Giordano Bruno

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A Lonely Sparrow

GENEVA, 1579

Go forth, then: I hope you find

A nobler fate, and have a god to guide you:

The one the sightless dare to say is blind.

Go; and find beside you

Each deity of this masterful design;

And don’t return to me unless you’re mine.

—From The Heroic Frenzies, 1.4

As Bruno told the Venetian inquisitors:

When I left here, I went to Padua, where I found some Dominican fathers I knew, and they convinced me to resume my habit, although I hadn’t wanted to return to religious life, but it seemed to them that it was better to travel about with the habit than without it, and with this thought I went to Bergamo. And there I had a cassock made from cheap white cloth, and over that I put my scapular, which I had kept when I left Rome, and in this habit I went to Lyon, and when I was in Chambéry, and went to stay at the convent of the order, and seeing that I was treated most soberly and discussing this with an Italian father who was living there, he said, “You’ll notice that here you’ll get no kindness of any sort, and the farther ahead you go, the less you’ll find.” So I turned around and went to Geneva.

By the fall of 1577, Bruno had spent nearly a year and a half scouring northern Italy in search of work. He was twenty-nine years old, superbly educated, energetic, intelligent, and ambitious, but he might also be facing charges by the Inquisition in Naples, and possibly in Rome. At last, like many Italian fugitives from the Holy Office, he decided to see what the Protestants were all about.

He may have chosen Geneva because it was close, and he may have chosen it for more considered reasons. When John Calvin took over the city, he had dumped its most precious relic, the arm of Saint Anthony, into the river, a far cry from the Genoese who still venerated their silk-wrapped donkey’s tail. The various foreign communities in Geneva, like its natives, actively sought out exiles from other places and generally treated them well. Bruno may already have heard about the city’s hospitality. Hospitality, however, came only at the price of obedience. Another illustrious exile, Miguel Serveto, had discovered as much in 1553, when he was tried by a Calvinist court and sentenced to burn at the stake.

When Bruno recalled his own experience of Geneva to his Venetian inquisitors, he could hardly bring himself to refer to it by name; he called it “that city,” and its brand of Protestantism “the religion of that city.” For once he was compelled to stay in an inn, white habit, long black cape, scapular, and all; there were no Dominicans left in Geneva after Calvin and his associates took over. He told his inquisitors:

Once I arrived there, I went to lodge in the inn, and shortly afterward the Marchese di Vico, a Neapolitan who lived in that city, asked me who I was and whether I had come to stay and profess the religion of that city. After I had given him an account of myself and the reasons for which I had left religious life, I added that I did not intend to profess the religion of that city, because I did not know what religion it was, and that I had come there hoping to live in liberty and safety rather than for any other reason. And persuading myself that in any case it would be better to shed my habit, I took the cloth and had a pair of hose made and other things, and that marchese along with other Italians gave me a sword, a hat, a cape, and all the other things I needed to be properly dressed, and so that I could make a living, they procured me a job as a copy editor. I stayed in that job for two months, and sometimes I went to the sermons, both in Italian and in French, that they read and preached in that city. Among others, I heard the lectures and sermons of Niccolo Balbani of Lucca, who was reading the letters of Saint Paul and preached on the Gospels. But when I was told that I could not stay any longer unless I decided to accept the religion of that city, and could expect no more help from them, I decided to leave.

The real story had gone somewhat differently, but Bruno was not about to say so to the Inquisition. The news of his arrival in Geneva had spread fast in that well-guarded city, and soon afterward Filippo Giordano Bruno, as he called himself just then, received a visit from the de facto leader of the Italian exiles in Geneva, a Neapolitan count, Gian Galeazzo Caracciolo, Marchese di Vico. A former page of the emperor Charles V, married to a grandniece of Pope Paul IV, Caracciolo had been forced to flee Naples after his conversion to Calvinism, leaving his wife, his family, and his properties behind. In Geneva, he established the city’s first Italian evangelical congregation. For this pioneering service and for his exalted social origins, he became the natural spokesman for an Italian community that numbered in the hundreds. In keeping with his role, Caracciolo introduced Bruno to their other compatriots, an unusually cultured, accomplished group of refugees. Most had arrived with nothing, after a dangerous passage out of Italy, but once they settled in Geneva, they prospered. Their own experiences taught them to be generous with new arrivals: Bruno’s gifts of hat, cape, sword, and job were typical. Besides, with five or six Italian presses operating in Geneva, there was a real need for good copy editors. Up to this point, Bruno’s tale to his inquisitors rings true. However, when Bruno’s hosts pressed him to convert, he made no effort to leave Geneva. He obliged.

As he admitted to his inquisitors, Bruno had attended Calvinist services in Italian and French. Protestant reformers were virtually unanimous in calling for vernacular liturgy and vernacular translations of the Bible, so that, as the English reformer Thomas Cranmer put it, “the Word of God should be in a language understanded of the people.” Furthermore, they encouraged all members of the congregation to read the Bible for themselves. The Council of Trent, on the other hand, had responded to these same demands by establishing the Latin Vulgate as the only acceptable biblical text, preserving Latin Mass, and insisting that the task of reading and interpreting Scripture be entrusted to priests. Outside the Church, in universities and learned academies, Latin was still the universal language of educated people, enabling Bruno to lecture in England and Germany as well as in Italy, Francophone Switzerland, and France. But the Reformers’ decision to adopt vernacular liturgy would gradually erode the influence of Latin in other spheres. Bruno, responding to this change, would write his philosophical works both in Latin and in Italian vernacular. In the meantime, he began learning French by attending French sermons.

The Italian preacher Niccolo Balbani, whose sermons Bruno mentioned to the inquisitors, went well beyond a simple call for vernacular liturgy. One of his pamphlets, from 1564, bears the title Responses … in Which, with the Word of God, It Is Shown That the Sacrifice of the Mass Is a Human Invention and a Horrible Idolatry. The problem, as Balbani saw it, was the Catholic contention that the bread and wine of the Eucharist were truly transformed into the body and blood of Christ. To the most adamant Reformers, the Host was a symbol of the bread passed at the Last Supper, but it did not at any time contain the “real presence” of Christ. Hence venerating a crucifix or elevating the Host during the Mass was no different from the Hebrews’ bowing down before the golden calf; all of these objects were the works of human hands, not of God, and hence all of them counted as the “graven images” whose worship was prohibited by the first commandment. Relics of the saints were scarcely different. The most militant Protestants stripped churches of their ornament, smashed statues, and dumped relics into the nearest river.

The Giordano Bruno who entered the stripped churches of Geneva was not the same Filippo Bruno who had emptied his elaborate cell at San Domenico Maggiore of its holy images. He had spent all but a few months of his life in Italy, surrounded everywhere by works of art, stocking his own memory with figures, emblems, and imagery that spill over into his writing. Even a stripped cell at San Domenico was a work of sophisticated, ornamental architecture. He had never before seen what Protestant severity really meant for a sensitive eye. He saw it now.

On May 29, 1579, Bruno enrolled in the University of Geneva as “Philippus Brunus Nolanus, professor of sacred theology.” Although true, the qualification was an odd one to stress at a university that had been entirely turned over to John Calvin’s version of the Reformation; indeed, so long as he lived, Calvin himself took the chair of philosophy at the University of Geneva. But it was important to Bruno here, as everywhere in his travels, to assert his status as a learned man and a gentleman. The fact that the Italians of Geneva gave him a sword, hat, and cape means that they recognized him as a person of rank.

Unfortunately for Bruno and for the University of Geneva, he arrived when the course in philosophy had passed to an acolyte of Calvin’s successor, Theodor Beza: Antoine de La Faye. Ambitious, vain, and greedy, La Faye collected as many salaries and official residences as he could: acting principal of the college, professor of philosophy, and, eventually, professor of theology, rector of the university, pastor of the city, and principal minister of Geneva. His competence in his various jobs was another matter: he had nearly been fired from the chair in philosophy in 1577.

Debate did not feature in the classrooms of the University of Geneva; the professor read from his lectern and his audience listened. Beza had already decreed that lecturers should not “turn away even the slightest bit from the opinions of Aristotle.” For Philippus Brunus Nolanus, professor of sacred theology, sitting as a captive of Antoine de La Faye and pretending to be a student again proved unbearable. Forbidden to challenge his professor in class, he resorted instead to the press. In August 1579, the printer Jean Berjon issued a broadsheet in which Bruno listed twenty mistakes that La Faye had made in a single lecture, “treating exclusively questions of knowledge, with nothing about God or the magistrates.”

La Faye, of course, had nearly lost his job two years before. It is not surprising that he reacted badly to such public criticism of his competence, and because he could count on the support of Theodor Beza, he took the case before the Consistory, Geneva’s equivalent of the Inquisition. There he charged Bruno with slander, making it known all the while that his authoritative position could justify turning the charge from slander to sacrilege, and the penalty from jail to death.

On August 6, 1579, Bruno and the printer Berjon were both arrested and thrown into prison. Berjon was released after an overnight stay and fined fifty florins. Bruno stood trial before the Consistory, which admonished him to “follow the true doctrine” and excommunicated him until he should make a proper confession. After two and a half weeks in jail, he capitulated, apologizing on his knees to La Faye and to the Consistory for having wrongly slandered them (although he had not slandered the Consistory in his broadsheet, he had talked back to them during his hearings with his usual lack of tact) and watching as all the known copies of his broadsheet were fed to the flames.

Two roads led out of Geneva. One pointed toward Germany, and one toward France. Despite the Dominican friar’s warning in Chambéry that French hospitality grew colder with every step farther into the country, Bruno took the road back to Lyon. If nothing else, he could understand French, and presumably speak it as well. His excommunication as a Calvinist followed him, but this, at least, was an excommunication he was happy to accept.

One of the images that Bruno would invoke repeatedly in his writing was that of the “solitary sparrow,” a brilliant blue bird whose English name, blue rock thrush, evokes its form, color, and habitat, but not its behavior. The ancient Hebrews and Romans, on the other hand, like modern Italians, had been more struck by its social habits; unlike most sparrows, the little bird sings alone rather than wheeling around in a flock.

The “solitary sparrow” appears in a despondent psalm (Vulgate 101; King James 102) that figures in the lectionary for Ash Wednesday and recurred several times in Bruno’s own work, an image of the loneliness that must have accompanied him through the Alps and the limestone crags of Provence, on his way to Lyon:

Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my cry come unto thee.

Hide not thy face from me in the time of my trouble; incline thine ear unto me; hear me when I call, and that right soon.

For my days pass away like smoke: I waste away because I cannot eat my bread.

I groan aloud and am weary; my bones cleave fast to my skin.

I am become like an owl in the wilderness: yea, even like an owl among the ruins.

I am solitary, and lie sleepless because of my groaning, like a sparrow that sitteth alone on the housetop.

Mine enemies revile me all the day long, and they that are enraged against me conspire to do me hurt.

Surely I have eaten ashes as if they were bread, and mingled my drink with weeping,

Because of thy indignation and wrath: for thou hast taken me up and cast me away.

My days are gone like a shadow: and I am withered like grass.

In a sonnet by Bruno, the sparrow pushes onward, a free soul for whom “the world is fine as it is.” These days of 1578 and 1579 were when Bruno’s philosophical thoughts at last began to gather into a coherent shape. The hardship of his physical life did nothing to dim his faith that the world was governed by a transcendent love to which philosophy, the love of wisdom, made answer. The “I” of his poem sends the “lonely sparrow” off to find its way, just as a mother releases her grown child (another image Bruno uses in the same set of poems), knowing all the while that the sparrow will probably never return; in some sense, he suggests in a Platonic vein, the soul never truly belongs to the person it inhabits. By the time he wrote this sonnet, Bruno knew that he would surely never see his parents again, or Nola, or Naples, and that sense of loss, coupled with optimism and undying affection, suffuses its verse:

My lonely sparrow, in those lofty parts

That cast their shade and burden down my will,

Soon build your nest, confirm your every skill;

There lavish all your industry and art.

Be born again, and there bring up your flock

Of pretty fledglings, now that all the force

Of hostile fate has run its final course