CHAPTER XXBRUNO
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 mildregret 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 hinterlandof 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 innerspirit 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, GiovanniMocenigo, 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.