thinker can engage in theological polemics,
or with jesuitical sophistries, without letting his reason excite his
emotions; and when the emotions enter the door logic flies out of the
window.
Let us say then that Bruno was in some respects so far ahead of his day
and generation that they understood him not. And yet he was a _torch
bearer_, save at his own last funeral pyre, shedding forth a light
which illumed the centuries to come, and helping to make the period
of the Italian Renaissance one of the most important and glorious in
the world's history. If better known and more widely studied, he would
be by English and American students placed on that pinnacle which he
deserves in the Hall of Fame.
What shall be said of Bruno as a philosopher? He, first of all men in
the middle ages, taught that Nature was lovable and worthy of study.
Loving her, trusting, confiding in her, he found himself at outs with
all the mental processes of his fellow scholars. In this way the
natural method was brought into direct opposition with the ponderously
artificial and strained methods of his day. He held that our eyes were
given us that we might open and look upward. "Seeing, I do not pretend
not to see, nor fear to profess it openly," he says. His philosophy
was rather a product of intuition than of ratiocination, which became
his real religion, for which Catholicism was a cloak, because in those
days one was compelled to wear a cloak or live but a short life, and
that within prison walls. What the medieval church, Catholic and even
Protestant, has to answer for, as to the suppression of truth and
provocation of hypocrisy, is beyond the mensuration of man. For the
argument from authority he had the greatest contempt, and herein he
set the world of thinkers a valuable lesson. "To believe with the many
because they were many, was the mark of a slave," (McIntyre). Before
Bacon, before Descrates, he saw the necessity of "first clearing the
mind of all prejudice, all traditional beliefs that rest on authority."
He thus begins one of his sonnets:--
"Oh, holy assinity! Oh, holy ignorance, holy folly and pious devotion;
which alone makest souls so good that human wit and zeal can go no
further," etc.
By the independence of his mental processes he was thrown quite upon
his own resources, and his nature, already dignified and reserved, was
made more introspective and self-conscious. In this way he developed
strains of vanity and egotism which led him at times to the bombastic
self-laudation of a Paracelsus. He had nothing but disgust for the
common people and the sort of scholars (pedants) whom they admired. The
vulgar mind was more influenced by sophisms, by appearance, by failure
to distinguish between the shadow and the substance. Take but two or
three of Bruno's conceptions:--
He perhaps first during the middle ages taught the transformation of
lower into higher organisms, following the Greeks who first enunciated
the doctrine of evolution, which it remained for Darwin and Wallace
to edit and illustrate as that law of the organic continuity of life,
which we call _evolution_. He further wrote of the human hand as a
factor in the evolution of the human race, in a way which should have
commended him to the author of the Bridgewater treatise. He wrote of
the changes on the earth's surface brought about by natural processes,
which have changed not only the external configuration of the same but
the fate and destiny of nations; of the identity of matter throughout
the universe; of the universal movement of matter. Long before Lessing
he showed how myths may contain the germs of great truths, and should
be regarded as indications thereof. In this way, he told us, the Bible
was to be regarded, holding its more or less historical statements to
be quite subordinate to its moral teachings.
When we realize how to such highly developed reasoning powers as Bruno
possessed, were added a phenomenal memory, a tremendous power of
assimilation, a developed imagination, a poetic nature, the gift of
easy and accurate speech and a temperament easily excited to fervor
in attack or defense, we may the better appreciate his dominating
greatness as well as his trifling weakness; the former being entirely
to his own credit while the latter are ascribed largely to the faults
of his time, and the fact that he was really living far ahead of his
day and generation. He was not only the forerunner of modern science,
he was the prototype of the modern biblical critic, foreshadowing the
modern higher criticism, albeit in veiled terms, and as a matter of
esoteric teaching; because the biblical critic of those days was burned
at the stake, while to-day he is barely ostracized by the shallow and
narrow minded, with whom he has at best nothing mentally in common. So
much have four centuries of labor and vicarious suffering accomplished
for the emancipation of the human mind.
Bruno _had_ a creed, but it was too simple for his times. He rejected
certain orthodox dogmas, (e. g. the Trinity, the Immaculate Conception)
which commend themselves still less to the emancipated and cultivated
minds of to-day. He absolutely rejected authority, which was a step
toward reason comparable to the freeing of the slaves or serfs. He
evolved a theory of evolution from _a priori_ concepts, which it
remained for Darwin to complete and demonstrate. He believed in the
natural history of religions. His motives were of the loftiest, though
his methods were not always those of to-day. He believed that the
essence of truth inhered in those differences which kept men apart, and
still sever them. He believed the _law of love_ and that it sprang from
God, which is the Father of All, that it was in harmony with nature,
and that by love we may be transformed into something of His likeness.
As Bruno himself says:--"This is the religion, above controversy or
dispute, which I observe from the belief of my own mind, and from the
custom of my fatherland and my race." (McIntyre, p. 110).
And yet this sublime man was burned as a heretic! Let us stop when we
hereafter pass through the Campo dei Fiori, as I have done many a time,
and take off our hats to the memory of this great man, who, while small
in some human traits, yet was the greatest thinker in Italy during
the sixteenth century, whose memory may help us to forget some of the
hypocrisies and cant so generally prevalent during the age which and
among the men who condemned him. Let us also thank God that there is no
Tribunal of the Inquisition to-day, to pass misguided judgment upon us
for having gone further than Bruno ever dreamed, though along the same
lines, and to condemn us therefore to the Flames.
This paper has already been prolonged, perhaps tiresomely, nevertheless
I cannot refrain from quoting a few paragraphs from that most versatile
student of this period, Symonds, whose estimate of Bruno is as
follows:--(Renaissance in Italy; Catholic Reaction, II Chap. ix).
"Bruno appears before us as the man who most vitally and
comprehensively grasped the leading tendencies of his age in their
intellectual essence. He left behind him the mediaeval conception of an
extra-mundane God, creating a finite world, of which this globe is the
center, and the principal episode in the history of which is the series
of events from the Fall, through the Incarnation and Crucifixion, to
the Last Judgment. He substituted the conception of an ever-living,
ever-acting, ever-self-effectuating God, immanent in an infinite
universe, to the contemplation of whose attributes the mind of man
ascends by the study of Nature and interrogation of his conscience.
"Bolder even than Copernicus, and nearer in his intuition to the
truth, he denied that the universe had "flaming walls" or any walls
at all. That "immaginata circonferenza," "quella margine immaginata
del cielo," on which antique science and Christian theology alike
reposed, was the object of his ceaseless satire, his oft-repeated
polemic. What, then, rendered Bruno the precursor of modern thought in
its various manifestations, was that he grasped the fundamental truth
upon which modern science rests, and foresaw the conclusions which
must be drawn from it. He speculated boldly, incoherently, vehemently;
but he speculated with a clear conception of the universe, as we still
apprehend it. Through the course of three centuries we have been
engaged in verifying the guesses, deepening, broadening and solidifying
the hypotheses, which Bruno's extension of the Copernican theory, and
his application of it to pure thought suggested to his penetrating and
audacious intellect."
Bruno was convinced that religion in its higher essence would not
sufferer from the new philosophy. Larger horizons extended before the
human intellect. The soul expanded in more exhilarating regions than
the old theologies had offered.
"Lift up thy light on us and on thine own,
O soul whose spirit on earth was as a rod
To scourge off priests, a sword to pierce their God,
A staff for man's free thought to walk alone,
A lamp to lead him far from shrine and throne
On ways untrodden where his fathers trod
Ere earth's heart withered at a high priest's nod,
And all men's mouths that made not prayer made moan.
From bonds and torments, and the ravening flame,
Surely thy spirit of sense rose up to greet
Lucretius, where such only spirits meet,
And walk with him apart till Shelley came
To make the heaven of heavens more heavenly sweet,
And mix with yours a third incorporate name."
VIII
STUDENT LIFE IN THE MIDDLE AGES[5]
[5] An Address given before the Chas. K. Mills Society of Students of
the University of Pennsylvania, February 19, 1902.
[Reprinted from the _Univ. of Penna. Medical Bulletin_, March, 1902.]
I assume that every university student of today realizes that his
possibilities and his opportunities are better in every way than were
those enjoyed by students of bygone times. I take it, also, that you
would not be averse to listening to an account of the habits, the
surroundings, the privileges, and the disadvantages which surrounded
students at a time when universities were young and when customs in
general, as well as manners, were very different from those of to-day.
With all this in view, I shall ask your attention to a brief account
of Student Life in the Middle Ages, with especial reference to that of
the medical student. Measured by its results, the most priceless legacy
of mediæval times to mankind was the university system, which began in
crude form and with an almost mythical origin, but which gradually took
form and shape in consequence of many external forces. It represented
an effort to "realize in concrete form an ideal of life in one of its
aspects." Such ideals "pass into great historic forces by embodying
themselves in institutions," as witness, for instance, the case of the
Church of Rome.
The use of words in our language has undergone many curious
perversions. Take our word "bombast," for instance. Originally it
was a name applied to the cotton plant. Then it was applied to any
padding for garments which was made of cotton. Later it was used
as describing literary padding, as it were, as when one filled out
an empty speech with unnecessary and long words, and, at last, it
came to have the meaning which we now give it. So with the word
"university." "Universitas" in the original Latin meant simply a
collection, a plurality, or an aggregation. It was almost synonymous
with "collegium." By the beginning of the thirteenth century it was
applied to corporations of masters or students and to other associated
bodies, and implied an association of individuals, not a place of
meeting, nor even a collection of schools. If we were to be literal and
consistent in our use of terms, for the place where such collections
of men exercise scholastic functions the term should be "_studium
generale_," meaning thereby a place, not where all things are studied,
but where students come together from all directions. Very few of the
mediæval studia possessed all the faculties of a modern university.
Even Paris, in its palmiest days, had no faculty of law. The name
_universitas_ implies a general invitation to students from all over
the world to seek there a place for higher education from numerous
masters or teachers. The three great _studia_ of the thirteenth century
were Paris, transcendent in theology and the arts; Bologna, where
legal lore prevailed; and Salernum, where existed the greatest medical
school of the world's history. In spite of the fact that these, like
all the other _studia_ of the Middle Ages, were under the influence of
the Church, from them sprang most of the inspiration that constituted
the mainspring of mediæval intellectual activity, although how baneful
such influence could be may be illustrated by the Spanish--that is, the
ultra-Catholic University of Salamanca, where not until one hundred
years ago were they allowed to teach the Copernican system of astronomy.
Under the conditions existing during the Middle Ages, with relatively
few institutions of advanced learning, and in the presence of that
spirit which led men to travel long distances, and very widely out
of the provinces, to the cities of the great scholia, or, as we call
them now, universities, the most imperative common want was that of a
common language; and so it happened that not only were the lectures all
given in Latin, but that it was very commonly used for conversational
purposes, and appears to have been almost a necessity of university
life. Early in the history of the University of Paris a statute made
the ability of the petitioner to state his case before the rector in
Latin a test of his bona-fide studentship. This may perhaps, in some
measure account for the barbarity of mediæval Latin. Still, as the
listener said about Wagner's music, "it may not have been as bad as it
sounded," since the period of greatest ignorance of construction and
rhetoric had passed away before the university era began. John Stuart
Mill even praised the schoolmen of the Middle Ages for their inventive
capacity in the matter of technical terms. The Latin language, which
was originally stiff and poor in vocabulary, became, in its employment
by these mediæval thinkers, much more flexible and expressive. It was
the Ciceronian pedantry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
which killed off Latin as a living language. Felicity in Latin counted,
then as now, as a mark of scholarship, and six hundred years ago a
schoolmaster could come up to the university and, after performing
some exercises and passing such an examination as the doctors of music
do to-day, could write one hundred verses in Latin in praise of the
university, and take his degree. The boys who went to the universities
learned their Latin at inferior grammar schools, often in university
towns. These schools were mainly connected with cathedrals or churches,
although, in the later Middle Ages, even the smallest towns had schools
where a boy might learn to read and write at least the rudiments of
ecclesiastical Latin. In those days not only were the clergy Latin
scholars, but the bailiff of every manor kept his accounts in Latin,
and a tutor even formed part of the establishment of a great noble or
prelate who had either a family or pages in his care.