And they came to a place which was named Gethsemane: and he saith to his disciples, Sit ye here, while I shall pray. And he taketh with him Peter and James and John, and began to be sore amazed, and to be very heavy; And saith unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death: tarry ye here, and watch. And he went forward a little, and fell on the ground, and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. And he said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt.
—Mark 14:32–36
I remember him saying that the apostles showed more constancy than Christ, because they showed themselves ready to die and Christ prayed not to die.
—Giovanni Mocenigo, accuser
As Bruno showered opprobrium on the figure of Jesus, their lives, ironically, took an increasingly parallel course. Bruno’s statements seem to regard Jesus as a symbol of the institutional Church rather than as a defiant figure in his own right, the flouter of Jewish Law who dined with publicans and sinners and described himself as a prophet without honor in his own country. But Giordano Bruno had also spent much of his life contemplating the acts, words, and death of Jesus, and the deeper significance of those meditations did not leave him in the prisons of the Inquisition. In many ways, his own passion not only paralleled but also imitated, whether consciously or instinctively, the passion of Christ.
At times, that imitation of Christ all but carried him away, as Giovanni Mocenigo would testify. It is strange to imagine the two of them in a gondola bound for Andrea Palladio’s magnificent church of San Giorgio Maggiore, the excitable little Neapolitan bragging more and more extravagantly beneath a building whose calm harmonies and massive proportions could not provide a starker contrast:
Giovanni Mocenigo, accuser: Once when I was going with Giordano to San Giorgio Maggiore, he said that there was no reason to marvel at the miracles of Christ, because he intended to do even greater things, and he added that it was no miracle that Christ predicted his own death, because with all his misdeeds, he would have to be strung up. In the matter of Christ’s miracles he said that he knew how Christ had performed his miracles, and using the same art he intended to do as much and more, but he did not say that Christ was a magician or whether his miracles were real or apparent so far as I remember. But I do remember that because he knew the Hebrew language, he wanted to infer that Christ, who had little knowledge of this language, performed these miracles. I remember him saying that the apostles showed more constancy than Christ, because they showed themselves ready to die and Christ prayed not to die.
Sixteenth-century prisoners were routinely called upon to remember the passion of Christ and his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane; such meditations were seen as a way of steeling them for their own destinies, which often included punishments as brutal and violent as those of ancient Rome. Typically, Bruno laced his meditations with bravado and antiquarian precision:
Francesco Graziani, cellmate in Venice: I heard him say that Christ had died a shameful death and that all the prophets and Christ died like wretches because everything they had done was a fiction … Seeing that the others and I crossed ourselves, he said there was no reason to make this sign, because Christ was not put on a cross, but on a pillory, on which they used to hang their condemned criminals, and the form of the cross that we have today is the sign that was sculpted on the breast of the goddess Isis, and that that sign had always been held in veneration by the ancients, and the Christians had robbed the ancients by pretending that the wood to which Christ had been nailed had taken that form.
He also treated his cellmates to his own variety of gallows humor:
Matteo Silvestri, cellmate: When he saw us make the sign of the cross, he laughed, and many times when he heard me chant the psalms, and especially chanting the psalm “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” he yelled at me, saying, “What kind of desperate psalm is this? Shut up, or you’ll go to jail!”
The Nolan philosophy offered the Nolan philosopher a way to live in a boundless universe, but when it came to facing down the conventional forces of a world that might no longer have seemed to be “fine as it is,” he turned, ironically, instinctively, to something closely resembling Christian morality. Not the morality of his inquisitors, to be sure, but the morality of generations of martyrs, beginning with Jesus himself. In the prison of the Holy Office, Giordano Bruno found his own Gethsemane. Like the Jesus who, “sorrowful unto death,” prayed for any possible deliverance from his situation, the philosopher from Nola tried to bargain his fate with Robert Bellarmine, and then, just like the fearful, despondent Christ he had once derided as a tristo, he changed his mind.
On the edge of Oxford’s Corn Market, on October 16, 1555, Hugh Latimer, bound to the stake, had called over to Nicholas Ridley, condemned to burn with him, “Be of good cheer, Master Ridley, and play the man; for today, God willing, we shall light such a candle in England as shall never go out.” Whether or not Bruno had read John Foxe’s account of their deaths in his Book of Martyrs, he would certainly have known about it from his Anglican hosts at Oxford, just as he knew the stories of early Christian martyrdom from his youth in Naples: Sebastian, bristling with arrows; Peter, crucified upside down; Paul, decapitated; Stephen, stoned; the virgin saints, tortured, healed, and finally decapitated—Catherine with her wheel, Agatha with her severed breasts, Margaret, Ursula, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia; the Dominican Peter Martyr, skull split by bandits. Like it or not, Bruno had been schooled in resistance, a resistance, he had always been told, that bore extreme witness to an ultimate truth.
In his own way, in his own terms, Giordano Bruno now began to prepare his own martyrdom. If he truly believed his own philosophy, his own death formed an infinitesimal part of the eternal life of the universe, but, like Jesus in the garden, he could not face that truth without passing through a sorrow unto death. Like his God, who would even pardon the demons, Bruno eventually came to pardon, at least by emulation, the Christ figure he had contended with ever since the age of eighteen.