I wish the world to possess the glorious fruits of my labor, to awaken the soul and open the understanding of those who are deprived of that light which, most assuredly, is not mine own invention. Should I be in error, I do not believe I willfully go wrong. And in speaking and writing as I do I am not contending through the desire of being victorious; for I deem every kind of renown and conquest God’s foe, vile and without a particle of honor in it, if it be not the truth; but for love of true wisdom and in the effort to reflect aright, I weary, I rack, I torment myself.
—Giordano Bruno
OF COURSE, THIS was not the end; how could it be? Indeed, some may see it merely as a beginning, others as a continuation. Bruno would certainly have thought as much; a burning that led to new life, new awakenings. The agony passed. And, as his life ebbed away, others elsewhere began, and as Bruno’s brain fried in the flames, the thoughts and ideas that had sprung from it survived and flourished anew.
Exactly four hundred years after Bruno’s execution, enthusiasts marked the day with tributes at the site of his burning, dedications appeared on the Web, and a stream of articles about the man and his ideas made a prominent mark in daily newspapers far, far from the Field of Flowers. One report read: “Rome: They laid wreaths, heaped roses and, in the sincerest tribute of all, they argued, interrupted and expounded—pilgrims of free thought, paying homage yesterday at the spot where the Inquisition burned an outspoken philosopher-priest four centuries ago. A cardboard sign at the base of Bruno’s statue denounced the ‘infamous homicide’ as if it were yesterday. A member of Italy’s Radical Party, Eleanora Caparrotti, declared: ‘They pardoned Galileo. But we’re still waiting on Bruno.’ A Vatican representative referred to the incident as a ‘sad episode’ and ‘a matter of deep regret.’”1
Four hundred years after his death, Bruno has become one of those almost legendary figures who has been appropriated by all shades of the political spectrum and by a plethora of groups whose interests range from the purely philosophical to religious extremes. On the Web you may find a ten-page article about Bruno at the World Socialist website. Groups linked with NASA have gone to the trouble of writing pieces that disparage the ideas of Bruno and attempt to deflate the myth that has grown up around him. Meanwhile, the Catholic Encyclopedia entry “Giordano Bruno” at http://www.newadvent.org mysteriously makes no mention of Bruno’s execution at all and goes shamelessly to great lengths to diminish both the merits of Bruno’s character and the value of his work. It refers to Bruno’s opinions as “errors.”
It may come as little surprise that the official position of the Church has remained unchanged since 1600. Indeed, almost no comment on the subject has emerged from the Vatican during the course of four centuries. Any form of official Church statement about Bruno is rare. In 1889, a group of supporters had constructed in the Field of Flowers a self-funded bronze statue cast by Ettori Ferrari in tribute to Bruno, and the move was unceremoniously condemned by the then pope, Leo XIII.2 As recently as 1942, Cardinal Mercati, the man who discovered the lost documents relating to Bruno’s Roman trial, declared that the Church had been perfectly right to burn Bruno because he had deserved it.
But of course, such statements do nothing but confirm the impact Bruno and some of his more adventurous contemporaries made. “Free philosophical speculation in Italy,” the renowned scholar Luigi Firpo has pointed out, “fought its decisive battle during the pontificate of Clement VIII, in the last decade of the century. It suffered the condemnation of Telesio’s De rerum natura, and of all the works of Bruno and Campanella. It was crippled by the investigations opened against Giambattista della Porta, Col’Antonio Stigiola, and Cesare Cremonini, by the beginning of Campanella’s long imprisonment, by the execution of Francesco Pucci, and by the burning of Bruno.”3 Naturally, the losses and the suffering of the martyrs to free thought and the freedom of the intellect could not last forever; battles were lost, but the war could go only one way.
In order to appraise what Bruno’s efforts have meant for the generations that followed him, we need, at least initially, to deconstruct his vision and trace the way his ideas have filtered into the work of a range of individuals and helped to shape whole disciplines, some of which have begun to emerge only in recent years. Bruno was a man of so many parts and amalgamated so much that it is inevitable he would inspire a variety of thinkers who followed him.
The period immediately after Bruno’s arrest in Venice was, of course, a dangerous time for his friends and associates, but there were no further arrests or persecutions among those with whom he had associated. Bruno’s assistant Besler vanished, and he appears to have wisely disassociated himself from Bruno’s legacy to the point where nothing is known of his fate. However, copies in Besler’s hand constitute the only original surviving versions of some of Bruno’s works. Manuscripts of nine treatises transcribed by Besler, now known as the Noroff Manuscripts, are currently in the Moscow Library, along with an original copy of Bruno’s De magia (On Magic), which the author dedicated to his amanuensis. Other philosophers and occultists Bruno had met in Germany did maintain an interest in Brunian philosophy outside Italy. Most significant was a young student of Bruno’s named Raffaele Eglin, who in 1595 published a collection of his master’s lectures even as their creator suffered the agonies of the Inquisition dungeons in Rome. However, much of the work of these early disciples fell into obscurity, and for many years most of Bruno’s teachings were forgotten. Yet his legacy survived, thanks to the impact of his ideas upon the work of a varied group of influential thinkers.
First we should consider the scientific element of Bruno’s work. Ironically, perhaps, this presents us with the most lateral links between his ideas and modern thinking. Bruno was not a scientist in the modern sense. For a long time, indeed for centuries, his conceptualization of natural philosophy was quite out of step with the New Science (as it became known after Galileo) and its blossoming forth into the Enlightenment and beyond.
Beyond this, Bruno was never in any sense a practical researcher. He did not think in terms of experiment or mathematics. In fact, he actively disapproved of the way the new science of his time was becoming increasingly entwined with mathematical proof and purity; Copernicus, he claimed, was “too much a mathematician and not enough a natural philosopher.”4
And from this stance we may start to understand the true essence of Bruno’s “science.”
Galileo was a younger contemporary of Bruno’s. He was thirty-six when Bruno was burned, and the older man’s martyrdom affected him enormously. Galileo worshiped Bruno, not for his scientific methods, but for his power, the power that had come from his sacrifice and the power of his convictions, the power of his vision and the power of his forward-thinking. Although thousands died at the stake as martyrs, Giordano Bruno was unique. Most martyrs were people of courage and conviction, but many were insane, consumed by an inner fire. Almost all of them went to the stake for their personal vision of God, obsessing over some nuance of doctrine. Others died because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Bruno was different because he held a broader vision; his heresy was all-embracing. He defended the right of all humans to think as they wished; he offered an alternative to the ideas enforced by orthodoxy. He was a man who wished to steer humanity toward reason, who wanted to allow us to conceptualize freely rather than have our thoughts determined for us.
Galileo, although also a natural philosopher, took a different tack from Bruno’s. He pioneered the use of experiment and mathematics as a primary tool of science, and it was his ideas that led directly to the work of Isaac Newton, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. It was his advances that gestated technology and what we now call “classical science.” Bruno thought in terms of images rather than mathematics, logic and pure reasoning rather than experiment.
Many commentators from Bruno’s time to the present day have viewed Bruno’s philosophy as antiquated, his ideas rooted in the ancient mystical tradition alone—in short, they refer to his work disapprovingly as “pseudoscience.” Some even suggest he was hypocritical to criticize Aristotle when he too applied deductive reasoning and did not back up his ideas with experiment or mathematics. But Bruno’s vision was far broader than these critics allow. He was indeed retrospective in the way he utilized aspects of the occult, but he also looked forward to a pure science of clinical reasoning, albeit nonmathematical in his definition. Most important to us today, these two seemingly irreconcilable visions, the mathematical and the intuitive, are once again seen as possible partners in the search for unification. The weirdness of quantum mechanics and the possibilities of uniting it with relativity has reawakened the concept of unifying diverse disciplines. Today, there is a belief that a unity of knowledge may be found, that thinkers might not necessarily rely solely upon empirical wisdom supported by mathematics. There is a growing interest in the intuitive approach, pictorial representation, and other forms of nonmathematical expression in science.
Galileo became a professor at the University of Padua just at the time Bruno arrived in Venice, and in 1592, as Bruno faced the Venetian Inquisitors, Galileo was teaching and researching only twenty-five miles from the Venetian court. Padua was a tiny city and the university a close-knit community. It is almost unthinkable that Galileo and Bruno did not meet when Bruno taught there in early 1592, and the two men may well have exchanged ideas. Indeed, recent scholarship has pointed to clear similarities between Bruno’s and Galileo’s statements concerning the heliocentric model, the very matter that later led to Galileo’s arrest and trial. In his Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance, Professor P. O. Kristeller goes as far as to say, “Galileo could have read Bruno long before the latter was condemned, and the resemblance between certain passages in Galileo and Bruno that deal with the place of the earth in the universe is so great that it may not be incidental after all.”5
However, as much as Galileo and Bruno agreed over the basic interpretation of Copernicus’s great work, they held quite different views on the matter of an infinite universe. The notion of infinity lay at the core of Bruno’s cosmological and teleological vision, but Galileo believed any contemplation of infinity to be a wasted effort and once declared to a friend: “Reason and my mental powers do not enable me to conceive of either finitude or infinitude.” In this sense at least, Bruno’s interpretation of the universe was more profound than that of Galileo.
But beyond this, a more important link between Bruno and Galileo was simply the impact Bruno’s fate had upon Galileo’s career and personal life. With his martyrdom, Bruno had become the model for the heretic-philosopher, and within a few years of his murder some commentators were making unwelcome comparisons between Bruno’s writings and some of the more daring contributions of Galileo. One, Martin Hasdale of the court of Emperor Rudolf of Germany and a friend of Galileo’s, even wrote to chastise him for not giving Bruno sufficient credit. In the letter he points out what he considered obvious similarities between comments in Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius (The Starry Messenger), published in 1610, and Bruno’s heliocentric vision. “I had this morning occasion for friendly dispute with Kepler,” Hasdale writes, “when we were both lunching with the Ambassador to Saxony…. He said concerning your book [Sidereus nuncius] that truly it revealed the divinity of your talent, but that you had given cause of complaint not only to the German nation but also to your own, since you make no mention of those writers who gave the signal and the occasion for your discovery, naming among them Giordano Bruno as an Italian, Copernicus, and himself.”6
To be fair to Galileo, although Bruno and others pointed the way to the ideas contained in Sidereus nuncius, unlike Galileo, these thinkers offered no form of mathematical treatment or experimental support for their ideas. Furthermore, it is understandable that Galileo would want to divorce his name from the Nolan’s and to put as much distance between them publicly as possible. First, Galileo did not much care for Bruno’s penchant for blending the Hermetic tradition with the new vision of natural philosophy. Galileo, perhaps the first great empiricist, favored the unceremonious dumping of “old” knowledge, subjective understanding, and the ancient Hermetic arts. He became the great standard-bearer of the new rationalism. For Galileo, mathematics was the ultimate expression of God, just as it had been for Plato. But, unlike Plato, Galileo studiously rejected mysticism.
Beyond this, Galileo had another simple and quite obvious reason for wishing to disassociate his name from Bruno’s. Aware of the Nolan’s left-of-center philosophies and his clearly heretical interpretations of Copernicus, Galileo would have viewed Bruno as a very dangerous man. Understandably, he would not want the whiff of heresy hanging around him, as it had clung to Bruno. This is supported by the comments of a recent editor of Galileo’s works who points out, “…Galileo dissociated himself from the current trend of pseudo-Pythagorean occult science and mystical rationalism, of which there had been an extraordinary revival in the late Renaissance, climaxed by the tragic fate of Bruno.”7
Yet links between the two were almost unavoidable. Bruno’s trial and testimony alerted the Papal Office to the threat of Copernicanism. This is evident from the fact that although Copernicus’s Revolutions (which had so inspired both Bruno and Galileo) had been in circulation since 1543, it was only after Bruno’s execution that it was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (in 1616). But with Bruno and Copernicus both dead, Galileo inevitably fell under suspicion. Turning their attention to his work, the Inquisition did not take long to find problems with his views, and in spite of his best efforts, Galileo’s name was connected with Bruno’s. Indeed, evidence shows that Galileo’s own arrest and trial as a heretic in 1633 came about because some powerful individuals within the Vatican viewed him as a “resurrected Bruno” and believed he could be used to set a further example in the Church’s struggle to eliminate heterodox philosophies.8
But ironically, Bruno and Galileo were very different enemies of the Inquisition. Certainly the views of each could spell (in the eyes of Vatican officials at least) the annihilation of orthodoxy and the dismantling of a faith-based universal vision. But Bruno offered a route only partly based upon science; his was a multifaceted paradigm, incorporating a strange resolution of opposites, the infinite and the finite, the macrocosmic and the microcosmic, religion and science, the occult and rational modeling, symbolism and ritual, mind and body, soul and brain. Galileo’s vision was purer, yet enormously more prosaic, strict, utilitarian. Bruno offered a majestic free expression tempered with logic; Galileo laid before us the clean lines of unsullied reason, a noble world of rules, proofs, axioms, theorems, pressed steel, steam engines, transistors, and microchips. It was only natural that the world, already leaning as it was toward unblemished rationalism and growing enamored of the undeniable charms of number and experiment, should pursue Galileo’s offerings and allow Bruno’s memory to fade.
For the seventeenth-century world, Bruno’s ideas offered nothing practical. Unlike Galileo’s science, they gave no immediate material benefits. Inevitably, as the years passed and humanity reached the dawn of the Enlightenment, any competition between Galileo’s science (championed by such demigods as Isaac Newton) and Bruno’s vision could have only one outcome. And in many ways we should be immensely grateful for this: classical science was incredibly successful and changed our world utterly, and we continue to reap the benefits.
But the first off the block does not always win the race. Around 1910, something strange started to happen in the world of science. Suddenly, scientists who had been weaned on classical science began to delve deeper, and they revealed some uncomfortable facts. Technology that had sprung from classical science worked, of course it worked; but there was no clear explanation for why it worked. Classical scientists had been acting like those of us who use a DVD player every day but with no real understanding of how the circuitry allows televised images to be stored on a disc and played back on a TV screen.
As a consequence, in order to find accurate explanations for what they observed, classical physicists were forced to rethink and reevaluate many of their most fundamental and cherished notions. They had to reinvent the very way they thought about science. They used mathematics (it was still the best tool they had), but they also allowed themselves to think more freely, intuitively, instinctively. Most important, although few scientists of the time were familiar with Bruno’s ideas, they began to incorporate some of his methods into the way they worked; in particular, they began to think in terms of images. Suddenly, the idea of “thought experiments” (a concept Bruno had made popular during the 1580s after developing his art of memory) became absolutely indispensable to the visionary quantum mechanist. Schrödinger gave us his cats, Heisenberg his uncertainty principle, concepts that threw our view of the universe into a pool of randomness and chance; each became a cornerstone of a new discipline, the panorama of quantum mechanics.9
Quantum mechanics turned classical science on its head, and the pioneers of the field (de Broglie, Dirac, Heisenberg, and Bohr) saw increasingly the huge rewards to be gained by thinking laterally and fusing pure mathematics with visual images. To a degree, scientists began to conceptualize as Bruno had done, rather than only as Galileo had taught them.
Naturally, modern science is still infused with mathematics; it is indispensable. But in recent years many theoreticians have begun to use visual images and logic pictures in their work, and have found the technique a powerful method for tackling resistant problems. The best example of this comes from the work of one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman, who created what have become known as Feynman diagrams, pictorial representations of complex subnuclear transactions.
And Bruno’s vision of picture logic is actually used by almost everyone in the industrialized world each day, for we live in a world dominated by computers, and computers are machines that generate images. With computers using Windows software, we are all now thinking pictorially and learning to understand concepts based upon logically connected images. This is exactly what Bruno was doing over four hundred years ago when he developed ancient techniques for enhancing memory. He also employed these tools as a way to process complex scientific ideas; in particular, he took the Copernican model, stripped away the mathematics, and explained the fundamentals in terms of readily understood images, which he then used again to take Copernicus into previously unimagined realms.
In this way, Bruno was able to rationalize his theories, even though he used no mathematics. In one of his most farsighted treatises, the Frankfurt Trilogy (De immenso, De monade, and De minimo), published in 1591, Bruno predated Karl Popper by three and a half centuries when he wrote, “He who desires to philosophize must first of all doubt all things.” But rather than spinning his ideas from the yarn of algebra, he molded pictures and manipulated visual images to interpret complex ideas.
Thanks to this shift in the way science is viewed, today many scientists and philosophers believe that mathematics is not the only modeling tool available to them. At the cutting edge is the idea that the way forward, the route to solving the deepest puzzles, may come only from an alignment of intuition, pictorial logic, and equations on a page; in other words, a powerful meshing of Galileo and Bruno.
Giordano Bruno would have approved of this; it was what he struggled for with the limited resources at his disposal. He cared little for practicality and wanted always to get to the root cause of things and then to extrapolate onward and ever farther, toward the stars. Galileo’s pool-table world could solve everyday engineering problems, but once removed from the prosaic, his model of the universe was entirely inadequate, entirely unable to explain the true miracle of existence. In some mysterious way, Bruno’s form of natural philosophy tapped into the eternal. The Nolan had touched the divine, a fact realized by only a very few while the man was alive.
But other aspects of the Nolan’s rational work have made an equal impact. A century after Bruno’s death, the great Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens found some of Bruno’s ideas inspirational but quite properly wished to defer open support until clear evidence could confirm these radical notions. “Later authors such as Cusanus, Brunus [sic], and Kepler have furnished the planets with inhabitants,” Huygens wrote in a letter to his brother Constantine. “It is reckoned they require an immense treasury not of twenty or thirty worlds only, but as many as there are grains of sand upon the shore. And yet we say that even this number exceeds that of the Fixed Stars? Some of the Ancients and Jordanus Brunus carry it further, in declaring the number infinite. Indeed, it seems to me certain that the Universe is infinitely extended; but what God has been pleased to place beyond the Region of the Stars, is as much above our knowledge as it is our habitation.”10
Kepler, too, was a contemporary of Bruno’s who was interested in his ideas and even dubbed him “Defender of Infinity.” Kepler makes many references to Bruno’s ideas, about which he was clearly familiar; more than once he writes favorably of Bruno in the same sentence in which he praises the great fifteenth-century German natural philosopher Nicholas of Cusa and even Galileo Galilei himself.
But beyond Bruno’s influence as a protean cosmologist, his ideas concerning the art of memory played a significant role in the way this arcane pursuit was adopted and adapted successfully by those born into the age of printing and global travel, people who would otherwise have displayed little interest in the art. The most significant Bruno adept and someone who was undoubtedly fascinated with the entire, dramatic story of Bruno’s life was Gottfried Leibniz.
Leibniz, a man who was often referred to as the “Continental Newton,” was born in Leipzig forty-six years after Bruno’s death. The son of a professor of moral philosophy at the University in Leipzig, Gottfried proved to be a prodigy who gained his doctorate in law by the age of twenty and wrote a paper, De arte combinatoria (On the Art of Combination), which is now seen as an early theoretical model for the modern computer. Since Leibniz lived in an age when specialization was beginning to overtake the Renaissance model of broad intellectualism, his versatility was rather anachronistic, but because of his great intelligence and dedication he could, even in the late seventeenth century, successfully adopt the mantle of the Renaissance magus.
By the 1670s, Leibniz had become a well-known and respected figure within the European scientific establishment, but he was elevated to celebrity status through his conflict with the most famous and honored scientist in the world, Isaac Newton, then the president of the Royal Society in London. The clash was a priority dispute over a mathematical technique called the calculus. Argument over who had arrived at the technique first, Newton or Leibniz, raged between them for some four decades and even continued between supporters of both after the two scientists were long dead. Today, both men are honored and it is generally agreed that Newton got to the calculus first, but Leibniz devised his technique quite independently and without any knowledge of Newton’s work. However, the argument over who should be seen as the father of the calculus is less important than the fact that Leibniz’s method was long ago adopted by most scientists.
The calculus is no backwater of science or insignificant tool of the pure mathematician; it is, rather, the single most important mathematical technique known to man. It lies at the heart of most work in science, from biological analysis to civil engineering, from the design of microchips to the plotting of a path to the moon. And Leibniz’s method is used instead of Newton’s for one very good reason: Newton’s system of representing mathematical terms was clumsy and unwieldy, whereas Leibniz’s notation was designed for ease of communication and efficiency of use. And this is because Leibniz was steeped in the tradition of memory enhancement using symbols as taught by Bruno.
Yet, important as this undoubtedly was, what Leibniz achieved with his adoption of Bruno’s methods was minuscule compared with what he wished to achieve. Leibniz believed in the bold notion that a form of unified knowledge could be found by the application of pure mathematics.
As we have seen, Plato had hinted at this some two millennia before Leibniz, but during the late seventeenth century some mathematicians believed they could see practical ways to determine a purely mathematical model of the universe that would ultimately lead to a union of all knowledge. During the first years of the eighteenth century, Newton, Leibniz’s reviled enemy, had led the way with his two great masterpieces, Principia Mathematica and Opticks, with which he had successfully modeled important aspects of the universe using mathematics. For Newton, the universe was a matrix of geometric figure, integer, and numeric symmetry, and his monumental achievements seemed to confirm this opinion. Leibniz felt precisely the same way about the all-consuming power of mathematics and tried unsuccessfully to describe the entire universe in a set of simple elegant equations all based upon the hierarchy of symbols and images described by Bruno.
It is perhaps ironic that Leibniz’s theoretical efforts failed to find a unity of knowledge but helped to develop the propositions offered by the empiricism of Galileo empowered by Newton’s mechanics. Among them, these three men produced the greatest impetus for technology and the creation of an industrialized world far from Bruno’s spiritual vision.11
And Bruno has left his indelible mark elsewhere in areas of the intellect that lie far from science. Best known as a philosopher who, up to that time, did more than any other to visualize the idea of total intellectual freedom, Bruno has been an inspiration for such men as Schelling, Goethe, and most especially Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Like Bruno, each of these men placed freedom and spiritual liberation at the core of their worldview.
To these, free religious expression was essential, and they, like Bruno, coupled this sacred belief with unfettered imagination and a will and an energy to push forward the boundaries. In some ways we may think of those who constituted the Romantic Movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as Bruno’s kindred spirits. In a sense, men like Coleridge and Goethe were expressing a vision of the world quite different from that offered by the creators of the Industrial Revolution. Steel and steam represented the dark aspect of the age to come, and the Romantics sensed a loss of soul, saw spirit subsumed by smoke, life ground away by cogwheels and the speeding spindle. Goethe and his peers were not so interested in Bruno’s picture imagery or even his cosmology; rather, it was his vision of free expression and his belief in universality and infinity that captivated them. And again, the ideal of unified knowledge supported their dreams. But their motivation was not a search for the knowledge that could lead to the making of better machines, nor even to produce a clearer model of how the universe began, how it grew, or what the fundamental rules might be. The Romantics of the nineteenth century were more interested in people, emotions, and utopian visions. For them, Bruno had offered an all-embracing mosaic of ideas, interlinked and mutually supportive; his vision of unification appeared to be the ultimate expression of poetic ecstasy.
And yet amazingly, this resurgence of something of the Renaissance spirit, this radical interpretation, all began with an advertisement in the magazine Punch in 1712. An anonymous admirer had offered for sale a copy of Bruno’s Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, a book that had been almost forgotten throughout the seventeenth century. The ad was immensely intriguing and declared (quite inaccurately of course) that the author of the book was “a professed atheist.”12
The tome was sold, but the purchaser remains unknown. More important, from this advertisement and the brief flurry of interest surrounding the sale, word of Bruno spread. Within a century, Goethe had, in his most famous work, Faustus, made repeated references to Bruno and his works; Jacobi and Hegel held heated debates about the merits of the Nolan (Jacobi for and Hegel against); and in a lengthy monograph, part of Essays for the Fine Arts (published in 1812), Coleridge wrote of Aristotle, Kant, Plato, and Bruno in the same sentence, comparing the Nolan’s brilliance with that of the great ancients. A few years later, in an autobiographical account, Coleridge declared that he had learned the finer points of logic and what he called “dynamic philosophy” from Giordano Bruno.
However, not everyone of the period was so enamored of Bruno and the other cabalists of his day. Hegel wrote: “These men felt themselves dominated, as they really were, by the impulse to create existence and to derive truth from their very selves. They were men of vehement nature, of wild and restless character, of enthusiastic temperament, who could not attain to the calm of knowledge. Though it cannot be denied that there was in them a wonderful insight into what was true and great, there is no doubt on the other hand that they reveled in all manner of corruption in thought and heart as well as in their outer life.”13
But probably Bruno’s most important contribution to the evolution of nonscientific culture comes again from his work with the art of memory. At the time of Bruno’s visit to London between 1583 and 1585, William Shakespeare, just turned twenty, already a father and his wife, Anne Hathaway, pregnant with twins, had recently become an actor in Stratford. He probably did not visit London until after Bruno had departed and the two men almost certainly never met, but there is evidence of links between them.
The connection between Giordano Bruno and William Shakespeare comes via Philip Sidney’s friend the poet and occultist Fulke Greville, who knew Bruno well and who appears as a lead character in The Ash Wednesday Supper.14 In a book by David Lloyd entitled Statesmen and Favourites of England Since the Reformation, the author offers a eulogy to Greville which includes the passage “One great argument for his worth, was his respect for the worth of others, desiring only to be known to posterity under no other notions than of Shakespeare’s and Ben Johnson’s Master, Chancellor Egerton’s Patron, Bishop Overall’s Lord, and Sir Philip Sidney’s friend.”15
This implies that Greville was at some stage Shakespeare’s teacher, an idea that is by no means impossible, as Greville’s family home was near Stratford-on-Avon and the academically minded Fulke Greville was Shakespeare’s senior by ten years. And if we take the argument another stage further, it is perfectly feasible that Greville, a keen follower of Bruno’s work, would have passed on to his pupil his appreciation of the Nolan. Furthermore, when Shakespeare arrived in London to start his acting career, it would have been natural for Greville, a leading light on the London literary scene, to introduce the young man to his circle of friends, including occultists and Hermeticists, many of whom were Bruno devotees.
It seems Bruno made a twofold impression on Shakespeare. First, his work and personality made an impact upon the Bard’s writing; we can see Bruno on the page and pacing the boards in the guise of several Shakespearean characters. There is Prospero, the isolated magus who dreams of resolving the inner mysteries of the universe, and more directly, the wording of Berowne’s famous monologue in praise of love from Love’s Labour’s Lost that mirrors a similar speech from Bruno’s The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast.
Bruno also influenced Shakespeare with his skillful use of simple language to evoke complexity of plot and character. The Nolan used the phrase “capturing the voices of the gods” to describe the way in which characters could come alive in a narrative. He caught this spirit well in his own play Il Candelaio (The Torch-Bearer), published and performed in Paris during 1582 (the year before he left for England), and it demonstrates links with some of Shakespeare’s earliest efforts and also with Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. But more important than these connections, Bruno’s techniques for developing the power of memory had an enormous effect upon Shakespeare’s career, both as an actor and as a playwright.
An actor’s life during the sixteenth century was tough. The thespian was poorly paid and received more abuse than respect, it was a peripatetic and often perilous existence, and above all it was intellectually demanding. A play was rarely performed more than two nights in succession, and some parts were long, convoluted, and difficult to learn. Any actor worth his salt was expected to perform several complex roles in one play and to have an extensive repertoire, so that the ability to remember scripts was of paramount importance. Shakespeare was a professional actor for twenty years before he found success as a playwright, and he gained a reputation for his prodigious memory, which was almost certainly developed from a reading of Bruno’s works on the art of memory.16
However, Bruno’s deepest interest and his most powerful ideas came not from his fascination for memory or even pure philosophy but from his religious outlook. His greatest achievement was to blend, to amalgamate seemingly disconnected notions, to fuse science with Christian dogma, Hermeticism with Copernicanism, in order to achieve a spiritual gestalt. And for those who read Bruno, his writing was most powerful when he dealt with purely spiritual matters.
Of course, the nature of Bruno’s demise and the very fact that the Inquisition hounded him for most of his life created a legend that succeeded in imbuing Bruno’s philosophy with heightened drama and dynamism, but this does nothing to diminish the power of his ideas.
Bruno’s writing certainly figured large for Spinoza, one of history’s most radical religious thinkers. Indeed, one scholar has suggested that the ideas of the two men were at times so close that when Spinoza was writing his classic work God, Man and His Blessedness, he must have had opened before him a copy of Bruno’s On Cause, Principle and the One. Certainly comparisons between the ideas of the two men run deep. Spinoza was said to have been “God-intoxicated,” by which it was meant that his sole intellectual drive came from an innate desire to understand the true nature of the divine. Much the same could be said of Bruno. For him, money, family, security, comfort, meant little; his goals were ethereal, intangible.
For the radical religious philosopher, the central principle that emerges from Bruno’s teachings is that there is no personal God. Bruno made this most clear when he wrote that “[God] has nothing to do with us except insofar as he imparts himself to the effects of Nature.”17
Elsewhere he declared that the myth of the personal extra-mundane God was created by theologians merely for consumption by the uneducated masses and that the educated philosopher and thinker should reject this and adopt the pantheistic position. In God, Man and His Blessedness, Spinoza echoed this with the remark “God is indwelling and not the transient cause of things.” In other words, according to Spinoza, God created the universe but played no part in its day-to-day running, a notion mirroring Bruno’s own analysis.
As he slipped away and the flames consumed him, Bruno set in motion wheels within wheels and sent spinning the cogs of change, for the golden phoenix hovered over Bruno. Throughout his life he had reinvented himself many times, risen from one failure after another to fight another day. In many parts of Europe he had set alight intellectual fires and had moved on when the flames became too hot. So too, in death, his words and ideas resisted the annihilation the cardinals had sought. Indeed, today Bruno’s persecutors are largely forgotten, their ideas marginalized. Meanwhile, Bruno’s stature has grown; his legacy is now more widely appreciated and honored than at any time during the four centuries since his death. Those four hundred years have led us from a sorry pile of ash in the Field of Flowers to a more tolerant world in which thinkers like Bruno may express their radical views, where challenge is welcomed and embraced, a world in which we may begin to imagine a unity and harmony for which Bruno made the ultimate sacrifice.
Perhaps the most fitting way to end this tale is with Bruno’s own words, a passage that amounts to his own epitaph. It is a most poignant passage from one of his last works, De monade, published in 1591, the year he returned to Italy. It both expresses his mood as he packed to make his last international journey as a free man and sums up how he viewed his life, his legacy, and his place in the larger scheme of things.
Much have I struggled. I thought I would be able to conquer…And both fate and nature repressed my zeal and my strength.
Even to have come forth is something, since I see that being able to conquer
Is placed in the hands of fate.
However, there was in me whatever I was able to do,
Which no future century will deny to be mine, that which a victor could have for his own:
Not to have feared to die, not to have yielded to my equal
In firmness of nature, and to have preferred a courageous death to a
Noncombatant life.