He who desires to philosophize must first of all doubt all things. He must not assume a position in a debate before he has listened to the various opinions, and considered and compared the reasons for and against. He must never judge or take up a position on the evidence of what he has heard, on the opinion of the majority, the age, merits, or prestige of the speaker concerned, but he must proceed according to the persuasion of an organic doctrine which adheres to real things, and to a truth that can be understood by the light of reason.
—Giordano Bruno
GIORDANO BRUNO WAS no ordinary philosopher. He was a cerebral maverick, a misanthrope, and an extreme intellectual radical. During an age when all but a few thought no further than acquiring their next meal and looking after their children, Bruno was one of a tiny group who took current ideas and extrapolated them to new and original vistas. As was the case with many intellectuals of his time, much of his thinking had roots in the past, within the ideas of other intrepid philosophers. Against tradition, Bruno argued for the concept of an infinite universe, which he visualized as filled with inhabited worlds. He claimed all matter was intimately linked to all other matter, that we live in a universe in which everything is recycled, all things are related; a universe in which we are in God, and God is in us. But even when his thoughts traveled to the limits of accepted reason, he retained a genuine commitment to many of the fundamentals of Christian doctrine. He loathed what the Church had become, but loved his God.
Of course, before, during, and after Bruno’s time there were others who also thought in heterodox ways. Many of Bruno’s contemporaries wrote about and taught a blend of mysticism and natural philosophy. Girolamo Cardano, Bernardino Telesio, and, most notably, Tommaso Campanella all shocked the faithful and intrigued the curious with their amalgamations of philosophy with non-Christian ideologies. But what made Bruno unique was his ability to take the protoscience of his day, combine it with vast erudition and a natural empathy for the ideologies of pre-Christian religion, and teach the resultant doctrine with unparalleled gusto. This heady brew was in part a nonmathematical form of science (or natural philosophy as it was then known) and in part a spiritual doctrine. Bruno, like others before him and thousands after him, believed he could rediscover the lost harmonia mundi; he sought the prisca sapientia, the unity of all knowledge, the ultimate truth.
In this respect at least, Bruno was a man of his time. Born toward the end of the Renaissance, he was infused with the intellectual Zeitgeist, and a major element of this was the conviction among the educated elite that the prisca sapientia was achievable, that humanity was close to acquiring the great hidden truth that would unlock all mysteries and lead to a new golden age of understanding. For these men, the model offered by the simplistic mechanisms of Christianity was too confining. Intellect was outgrowing faith, moving far beyond the medieval matrix.
Until this moment in history, philosophical reasoning had followed two quite independent paths. One was the route chosen by the natural philosopher, who took the ideas of Aristotle as a springboard to help define the material world. The other was the route of the occultist, chosen by men who, in strictly clandestine fashion, pursued the art of Hermes Trismegistus and the ancient magi of the pre-Christian world. Only rarely did the two avenues cross within extraordinary figures. Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, and Leonardo da Vinci were such rare conduits; for most of the time, followers striding along one path ignored and often despised those pounding the other. But like Aquinas, Bacon, and da Vinci, Bruno was one in whom the twinned intellectual routes met, although in him they reached a unique apotheosis.1
For reasons still not fully understood, two figures emerged from Hellenic times as intellectual standard-bearers of their age towering above all other classical thinkers: Aristotle and Plato. Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) was the man who laid the first stone for the natural philosopher, and he dominated the prescientific path for two thousand years, providing civilization with shape and form. Yet, ironically, on almost every level and about every subject, he was utterly wrong, and the far superior ideas of other Greek thinkers were ignored and for a long time forgotten, trampled underfoot by fate and the voracious force of Aristotle’s supporters.
Aristotle’s work was encyclopedic in scope. He was as interested in astronomy as he was in botany, logic, or geology. His weakest subject was what later became known as physics, but ironically, it was his ideas in this discipline that had the greatest impact upon future generations. His most famous works, On Generation and Corruption and the Physical Discourse, which described his ideas concerning motion, time, matter, and the heavenly and earthly realms, were lauded as the ultimate scientific authority from the time they were written during the fourth century B.C. until the Enlightenment some twenty centuries later.
Aristotle described a model in which the observed material world is composed entirely from a blend of just four elements: fire, air, water, and earth. If these are left to settle, he argued, they arrange themselves into layers. This came from simple observations such as the fact that water falls through air (or air moves up through water in the form of bubbles) and earth (such as stones and other dense matter) falls through water and air. Fire, he then reasoned, exists in the top layer because it moves up through air. By the same token, rain falls downward because it is trying to return to its rightful place, a layer beneath air. Finally, because flames of a fire clearly rise upward, they are occupying their proper position above the other three elements. And Aristotle’s ideas about the motion of objects and the nature of what later natural philosophers referred to as “forces” were equally confused. Most nebulous was his notion of the Unmoved Mover, the name he gave to the omnipotent being who he imagined maintained the movement of the heavens and kept the sun and the planets traveling about the earth.
Aristotle’s ideas about astronomy were just as muddled and often unrelated to reality. He insisted that the earth was made of denser matter than what he called the “heavenly sphere.” For Aristotle, the earth was an imperfect, gross realm, while the heavens and stars were made from a mysterious ethereal fifth element. From this he derived a geocentric model based upon the idea that the heavier, denser matter from which the earthly realm was formed always sought the center of the universe.2 Finally, he proposed a simple model for a universe in which the stars are fixed in spheres and epicycles about the earth, itself fixed rigid and immutable at the center of Creation, placed there by a God who controlled all things, initiated all motion, and determined all fates. This system provided the starting point for Ptolemy (c. A.D. 100–170) some five centuries later; Ptolemy devised a geocentric world system that was the standard, accepted model for fifteen hundred years.
As these ideas laid a path for the natural philosopher, more interesting and exciting doctrines were sidelined. Most important of these were the teachings of Democritus (460–370 B.C.), which have survived in the verses of the Roman historian Lucretius (95–55 B.C.). Writing with a breathtaking elegance, Lucretius offered a lucid description of Democritus’s philosophy. “But things are formed, now, from specific seeds,” he declared. “Hence each at birth comes to the coasts of light from a thing possessed of its essential atoms. Thus anything cannot spring from anything, for things are unique; their traits are theirs alone. And why in spring do we see roses, grain in summer, vines produce at autumn’s call, if not because right atoms in right season have streamed together to build each thing we see.”3
Democritus described a mechanical universe, but one very different from Aristotle’s. In this model the most fundamental components of matter are atoms, and these create all movement and dynamism by their collisions with one another. Democritus and his followers were so keen on this concept that they applied “atomism” to every aspect of the observed world and went further still by attempting to explain human behavior as a consequence of atomic collisions. By thinking in this way, on an empirical level at least, Democritus was millennia ahead of his time and operated in an entirely different league from the relative amateurism of Aristotle. Democritus had no mathematical interpretation for atomism, nor any experimental support, but in essence, his conceptual model was dramatically closer to the modern model shaped by Antoine Lavoisier and John Dalton during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We may only wonder what ideas might have filled the minds of Renaissance natural philosophers if Democritus, rather than Aristotle, had been the voice of Hellenic “science.”
The other pillar of Hellenic wisdom, Aristotle’s teacher, Plato (428–348 B.C.), had been inclined to a more mystical vision of the world than his famous pupil ever was. If we think of Aristotle as stone and metal, fire and thunder, Plato is gossamer lightness and dreamy numeric juggling. In fact, to Plato, mathematics was everything. In his enthusiasm he had written over the door of his academy: “Let no man enter who knows no geometry.” But he tempered this obsession with another: the conviction that humanity (rather than just the earth) lay at the center of all things. Believing the cosmos to be a single living organism with a body, a soul, and reason, Plato became the first thinker to propose that the philosopher could reach a profound understanding of God through the study of His creation, Nature. For Plato and his disciples, the investigation of the world in which we live was an imperative, the very reason we exist at all. Taking this anthropocentric line to its ultimate conclusion, Plato believed the universe had been created and was controlled by a supreme being who had a special role for humanity. Plato took this concept so far that he even suggested the planets moved as they did simply to mark the passing of time for humankind.
But, for all this wayward thinking, the kernel of a great notion lay at the heart of Platonic thought. Plato’s was a dynamic, holistic vision of the universe that was an inspiration to many great intellectuals. It counterpointed the brute force of pure Aristotelianism and encouraged an acceptance of seemingly contrary ideas, thrived on the melding of opposites and sought overarching grandiose answers. One day, some two and a half thousand years after Plato, holistic thinking would again come to the fore as twenty-first-century scientists continued to seek the prisca sapientia. For this is precisely the ultimate goal of the particle physicists and cosmologists (such as Steven Weinberg and Stephen Hawking) who are presently struggling to create a Grand Unified Theory, a seamless blend of quantum theory, a theory of gravity, and relativity.
Aristotelianism soon became the bedrock of all rationalism, and then later, during the earliest centuries after Christ, its status was enhanced enormously in a marriage with Christian theology. Aristotelianism became the official universal model for orthodox teaching, “Church science.” The scriptures defined the spiritual world; the Hellenic tradition epitomized by Aristotle’s fantasy described the material. Crucially, each supported the other.
This marriage was represented best by the Scholastics, European monks of the Middle Ages who had copies of many Greek works taken from originals first seen by Europeans during the Crusades. Many of these originals had survived the repeated sacking of Alexandria and had been rescued from the flames by bounty hunters. They had been sold and resold until they reached the hands of Arabic intellectuals who translated them and used them as a basis for their own scientific studies; these translations (along with the monastery libraries of Europe) acted as one of the few repositories of human knowledge during the Dark Ages.
Together, the ideas of Aristotle in manuscript form and the words of the apostles and the Old Testament writers produced a self-contained and self-consistent image of the universe. According to this model, God had created the world precisely as the Scriptures described and He continued to guide all action. Every object had been set in motion by God and was supervised by divine power. In this way, the Church’s doctrine of divine omnipotence fit neatly with Aristotelian concepts such as the Unmoved Mover.
Beyond this, orthodoxy decreed that all matter consisted of the four elements as Aristotle had stated during the fourth century B.C., and that every material object was a complete individual entity created by God, composed of varying combinations of the four elements. Each object possessed certain distinct and observable qualities, such as heaviness, color, smell, and coolness. These were seen as solely intrinsic aspects or properties of the object, and their observed nature had nothing to do with the perception of the observer. Orthodoxy also supported other Aristotelian beliefs long since disproved: the idea that we see things because our eyes project particles that bounce off viewed objects, and that an object moves through the air because, as it does so, the displaced air in front of it flows behind it instantaneously and pushes it onward. Most important for Bruno’s fate, the line the Church took on astronomy was wholeheartedly geocentric, purely Aristotelian, and supported by Ptolemy’s model.
This then was the path of natural philosophy, an often torturous journey from the almond groves of the Peloponnesus via the Arabic intellectuals and mathematicians to the ice-cold wet stone libraries of Dark Age monasteries. This learning seeped out and was adopted practically to the letter by the administrators of the great universities where clerics taught and the clerics of the next generation listened, scribbled, and, almost to a man, accepted without question.
But not everyone was fooled. A brave, maverick few began to whisper dissent; they saw obvious inconsistency and refused to accept what was, from their own experience, clearly false. These men contributed to a creeping awareness that all was not right with official doctrine or natural philosophy.
The most famous of this group of contemporaries were Thomas Aquinas (1224–74), Albertus Magnus (1200–80), and Roger Bacon (1220–92). In much of their writing, Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus stuck to the traditional Classical line and maintained a firm belief that man was the central object of the Creation and that the universe was designed for him by God. In private, however, they espoused the merits of alchemy and conducted investigations into quite unorthodox areas of knowledge. They were even said to have designed an automaton that could walk and talk and behave like a man, while conducting experiments to find the elixir vitae.4
The great Oxford scholar and Franciscan Roger Bacon was more open about his researches and is now seen by many science historians as one of the first to erode the restrictions inherent in the philosophy of the Scholastics. He was the first to understand the power of experiment, and he composed three farsighted tracts, Opus majus, Opus minor, and Opus tertium, which together outline his philosophy and his experimental techniques across a range of disciplines. Bacon’s efforts gained him an esteemed place in the history of science, but in his lifetime his work was viewed as heretical and its anti-Aristotelian elements as subversive. In 1277, the anti-occultist minister-general of the Franciscans grew suspicious of Bacon’s ideas, and when the English monk rather naively presented the head of his order with a special edition of his trilogy, he was thrown in jail, where he died fifteen years later.
Men like Bacon, as brilliant as they were, lived in the wrong age to do much more than dent Aristotelianism, but as the Renaissance blossomed, dissenting voices grew louder and more numerous. Leonardo da Vinci was originally a supporter of Aristotle, until he began to conduct his own experiments and to learn, as Bacon had before him, that what the Greek philosopher said about the world was in obvious conflict with experience. Leonardo wrote thousands of pages of notes in which he constantly criticized Aristotle (and took swipes at Plato), but because he kept these notes secret, nothing of his radical ideas was known during his lifetime. Upon Leonardo’s death, his notes were lost for almost two hundred years, rediscovered only during the seventeenth century at the beginning of the Enlightenment. As a sad result, Bruno was totally unaware of the discoveries of his countryman, made a century before his own time.
Through such confusion and because most researchers kept their heretical ideas to themselves or were destroyed like Bacon, the world had to wait until an auspicious collision of ideas and methodology before events could conspire to change the prevailing view. And that moment came a quarter of a century after Leonardo’s death and a full century and a half after Roger Bacon’s slow murder. It was not until then that one man dared to throw reason and recorded observation in the face of irrationality and in so doing transformed human thought, buried Aristotle, and hacked at the foundations of Christian theology. That man was Nicolaus Copernicus.
Copernicus (1473–1543) was a Polish priest who had studied medicine at Padua and then law at the University of Ferrara, earning a doctorate in canon law in 1503. As he conducted his official studies he had, like so many great thinkers before and after him, followed a separate unorthodox path of learning. And for Copernicus, his muse was the heavens, the poetry of stellar motion, the grand procession of the planets. Unconvinced by what the masters had written, he dedicated himself to understanding the true nature of the universal dynamic, the way in which celestial bodies moved. He labored long into the night unraveling the mysteries of the heavens, while by day he toed the orthodox line.
But, as fascinated as Copernicus may have been, he was also very much aware of the dangerous nature of any thoughts leaning toward an anti-Aristotelian worldview, most especially within the sensitive area of what would one day become astronomy and cosmology. During the fifteenth century, the Church was particularly anxious to keep intellectuals away from any reinterpretation of universal mechanics. As far as the cardinals were concerned, the celestial realm—what the Greeks referred to as the “heavenly sphere”—was quite definitely off-limits; it was God’s territory. Indeed, even questioning Aristotelian totalitarianism fell afoul of a set of what were called “the 219 dangerous propositions,” defined in 1227 by Bishop Stephen Tempier, someone who at least had the imagination to see the dangers of epistemology and the inquisitive nature of the human mind.
So Copernicus did what any sensible researcher of the time would do: he wrote in secret and kept his innermost thoughts strictly private. Over a period of thirty years, from 1513 until the year of his death in 1543, Copernicus gathered a vast and detailed collection of astronomical observations, all recorded and reported with only the vaguest thoughts of ever publishing the conclusions he was beginning to draw from his nightly clandestine labors.
In 1543, Copernicus fell ill and came to realize he was dying. Secretly, he arranged for his heretical papers to be printed and published. He had no close family, no one Rome could destroy after he had gone, and so he could now expose his ideas to everyone who might be interested.
His book was entitled De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), and legend has it that one of the first copies to emerge from the press was placed on the author’s deathbed. If this was indeed true, Copernicus must have felt deeply satisfied to learn his life’s work had finally reached the press, but it was to be many years before his ideas would be widely understood and interpreted, and many more before they would be accepted.
First, Copernicus’s publisher, a Lutheran minister named Andreas Osiander, had tried to head off any controversy that might embroil him by adding a preface to the book without the author’s consent. In this he had declared that the treatise was not to be considered a statement of reality but merely an aid to the calculation of planetary movement. But beyond this, although the contents of On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres were extremely radical, they were presented in a misleading and sometimes confused way. Perhaps Copernicus did this deliberately. It is possible he took his lead from the alchemists and mystics of the time and, on a superficial level at least, had attempted to dull the book’s impact.
At the heart of Copernicus’s theory was his observation that the stars and the planets moved in such a way that the earth could not possibly lie at the center of the universe, but in the account of these findings he had, with significant innovations, clung to many traditional Ptolemaic and Aristotelian concepts. He adhered to Aristotle’s notion that the stars and planets followed perfect circular paths and that such planetary motion could be explained by means of complicated combinations of circles called epicycles, as suggested by Ptolemy during the second century.
More important, he began his great treatise boldly by asserting that the sun lies at the center of the universe, but then he seems to have changed his mind. After the first few pages, Copernicus complicated what was otherwise a simple idea with unnecessary obfuscation. By the end of the book, he had placed the sun slightly off-center. Such prevarication makes the entire work almost unreadable and occasionally contradictory. At 212 sheets in small folio, the heart of Revolutions may be found in just the first twenty pages.
Because of the nature of the book, Revolutions did not make the immediate scientific impact it should have. Indeed, it went unnoticed by the Church for over seventy years after its first publication, only finding its way onto the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1616.5
Even so, Copernicus had been absolutely right to conceal his intentions and ideologies until he was beyond reach. In his treatise he had rejected wholesale the words of Aristotle on the key subject of astronomy, words describing unbending dogma that had for so long portrayed a false image of reality. For too long the egos of men had been soothed by what they had wanted to believe, the agony of insignificance muted by the geocentric model taught since ancient times and describing the planets and other celestial bodies revolving around the earth. “In the midst of all dwells the sun,” Copernicus declared proudly in those clear and precise opening pages of his masterpiece. “Sitting on the royal throne, he rules the family of planets which turn around him…. We thus find in this arrangement an admirable harmony of the world.”
Few words could have been more inflammatory, and gradually they reached their audience. Word-of-mouth played its crucial role, and slowly, a generation after the death of its author, Revolutions became the most famous and controversial book ever written. Long after the educated of Europe had devoured its contents and discovered its charms, Revolutions was burned in public by frenzied clerics. But in spite of the best efforts of the Church, books such as this could not go the way of flesh. Revolutions had already acted as an inspiration to those prepared to open their minds, those able and willing to accept a vision that opposed the traditional and comforting falsehoods the Holy Roman Church and Aristotle could offer. Copernicus’s heretical heliocentric system became the foundation for an entirely new approach to natural philosophy, and it flung wide the intellectual floodgates. Revolutions showed clearly and irrefutably that Aristotle had been entirely wrong about the movement of the heavens. But, more important, it suggested that if Aristotle could be wrong about that, what of the other givens? What of the rest of Greek dogma so keenly adopted for their own ends by the theologians and popes? Perhaps these too were no less fanciful, no less misguided. The words of Copernicus were as shocking to men like Bruno as they were to the cardinals and the pope, but they produced opposite effects within each camp.
Bruno probably first learned of Copernicus when he was still a novice at the Monastery of St. Domenico. Naples had only come under the yoke of the Inquisition in 1547, so it is possible that the well-stocked library of the monastery still contained some unconventional books. Evidence to support Bruno’s youthful introduction to Copernican heresy comes from a recently discovered mid-sixteenth-century edition of Revolutions found in the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome. On the flyleaf of the book is the inscription “Brunus,” written in a very ornate, rather juvenile style that suggests it could have been produced by a student. It is by no means certain that Bruno owned this book, but, knowing how from an early age he was thinking in heterodox terms and pushing his intellect beyond accepted wisdom, it is not difficult to visualize him blatantly adding his name to a book he probably even then understood to contain heretical ideas.6
But for Giordano Bruno, the shock of Copernicanism was not to be feared. Quite the opposite. Even as a young man he embraced On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres as though it were a new Bible; indeed, to him it carried equal power and offered perhaps greater genuine insight. As stated at the start of this chapter, Giordano Bruno was no ordinary philosopher. He was well versed in the tradition of natural philosophy, but he was also cast from a very different mold than even those academics and learned clerics who dared to contemplate a universe not governed by Aristotelian principles. Bruno loathed those he perceived as dull-witted slaves to Aristotle; he abhorred the way advance was stultified by ancient misconceptions. Examples of how much he hatred mindless acceptance of traditional teaching proliferate in his books, but his most scathing attacks are to be found in The Ash Wednesday Supper, in which one of his lead characters refers to orthodox thinkers and followers of Aristotle as “the mob.”7
But crucially, Bruno was an initiate of the occult tradition, and this alternate path running parallel with the progress of natural philosophy was one upon which Bruno traveled farthest. By the time he came to write his greatest works (in London and Paris and in Germany during the 1580s), when his talent was in full flower, he had already spent the greater part of his life studying the occult and the doctrine of pre-Christian religions. He had also readily absorbed traditional natural philosophy along with the latest ideas circulating among the intelligentsia of Renaissance Europe. Bruno acted as a vessel into which could flow the raw ideologies, the ingredients of human intellectual and intuitive endeavor, creating in him a gestalt, a union of the occult and protoscience. Others had provided fertile soil for such a blend, but none could add the special spice Bruno offered, none were nearly so brave, nor so determined.
The Hermetic tradition, the path of the occult, predates the route of natural philosophy by many millennia. To us, as to the people of the Renaissance, Greek knowledge is ancient knowledge, but the font of learning offered by the mystical, the intuitive, is far older still.
Some claim the occult tradition so treasured by many Renaissance figures can be traced to ancient Egypt; others place the source farther back in the fabled lost civilizations of Atlantis and Mu. According to legend, this secret knowledge was preserved by a chain of acolytes. From Hermes, the canon was supposedly passed on to the ancient Chaldeans (who are said to have founded the art of astrology). They donated their knowledge to another mythical figure, Orpheus, whose Orphic Hymns encapsulated much Egyptian learning. From Orpheus, Zoroaster became an initiate, followed by Pythagoras, Plato, and Plotinus. During the Renaissance the knowledge was adapted by Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus (Theophrastus Philipus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Masilio Ficino, and many others.
Although this may be largely speculation and legend, there is some evidence to show that a few elements of primitive magic and occult teachings were preserved from the Egyptian civilization, a period some two thousand years before Christ, but much of this arrived in Renaissance Europe in extremely distorted form. As late as the second century after Christ, obscure sects still worshiped in a few surviving Egyptian temples. Sun worship, a belief in the ability of magi to imbue life into inanimate objects by incantation, the empowering nature of symbols and ritual, and a devotion to astrology were core beliefs. A few rare texts from this time were copied, recopied, altered, and updated and eventually found their way to Alexandria, where they, along with the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and other Greeks, Alexandrians, and Romans filtered piecemeal into European culture.
For the intellectuals of the Renaissance, their source materials came as a result of a massive effort to rediscover the lost secrets of the ancients. This was certainly the most significant process in the flowering of the Renaissance itself. Today we live in an age when we habitually look forward rather than back to the past. Ours is a time during which we assume automatically the future will be more progressive, more enlightened, than the past, that we will know more and understand more tomorrow and still more the day after tomorrow. In our age, the past receives only lip service. But the Renaissance, as glorious and important as it undoubtedly proved to be, was a period during which thinkers viewed the past and the future in a way diametrically opposed to that of modern intellectuals. People of the Renaissance looked back upon past ages and saw a more sophisticated culture; theirs was a conviction that the ancients had access to a pool of knowledge and a unity of knowledge far superior to their own.
In some ways they were right; much had been lost and still more forgotten between the time of the Alexandrian philosophers and the reemergence of learning in the fourteenth century. But the idea of an ancient “grand understanding” was actually a fiction; the ancients had their own secrets but no truly overarching unity of knowledge, and they possessed no Ultimate Truth.
Yet, the Renaissance was also an expression of yearning for a new golden age modeled upon the wisdom of the ancients. As we have seen, emissaries were sent across the known world to find, buy, and, if necessary, steal any manuscripts or documents in the original Latin and Greek (for no one was then aware of the existence of tombs containing original Egyptian hieroglyphics). When these treasures were brought to Italy and translated, a vista of ancient learning, from Cicero to Plato, Homer to Hero, Aristotle to Archimedes, was opened up, and it acted as the seed for Renaissance neoclassicism.
As mentioned in chapter II, one of the most significant patrons for this expensive but highly rewarding search was the Medici family. Most conscientious was Cosimo de’ Medici, who was born in Florence in 1389 and became one of the richest and most powerful men in Europe. Being a true model for the era in which he lived, Cosimo showed as much interest in Horace as he did in Hippocrates and had a lively fascination for the occult. In 1460, an anonymous monk came to him with a collection of Greek texts which, he claimed, were the original source material for all occult knowledge written by the ultimate authority, the man considered to be the font of all knowledge, Hermes Trismegistus. Cosimo was so captivated by this story he not only paid an exorbitant sum for the material but called upon his most trusted translator, Marsilio Ficino, to stop work on his almost completed translation of Plato to concentrate instead on this new collection. The result, completed a few months before Cosimo’s death in 1464, was the Corpus hermeticum, a collection of fourteen volumes that energized the mystics, alchemists, and cabalists of the era more than any other occult text printed during the Renaissance.
But to a degree at least, Cosimo had been duped. The texts he had bought were not originals but dated from around the second century after Christ (the last period during which the ancient Egyptian religion was practiced openly) and were probably based on copies of copies of copies of a more ancient and purer text by then long lost.8 But this mattered little; for the interested philosopher of the time, the Corpus hermeticum was an essential item, and it remained a cornerstone for the work of alchemists and mystics for at least two centuries after Cosimo’s death. Indeed, no less a figure than Sir Isaac Newton possessed a copy, which he annotated with dense scribblings and used as a foundation for his own work as an alchemist.
Throughout the period during which ancient natural philosophy was lost, then rediscovered by European theologians, the Hermetic tradition had also survived, kept alive and vibrant by generations of occultists who each added to the canon and watched it grow. Astrology, divination, symbol logic, alchemy, and ritualistic practices (including the black arts, demonology, and devil worship) thrived during the early Renaissance. Any individual could find what he wanted within the Hermetic tradition and could come away with his own treasure, his own magical directive.
It is clear from Bruno’s writings that he was convinced by very little of the occult canon. To Bruno, as to many great thinkers after him, the occult was primarily a useful tool, a key that would open doors into arenas of thought and hidden depths of the human psyche. Along the occult path he found tracks, roughly hewn, that led to revelation and inspiration. Alchemy held no interest for Bruno; he was never motivated by experiment and was not drawn by the search for the philosophers’ stone, the dream of limitless wealth. Neither did he practice ritualistic magic or necromancy; indeed, he often mocked practicing astrologers and many of the irrational precepts of witchcraft.9
Bruno was fully cognizant of the power of magic ritual and the occult tradition, but he knew much of it was superstition, wild fantasy, and wishful thinking.10 He knew ritualistic magic produced results, but reasoned this was entirely due to the hypnotic power of the ritual itself. Symbols and incantations, he knew, could influence the mind powerfully, and the results depended upon the motivations of the participants. If one’s intention was to corrupt or to destabilize, then the result might be defined as “black magic,” whereas “white magicians” entered into the ritualistic process to produce a positive, or at least neutral, result. Either way, Bruno knew that the power of ritual stemmed from the mental and emotional characteristics of those involved and had nothing to do with external forces such as spirits or devils. The only force at work was the power of the human mind itself.
Bruno had a natural empathy for the pre-Christian theology of the ancient Egyptians and considered this closer to the source of Truth. For Bruno, ancient teachings possessed a purity and simplicity unsullied by a corrupt organization, whereas he considered the orthodox Church and its administration a destructive force.
Today, our perception of magic and the occult is quite different from that of people of the Renaissance. If we think about these things at all, we tend to visualize the occult as something dark and frightening, a plot element from a B movie, or perhaps we dismiss it as Disneyesque. But Bruno, who epitomized the approach of most intellectuals of the Renaissance, considered the occult to be a pattern of ideas, a network of concepts that could be tapped into in order to gain a greater understanding of the universe. The Renaissance embodied the concept of fusing seemingly disparate disciplines, and the intelligentsia of the sixteenth century thought the same way about the occult. Many philosophers delighted in amalgamating ideas from the Hermetic tradition with natural philosophy, art, poetry, the study of language, rhetoric, medicine, music, even architecture and engineering in an attempt to produce a dynamic that could lead to great revelation. Indeed, what lies at the heart of Bruno’s achievement is his belief that he could improve the world enormously by successfully fusing natural philosophy with the occult tradition, ancient religions, and Christianity.
Bruno began by developing a nonmathematical treatment of Copernicanism. This was both a way for him to understand the concepts and a method by which he could express the heliocentric model of Copernicus to students and laypeople who attended his lectures and read his books. But Bruno did not stop with such a shallow interpretation of Copernicus; he took it into areas none would have imagined.
And here a second obsession of Bruno’s played a major role. From ancient religions and from his own reading and reasoning, he had reached an extreme form of Pantheism. For Bruno, the work of Copernicus could be used simply as a starting point, almost as a metaphor. To him, Revolutions was a foundation upon which he could build a doctrine of universality. Bruno believed in an infinite universe, a universe far greater than the cramped, rather ridiculous, parochial little place imagined by the Church fathers and theologians. He considered Copernicus’s heliocentrism to be simplistic. Bruno’s was a far more modern vision, one in which the sun was viewed as nothing more than one of many stars in an infinite firmament. In this philosophy, the people of the earth, the entire human race, should be considered as just another group of living things in a universe in which all was interconnected, each element interdependent and interrelated.
Bruno’s vision was at once rooted in the sixteenth century and centuries ahead of his time. On the one hand, he saw a universe that bore no relationship to the orthodox model, but on the other, he cherished a close affinity with the ancient world and its ideologies. And of course, his convictions were outrageously heretical. Copernicus, still little noticed by the Church philosophers during the late sixteenth century, had offered a model that would soon be perceived by many of the faithful as the thin end of the wedge, anti-Aristotelian and dangerous; but Bruno’s description trampled underfoot everything that was sacred.
Bruno’s heresy was multifaceted. First, the notion of an infinite universe was anti-Aristotelian, but beyond this, even if it was a true description of the universe, it was such an esoteric, nebulous idea that the laity could never be made to understand it. The Church cherished simplicity in religious doctrine; the notion of a universe in which the sun and the earth were so devastatingly insignificant was simply unbearable. But still more extreme was Bruno’s belief in the existence of intelligent life other than the human form on our own world. In his De l’infinito universo et mondi (The Infinite Universe and Its Worlds) of 1584, Bruno had written: “There are countless suns and an infinity of planets which circle round their suns as our seven planets circle round ours.” This was perhaps the most dangerous notion of all, for, by implication, it denied one of the central precepts of orthodox Christianity, that Christ had died to cleanse this world and lead humanity to heaven. If other worlds existed with intelligent beings living there, did they have their own visitations? Did they nail their own Christs to a cross? The idea was quite unthinkable.
But Bruno did not stop even there. Inspired by Democritus and influenced by the mystical teachings of ancient Indian and Egyptian religions, he developed further his doctrine of universality. To him, the essence of a bee was indistinguishable from that of a human, the minerals of a rock were as significant as a pope. To Bruno, all things were recycled, all things interdependent. For this most extraordinary of thinkers, God existed in a ray of sunshine and in the soldier’s sword, the whore’s breath and the saint’s healing robe. “This entire globe, this star, not being subject to death and dissolution and annihilation being impossible anywhere in Nature, from time to time renews itself by changing and altering all its parts. There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the universe, and the observer is always at the center of things.”11
For Bruno, Copernicus, Horus of Egypt, Shiva, and the sun could coalesce, conjoin, and offer up miracles. And for him, none of this diminished humankind; on the contrary, such an idea energized and invigorated, expanded and enlarged our importance in the universal scheme. The nineteenth-century German philosopher Ernst Cassirer said of Bruno’s approach, “This doctrine was the first and decisive step towards man’s self liberation. Man no longer lives in the world of a prisoner enclosed within the narrow walls of a finite, physical universe. The infinite universe sets no limits to human reason; on the contrary, it is the great incentive of human reason. The human intellect becomes aware of its own infinity through measuring its powers by the infinite universe.”12 We are part of a greater whole, Bruno believed; we are in direct communication with the divine, we are all part of the infinite. But to his enemies, infinity simply diminished, universality demeaned; and more than anything, it was this clash of ideologies that rested at the heart of their mutual hatred.
Yet, in spite of such adventurousness, Bruno’s philosophy could be seen as little more than a loose collection of ideas, diaphanous, without anchor. But, to save it, there was one other element of Bruno’s thinking that focused his view of the universe. To a love of God, an extreme Pantheism, a belief in the purity of original faith, and a model of universal Copernicanism, he added what would soon become a dying art, a branch of the Hermetic tradition no one today would even consider mystical at all, the “art of memory.”
Bruno wrote five important books on memory, and although these are revelatory and contributed much to the discipline, they are but five of perhaps five thousand texts on the subject that were already in existence during the Renaissance.13 During the entire sweep of human history up to the invention of the printing press, a prodigous memory was highly prized. Today we take for granted the ability to obtain information in whatever form on almost any subject. We have no need to recall the contents of our favorite novel, because it is always available for us to reread. We need not retain the memory of a symphony or the lines of a painting, because they are recorded and have been copied and copied again. If we are to make a speech, we can use an autocue; if we teach or preach, we rely upon a range of resources. But for the intellectual of the preprinting age, texts were scarce, hand-copied and extraordinarily expensive; little information was recorded and what little there was was often difficult to track down.
The art of memory (or mnemonics) is a subject that has been carefully documented since ancient times, and the Greeks, Romans, and Alexandrians expended considerable effort in developing ways to improve memory. By Bruno’s time these techniques had reached a peak of sophistication but were already becoming anachronisms thanks to the proliferation of the printed word. Yet for him, they still possessed a power that would provide another thread in his elaborate philosophical tapestry.
Bruno had a rich heritage upon which to draw. The first known book on the art of memory was Ad herennium, dating from around 80 B.C. and attributed to an anonymous Roman teacher. This was one of the first books translated into Italian, and copies found their way into the libraries of all the great thinkers of the age. The basic precepts of the art had remained unchanged through centuries of use. Aquinas and Magnus had been enthusiastic students of mnemonics and had written widely on the subject. The alchemists and mystics who followed the Hermetic path through the ages also utilized memory techniques to recall complex rituals and the details of convoluted experiments. Often, to protect their secrets, they had subjected their findings to memory rather than recording them in written form.
The essence of the art is the ability to enhance memory by a process of mechanical mental exercises. If a complex array of information is to be remembered it must first be separated into sections relevant to different subjects. These must then be placed into some sort of order, perhaps hierarchical, alphabetical, or chronological. Then each manageable piece of information is attached to an easily recalled material item. This could be a place, an object, or a person. The best example is a method for memorizing a diverse and lengthy list of names, numbers, or any other collection of information. First, the list is broken down into sections, then the more manageable chunks are assigned to a room in a house. Within each room the several pieces of information related to it are assigned to different objects in that room. If this technique is adhered to closely, vast amounts of data may be recalled by mentally wandering through the house and “picking up” objects to which information has been assigned.
Certainly a useful party trick. But to Bruno, his contemporaries, and his forebears, this technique and other similar methods devised by the ancients represented far more than a game. For Bruno, the art of memory was a prized method of remembering and recalling all he had learned, and if blended with the occultist’s fascination for symbols, it could provide a structure for his carefully designed Christian-Hermetic system. Bruno believed that an enhanced memory could boost the power of the individual psyche so that the human mind, and with it the spirit, could tap into the greater imprint of the universe.
To understand this, we must piece together Bruno’s philosophy stage by stage. First came the concept of universality and infinity. Bruno insisted the individual and the race were elemental parts of a unit, that there is a universe in us and we are part of the universe. Second were the pure forms of ancient religion combined with the beauty of Christ’s original teachings along with those of other great prophets and ancient magi. Next came the new visions provided by the embryonic “science” of the time. Natural philosophy had created a doctrine to transcend and supersede the false notions of Aristotle, reveal the corruption of the Church, and clear the obfuscation generated by the Council of Nicaea. Last, these combined notions could be understood and represented by occult symbols and rituals (not unlike the way Christianity was also portrayed through symbols and rituals) but made accessible with a mind empowered by a boosted memory.
Bruno looked out upon a world in which the vast majority of people understood little of the things they worshiped. For most people of the age, driven by fear, God was an all-powerful Creator and ultimate authority. But in equal measure, the common folk also feared Nature, the imagined spirit world, and witchcraft. Bruno believed he could raise the minds and the spirits of men above this tawdry existence, emancipate, enrich, and empower. Each individual, he believed, each element of the great universe, each part of the One, could understand and draw upon the whole to make an infinitely better world.
Bruno produced some thirty books during a writing career spanning two decades.14 In these, his seemingly complex (yet, at its core, wonderfully simple) doctrine grew and developed. Some of these works, such as his last published work, De imaginum, signorum et idearum compositione (On the Composition of Images, Signs and Ideas), concentrated on the art of memory. Others, most important La cena de le ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper) and De la causa, principio et uno (On Cause, Principle and the One), both from 1584, are attacks on Aristotle and develop Bruno’s unique universal Copernicanism. Another of his most famous works, still in print in English, is Spaccio de la bestia trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast), the last of a quartet of masterpieces all written and published in London in 1584.15 In this, perhaps his most accomplished literary work, he uses the allegory of an internal struggle among the pagan gods of the ancient world to rip into the authority of the Church, satirizing, mocking, and exposing the inconsistencies and weaknesses of what he saw as a manmade religion fabricated by the Council of Nicaea. In his final work, De vinculis in genere (On Links in General ), left incomplete and unpublished after his arrest in Venice, Bruno came close to unifying the disparate elements of his philosophy into a cogent whole. This was a book that might well have become his most complete testament, the book he was completing when he returned to Italy and was trying to supervise through the press when he was arrested in Venice. De vinculis in genere also formed the basis of the document Bruno wished to present to the pope explaining his doctrine.
With his most accomplished works published in 1584 and within the surviving fragments of De vinculis in genere, Bruno had produced a collection of tracts that went a long way toward creating a grand synthesis, an all-embracing new philosophy representing an original mental paradigm. He had, he believed, done nothing less than woven the fabric for a new religion. But what did he hope to achieve with his work? What had been his goal through two decades of effort, and what remained of his mission as he left Frankfurt for Italy?
To answer this we need to recall the political and religious struggles that dominated Europe during the sixteenth century. As we have seen, Renaissance Europe was a civilization at a crossroads, about to step into a future of global trade, a massive expansion in the ways people communicated, traveled, and recorded information, but it remained grounded by ideological conflict. As Bruno traveled Europe, the Counter Reformation was in full swing, the witch-hunts had become the favorite sport of the Inquisitors, and Europe was embroiled in a succession of bloody conflicts initiated by doctrinal clashes and endemic intolerance.
The true powder keg of conflict was produced by the ideological clash between Catholics and Protestants, and Bruno, a disillusioned Catholic, but unconvinced by Protestantism, held an unshakable personal conviction that he could straddle the divide between these factions. His method had nothing to do with diplomacy or debate and everything to do with wiping the slate clean and presenting a fresh page upon which a new doctrine could be inscribed. Bruno was convinced that liberal thinkers among both Protestant and Catholic could understand his vision, appreciate it, and eventually adopt it wholeheartedly.
Typically, his method for trying to achieve this goal was idiosyncratic to say the least. During the 1580s, he did not view himself as a Luther or a Calvin, but he knew he could communicate, knew he was a gifted and charismatic teacher. His best chance of making a significant mark, he believed, was to influence those far more powerful and better-connected than himself. Instead of pushing himself forward as some sort of messiah of the new age, he intended to use someone universally recognized as a world-class statesman. Bruno would educate him, inspire him with his revolutionary philosophy, and through this figure establish a new world order based upon a deep spirituality, a universality, a Christian Hermeticism.
With his first attempt he planned to use Henry III of France. The two men became close, and Bruno seems to have greatly influenced the king’s thinking, but eventually political pressures in a country which in recent years had experienced the fullest extremes of internecine religious conflict were too much even for Henry’s diplomatic skills and aggressive individualism. Still holding faith with Bruno’s ideas, however, Henry encouraged Bruno to journey across the English Channel, where his philosophies would be more favorably received by the relatively liberal-minded English court. To facilitate his entrée into the highest echelons of English society, Bruno was put in direct contact with Henry’s ambassador in London, Michel de Castelnau.
It can be no coincidence that Bruno composed his greatest work in London between 1583 and 1585. He was in full bloom, confident and clear-sighted. His synthesis of universal Copernicanism, Christianity, and the occult had matured, and he was able to express his ingenious doctrine using the vehicle of drama and dialogue (a technique Galileo and others would later copy). And in England he found his second chance to educate and convert a monarch, a figure powerful enough, given the necessary philosophical materials, to influence the minds of men and bring dramatic change.
To Bruno, Elizabeth was the universal, utopian monarch, the one who could unite and clarify, enlighten and advance. She also shared many of Henry’s spiritual preoccupations. She surprised European leaders by conferring upon Henry the Order of the Garter, and for a short period around the time of Bruno’s visit to London relations between England and France were exceptionally cordial; there was even talk of the two countries forming an antipapal league. But Bruno’s hope was misplaced. As fond of Henry as Elizabeth may have been, she had absolutely no intention of attempting to unite Catholics and Protestants through philosophy. She certainly wished for unity, but only by conventional means, the diplomatic letter and the blades of her soldiers. Elizabeth was a monarch who relied heavily upon a rostrum of advisers and guides; her more conservative ministers loathed her interest in the magus John Dee, but at least he was English. Bruno, who was perceived by many Englishmen as a loud, overexpressive, abrasive little man, would have grated on and antagonized them, and indeed, within two years of meeting Elizabeth, he returned to mainland Europe disillusioned, his confidence in tatters.
Bruno’s aim was to bring together the liberals in each camp, and key to accomplishing this was to find a way in which Protestants and Catholics could agree over the meaning of the Eucharist, a concept that lay at the heart of both faiths. Of all the doctrinal incompatibilities between Rome and the Protestant religion, the interpretation of the Eucharist was the most profound. Protestants held the view that the earthly components of the Eucharist simply represented the flesh and the blood of the Lord, but this was not good enough for Catholics. Rome insisted that the communion meant quite literally partaking of divine matter; during the sacrament of Eucharist service the bread and the wine were transubstantiated into the flesh and blood of the Savior.
Bruno wanted to treat the Eucharist as a supreme example of how conflict could be negated. His interpretation of the process was one of union. The bread and the wine, just like the chalice and the cloth, the priestly robes, the stone of the church, and the saliva of the believers, were all one and the same. By drinking the wine and swallowing the bread, the faithful conjoined with the great “oneness of the universe.” By creating this third way, Bruno imagined he could end the disagreement over the Eucharist. And if this was possible, then all doctrinal disagreements might be overcome with equal grace.
Bruno’s Ash Wednesday Supper is probably his most widely read book and the most absorbing. It focuses upon a supper held in Westminster, not far from where Bruno was living at the time (the French ambassador’s home near Fleet Street). The guests invited to the meal constitute a select group of London’s intelligentsia, and over the meal they discuss their beliefs and debate the issues uppermost in Bruno’s mind. Of course, the supper is allegorical, and the food and the wine are the materials of the Eucharist, then at the heart of Bruno’s philosophical concerns. The story begins with a discussion about Copernicus and develops, through his interlocutors, into the theme of universal Copernicanism, which offers up the notion Bruno saw as a unifying force, the concept of the Oneness of Nature.
Bruno found new followers in England and nurtured already well established relationships. The most important was his friendship with the famous courtier, soldier, diplomat, and poet Philip Sidney, but even this relationship did not further his chances of finding a practical solution to the conflict between Catholic and Protestant. Bruno’s books, although influential and widely read by the educated elite, did not impress Elizabeth herself, nor anyone of great importance at court other than Sidney.
Also, to be fair to Bruno, the political kaleidoscope of European politics and religious allegiance had been shaken again while he was in England. During the summer of 1585, Henry’s mother, Catherine de Médicis, a brilliant diplomat despite being in her sixty-seventh year and riddled with syphilis, had negotiated a temporary peace between French Protestants and Catholics that effectively kept foreign powers out of her son’s kingdom. Although these actions provided only a temporary solution to the religious problems of Europe, fickle monarchs and ambitious politicians turned their attention elsewhere for a time. Consequently, by October 1585, Bruno was once more in Europe and attempting to find a new avenue for his convictions.
For five years, he continued to write, to lecture widely, and to develop many important new friendships during the travels that occupied these remaining years of freedom. And by 1590, or perhaps as late as the beginning of 1591, Bruno had reached the conclusion that if he was to have any serious hope of attaining his goal of uniting the splintered world of religion, there was only one man who could help him do it, the pope himself.
During the months before his decision to return to Italy, Bruno was living in Germany and Switzerland, far from Rome, far from danger. He could have remained in either of these places, patronized by wealthy cabalists and occultists; he could have found teaching positions and enjoyed some security. Yet, this would also have meant defeat, capitulation, stagnation. This he could not face. Instead, he turned away from convention once more by shunning the easy path. He began his final work, a grand summation of his entire canon, a document to encapsulate his whole doctrine and one that would, he believed, captivate and enthral the pope. This is why, in October 1591, he packed his trunks, collected together his papers, persuaded his amanuensis Herman Besler to accompany him, and set forth on the road from Frankfurt to teach the nobleman Mocenigo in the land of his forefathers, the land he had fled twelve years earlier.