Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.
If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me.
Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.
—Psalm 139:7–12
TEOFILO: To you, Smitho, I will send the Nolan’s dialogue called Hell’s Purgatory, and there you will see the fruit of redemption.
—The Ash Wednesday Supper, dialogue 5
And what communion hath light with darkness?
—2 Corinthians 6:14
In the end, Giordano Bruno seems to have decided that all the debates with his inquisitors about questions of doctrine, cosmology, and even philosophy were beside the point. The only question that mattered was whether the Inquisition could justify its claim to authority over him. Aside from slapping his crazy cellmate, Fra Celestino, Bruno had done nothing in his life except talk, write, and argue. If he ever acted as a spy, we have no record of it. Although he moved at times in powerful political circles, he had fomented no rebellions, killed no one, tortured no one, stolen nothing. He may have ridiculed his cellmates in Venice for reciting the breviary, but he had never, like the Protestant agitator Walter Merse, interrupted the Mass or profaned the Host. He had observed the terms of his excommunications, Catholic, Calvinist, and Lutheran, as scrupulously as any believer. Nevertheless, his inquisitors, late in the game, discussed subjecting him to torture; technically, this meant ordering that he be examined stricte, “strictly.” It was his sixteenth interrogation, six years into his imprisonment. Their motive could no longer have been primarily to extract information; Bruno had readily told them his beliefs, in great detail. He had been much less willing, however, to retract those beliefs. Torture might make him do so, if only for the moment of his duress. Thus the recommendation to interrogate him stricte, endorsed by every one of his inquisitors, seems mostly to express their frustration with the case; it was an opportunity to watch their clever, obstinate victim bend at last, hanging from a beam by arms tied together behind his back.
It is not clear that Bruno was ever tortured physically (neither is it clear that he was not), but in any case listening to the discussion of torture at the end of his sixteenth interrogation must have been a torture in itself. Some prisoners talked as soon as they saw the instruments that were to be used against them. But inflicting physical harm on a prisoner who had given information willingly was, as the cardinals and Bruno well knew, an outrage against the Inquisition’s own ideas of due process.
It was at this point in his long trial, when the cardinals resorted to pure coercion, that Bruno, like many of the Inquisition’s victims before and after him, began to contest their very right to sit in judgment at all. Abruptly, as the records seem to show, he turned from an apparent willingness to negotiate with his inquisitors to radical defiance, both of Christian dogma and of the Inquisition’s right to enforce it.
The initial negotiations began in mid-January 1599, as his inquisitors would remind him in their final sentence:
[Eight] propositions were presented to you on the eighteenth of January 1599 in the congregation of the lord prelates held in the Holy Office, and you were assigned the limit of six days in which to deliberate and then answer whether you wanted to abjure said propositions or not.
Bruno’s reply a week later only incensed them:
You replied that if the Holy See and the Holiness of Our Lord [that is, the pope] had declared eight propositions as definitively heretical, or that His Holiness knew them to be such, or that they had been so defined by the Holy Spirit, then you were disposed to revoke them; and then you presented a document addressed to His Holiness and to us, which, as you said, concerned your defense.
This strategy silenced the cardinals for another ten days. However, Bruno’s appeal to the pope over their heads seems to have failed; if Clement VIII read the document that Bruno submitted to him, he gave no sign of it. At the beginning of February, the inquisitors returned again to Bellarmine’s propositions, again demanding an abjuration. Now Bruno seemed to take a more conciliatory line—except that he still insisted on speaking directly with the pope:
Subsequently, on the fourth of February 1599, it was ordered that the eight propositions be proposed to you again, as in effect they were proposed to you on the fifteenth of said month, and if you were to recognize them as heretical and desire to abjure them, you would be received in penitence, otherwise, that a term of forty days would be set for you to repent; and you said at the time that you recognized the said eight propositions as heretical and that you were ready to detest and abjure them at a time and place acceptable to the Holy Office, and not only the said eight propositions, but that you were also prepared to perform every obedience with regard to the others that were proposed to you, but afterward, after you had handed over other documents to the Holy Office addressed to the Holiness of Our Lord and to us.
“From which,” the inquisitors concluded, “it is manifestly apparent that you stubbornly persevered in your aforementioned errors.”
Bruno had to know that he would pay for having “stubbornly persevered” with his death. Thus his own agony in prison, like Jesus’ agony in the garden, ended with the resolve to drink the bitter cup he had prayed would pass him by.
Bruno’s own view of divine justice could not have diverged more radically from that of the Church, a fact that had emerged early in his trial:
Francesco Graziano, fellow prisoner in Venice: “He said that neither hell nor purgatory existed, but if one of them had to exist, it would be purgatory, which was more reasonable than hell, for even if the fire were eternal, it did not follow that the punishment would be eternal, because in the end everyone would be saved, and that God’s wrath was not eternal. He cited [Jeremiah 3:5] Will he reserve his anger forever? and also said that at the end of the world even the demons would be saved, because [Psalm 36:6] O LORD, thou preservest man and beast. And if I argued with him, he said that I was a beast and a goatherd, and that I knew nothing.”
The Nolan philosopher’s last known act, as the eyewitness Gaspar Schoppe reported, was to turn his head away from the crucifix put before his eyes when he mounted the stake. Bound, with his tongue stopped (probably by a leather bridle, possibly by an iron spike), he could do no more than launch what Schoppe called “a fierce expression,” and that expression in that public place must have read as contempt for the crucified image as well as for the Church his executioners claimed to represent.
His teacher Fra Teofilo da Vairano had written eloquently and broadly about the membership of the Church as a gathering of all humankind. Bruno himself had written about “that law of love that is spread far and wide … which derives … from God the father of all things, so that it is in harmony with all nature, and teaches a general philanthropy by which we love even our enemies, lest we become like brutes and barbarians, and are transformed into his image who makes his sun rise over good and bad, and pours out a rain of grace upon the just and the unjust.”
“This,” he had told Rudolf II, “is the religion that I observe, which is without controversy and beyond all dispute, whether of the spirit’s inclination or the principle of ancestral or national custom.” If the inquisitors killed him for observing it, they would have to explain to the world how they could do so in the name of love, forgiveness, and the Gospel. As Saint Paul wrote, “What communion hath light with darkness?”