II

This is the confession and apology of Giordano Bruno, taken from the

minutes of the Inquisition of Venice, so far as I have been able to

interpret the ungrammatical, ill-punctuated report of the secretary.

The examinations were held on May 26 and 30, June 2, 3, 4, and July 30,

1592; and as there were, consequently, many repetitions of statement,

I have condensed where it seemed advisable. From Bruno’s lips we hear

the explanation of his philosophical system, his doubts, his belief,

and his recantation of any opinions which clashed with the dogmas

of Catholicism. Was his recantation sincere? Before answering this

question, let us glance at his opinions as he expressed them freely in

his works; for upon Bruno’s value as a thinker must finally rest the

justification of our interest in him. True, the romance of his strange

vagabond career and the pathos of his noble death will always excite

interest in his personality; but the final question which mankind asks

of prophet, philosopher, poet, preacher, or man of science is, “What

can you tell us concerning our origin and our destiny?”

Be warned at the outset that Bruno furnished no complete, systematic

reply to this question. He did not, like Spinoza, reduce his system to

the precision of a geometrical text-book, all theorems and corollaries;

nor, like Herbert Spencer, did he stow the universe away in a cabinet

of pigeonholes. He is often inconsistent, often contradicts himself.

Perhaps his chief merit is that he stimulated thought on every subject

he touched, and that he made sublime guesses which experiment, toiling

patiently after him, has established as truths. Like all searchers

for truth, his purpose was to discover the all-embracing Unity. Our

reason shows us an unbridgeable chasm between matter and mind; the

world of ideas and the outward world are in perpetual flux; nature is

composed of innumerable separate objects, yet a superior unity pervades

them. Life and death subsist antagonistically side by side: what is

that, greater than both, which includes both? What is the permanence

underlying this shifting, evanescent world? Conscience likewise reports

the conflict between good and evil: what is the cause anterior to both?

Many solutions have been offered; perhaps the commonest is that which,

taught by the Manicheans and adopted by early Christians, announces

that there are two principles in the universe,--one good, God, the

other evil, Satan. But insuperable difficulties accompany this view.

If God be, as assumed, all-powerful, why does he not exterminate Satan;

if he be just, why does he permit evil to exist at all?

Bruno, as we have seen in his deposition, proclaims that God is one and

indivisible, the Soul of the universe; that his attributes are power,

wisdom, and love; that he is in all things, yet above all things,

not to be understood, ineffable, and whether personal or impersonal,

man cannot say; that Nature is his footprint, God being the nature

of Nature; that since every material atom is part of him, by virtue

of his immanence in Nature, it is eternal, and so are human souls

immortal, being emanations from his immortal spirit; but whether souls

preserve their identity, or whether, like the atoms, they are forever

re-composed into new forms, Bruno does not decide. This, speaking

broadly, is pantheism; and pantheism is a system from which we are

taught to recoil with almost as much horror as from atheism. “That is

mere pantheism!” exclaimed John Sterling, aghast, at one of Carlyle’s

conclusions. “And suppose it were _pot_-theism? If the thing is true!”

replied Carlyle,--a reply not to be taken for valid argument, perhaps,

yet worthy of being pondered. As a pantheist, then, we must classify

Bruno,--in that wide class which includes Spinoza, Goethe, Shelley,

and Emerson. “Within man is the soul of the whole,” says Emerson; “the

wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is

equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which

we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only

self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the

thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are

one.” The Inquisition in 1600 would have burned Emerson for those two

sentences.

Coming to details, we find that Bruno shakes himself free from the

tyranny of Aristotle,--a mighty audacity, to measure which we must

remember that upon Aristotle’s arbitrary dicta the fathers and doctors

of the Catholic Church had based their dogmas. Though a pagan, he had

been for fifteen hundred years the logical pillar of Christendom,

uncanonized, yet deserving canonization along with St. Thomas and

St. Augustine. Bruno dared to attack the mighty despot in his very

strongholds, the Sorbonne and Oxford, and, by so doing, helped to clear

the road for subsequent explorers of philosophy and science. Equally

courageous was his championship of the discoveries and theories of

Copernicus. Bruno, we may safely say, was the first man who realized

the full meaning of the Copernican system,--a meaning which even

to-day the majority have not grasped. He saw that it was not merely

a question as to whether the earth moves round the sun, or the sun

moves round the earth; but that when Copernicus traced the courses

of our solar system, and saw other and yet other systems beyond, he

invalidated the strong presumption upon which dogmatic Christianity

was reared. According to the old view, the earth was the centre of

the universe, the especial gem of God’s creation; as a final mark of

his favor, God created man to rule the earth, and from among men he

designated a few--his “chosen people”--who should enjoy everlasting

bliss in heaven. But it follows from Copernicus’s discoveries, that

the earth is but one of a company of satellites which circle round the

sun; that the sun itself is but one of innumerable other suns, each

with its satellites; that there are probably countless inhabited orbs;

that the scheme of salvation taught by the old theology is inadequate

to the new conceptions we are bound to form of the majesty, justice,

and omnipotence of the Supreme Ruler of an infinite universe. The God

whom Bruno apprehended was not one who narrowed his interests to the

concerns of a Syrian tribe, and of a sect of Christians on this little

ball of earth, but one whose power is commensurate with infinitude, and

who cherishes all creatures and all things in all worlds. Copernicus

himself did not foresee the full significance of the discovery which

dethroned the earth and man from their supposed preeminence in the

universe; but Bruno caught its mighty import, and the labors of Kepler,

Galileo, Newton, Herschel, and Darwin have corroborated him.

Inspired by this revelation, Bruno was the first to envisage religions

as human growths, just as laws and customs are human growths,

expressing the higher or lower needs and aspirations of the people and

age in which they exist. His famous satire, _The Expulsion of the Beast

Triumphant_,[31] has a far deeper purpose than to travesty classic

mythology, or to ridicule the abuses of Romanists and Protestants, or

to scoff at the exaggerated pretensions of the Pope. Under the form

of an allegory, it is a prophecy of the ultimate passing away of all

anthropomorphic religion. It shows how the god whom men have worshiped

hitherto has been endowed by them with human passions and attributes,

“writ large,” to be sure, but still unworthy of being associated with

that Soul of the World which is in all things, yet above all things.

Everywhere he assails the doctrine that faith, without good works, can

lead to salvation. He denounces celibacy, and other unnatural rules of

the Catholic Church. He denounces still more vigorously the monstrous

theory of original sin, according to which an assumedly just God

punishes myriads of millions of human beings for the alleged trespass

of two of their ancestors. Bruno also cites the discovery of new races

in America as evidence that mankind are not all descended from Adam and

Eve; whence he infers that, since the Mosaic cosmogony is too narrow

to explain the creation and growth of mankind, the Hebrew scheme of

vicarious punishment and vicarious redemption must be inadequate. He

laughs at the idea of a “chosen people.” Over and over again Bruno

derides the assertion that, in order to be saved, we must despise our

divinest guide, Reason, and be led blindly by Faith, reducing ourselves

so far as we can to the level of donkeys. His satire, _La Cabala del

Cavallo Pegaseo_, which supplements _The Beast Triumphant_, is a mock

eulogy of this “holy asininity, holy ignorance, holy stupidity, and

pious devotion, which alone can make souls so good that human genius

and study cannot surpass them.” “What avails, O truth-seeker,” he

exclaims in one of his finest sonnets, “your studying and wishing to

know how Nature works, and whether the stars also are earth, fire, and

sea? Holy donkeydom cares not for that, but with clasped hands wills to

remain on its knees, awaiting from God its doom.”

[31] This, the most famous of Bruno’s works, was until recently so rare

that only two or three copies of it were known to exist. Hence numerous

blunders and misconceptions by critics who wrote about it from hearsay.

For a detailed analysis of “The Beast Triumphant” I may refer the

reader to _The New World_ for September, 1894. Lucian’s satire, “Zeus

in Heroics,” may have given the hint to Bruno.

In a striking passage, Bruno explains that evil is relative. “Nothing

is absolutely bad,” he says; “because the viper is not deadly and

poisonous to the viper, nor the lion to the lion, nor dragon to dragon,

nor bear to bear; but each thing is bad in respect to some other,

just as you, virtuous gods, are evil towards the vicious.” Again he

says, “Nobody is to-day the same as yesterday.” The immanence of the

universal soul in the animal world he illustrated thus: “With what

understanding the ant gnaws her grain of wheat, lest it should sprout

in her underground habitation! The fool says this is instinct, but we

say it is a species of understanding.”

These are some of Bruno’s characteristic opinions. Their influence

upon subsequent philosophers has been much discussed. His conception

of the universe as an “animal” corresponds with Kepler’s well-known

view. Spinoza, the great pantheist of the following century, took from

him the idea of an immanent God, and the distinction between _natura

naturans_ and _natura naturata_. Schelling, who acknowledged Bruno

as his master, found in him the principle of the indifference of

contraries; Hegel, that of the absolute identity of subject and object,

of the real and the ideal, of thought and things. La Croze discovers

in Bruno the germs of most of Leibnitz’s theories, beginning with the

monad. Symonds declares that “he anticipated Descartes’s position of

the identity of mind and being. The modern theory of evolution was

enunciated by him in pretty plain terms. He had grasped the physical

law of the conservation of energy. He solved the problem of evil by

defining it to be a relative condition of imperfect energy.... We have

indeed reason to marvel how many of Bruno’s intuitions have formed

the stuff of later, more elaborated systems, and still remain the

best which these contain. We have reason to wonder how many of his

divinations have worked themselves into the common fund of modern

beliefs, and have become philosophical truisms.”[32] Hallam, who

strangely undervalued Bruno, states that he understood the principle of

compound forces. After making due allowance for the common tendency to

read back into men’s opinions interpretations they never dreamed of, we

shall find that much solid substance still remains to Bruno’s credit.

He is, above all, suggestive.

[32] From J. A. Symonds’s _Renaissance in Italy: The Catholic

Reaction_, chap. ix.