“I have, in effect, harbored doubts”
NAPLES, 1562–1576
In the abstract, Bruno may have eventually come to believe that the world was fine as it was. He spent much of his time, however, trying to change it, beginning, when he was seventeen, with his cell in the convent of San Domenico Maggiore. Bruno’s new home was no ordinary convent; its friars came from the most powerful families in the Kingdom of Naples. The novices, therefore, lived like nobles, in vaulted rooms around an immense courtyard.
The Neapolitan barons who sent their younger sons to the convent and their dead to crypts beneath the church also met in the convent’s labyrinthine halls to hold learned conversations (eventually enshrined in 1611 as the Accademia degli Oziosi, the “Gentlemen of Leisure”) and to plot resistance to the Spaniards, abetted by the friars themselves. Dominicans from San Domenico led the revolt in 1547 against imposing the Spanish Inquisition in Naples; as the city’s inquisitors, they would have been responsible for enforcing the harsh Spanish rules. The friars would revolt again in 1599, urged on by their own Fra Tommaso Campanella and a handful of renegade barons. Campanella would spend the next twenty-seven years in prison (and forty hours on a torture seat called the Judas cradle), but the viceroy could not suppress the entire convent, let alone the barons; instead, he kept track of them through the Royal University, still housed on the premises, and by participating in person in the barons’ learned gatherings.
In short, the sixty-odd friars of San Domenico were accustomed to exceptional freedom of thought and action, and also to aggressive manipulation of political power. Yet even this loose conventual life proved too strict for many of them. A dozen were convicted of thievery during Bruno’s fourteen-year stay, unprepared for the rigors of monastic poverty. Furthermore, it was nearly impossible to separate a sixteenth-century gentleman from his weapons; no matter what religious vows the gentleman may have taken, his arsenal was a matter of basic identity. Steel blades, usually daggers, flashed forth from the friars’ white robes with some regularity; in 1571, Fra Teofilo Caracciolo, still an aristocrat to the core, struck another brother with his sword. In an unusually intelligent community, forgery thrived in several media, from bank checks to notarial documents. Novices copied the keys to the outside doors and slipped out into taverns like the notorious Cerriglio, only a few blocks away, or into the taverns’ upstairs brothels. The confessional served as another way to meet women; more than one Dominican faced a paternity suit from an outraged neighbor, and one friar barely escaped the man who chased him around Piazza San Domenico with a rake. Punishments for violent infractions, as well as for forgery, were harsh: years of service as a galley slave for the worst offenders, or a lifetime of menial tasks in a distant monastery. In 1580, however, Pope Gregory XIII could still write that he “understood that the inquisitors of the Order of Saint Dominic claim to be entirely immune from obedience to their superiors, and do not want to obey or observe their rule, and leave the convent when they wish without informing anyone where they are going.” Religious life within the walls of this singular institution may not have taught Bruno obedience, but it certainly taught him how to move among the ruling class.
And move he did; early in his novitiate, he made a commotion clearing his cell of pictures of the Madonna, Saint Catherine of Siena, and Bishop Antoninus of Florence, leaving himself only a single crucifix. It was the kind of scene that Protestants were making all over Europe, stripping churches of their paintings and statues and calling them pagan idols, but in Naples, with its riotous wealth of religious art, this bid for austerity must have seemed especially odd. San Domenico’s novice master, Fra Eugenio Gagliardo, wrote out a formal reprimand, but tore it up later in the day. And he let Filippo da Nola’s redecoration stand.
When Bruno made trouble a second time, Fra Eugenio was less accommodating. A novice had been sitting in the courtyard, reading a cheap pamphlet with a devotional poem, The Seven Joys of the Virgin, when the little Nolan asked what he was doing with that book and told him to throw it away, and read some other book like the Lives of the Holy Fathers. This time, Fra Eugenio reported Filippo da Nola to the Inquisition; he took the incident as more than a case of bad manners, or a demanding scholar’s recommendation of sober Latin literature over a vernacular tract. Instead, for a novice who had already banished the Madonna’s picture from his cell, criticizing The Seven Joys suggested a distinct lack of reverence for the Virgin Mary, an attitude, again, that was particularly surprising in Naples, a city that prided itself on devotion to the Madonna. Reporting this outspoken novice to the Inquisition was only a matter of walking down the hall—the Holy Office, staffed by friars from San Domenico, occupied yet another of the convent’s many courtyards—but it was a significant move, one that left Bruno with a permanent record in the Inquisition’s archive.
Fra Eugenio recognized that Filippo da Nola, for a Neapolitan Catholic, was behaving suspiciously like a Protestant. In the mountainous regions of northern Italy, native Protestant communities, isolated from big cities, had worshipped in their own way since the late Middle Ages, but Naples, especially under its Spanish overlords, had always adhered staunchly to the Roman Church. Any change in that situation had the potential to upset the city’s tense balance of interests among Madrid, the local barons, and Rome, and, equally, the balance among the city’s dominant religious orders: the Franciscans, Augustinians, Benedictines, and Dominicans.
Furthermore, the Dominicans of San Domenico Maggiore found themselves in an especially awkward position in the 1560s, caught between pressure from Spain to impose the Spanish Inquisition and pressure from Rome to impose a new set of decrees resulting from the Council of Trent. Convoked unsuccessfully in the 1530s as a response to the Protestant Reformation, seated only in 1545, the council was so riven by conflict among its delegates that it dragged on for nearly two decades, issuing its final decrees only in 1563. Its initial aim, guided by the Venetian cardinal Gasparo Contarini and the Neapolitan Girolamo Seripando, had been to attempt reconciliation with the Protestants by facing up to, and righting, the real problems within the Roman Church. Instead, the council moved toward a fierce defense of the Church’s established hierarchies and traditions, especially during the pontificate of Pope Paul IV (reigned 1555–59). The most combative of all the council’s traditionalists, Paul, a Neapolitan and the former cardinal Giovanni Pietro Carafa, pinned his own hopes for reforming the Church on a strengthened Inquisition for Catholics, hostility for the Protestants, and ghettos for the Jews. His demands for absolute obedience reflected his upbringing in a grand old baronial family, one of whose chapels stands just to the right of the entrance to the church of San Domenico Maggiore.
Arrogant and cruel, Pope Paul also had his opponents, centered, like the cardinals Contarini and Seripando, in Venice and Naples. Though they may have emerged battered from the Council of Trent, the more conciliatory Catholic reformers continued as a powerful intellectual force, their social status and political weight comparable to those of Carafa and his allies. In Naples, figures like the aristocratic poet Vittoria Colonna (a close friend of Michelangelo’s) and a pair of Augustinian cardinals, Giles of Viterbo and Girolamo Seripando, had brought Naples into the reforming currents of the Roman Church, especially Cardinal Seripando, whose personal library in the Augustinian church of San Giovanni a Carbonara had become an important place to read and discuss philosophy and theology.
It is no wonder, under such circumstances, that in San Domenico, Fra Eugenio Gagliardo alerted his colleagues in the Inquisition to Filippo Bruno’s strange ideas. If they had come from the young man’s own head, the Dominicans faced a simple problem; if, however, they reflected a larger trend in local thought, the problem was more serious—not necessarily for Bruno, but certainly for the Dominican Order in Naples.
In fact, Bruno’s private thoughts were far more radical than the novice master knew. After having rid his room of every image except a crucifix, he had begun to wonder seriously about the crucifix as well. When he faced the Inquisition in Venice thirty years later, he claimed that he had begun to doubt the divinity of Jesus at the age of eighteen:
I have, in effect, harbored doubts about the term [“person”] for the Son and the Holy Spirit, as I have never understood them as persons distinct from the Father … I have held this opinion from the time that I was eighteen years old until now, but I have never made a public denial, nor taught or written anything to that effect, but only doubted to myself, as I have said.
But, as Fra Eugenio clearly feared, Bruno’s ideas also reflected contacts he had made with other people in Naples. The most important of these people was an Augustinian friar from the convent of San Giovanni a Carbonara, a protégé of Cardinal Seripando’s who shared many of his mentor’s ways of thinking about God, faith, and the world.
Still, despite his personal doubts about the personhood of Jesus, his studies with a member of another order, and his tendencies toward disobedience, now a matter of record, Filippo da Nola, after a year’s novitiate, pronounced his final vows as a friar in the Order of Preachers and began to prepare for his ordination as a priest. The advantages of life at San Domenico Maggiore apparently outweighed the restrictions, and his behavior, though unruly, was not unruly enough for Fra Eugenio to question the young man’s fitness for the Order of Preachers. Like several other novices in 1566, Filippo da Nola took the name Fra Giordano in homage to the convent’s former prior, Fra Giordano Crispo.
Acceptance into the convent of San Domenico Maggiore and the Dominican Order was only the beginning of Bruno’s preparation for the priesthood. His next aim was far more ambitious: admission to the College of San Domenico Maggiore to take a degree in theology. Young men throughout the Kingdom of Naples entered the order by the dozens every year, but the College of San Domenico had only ten places for what were called “formal students.” These ten were the most select and privileged students of any institution in the realm, including the famous Medical School of Salerno, the other Dominican colleges, the other religious colleges, and the Royal University of Naples. The history of the College of San Domenico stretched back to the very beginnings of university education in Europe; only Salerno could make a similar claim.
As for San Domenico’s prestige, the faculty had once boasted Thomas Aquinas himself, lured back to Italy from his professorship at the University of Paris. The secular Royal University of Naples rented rooms in the Dominicans’ convent, basking in the college’s reflected glory.
Formal students were usually admitted to the College of San Domenico, after an extensive period of preparation, as what were called “material students.” Material students took private lessons from a variety of teachers; most professors were eager to earn extra money by tutoring on the side. Material students studied without limits on their time or curriculum, but formal students, once admitted to the Dominican college, were required to complete a rigorous course in academic theology within three years. If they did so successfully, they earned the degree of lector, “reader.” Slower progress meant expulsion. It would take Giordano Bruno eight years to obtain, in 1571, an offer to become a formal student at the Dominican college at Andria, a small city near the Adriatic coast. He passed it up; Andria stood at the opposite end of the kingdom, far from anything Bruno knew and far from the centers of intellectual life, Naples and Rome. He chose instead to continue in Naples as a material student at the College of San Domenico, and his gamble paid off: he was accepted as a formal student in Naples one year later, in May 1572. For all his intelligence, his wide reading, and his phenomenal memory, it had taken him nine years of study to earn admission. He was twenty-four years old.
What we know about Bruno’s student days is painfully limited, but the huge church of San Domenico preserves the same general form, despite its remodelings over the centuries. It is fairly easy to imagine the tall, stout aristocrat Aquinas or the burly Calabrian peasant Tommaso Campanella booming out a sermon under San Domenico’s lofty vaults, but it must have been a real achievement for little Fra Giordano to project his voice to the very ends of the high, long nave. But project he must have; the Order of Preachers took their mission seriously. The immense church was only the first of many venues where Bruno would make himself heard, learning to carry his ideas not only on his voice but also on the extravagant gestures for which Italian preachers were famous. Here, in silence, students and professors also practiced linking their powers of observation to the development of their memories, scrutinizing every colorful chapel for its statues and paintings, each work of art for its story, saving the whole treasury in their heads for future sermons.
Here the friars must also have spent hours making and listening to music; indeed, as young Bruno grew to adulthood in the convent of San Domenico, one of the era’s greatest musicians was growing into his troubled adolescence just next door in the Palazzo Sansevero. Don Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, would eventually write piercing love songs in strange, dissonant harmonies, and one of the most sublime of all sacred motets, a setting, for Good Friday, of Lamentations 1:12: “Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.” He was no more comfortable than Bruno in his gilded cage, and it is no accident that they both identified themselves with this biblical verse.
Above all, however, Bruno’s studies sharpened his appetite for philosophy. Philosophy was a broad field in the sixteenth century, embracing the natural sciences as well as disciplines like logic and metaphysics. Philosophy at the Dominican college, however, hewed to a more narrow definition: it continued diligently in the tradition of its titanic thirteenth-century professor, Thomas Aquinas, whose lecture hall and apartment had become—and still are—carefully preserved shrines. A man as imposing in body as he was in mind (the convent’s refectory table had a half-moon cut out of it to accommodate his prominent belly at meals), Thomas was also a great organizer, of people, institutions, and ideas. His lucid, systematic account of Christian theology garnered Bruno’s unending respect, as he would emphasize repeatedly to his inquisitors when the time came.
Aquinas himself had drawn inspiration for his system building from Aristotle, whose works on every subject from animal behavior to literary criticism to metaphysics began to appear in Latin translation during the thirteenth century, passed on to the Christian world by Arab merchants. Three hundred years later, Bruno’s program of study at San Domenico still included both the ancient Greek sage and his medieval Italian admirer, two prodigiously analytical minds whose writings left virtually no phenomenon of heaven or earth unaccounted for. Their style of argumentation by syllogism and the precise Latin vocabulary that Aquinas and his contemporaries devised for their needs took the name “Scholasticism,” and it was as eminently scholarly as any system of thought before or since.
The only drawback with such majestically systematic thinkers as Aristotle and Aquinas was their tendency to dryness; the beauty of their thought lay in its structure rather than in its expression. By Bruno’s day, the Dominican program of education and its Scholastic vocabulary had become distinctly old-fashioned; the emphasis on precision and order had been swept away in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries by a revival of interest in Plato, the passionate, dramatic prophet of philosophy as a rapture beyond words. Neither Aristotle nor Aquinas spent much time writing descriptions; Plato reveled in them. As a young man, he had hoped to become a writer of tragedy, but when his teacher Socrates was arrested and condemned to death on trumped-up charges, he withdrew from their native Athens, its democracy, and its state-sponsored dramatic festivals to promote his own elaboration of Socrates’ philosophy. There is no question that Plato would have been a tragedian of genius; his philosophical dialogues are equally inspired works of literature in an entirely new medium. His skill as a dramatic writer creates vividly real personalities, above all Socrates, and awakens his readers’ senses: lingering on the sensation of walking barefoot in soft, shady grass, or lying next to a handsome, tipsy, and decidedly amorous swain, he slyly shifts his focus to ideas, turning philosophy, irresistibly, into the ultimate erotic pursuit. Like the biblical Song of Songs, his dialogues combined torrid reading with uplifting content, and through their echoes in the Gospel of Saint John, the letters of Saint Paul, and the writings of Saint Augustine, they had captured Christian imaginations from the very beginning. In Naples, thanks to Thomas Aquinas, the center for Scholastic education had always been San Domenico Maggiore. For the study of Plato, however, beginning in the fifteenth century, it was the Augustinian convent of San Giovanni a Carbonara, and there Bruno found his own way to Platonic philosophy.