LONDON, 1584
It is said that the art of magic is so important that against nature it makes the rivers run backward, stops the sea, makes the mountains moo, the abyss groan, restrains the sun, detaches the moon, uproots the stars, removes day, and holds back the night; hence the Academic of no Academy said, in that odious title and lost poem:
It makes the rivers rush in upward flight,
Displaces stars from heaven’s lofty space,
Turns night to day and turns the day to night,
Uproots the moon from her own orbit’s trace,
Switches her crescent’s left horn to the right,
Swells ocean waves, and freezes them in place.
It alters earth and water, air and fire,
And molts the plumes of all human desire.
—The Candlemaker, act 1, scene 2
However new and radical the Nolan philosophy must have seemed in Elizabethan England, its inventor insisted that there was really nothing new about it. His dialogues on the structure of the universe, Cause, Principle, and Unity and On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, refer back insistently to the ancient philosophers who preceded Plato and Aristotle, and in The Ash Wednesday Supper he explicitly describes his own enterprise as renewing “the ancient philosophy”:
The point on which we should fix our mind’s eye is this: Do we abide in the daytime with the light of truth above our horizon, or are we in the regions of our adversaries, our antipodes? Do we stand in the shadows, or rather they? Do we, in conclusion, who begin to renew the ancient philosophy, stand in the morning to put an end to the night, or in the evening to put an end to the day?
For Giordano Bruno, as for the ancient Greeks, there was no civilization older than that of Egypt. For fourteen years, he had lived in Naples alongside a battered statue of the river Nile that stood just off Piazza San Domenico; it gave its name to his district, the Seggio di Nilo. Perhaps for its nudity, the image was called the Corpo di Napoli—the Body of Naples—but it might well have begun life as a “Body of Alexandria.” Ancient Neapolis had maintained an active colony of merchants from Alexandria in Egypt, for whom this little statue must once have stood as a reminder of home. Along with their trade, their expertise, and their ancient culture, the Alexandrians also brought their cult of the goddess Isis, which took its first firm hold in the region of Naples a little more than a century before another religion, Christianity, began to make its own appearance. For three centuries, the worship of Isis continued to make converts in waves of devotional enthusiasm that shook the Roman Empire, until Christian priests finally stamped it out; by then, however, important aspects of her cult had been transferred to worship of the Virgin Mary, another loving mother, devoted mourner, and patient consoler of souls. In Naples, the little statue of the Nile must have remained aboveground well into the Christian era if it was still mentioned in thirteenth-century chronicles; shortly afterward, however, it was buried, and rediscovered in 1446.
Medieval Neapolitans had lost any idea of what the weathered marble figure might have portrayed; they guessed that it might have been a reclining woman with children. By the fifteenth century, however, the statue’s new neighbors, who included scholars like Lorenzo Valla, Antonio Panormita, and the young Giovanni Gioviano Pontano, could pick out lion’s paws on the “child” and the traces of a pharaoh’s nemes headdress on its shoulders, which allowed them to identify it correctly as an Egyptian sphinx. The reclining figure that used the sphinx as an armrest, they knew, must then be the river god who evoked the idea of Egypt; Valla, especially, who had lived in Rome, knew that there were other, grander examples of these Nile statues on display there.
Twenty years later, in 1466, the philosopher and physician Marsilio Ficino acquired a manuscript in Florence that brought back memories of Egypt as forcefully as the Corpo di Napoli. Under the name of Hermes Trismegistus—“Thrice-Great Hermes”—it contained a series of texts written in Greek and set in ancient Egypt (where Greek had served as the diplomatic language under both the Ptolemys and the Roman Empire). These Hermetic books, most of them in the form of dialogues, described the process of divine interaction with the material world and a program for human enlightenment that strikingly paralleled some of the formulations of Plato and his followers, of Hebrew mystics, and to a certain extent of Christianity. The dialogues spoke of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Egyptian wisdom, and Egyptian ways of attracting the powers of God and the spirits to bring long life, good health, and spiritual enlightenment. Ficino and his contemporaries read the ancient books with amazement, debating whether Hermes Trismegistus came before or after Moses; some scholars suggested that Hermes might be the master from whom Moses had first learned the secret wisdom of Egypt. The more they read, the more Ficino and his friends became convinced that the texts of Hermes Trismegistus must rank among the most influential works of all time.
In 1614, the Protestant scholar Isaac Casaubon would demolish the reputation of Hermes Trismegistus by suggesting that these supposedly primeval documents had been drafted in the same environment that produced the statue of the Nile in Naples: the cosmopolitan world of Alexandria, where Greeks, Jews, Romans, Persians, and merchants of the whole Mediterranean met, exchanged ideas, and came up with new, sophisticated syntheses. By Casaubon’s reading, the Hermetic texts sounded like so many different religious traditions not because they had served those traditions as a single primordial source, but because they were written at a time of lively and liberal intercultural borrowing. In Giordano Bruno’s day, however, the writings of Hermes Trismegistus still exerted all their Egyptian allure, exotic and yet familiar. The Nolan read them as eagerly as the rest of his contemporaries.
The most famous passage in the Hermetic writings is an apocalyptic prediction of Egypt’s eclipse, attractive to Renaissance readers for its clear reference to hieroglyphs, the “letters in stone” that recall the Egyptians’ “pious deeds.” This “lament for Egypt” gained an added poignancy for Hermes’ readers in 1519, when Cairo fell to the Ottoman Turks; European scholars had come to identify the Hermetic texts as so essential a component of their own Christian tradition that an assault on Egypt was an assault on themselves. As the century progressed, and Italians engaged in an ongoing battle with Turkish marauders on their own shores, the Hermetic prediction of Egypt’s conquest by “Scythians and Indians, or other savages” continued to have a menacing immediacy: after the brief Turkish invasion of Naples in 1562 came the terrible siege of Malta in 1565, narrowly won by the Christian Knights of Saint John with their international garrison. Even the Italian naval victory at Lepanto in 1571 could not entirely stave off fear that Naples or Malta might end up like Constantinople and Cairo before them, paying homage to the sultan. In such dangerous times, the Hermetic “lament for Egypt” could read as a potential lament for European civilization:
Do you not know … that Egypt is the image of heaven, and to state it more clearly, the colony of all things that are governed and exercised in heaven? To tell the truth, our land is the temple of the world. But, alas, the time will come when Egypt will seem to have been the pious worshipper of divinity all in vain, for divinity, returning to heaven, will leave Egypt deserted, and this throne of divinity will become widowed of all religion, piety, law, and creed. O Egypt, Egypt, of your religions only the tales will remain, unbelievable to future generations, and they will have no one to tell of your pious deeds except the letters carved in stone, which will not speak to gods and men (for the latter will be dead, and deity transmigrated to heaven), but to Scythians and Indians, or other savages. Darkness shall prevail over light, death shall be judged more useful than life, the religious person shall be judged insane, the impious prudent, the madman strong, the worst man good.
Giordano Bruno must have come to Hermes Trismegistus through his readings of Marsilio Ficino, not only through Ficino’s translation of the Hermetic dialogues themselves, but also his manual titled On Living the Heavenly Life, in which the Florentine philosopher invokes the example of the ancient Egyptians to explain how he has learned to attract beneficial influences from the stars, using gems, colors, and, importantly for Bruno, images, by which Ficino meant both statues and images held in the mind.
Ficino himself associated images not only with an internal system of symbolism but also with the external workings of the cosmos. They brought God to a human level, but also raised human souls toward God. But Ficino’s cosmos, like that of Hermes Trismegistus, was the old system of crystalline spheres and fixed stars. Bruno, who had already used geometric diagrams and philosophical terms to present an infinite universe, now wrote a dialogue in which he transformed the cosmos by transforming its imagery. He called it The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, a phrase that brought to mind the book of Revelation: “And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever … And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away.”
Bruno begins, however, not with a Christian vision but with Jupiter, king of the gods, fretting about the signs of old age; the ancient womanizer no longer has the energy to change into bulls, lightning, or showers of gold in pursuit of nubile young women. After a long and none too distinguished career as rulers of the universe, the gods of Olympus, he recognizes, are on their way out of power. But perhaps, Jove muses, he can stave off retirement by reforming the heavens. Too many of the constellations enshrine monsters, cruel kings, and degenerate princesses, not to mention a large, timid rabbit. By promising to reform the cosmos—and doing so on his own terms—the father of the gods hopes to buy more time for himself and his regime.
Bruno addressed this dialogue to Sir Philip Sidney, aiming, therefore, at a powerful patron within English society, as well as a reader and writer of exceptional refinement. As he explains to Sidney at length, Jupiter, fickle, weak-willed, and fallible, represents both the material world and human nature. The triumphant beast is “the vices that dominate and trample the divine part” of our spirit; by expelling that triumphant beast, “the spirit is purged of error and comes to be clothed in virtue.”
Bruno flanks his Jupiter with the figures of Momus, the mocker of the gods (who, as he tells Sidney, represents conscience); the Egyptian Isis; Sophia, the image of Greek wisdom; and Saulino, whose name echoes that of his own maternal family, the Savolino, but has also been read as a Hebrew name. The characters represent, then, entire cultures as well as individuals.
Unlike most of his contemporaries, who gave the universe about six thousand years of existence since creation, the Nolan philosopher had already proclaimed that it was infinitely old; in The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, he insists that the universe holds cultures and memories that have come and gone and will come and go again. He could look back to Plato for confirmation and, most of all, to ancient Egypt. Plato’s dialogues Timaeus and Critias tell of an Egyptian wise man who informs the Greek statesman Solon that he knows nothing of history: nine thousand years ago, the Egyptian notes, Athens was under siege by the people of Atlantis. Now, he tells Solon with a sigh, all is forgotten.
Ancient philosophy proved to Bruno that some ideas about humanity and its place in the cosmos were as old as human memory, although the expressions of those ideas might change as languages or scripts or cultures changed. Hence the essential truths of Egyptian religion as he understood them were not so different from the Nolan philosophy. This is not to say that Bruno intended to revive Egyptian religion, far from it. He regarded his own philosophy as vastly superior to ancient Egyptian religion, and vastly more suited to his own time and place. But as he wrote from the bloody soil of France and Britain, he pointed up the virtues of Egyptian idolatry to provide an example of extreme tolerance in his violently intolerant world.
As Bruno has Isis explain to the rest of the gods, the Egyptians had made sense of their world, using their “irrational” worship of animals and idols to eminently rational ends:
The stupid, insensitive idolaters had no reason to laugh at the magic and divine religion of the Egyptians, who in every cause and every effect, according to the principles appropriate to each, contemplated divinity, and knew how to obtain the benefits of Nature by means of the species that are in her womb: just as she gives fish from sea and river, wild animals from the desert, metals from mines, fruits from trees, so from certain parts, certain animals, certain beasts, certain plants, there are offered certain destinies, powers, fortunes, and impressions. Hence the divinity in the sea was called Neptune, in the sun, Apollo, in the earth, Ceres, in the desert, Diana, and so differently in the other species, all of which refer back to a god of gods and wellspring of all ideas that exists above Nature. That god, being absolute, has nothing to do with us, but inasmuch as he is communicated through the effects of Nature and is more intimate to them than Nature herself, if he is not Nature per se, certainly he is the nature of Nature and is the soul of the soul of the world, if not its soul per se: hence those who wanted to receive his help had to present themselves by the order of species, adjusting themselves to particular principles, just as whoever wants bread goes to the baker, whoever wants wine goes to the wine-maker, whoever wants fruit goes to the gardener, whoever wants learning goes to the teacher, and so it goes for all the other things: so that one goodness, one joy, one absolute origin for all richness and good, contracted to different principles, pours out the gifts according to particular needs. From this you can infer how the wisdom of the Egyptians, which is now lost, worshipped crocodiles, lizards, snakes, onions, not just the earth, the moon, the sun, and other stars in the heavens—and this magic and divine rite (by which divinity was so conveniently transmitted to men) were lamented by the Thrice-Great Hermes.
In its own way, in its own time, then, Bruno argues, Egyptian religion presented the same essential truths as the Nolan philosophy; thus Isis uses a phrase from Cause, Principle, and Unity, “the soul of the soul of the world,” to describe the transcendent God who underpins all the minor gods of Egypt, but also Bruno’s own transcendent God. Sophia, Greek wisdom, presents the same story as Egyptian Isis, proving that all the civilizations of antiquity had developed their own foreshadowings of the Nolan philosophy, and like Isis, she uses the term “magic” in connection with those insights:
You can see, then, how a simple divinity that is found in all things, a fertile nature, preserving mother of the universe, shines forth in different subjects according to the different ways in which she is communicated and takes on different names. You see how it is necessary to ascend to that one [nature] in different ways through participation in different gifts; otherwise, you try to enclose water with nets and go fishing with a shovel. Therefore [the ancients] understood the two sovereign bodies near our globe and mother goddess, that is, the sun and the moon, as the life force that informs things according to the two sovereign principles. Next, they understood her [Nature] according to seven other principles, distributing them among the seven lights called wanderers [planets]; tracing the differences among species of every kind to those [seven] as if to their first beginning and fertile cause; saying of plants, animals, stones, influences, and such, these are Saturn’s, these belong to Jove, these to Mars, this and that to this planet and that one. So, too, [are] the parts, the members, the colors, the seals, the characters, the signs, the images distributed among the seven species. But it does not mean that because of this [the ancients] failed to understand that a single divinity is to be found in all things, which pours forth and communicates itself in numberless ways, and hence it has numberless names, and it can be sought out by numberless paths, with distinct principles and appropriate to each: at the same time it is honored and worshipped by numberless rites, because we seek to request numberless kinds of favors from it. But in this there is a need for that wisdom and judgment, that art, industry, and use of intellectual enlightenment that is revealed, sometimes greatly, sometimes scarcely, by the intelligible sun to the world, more in certain times than in others. This habit is called magic: and when it involves itself in supernatural principles, it is divine, when it turns to the contemplation of Nature and the close scrutiny of her secrets, it is natural, and it is called intermediary and mathematical when it considers the principles and activities of the soul, which stands at the border between body and spirit, spirit and intellect.
Here Sophia sounds like wisdom absolute, and yet, for all her rationality and her resounding name, “wisdom,” Bruno shows that she, too, is limited by her own time and place.
For Bruno, indeed, the infinite stretches of time and space bred, at least ideally, an infinite tolerance for the various ways that people have sought God and wisdom (although he never quite found the patience to tolerate Calvinists or pedant asses). Sometimes, as in speeches of Isis and Sophia, he used the word “magic” to refer to this long tradition of human wisdom. This association of magic with ancient wisdom fitted equally well with the biblical Magi: the three kings’ knowledge of ancient traditions had led them to expect the coming of the Messiah, just as their expertise in astronomy reassured them that following a star would be as good as following a map to reach the rock-cut stables of Bethlehem in Judaea. The Magi were also clever, attentive to political conditions in the states through which they traveled. As the Gospel notes, after handing over their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the Christ Child, they slipped out of Judaea by a back road to elude the Roman puppet King Herod and his praetorian guard. Like the wisdom of the Magi, what Bruno calls “magic” sometimes looks like plain common sense. Part of the ancient wisdom was simple skill at survival.
The supreme magic in the reformed heavens of The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast is no different from the supreme revelation expounded in Bruno’s other dialogues: the most urgent task for modern philosophy in all these works is to comprehend the infinite extent of the universe, space, time, and God. From his courtesan Vittoria, for whom “the world is fine as it is,” his Italian dialogues come nearer in tone to the book of Genesis: “And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good.” Indeed, the more Bruno became convinced of the world’s grand immensity, the more he insisted on its goodness.
Savagely comic in much of its text, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast inspired Bruno to write a still more savage coda, a dialogue he called The Kabbalah of the Horse Pegasus and dedicated not to a potential sponsor but rather to a pedantic Neapolitan cleric from his past, “Don Sapatino,” who was probably a relative from Nola, Don Sabatino Savolino. The “Sonnet in Praise of the Ass” that he places at the beginning of the dialogue (see Chapter 11) reveals the true nature of the horse Pegasus.
Pedant asses and holy asses, as the sonnet makes clear, have no need for the Nolan philosophy and its questions about the structure of the cosmos. But Bruno could see close parallels between the Jewish tradition of Kabbalah, which used the letters of the Hebrew alphabet to call down the ten emanations of God, and his own art of memory, which used Hebrew as well as Roman letters to fix the world’s complexity on orderly wheels. Furthermore, Hebrew mystics were the ones who had envisioned traversing a thousand worlds, riding on cherubs, long before the Nolan could write that he had “discovered the way to climb the heavens, traverse the circumference of the stars, and leave the convex surface of the firmament at his back.”
Both Bruno’s Dominican training and his early experience with the Augustinians in Naples required him to devote close attention to the Hebrew tradition as well as the ancient wisdom of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, to recognize Kabbalah as another means to live the heavenly life. Like Isis and Sophia, the Hebrew personifications of divine wisdom—Hochmah and Shekinah—were female; philosophers like Ficino’s pupils Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Giles of Viterbo had already applied the techniques of Kabbalah to Christian spirituality. The Kabbalah of the Horse Pegasus, with its mixture of Hebrew mysticism and Greek mythology, also spun off its own brief appendix, The Cyllenian Ass, that is, The Ass of Hermes.
Like Virgil escorting Dante through the inferno, these wise ancients helped to guide both Bruno and his readers in their first steps through the infinite universe, but in the end all their philosophies and religions, however worthy, could present only the shadows of that universe rather than reality itself. Bruno’s real project was to find a language that could adequately describe infinity. He sensed that there were several possibilities, none of them simple. His dialogues Cause, Principle, and Unity and On the Infinite Universe and Worlds outline what might be required of mathematics, beginning with the ability to account for infinities and infinitesimals. The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast explores adapting the ancient art of memory—multiplying images as the heavens multiply worlds. In his sixth Italian dialogue, The Heroic Frenzies, he turned, at last, to words. It was no coincidence that he did so in England; the peculiarities of its politics and culture had created a fever of excitement about language in the late fifteenth century.
When Giordano Bruno arrived in London, Spain was already beginning to gather its Invincible Armada to fling against the Protestants, but there were many Londoners who already knew Spanish well. The city was one of the poles of the international cloth trade, the chief outlet for prized Cotswold wool, traded in a chain of connections that finally led, through Venice and Constantinople, down the Silk Road to China. As a result, English merchants had long maintained close contacts with merchants in Flanders and the Netherlands, which were beginning to rebel in the late sixteenth century against decades of Spanish control. Spanish dominion had nearly spread to England itself when Elizabeth’s predecessor, the Catholic queen Mary Tudor, married Philip II of Spain; now, married to a Habsburg cousin who was also his niece, Philip still yearned after the British Isles.
Elizabeth fought back the Spanish threat by building up her own fleet, led by dashing warlords like Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh, half merchants, half pirates, but she also fought back through culture; she had read her Thucydides and her Machiavelli well enough to apply their wisdom to her own circumstances. Learned in Greek and Latin, she spoke Spanish, French, and Italian well enough to negotiate in these languages, but above all, she had at her disposal an English that had begun to grow and change so radically that it seemed as new as the New World itself. Its basis both in Anglo-Saxon and in Norman French gave it a host of synonyms, as well as a structure that absorbed new coinages from Latin and Italian as if they were natural. Elizabethan poets, inspired by Italian models, were beginning to discover the potential of English to express the same vagaries of love as the sonnets of Petrarch and his followers. They adopted the discipline of sonnet form, even though Italian was far easier to rhyme than English, adapting a rhythm created for and by long, inflected words to Anglo-Saxon’s monosyllabic punch:
How can my Muse want subject to invent
While thou dost breathe, that pour’st into my verse
Thine own sweet argument, too excellent
For every vulgar paper to rehearse?
O, give thyself the thanks if aught in me
Worthy perusal stand against thy sight;
For who’s so dumb that cannot write to thee,
When thou thouself dost give invention light?
Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in words
Than those old nine which rhymers invocate,
And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth
Eternal numbers to outlive long date.
If my slight Muse do please these curious days,
The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise.
As William Shakespeare began to test the powers of English to express the full range of human behavior, Giordano Bruno made his own test of language: to see whether Neapolitan vernacular could sing the praises of philosophy. To counterbalance the unruly crowd of gods, animals, and personifications who populate The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, he claims to have resorted to plain, simple language, but for anyone born north of Rome, the plain, simple language of Naples sounded more like a torrent of oratory:
Here Giordano speaks the common language, he names names freely … he calls bread bread, wine wine, a head a head, a foot a foot, and other parts by their proper name, he calls eating eating, sleeping sleeping, drinking drinking … He holds miracles as miracles, prodigies and marvels as prodigies and marvels, truth as truth, doctrine as doctrine, goodness and virtue as goodness and virtue, impostures as impostures, deceptions as deceptions, knife and fire as knife and fire, words and dreams as words and dreams, peace as peace, love as love. He regards philosophers as philosophers, pedants as pedants, monks as monks, ministers as ministers, preachers as preachers, bloodsuckers as bloodsuckers, ne’er-dowells, mountebanks, charlatans, triflers, barterers, actors, parrots as that which they are called, show themselves to be, are; workers, benefactors, sages, and heroes as themselves.
It was perhaps inevitable that when Bruno came to describe the actions of those workers, benefactors, sages, and heroes, he turned to a different kind of language entirely: the poetry of love.