“I came into this world to light a fire”
NAPLES, BEFORE 1566
Our Lord says that he inflames his people, where he says in Luke 12: “I came into this world to light a fire: what should I want but that it burn?” … for he who gives love is God.
—Fra Teofilo da Vairano, On the Grace of the New Testament, 163v
From the thirteenth century onward, the most influential members of the Hermits of Saint Augustine had gathered, not at Sant’Agostino in the center of Naples, but at the convent of San Giovanni a Carbonara on the city’s eastern edge. Dramatically set into a precipitous volcanic slope along the city wall (which conveniently blocked the sight and smells of the city ditch below it), San Giovanni a Carbonara became the chosen burial place of the last Angevin king, Ladislas II. When the Angevin heirs of Ladislas were expelled by Alfonso of Aragon in 1442, San Giovanni a Carbonara lost the privilege of royal burials to San Domenico Maggiore, and changed its politics from pro-French to pro-Spanish. By the last decades of the fifteenth century, the congregation had also decided to trade its reputation for the love of good food and drink for something more actively spiritual.
In keeping with their self-transformation, these reformed Augustinians introduced a new style of religious oratory. Although they spoke in Latin, they tried to emulate popular preachers like the Franciscan saint Bernardino of Siena, who used humor, empathy, and pithy Tuscan vernacular to reach huge congregations. At the same time, in order to give their own sermons a more sophisticated polish, they studied the principles of ancient rhetoric. Ancient oratory had been a practical art; its primary aim was to teach lawyers how to persuade a jury no matter how weak their case. Hence the ancient rhetorical manuals put supreme emphasis on clarity—and, when clarity was likely to fail, on shamelessly manipulating jurors’ emotions. Bernardino was a master of emotional appeals (although he kept his language simple, he had studied ancient rhetoric himself): he brought his congregations to laughter, pity, terror, and, on one occasion, hysterical eagerness, when he promised, with huge fanfare, to give every person present a relic straight from Jesus Christ. (When he crowed, “It’s the Gospel!” they all groaned in disappointment.)
The Augustinians found their own version of Saint Bernardino in their prior general, Fra Mariano da Genazzano. Even in Italy, where effusive speech was commonplace, Fra Mariano’s sweeping gestures and the dramatic rise and fall of his voice made a striking impression on his listeners. So did the literary quality of his language and the images he conjured up for his hearers to contemplate. Compared with the Franciscans’ homespun homilies and the Dominicans’ sophisticated logic chopping, his oratory was both elegant and moving; he had cut an unforgettable figure when he preached in San Giovanni a Carbonara. But Fra Mariano’s reputation was swiftly eclipsed in the very first years of the sixteenth century by that of his closest protégé, Fra Egidio Antonini da Viterbo (Giles of Viterbo), whose sojourns in Naples were longer and, in the end, still more influential than those of his mentor.
Giles of Viterbo was one of the great preachers of his age. At the beginning of his career, he drew criticism for imitating Fra Mariano too closely, from the austere black robe to the full black beard they both affected, but that line of criticism stopped once the younger man developed a full command of his own powers. Giles was, above all, an enthusiast; this is what captivated most of his listeners still more than the elaborate language and the intricate formal structure of his homilies. His black eyes sparkled and snapped, his hands waved, his voice soared and plummeted as he told stories and shouted exhortations; he drew forth laughter, tears, and battle cries, not to mention money from his hearers’ pockets. He made Plato (another brilliant demagogue) seem not only easy to understand but urgently important, an ancient pagan so divinely inspired that he could cast light on Christian doctrine and pressing current events. Furthermore, in an age of rampant anti-Semitism, Giles spoke with deep respect for the Jews. He studied Plato and the Hebrew tradition of Kabbalah as if their mystic doctrines were needed complements to Christian theology, and to his mind they were: he believed that the ancient religions of the world had formed part of a grand divine plan for humanity’s gradual and universal enlightenment. Now that we can no longer see or hear him, but only read his writings, Giles’s most lasting legacy is a series of word-pictures, images of indelible clarity created to illustrate the abstract reaches of his thought, pictures so clear, in fact, that painters like Michelangelo and Raphael adopted them as their own. When Mariano da Genazzano died in 1506, Giles of Viterbo succeeded him as prior general of their eight-thousand-man order, advancing in 1517 to the position of cardinal protector. He was a strong if unsuccessful candidate for the papacy in 1521 and 1523.
In Naples itself, Giles of Viterbo was known not only as a preacher and reformer but also, and importantly, as a literary figure. He had been a close friend of the city’s best writers, Giovanni Gioviano Pontano, who named one of his dialogues after the affable Augustinian (Aegidius, 1498), and Jacopo Sannazaro, who undertook his religious epic on the birth of Christ, On the Virgin’s Childbirth (De partu Virginis, 1521), at Giles’s explicit suggestion. The friar’s influence also extended to less solemn works, like Sannazaro’s pastoral novel Arcadia (1504) and his book of poems about fishing (Eclogues), both of which expressed deep Christian devotion as they entertained. Giles himself wrote at least one vernacular poem, “Love’s Beautiful Hunt” (“La caccia bellissima dell’amore”).
Giles of Viterbo met his closest Neapolitan associate within the walls of San Giovanni a Carbonara. The austere young aristocrat Fra Girolamo Seripando studied closely with Giles during the latter’s term as prior general of their order, absorbing his mentor’s devotion to Plato and his driving commitment to reforming the Church. He also began to gather a substantial collection of Giles’s writings. Eventually Seripando returned to San Giovanni a Carbonara to head the congregation, until, like Giles of Viterbo before him, he became prior general, and then cardinal protector of the Augustinian Order. In those positions of authority, he would follow the interminable efforts toward Catholic reform at the Council of Trent, whose tormented proceedings dragged on for eighteen years from 1545 to 1563, the year of Seripando’s own death. During his years at San Giovanni a Carbonara, he shared his splendid personal library with the friars, setting it up in a separate reading room above his family chapel in the church under the care of his brother Antonio; perhaps only San Domenico Maggiore boasted a richer collection in the sixteenth century than these two Augustinian libraries combined. Its visitors included the friar who would become Giordano Bruno’s most beloved mentor, Fra Teofilo da Vairano.
The Augustinian library and Seripando’s collection were broken up in the nineteenth century. Most of the books were taken to the National Library of Naples, where those that belonged to Seripando still bear the special call numbers of his private library. The only record of Fra Teofilo’s own ideas comes from a single manuscript in the Vatican Library, a treatise titled On the Grace of the New Testament, written in 1570–71, when the author had just left a chair in metaphysics at the University of Rome to become a private tutor to Prince Ascanio Colonna. This manuscript contains enough evidence to suggest, however, that the friars of San Giovanni a Carbonara had developed a tradition of Platonic studies in Naples as distinctive as the Dominicans’ tradition of Scholasticism, and that this tradition exerted a powerful influence on Bruno at the very beginning of his time in Naples.
Like his student, Fra Teofilo was destined for a life of constant movement. Born, like Bruno, in a small town in the Kingdom of Naples, Teofilo da Vairano had been accepted as a student at the Augustinian college at Sant’Agostino in 1558—he was probably ten to fifteen years older than Bruno. By 1562 he had joined the faculty; by 1563 he had earned his baccalaureate degree; and in 1565 he was certified to serve as a professor of metaphysics “on any faculty” in Naples. By May 1566 he had been appointed rector of the Augustinian University of Florence, and moved away from Naples for good; at almost the same time, Filippo da Nola entered the convent of San Domenico Maggiore as a novice.
Given his admiration for Fra Teofilo and his evident affinity for Platonic philosophy, Bruno’s decision to join the Dominicans seems somewhat surprising, and the choice, made at a very young age for reasons we do not know, was not an entirely fortunate one. On the other hand, Bruno’s mind thrived as much on Scholastic organization as it did on Platonic passion, and in the end his writing showed a personality as divided as his philosophical loyalties. When he wrote in Latin, he wrote with a Dominican’s vocabulary and a Dominican’s precision. When he wrote in vernacular, he wrote, like Plato, as a dramatist and a philosophical lover.
At the same time, Fra Teofilo’s treatise On the Grace of the New Testament shows that his own preparation in theology rested on a firm Scholastic base; it displays his mastery of the tightly ordered rules of Scholastic syllogism, and delights in the minute theological arguments that Dominicans, as potential inquisitors, needed to know better than anyone else. He would have been more than adequate as a teacher of logic, an elementary course that prepared young students for the higher realms of metaphysics and theology.
But in a comment to a Parisian bookseller, Bruno called Teofilo da Vairano “his greatest master in philosophy,” a description that implies a teacher of an entirely different order. In one section of his treatise, Fra Teofilo describes his own philosophy as “what we have been taught by the Holy Scriptures, the teachings of Augustine, and the great Dionysius the Areopagite, so that the truth shall ever more shine forth,” and trains his skill “against some sayings of the Scholastics.” He belonged firmly, in other words, to the Platonic tradition that had been developed by the Augustinian Hermits of San Giovanni a Carbonara. In keeping with that tradition, many passages of Fra Teofilo’s text show magnificent flights of emotional rhetoric. If Filippo Bruno had never before seen a man driven by ardent love of transcendent ideas, Teofilo da Vairano was certainly such a person. In his work on divine grace, Fra Teofilo described a Church that included the entire human race, whose universal mission was propelled by love. His ecclesiastical name, Teofilo, “beloved of God,” could not have been more apt. (Ironically, he dedicated On the Grace of the New Testament to Antonio Cardinal Carafa, a nephew of the severe pope Paul IV.)
As it survives today, On the Grace of the New Testament is a collection of twelve shorter studies on such subjects as divine grace, infant baptism, original sin, and free will, all matters of urgent debate with the Protestants. Frequently the discussions are cast as dialogues between Fra Teofilo himself and various adversaries, who range over time and space from late-antique dissenters like Pelagius and Donatus, to thirteenth-century luminaries like Thomas Aquinas and the Augustinian Giles of Rome, to near contemporaries: the declared Protestants Luther, Melanchthon, Bucer, and Calvin, and the Catholic reformer Erasmus, who was, like them, consigned to the Inquisition’s Index of Forbidden Books. From 1559 on, any Catholic who wanted to read Erasmus or the Reformers could do so only by special dispensation, granted by a bishop or the Holy Office; otherwise the reader faced excommunication. Such a dispensation had evidently been granted to Fra Teofilo for some time, permitting him a wide range of readings.
Surprisingly, however, Teofilo da Vairano’s position in On the Grace of the New Testament diverged significantly from the hard traditional line then prevailing in Spain and Rome. His own view of religion was Catholic in the most trenchantly literal sense of the word; in one paragraph, he reviews the Greek adjective katholikos to show that the prefix kata- transforms it into a superlative version of holos, “whole,” “entire.” And indeed, to his age of vicious religious strife, Teofilo responded with an ardently universal profession of love for God and for creation. In writing about the passage in the Gospel of Saint Luke where Jesus says, “I came into this world to light a fire: what should I want but that it burn?” Fra Teofilo, unlike many of his contemporaries, saw neither the sacking of cities nor the burning of heretics in the name of religion, but rather a huge blaze of passionate human charity. He declared that the divine favor he called the grace of the New Testament had been available to every human being from Adam and shall be available to everyone, down to the least descendant of humanity on Judgment Day. He included an unusually large number of women in his catalogs of heroic figures from the past. He devoted one essay to proving that the Hebrew patriarchs were no less aware of full divine truth than Christian saints, fully admitted to “the grace of the New Testament,” and argued elsewhere that Christians were no less Jewish than the Jews themselves. In Fra Teofilo’s work, the river Jordan repeatedly symbolizes the crossing from ignorance into awareness, so that the real meaning of the Jews’ passage into the Promised Land is spiritual rather than physical. In his view, their rebirth is exactly comparable to the baptism of Jesus, and the baptism of every faithful Christian.
When Bruno wrote himself into philosophical dialogues, he would always take the name Teofilo. As with Fra Teofilo, rivers were to figure prominently in the imagination of the man who chose for himself the religious name Giordano, who likened his inspiration to a great river of eloquence, dreamed of his soul flowing into the great ocean, and ended his most ambitious dialogue with the baptism of nine blind initiates in the waters of the Thames—the river Jordan of the Nolan philosophy. He certainly came into the world to light a fire, and like Fra Teofilo, he saw that fire as an image of the blazing love that had created both the cosmos and human hearts. From his cell in the prisons of the Venetian Inquisition, he would contemplate the stars.
In 1571, shortly after completing On the Grace of the New Testament, Teofilo da Vairano handed his manuscript to the Vatican librarian, Antonio Cardinal Carafa (the book’s dedicatee), with a promise of more to come. The book passed almost immediately to the pope’s Private (“Secret”) Archive, where it sat among a series of volumes that seem to have served as reference texts when the popes Clement VIII and Paul V ordered hearings on the subjects of grace and free will, the topics most bitterly contested by Catholics and Protestants in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The fact that the manuscript was never published suggests that its theology was not easy to digest, especially for those two stern enforcers. (Nor was Fra Teofilo around to defend himself; he died in Palermo in April 1588.) It would take another four hundred years for a pope to issue an encyclical that began with the words “Deus caritas est”—“God is love.”