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 werepot-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 eternalONE. 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 whicheven 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 inall 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 stillunworthy 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 supplementsThe 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 toThe New Worldfor September, 1894. Lucian’s satire, “Zeus in Heroics,” may have given the hint to Bruno.
[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 toThe New Worldfor 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 betweennatura naturansandnatura 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’sRenaissance in Italy: The Catholic Reaction, chap. ix.
[32]From J. A. Symonds’sRenaissance in Italy: The Catholic Reaction, chap. ix.