Giordano Bruno’s La cena de le ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper) is a seminal text of the late European Renaissance, as well as being closely connected with Elizabethan London, where it was written and originally published in 1584. It is the first of six philosophical works in Italian that Bruno wrote and published in London between 1584 and 1585. Although developing multiple themes related to the London and Europe of his time, the core theme of The Ash Wednesday Supper is the new Copernican astronomy. Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) had been published in 1534. The traditional Aristotelian-Ptolemaic astronomy, still dominant throughout the sixteenth century, placed a stationary earth at the centre of the universe, but Copernicus sent the earth into orbit both around its own axis and around a central sun. In the lifetime of Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), this new astronomy was still frowned upon in both Catholic and Protestant Europe because it was thought to disagree with the cosmology of the Holy Bible. Nevertheless, it was gradually causing a revolution in people’s perception of the universe they lived in that was upsetting many traditional assumptions and ideas.
After a scintillating authorial introduction, The Ash Wednesday Supper is presented in the form of a cosmological, pro-Copernican dialogue in five parts between four characters. Theophilus, an admirer of Copernicus and a proponent of his astronomy, is the mouthpiece of Bruno himself. A cultivated English gentleman going by the widespread name of Smith (Smitho in the original text, Smithus in my translation) is open-minded and sympathetic to the arguments put forward by Theophilus. A neo-Aristotelian pedant called Prudentius indignantly repudiates the new Copernican astronomy. A lively servant or attendant with the name of Frulla (meaning, in Italian, someone who mixes everything up) provides a note of intelligent comic relief.
The Ash Wednesday Supper goes far beyond a mere defence of Copernicus’s new heliocentric cosmology. Indeed, Theophilus declares that he is not to be considered as simply a disciple of Copernicus, who, in his opinion, is to be seen only as the starting point of an authentic astronomical revolution. Bruno recognizes that the exchange of the relative positions of the sun and the earth courageously defies our common sense perceptions by claiming that it is the earth that moves. Bruno himself, however, uses this new astronomy as the foundation of an even more revolutionary idea by claiming that the new vision of the universe implies a universal infinity, or a universe without boundaries in which our own world becomes a mere speck in an overwhelmingly immense whole. Furthermore, Bruno fills his infinite universe with an infinite number of other solar systems similar to our own. Bruno’s new infinite cosmology, although calling on prestigious ancient sources such as Pythagoras, Democritus, and Lucretius, represents an even more daring and radical challenge to what was in his time the conventional world picture, closed by the sphere of fixed stars, and sanctioned by Aristotle and Ptolemy. Their cosmological picture had not only dominated late classical culture but had endured throughout the Middle Ages, receiving the benediction of Christian culture, which saw it as the creation of a Christian God.
Bruno’s new cosmological picture, presented for the first time in its radical entirety in The Ash Wednesday Supper, raises complex philosophical and theological questions such as the relationship of the infinite universe to a divine cause, the nature of the universal substance and the relations within it of matter and form, as well as delicate questions for the Christian culture of his time, such as the status of the individual soul within an infinite whole. These more specifically philosophical issues would be the subject of discussion in the following two Italian dialogues that Bruno published in London in 1584 entitled Cause, Principle and Unity and The Infinite Universe and Worlds. Usually known, with The Ash Wednesday Supper, as Bruno’s three cosmological dialogues, these were followed in 1584/5 by three dialogues that examine the social/political, ethical, and epistemological implications that Bruno associates with his new infinite cosmology: The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, The Cabala of Pegasus, and On the Heroic Frenzies. The Ash Wednesday Supper thus figures both as a revolutionary cosmological dialogue in its own right and also as the starting point of an extraordinarily complex and rich intellectual inquiry spanning six full-length works and leading up to what Bruno considers a new philosophical apotheosis, or an ecstatic vision of an entirely renewed world.
Bruno’s Italian dialogues have all been translated into English over the years, while the new millennium has witnessed numerous new translations both of his Italian and some of his Latin works. Although to be considered an admirable development in itself, this resurgence of activity regarding Bruno and his works has led to results of very varying quality, both in linguistic and intellectual terms. This new translation of The Ash Wednesday Supper should be associated with Ingrid Rowland’s translation of the last of Bruno’s six London dialogues, On the Heroic Frenzies, as part of a project, incorporated into the Lorenzo da Ponte Library and published by the University of Toronto Press, aimed at providing an integrated series of new translations incorporating the most recent work on both Bruno’s ideas and his texts.1
The Ash Wednesday Supper itself has so far been translated into English only three times, in relatively recent years. Frances Yates made a first ever translation in the 1930s, which remains in her personal archive held by the Warburg Institute in London. She left it unpublished when she began to have doubts about Bruno’s version of the new Copernican astronomy, which earlier commentators had considered a valid contribution to the new science of the late Renaissance.2 Yates, however, gradually came to consider it as not scientific at all but rather a presentation of a cosmos characterized by Hermetic mysticism and magic. Many years later, in 1964, Yates would publish her influential Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, presenting a strictly Hermetic and magical reading of The Ash Wednesday Supper, as of all Bruno’s works.3 A translation of The Ash Wednesday Supper published in 1975 by Stanley L. Jaki made the text available in a lively English translation for the first time, not without some questionable renderings of Bruno’s undoubtedly complex and difficult Italian. Jaki, who was a philosopher and historian of modern science of some prestige, notes that Bruno advocated a physical astronomy rather than a mathematical one, but concludes that his physical astronomy bogs down in what Jaki considered a gross animism. Accordingly, he expressed considerable scorn for Bruno’s attempt to understand the Copernican theory in terms of a biological rather than a mathematical concept of a heliocentric universe, extended to a universal infinity. Two years later, Edward A. Gosselin and Lawrence S. Lerner published a more precise translation based on a better knowledge of Bruno’s Italian and of what was then the latest bibliography of Bruno studies.4 Their text offers a more positive evaluation of Bruno’s animism by explicitly placing itself under the influence of the Yatesian Hermetic interpretation of Bruno. By doing so, however, Gosselin and Lerner also deny any technical validity to the astronomical aspects of Bruno’s dialogue.
One of the consequences of this dismissal of Bruno’s participation in the development of the new astronomical revolution was an increased attention to the formal and literary aspects of his text.5 On the other hand, the 1990s and the early years of the new millennium have also seen a renewed increase of study of the details of Bruno’s cosmological discourse that once again places him firmly within the early dissemination and discussion of the Copernican revolution. The terms in which he did this, both in The Ash Wednesday Supper and in later texts, are now much more fully understood. This more recent “scientific” bibliography places a particular emphasis on Bruno’s concept of cosmological infinity. His “infinite infinite” (as Bruno himself calls it) not only enlarges cosmological space to infinite dimensions (nowhere contemplated by Copernicus himself) but also fills it with an infinite number of solar systems similar to our own. Bruno thus proposes an entirely new and original cosmological picture, filled with a multitude of stars and planets in a constant state of movement and change. Other contemporaries, such as Palingenius and Patrizi on the European continent and Thomas Digges in England, had also envisaged an infinite space outside what the traditional astronomy called the “sphere of fixed stars.” But, even when they had filled it with stars, they had conceived of this infinite space in static terms of divine light. Bruno, on the contrary, posits a homogeneous cosmic infinity in which all bodies move.6 As far as sources are concerned, Bruno’s reading of Copernicus links up to the idea of a “Lucretian Renaissance” that has gradually been emerging in recent years. In terms of influence, it looks forward to the discussions of cosmological infinity that will characterize much of the new science up to and after Newton himself.7 The following new translation of, and comment on, The Ash Wednesday Supper reinterprets Bruno as a serious participant in the early Copernican discussion, and The Ash Wednesday Supper as anticipating in numerous ways Galileo’s great Dialogue on the Two Major World Systems.8 However, it also engages with the discussion of the formal structure of the work, as well as with the latest aspects of the study of the text (see the Note on the Text that follows this Introduction).
A central feature of Bruno’s cosmological discourse, especially prominent in The Ash Wednesday Supper, is his perception of the new science that was developing in the wake of the Copernican revolution as intrinsically embedded in the social, political, and religious contexts of his time. In this first full-length presentation of his positive reading of Copernicus, Bruno is not only writing the kind of text that we would define today as “scientific,” commenting on, and developing in important ways, the technical aspects of the astronomical revolution of his age. He is also offering a lively representation of the fierce discussions to which it was giving rise. Bruno understands that the new heliocentric universe represents a major threat to rigidly established academic, social, and religious norms, upsetting a neo-Aristotelian mindset that was deeply embedded in the culture of his age. He knows that his infinite universe makes everything relative, destroying fixed centres and ideas by reducing earth and its inhabitants to a tiny speck within an overwhelmingly immense whole. Nevertheless, Bruno also claims that his new cosmological picture represents a new dawn of civilization. He is intent on enlarging not only the universe but also the mind, by opening it up to enlarged prospects of vision and a new understanding of mental as well as cosmic space. In this sense, The Ash Wednesday Supper lays the foundation for the cosmological discourse of modernity.
I have divided the following Introduction to the text into four parts, covering the various aspects of Bruno’s discourse in this work. The first part is dedicated to the occasion that gave rise to the supper in the first place. It clarifies for the reader how it was that Bruno, born near Naples in Italy in 1548, came to be in London in 1584, and what adventures and misadventures gave rise to the discussions represented in his text. The second part of the Introduction looks at the formal aspects of Bruno’s text, analysing in particular what I propose as an important reference on Bruno’s part to Plato’s Symposium. Plato’s dialogue, known in Latin as the Convivium, had been the subject of a famous comment by Marsilio Ficino in the previous century, and was one of the most read and admired texts of the European Renaissance. It is also in the form of a philosophical discussion that takes place during a supper, remembered and commented on by a group of learned friends after the event. What Bruno rejects and what he takes from Plato is the subject of this second part of my Introduction. In the third part, I start to comment directly on Bruno’s cosmological speculation, and particularly on his idea of infinite cosmological space. Only in the fourth and last part do I analyse the technical aspects of Bruno’s reading of Copernicus. This corresponds to the strategy followed by Bruno himself, for it is only in the last of the five dialogues that compose his work that he finally leaves behind the commentary on the supper, with its fiercely debated cosmological, social, and religious arguments. Only in Dialogue V does Bruno attempt a synthetic presentation of his own personal way of reading and understanding the Copernican theory of the movements of the earth.
All’hora gli disse il Sig. Folco Grivello. Di gratia S. Nolano, fatemi intendere le raggioni per le quali stimate la terra muoversi.
Then Sir Fulke Greville said to him: – “Signor Nolano, please explain to me the reasons which lead you to think that the earth moves.”
Between January and February, 1548, a boy was born in Nola – a town in southern Italy about fifteen miles inland from Naples – to Giovanni Bruno, a soldier in the service of the Count of Caserta, and his wife, Fraulisa Savolino. The child was christened with the name of Philip.9 The grown man’s memories of his home town would later surface in his philosophical works with the slightly obsessive precision so often found in exiles or restless wanderers, as the young Bruno would become, and remain for most of his adult life.
Towards the end of The Ash Wednesday Supper, Bruno mentions Nola in a discussion of the endless movement and change which take place on the surface of the earth as it revolves with multiple movements around the sun. The argument is an important part of his defence of the infinite, post-Copernican cosmology that he proposes in this work. Bruno envisages a process of universal natural evolution and change throughout the infinite whole, and he illustrates the nature of such change with reference to a Nolan martyr of the fifth century AD who had written that the sea reached almost up to the walls of the town. Bruno himself remembers a temple still in his day called the Church of the Port, although by then the sea had receded by twelve thousand paces.10 The point about universal evolution is made all the more vividly through the detailed example furnished by childhood memories, for Bruno’s Nolan years did not last long. In 1562 he went to Naples to study philosophy, and in 1565 he entered the monastery of San Domenico Maggiore. There, according to traditional monastic thinking, he became a changed man, assuming the name of Giordano. He used his monastic name from then on, although his freedom of thought led him into trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities almost at once.
Already in 1566/7, Bruno was accused of urging another novice to give up reading a book of popular piety about the Virgin Mary and to read the early Church fathers instead. More seriously still, he was accused of destroying all his holy images except for the crucifix. A document of accusation, which may have noted the danger of Protestant tendencies behind this behaviour, was drawn up but later destroyed. Bruno continued his monastical training, and was ordained as a priest in 1572, when he celebrated his first Mass. In 1575 he obtained his diploma in theology with a thesis on St Thomas Aquinas. However, at the end of that same year, some forbidden books were discovered in his possession, including works of St John Chrystostom and St Jerome with comments by Erasmus. The complete works of the great Dutch scholar, Erasmus of Rotterdam, had by that time been placed on the Index of Prohibited Books, drawn up by the ecclesiastical authorities in Rome after the Council of Trent had reorganized the Inquisition as its principal instrument of defence against heresy. Erasmus had remained a devout Catholic, but he was critical of much that he saw in the Church of his time, and his works contain some particularly harsh anti-ecclesiastical satire. An official inquiry was initiatied into Bruno’s reading habits that forced him to flee from the convent in Naples, and to search for refuge in Rome.11 After receiving news that the inquiry was continuing into his heretical opinions, Bruno left Rome and started a long journey north which would take him to all the major cultural and religious centres of the Europe of his time: Venice, Geneva, Paris, London, Wittenberg, Frankfurt, and imperial Prague.
In the course of this journey, the ex-friar would become a “man of infinite titles, among other phantasticall toyes,” as the anonymous N.W. would write in 1584 in his preface to Samuel Daniel’s English translation of Paolo Giovio’s Imprese.12 Most of these titles were self-conferred, sometimes with a wry smile of self-mockery. For example, Bruno describes himself as an “Academic of no Academy” on the frontispiece of the Candelaio, a comic drama he published in Paris in 1582 representing the semi-criminal affairs of contemporary Naples.13 Often he would refer to himself rather grandly in the third person as “The Nolan,” and to his works as “The Nolan Philosophy,” feeling, perhaps, that the titles signified seigneurial status in a world where obscure origins were no help to fame. In his works, however, Bruno frequently insisted that rank and wealth were indifferent to him in his dedication to an intellectual inquiry which occupied him incessantly from 1582, the year of his first publications to have survived, until 1592, when, less than a year after his return to Italy, he was arrested for heresy in Venice and consigned to the prisons of the Inquisition. His trial lasted eight long years, during which Bruno tried to persuade his judges that it was his right to think on philosophical matters according to his own reasons and convictions. The Inquisitors remained unmoved. On 17 February 1600, Giordano Bruno of Nola, after refusing to recant, was burnt at the stake as an impenitent heretic in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome.14
According to his own account, offered to his judges at his trial, Bruno arrived in London in the spring of 1583. He was carrying letters from the French King, Henri III, to the French Ambassador in London, Michel de Castelnau, Lord of Mauvissière, who was covertly supporting the cause of Mary, Queen of Scots.15 Bruno left London when Castelnau was recalled to France in the autumn of 1585, in a moment of mounting tension between England and Spain. This tension was accompanied by ever more pressing requests by the English people to Queen Elizabeth I to execute the Catholic Mary. It was during these troubled years that Bruno wrote and published with the printer John Charlewood the six philosophical dialogues in Italian presenting his infinite post-Copernican cosmology, as well as inquiring into its physical, metaphysical, social, and historical implications.16 These dialogues, culminating with the Heroici furori (On the Heroic Frenzies), posit a supreme good (il sommo bene) within the world, rather than in a transcendent sphere beyond. They thus culminate in a concept of divine immanence, or a divinity that is manifest within every aspect of the infinite universe itself. Accordingly, Bruno repudiates his former Christianity, and with it all other churches and ecclesiastical hierarchies.17
Apart from the philosophy, there is documentary evidence of various kinds showing that Bruno visited Elizabeth’s court in the company of Castelnau. He also cultivated direct personal relationships with important members of Elizabeth’s entourage, such as Sir Philip Sidney, recently married to the daughter of the Queen’s Secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham. Bruno seems to have known personally Sidney’s lifelong friend Fulke Greville (whose rooms in the royal palace at Whitehall are the setting of this first dialogue, The Ash Wednesday Supper), and possibly Robert Dudley, the powerful Earl of Leicester and uncle of Sidney, whose hospitality to Italian guests receives a special mention in Bruno’s text. There can be no doubt of Bruno’s admiration for the political acumen and cultural prowess of the English Queen, both of which are amply praised in The Ash Wednesday Supper. He refers to her courtiers primarily in cultural terms, and will address to Sir Philip Sidney the dedicatory letters to two of his later dialogues, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (Lo spaccio della bestia trionfante) and On the Heroic Frenzies.18 There has, nevertheless, been a widespread feeling among his commentators that Bruno may have been engaged in some form of semi-political activity in England, whose nature has been variously conjectured and remains uncertain.19 There were certainly closer friendships with lesser Elizabethans such as John Florio, son of an Italian Protestant refugee and later a figure of considerable cultural importance in the court of James I; the writer and Latin dramatist Mathew Gwinne; and Alexander Dicson, whose works on the art of memory are similar to Bruno’s. Dicson would later partake in a heated polemical exchange with the Ramist logician William Perkins of Cambridge, who saw the memory as assisting in the fabrication of a purely logical-rational concatenation of ideas, and declared himself hostile to Dicson’s emphasis on visual imagery and a more traditional picture-logic.20
In Paris, Bruno had found royal favour and his first taste of fame with the publication of the first four of his works to have survived: the De umbris idearum and the Cantus circaeus, which develop his thought on the art of memory, the De compendiosa architectura, which celebrates the combinatory picture-logic of Raymund Lull, and his first and only play, written in Italian, Candelaio.21 Bruno clearly thought that it would be even easier to distinguish himself in England, which he considered a still largely barbaric island. He would have ignored the fact that his arrival had been preceded by a message from the English Ambassador in Paris, Henry Cobham, warning the Secretary of Elizabeth’s Privy Council, Walsingham, that “Doctor Jordano Bruno Nolano, a professor of philosophy, intends to pass into England, whose religion I cannot commend.”22
Nevertheless, Bruno’s visit started out under favourable auspices. On 10–13 June 1583, he was in the entourage of the French Ambassador as part of a delegation which accompanied to Oxford the Polish prince Albert Alasco. On that occasion, a number of academic debates were organized in the colleges. Bruno is known to have measured himself against an opponent whom he accuses of boorish behaviour and refers to scathingly in The Ash Wednesday Supper as that “poor doctor” (“povero dottor”), claiming that during the fifteen syllogisms debated he had him running about like a chick in the chaff. A marginal note written by Gabriel Harvey in his copy of Oikonomia by Ioannes Ramus (Johann Ram) offers, in Latin, a succinct description of Bruno’s strategy in debate. This consisted in referring all subjects raised, whether theological or philosophical, to the Topics and the axioms of Aristotle, and proceeding from there to argue his own (often very anti-Aristotelean) ideas.23 Harvey’s neat description nicely echoes Bruno’s own definition of his debating method in Dialogue IV of The Ash Wednesday Supper: “the first lesson given to anyone wishing to learn how to dispute is to ask questions not according to his own principles, but according to those held by his adversary.” Harvey’s note is also useful in revealing the identity of Bruno’s “povero dottor.” He was Dr John Underhill, already chaplain to the Queen and a distinguished member of the university. A year later he would be elected Vice-Chancellor.
It is probable that this well-documented academic dispute took place after the third dinner on the fourth day of Alasco’s visit to Oxford. Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, in the second edition of 1587 continued by John Stow and others after Holinshed’s death in 1580, covers the year 1583 at vol. VI, offering a lively and detailed description of Alasco’s Oxford visit. Although neither Bruno nor Underhill is mentioned by name, here the author claims that on the evening of the fourth day Alasco dined at New College, where there were “publike philosophie, physike, and divinitie disputations, in all of which those learned opponents, respondents, & moderators, quited themselves like themselves, sharplie and soundlie.”24
The result seems to have been a positive one for Bruno, who later that summer returned to Oxford to give a series of lectures. All that he himself tells us about this second visit is that he read two texts entitled de immortalitate animae and de quintuplici sphaera, and that he was obliged to interrupt his lectures. Apart from this indignant and tantilizingly brief comment in The Ash Wednesday Supper, a number of external documents have come to light containing comments by cultural figures of notable importance who refer to this second Oxford episode as a ludicrous and embarassing débâcle. A letter to Jean Hotman from the international jurist Alberigo Gentile, written from Oxford on 8 November 1583, ridicules doctrines he had just heard expounded which talk of a stony sky, a two-foot-wide sun, a moving earth, and an inhabited moon. This is almost certainly a reference to (and a partial distortion of) Bruno’s cosmological doctrines, even if no name is specifically mentioned. Some years later, an undated letter (probably written in 1588) from the Anglican theologian Richard Hooker to his old friend and ex-tutor at Oxford, the Calvinist John Rainolds, refers to Hugh Broughton as “an English Jordanus Brunus.” Broughton was a fiery religious polemicist, who also got into trouble at Oxford. He would spend much of his life on the European continent, where he cultivated close relationships with the Jews, whose Old Testament of the Bible he considered as a prophecy of all that was to come in the New Testament. Broughton was a radical Protestant whose work seems to have had little in common with that of Bruno. Giovanni Aquilecchia, who brought this letter to the notice of Bruno scholars, thought that what Hooker had in mind was the turbulent characters of the two men, rather than any similarities in their thought.25
The most important document to come to light concerning Bruno’s Oxford lectures is the page written by George Abbot in a book of anti-Catholic religious polemic published in 1604: The reasons which Doctour Hill hath Brought for the Upholding of Papistry.26 Abbott, who would later become Archbishop of Canterbury under James I, had been a Fellow of Balliol College at the time of Bruno’s lectures at Oxford twenty years previously. He clearly writes about an episode at which he had been present personally. Unfortunately, his account is vitiated by being bitterly loaded against Bruno, as well as against Italian and Catholic culture generally. Furthermore, it was written many years after the event. Nevertheless, Abbott offers precious information that had not been available before Robert McNulty drew attention to this page of Abbott’s book in 1960. Abbott’s account emphasizes the ill feeling caused by a furiously insulting letter to the Vice-Chancellor of the University that Bruno added to some of the copies of his Explicatio triginta sigillorum. This work was a second reprint of a Latin account of the art of memory and the workings of the soul published some time after Bruno’s arrival in London. It still remains uncertain at what precise moment Bruno wrote this letter, which would seem to be an outburst against what he considered the uncivil behaviour of the Oxford dons, who had interrupted his second visit to the university in the summer of 1583.27
It is Bruno’s second visit to Oxford that is described in some detail by Abbott, who refers to him insultingly as “that Italian Diadapper,” or a very small bird. The comment is clearly intended as unkind, but it offers the modern reader a confirmation of Bruno’s own references to himself as physically small and spare. Abbott accuses him, firstly, of undertaking “among very many other matters to set on foote the opinion of Copernicus,” and, secondly, of cribbing from Marsilio Ficino’s magical and astrological work De vita coelitus comparanda, the third book of Ficino’s widely read Libri de vita, first published in 1489 and then in numerous editions throughout the sixteenth century. The cribbing, first detected by “a grave man, and both then and now of good place in the University,” was repeated, apparently, in all three lectures that Bruno was allowed to give: after which he was invited to step down. Abbott makes no effort to conceal his scathing opinion of Bruno’s “madness” in trying to put forward the Copernican theory in “the highest place of our best and most renowned schoole.” Copernicus’s book had not yet been placed on the Index of Prohibited Books; this would happen only in 1616, in the wake of Galileo’s discovery of the moons of Jupiter. However, Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was already frowned upon by both Catholic and Protestant theologians because of its disagreement with biblical authority.
At Oxford the new Copernican astronomy had so far been officially mentioned only briefly in some lectures by the renowned mathematician Henry Saville, who sanctioned it as a purely mathematical hypothesis acceptable as a basis for obtaining more correct astronomical calculations.28 Bruno was presumably already proposing the realist reading of Copernicus’s astronomy, as a physical description of the universe, which he develops in The Ash Wednesday Supper. Furthermore, Bruno’s “madness” at Oxford was capped, according to Abbott, by his dishonesty in attempting to pass off Ficino’s Neoplatonic philosophy as his own. Abbott’s scornful account of Bruno’s lectures tends to raise as many problems as it solves. First and foremost, it remains unclear in what terms Bruno was referring to Ficino’s pre-Copernican philosophy, more concerned in the De vita coelitus comparanda with astrology than with astronomy, in what appears as an attempt to present at Oxford the first realist reading of the Copernican cosmology. It is equally unclear in what way Abbott’s incomplete account of these lectures can be reconciled with Bruno’s own claim that he was “reading” at Oxford two works entitled de immortalitate animae and de quintuplici sphaera.
Attempts to answer these quesions have led to disagreement among Bruno’s commentators. Frances Yates, in her book on Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, and more recently Rita Sturlese, propose readings of Bruno’s Oxford lectures that accentuate his constant use of Neoplatonic sources. This is particularly marked in metaphysical works such as his Sigillus sigillorum (which is what Sturlese thinks Bruno was actually reading at Oxford). Yates and Sturlese thus attempt above all to explain the link with Ficino, dismissing the Copernican question as a marginal detail.29 Giovanni Aquilecchia points out, in disagreement with these emphases, that Abbott’s account is concerned primarily with the Copernican question, and that in some way Copernicus and Ficino must have been reconciled by Bruno at Oxford, although it remains unclear how this might have been done. Aquilecchia further suggests that Bruno’s de quintuplici sphaera could have been an astronomical text attempting to present Copernicanism in terms of Tycho Brahe’s recently formulated compromise cosmology. Brahe left the earth at the centre of the universe as the centre of the orbits of the sun and the moon, while the five planets circled around the sun, and with it around the earth.30 This possibility, however, seems unlikely in view of the fact that Brahe had not made his cosmology public when Bruno gave his Oxford lectures. Furthermore, Bruno makes an unequivocal claim in The Ash Wednesday Supper, which is presented as a London-based sequel to the Oxford lectures, that the sun and not the earth lies at the centre of the universe. Nevertheless, Tycho Brahe’s already published observations of comets above the sphere of the moon, which were destroying the idea of a heavenly sphere made up of a non-elemental quintessence, may have already been assimilated by Bruno. He would use this dismissal of a quintessential heavenly sphere in The Ash Wednesday Supper as a foundation stone of his new homogeneous infinitism.
In any case, Abbott mentions cribbing from Ficino rather than Brahe, and it could be that Bruno had other aspects of the De vita coelitus comparanda in mind. For Ficino’s text contains a crucial passage on magnetism, seen as a cosmic phenomenon extending to the pole star, and therefore above the sphere of the moon.31 Ficino himself fails to draw any explicit cosmological conclusions from this phenomenon. Bruno, however, may have done so, using Ficino’s pages, together with Tycho Brahe’s work on comets, to propose the idea that there was no empyreal quintessence beyond the sphere of the moon. This idea will become central to the cosmology of The Ash Wednesday Supper with its infinite universal space filled by an infinite number of solar systems similar to our own. Interestingly, the posthumous work of the foremost magnetical philosopher in England, William Gilbert, published in 1651, contains an extended reference to Bruno’s early cosmological theories. This is followed by a diagram of the new universe in which the earth (together with the moon) revolves freely around the sun, while the five remaining planets also revolve freely around the sun, disposed in a pattern which could well correspond to the title of the de quintuplici sphaera.32 All these suggestions, however, are inevitably speculative, as the texts of Bruno’s Oxford lectures appear not to have survived.
Abbott’s page on Bruno’s second visit to Oxford fails to account fully for all the details of an episode that he nevertheless clearly judged to have been an academic scandal. Bruno’s return to London must have seemed an ignominious retreat. Fortunately, in the following year, the circle of aristocrats surrounding Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, offered Bruno another chance. It was this group, of which Fulke Greville was a part, that invited Bruno to discuss his Copernicanism with two anti-Copernican opponents from Oxford at a private supper to be held in London on Ash Wednesday, 1584. Was it an attempt to heal the wound? Or was it an attempt to draw out, in semi-official surroundings, this difficult and perhaps dangerous visitor? The second hypothesis would seem to assume some substance from the fact – adduced by Aquilecchia from the itinerary followed by Bruno and his friends to reach Fulke Greville’s rooms in the second dialogue of his text – that the supper was held in Greville’s official chambers in Whitehall and not in his private house in Holborn.33 In any case, the text makes it quite clear that Leicester’s circle of refined aristocrats appealed to Bruno in these early stages of his visit, although later on relationships with them seem to have become more strained.34 The central figure is clearly Leicester’s nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, whose humanistic culture and easy command of Italian and French are praised at length by Bruno in his text. The reader of the Supper is expected to notice the difference between Oxford’s rude refusal to listen to the visitor from Nola and the courteous invitation extended to him by Sir Fulke Greville, the lifelong friend and future biographer of Sir Philip Sidney.
Nevertheless, the supper itself can hardly be considered a friendly affair. The debate with the Oxford scholars invited by Greville to discuss the “new philosophy” developing in the wake of the still much suspected Copernican theory is fiercely hostile to Bruno’s ideas and his followers, who have to be pacified by an embarrassed host. Perhaps that is why, when he afterwards narrates the events that took place on that evening, Bruno abandons the traditional Latin of the academic sphere and addresses what he hopes will be a more open-minded, courtly, cosmopolitan reader, offering him in The Ash Wednesday Supper a lively defence of “the Nolan philosophy” in his native Italian.35
The result seems to have been a general outcry. “They say of you, Teofilo, that in your Supper, you criticize and insult a whole city, an entire province, a complete kingdom,” exclaims the character called Armesso in Bruno’s next work, Cause, Principle and Unity. The first dialogue of this text is dedicated to what Bruno calls an apology, or something of that sort, for the publication of the Supper. His repentance, however, seems to be only skin deep. A few pages later, in a remarkably clear-sighted judgment of his own work, Bruno has Armesso say to Teofilo, who stands for Bruno himself: “As far as I am concerned, I have read, re-read and meditated on all you have said and (although on some points, I do not know just why, I find you a bit excessive), you seem to me for the most part to proceed with moderation, reason and discernment.”36
The Narrative Frame
Mi dimandarete che simposio, che convito é questo? E’ una cena. che cena? De le ceneri. che vuol dir cena de le ceneri?
You will ask me: what symposium, what banquet is this? It is a supper. What supper? A supper of ashes. What does a supper of ashes mean?
These brief questions and answers are found in the scintillating Proemiale epistola prefixed to Bruno’s text: an introductory letter addressed in his own authorial voice to the French Ambassador, Castelnau, Lord of Mauvissière. They seem designed to present Bruno’s The Ash Wednesday Supper as a modern version of Plato’s Symposium. This use of a Platonic source is particularly evident in the structural and formal tactics that define Bruno’s text. He does not present the reader directly with the discussion that took place during Fulke Greville’s Ash Wednesday supper, but filters it through a conversation that takes place some days later. It is this conversation, concerned with narrating and commenting on the supper, that constitutes the principal dialogue of Bruno’s text. The imaginary philosopher, Theophilus, is presented as having participated in the supper, and it is Theophilus who describes the event, and the principal themes discussed then, to the other three participants in the later conversation: Smithus, Prudentius, and Frulla. At the same time, Theophilus narrates the adventurous journey through nighttime London that took “the Nolan” (as Bruno calls himself in the context of the supper) and a group of his friends to Fulke Greville’s rooms in Whitehall. These events, which give rise to frequent comments by the three other participants in the main dialogue, are thus presented to the reader in a series of flashbacks from constantly changing perspectives. Only in the fifth and final dialogue, between the four characters involved in the later discussion, is the supper left behind, and the cosmological theme developed directly without any further reference to Sir Fulke Greville and his guests.
These structural tactics appear to have been taken over directly from Plato’s text.37 Like Plato, Bruno uses a convivial banquet, or symposium, as an appropriate occasion in which to develop serious philosophical debate. Like Plato, he then narrates the original debate through the perspective of a second discussion that reviews the arguments discussed at the supper itself. He thus adopts a strategy of reinforcing the central philosophical message by “doubling” the author’s presence in the work (in Plato’s case tripling or even quadrupling himself through the voices of Socrates, his disciple Aristodemus, his lover Alcibiades, and the possibly fictitous wise woman Diotima, who is his instructress in the art of love). Like Plato, Bruno too “doubles” himself as “the Nolan” at the supper and Theophilus in the later conversation. He also underlines, like Plato, the comic contrasts created during the banquet between true philosophical debate and vain and empty pedantry or sophistry.38
Bruno’s relationship to Platonic philosophy, however, was by no means a simple or wholly admiring one. In spite of the Neoplatonic elements already developed in an early memory work such as the De umbris idearum, which will continue to pervade many of Bruno’s Italian dialogues culminating in On the Heroic Frenzies, it is clear from the Supper that he has already repudiated the Platonic doctrine of a transcendental sphere of ideas as the goal towards which the philosophical mind projects itself in its search for truth. This rejection is underlined by the baroque sensualism of Bruno’s invocation to his English muses in Dialogue I of the Supper, which finds its philosophical counterpart in the definition of his physical doctrine as one which teaches that we should not look for the divine outside ourselves, given that we have it near at hand, even within our own selves. To some extent, then, Bruno is writing an anti-Symposium; in the exuberant cluster of negative definitions of his banquet with which he presents his work to the French Ambassador, Mauvissière, he states explicitly that it is not to be read as a piece of Platonic philosophy.39
Yet the deliberate reference to the Symposium is far from being casual or simply critical. Bruno clearly shares, for example, the concept of love defined by Plato, in the words of Diotima to Socrates, as proper to the philosopher in his search for universal truths:
Whoever has been initiated … in the mysteries of Love and has viewed all these aspects of the beautiful in due succession, is at last drawing near the final revelation. And now, Socrates, there bursts upon him that wondrous vision which is the very soul of the beauty he has toiled so long for. It is an everlasting loveliness which neither comes nor goes, which neither flowers nor fades, for such beauty is the same on every hand, the same then as now, here as there, this way as that way, the same to every worshipper as it is to every other.40
Initiation through love of the beautiful and true leads to an entirely new concept of the universal whole contemplated in due and orderly succession by a mind now liberated, in an exalted sense of freedom and illumination, from slavery to base and distorted forms of vision. Bruno takes this theme over directly from Plato, even if the terms of the vision achieved have been overturned. For this is the spirit in which Bruno leads his reader into his post-Copernican, infinite universe. Bruno’s is a universe whose truth and unity lie not (as Plato’s does) in a static perfection conceived of as beyond the natural world, but in an ordered and natural mutability. And if the mutation is true, Bruno had written in his early comedy Candelaio, “everything which is, either is here or there, either near or far, either now or to come, either early or late.”41 Here we have a clear reversal of the Platonic text cited above. Not Plato’s transcendental sameness, but an infinite natural process of change and variety characterizes Bruno’s universe of truth.
In the Supper, Bruno also reverses the order of argument followed by Plato in the Symposium, for he describes his sphere of truth in the effect it produces on the inquiring mind before proceeding to argue the physical and logical premises on which it is based. So we find, in the first dialogue, or exordium, in the words of Theophilus, the series of celebrated passages in which Bruno evokes the liberating effect of the Nolan philosophy:
Then what shall be said of the man who has found the way to fly into the sky, to leap over the circumference of the stars, and to leave behind him the convex boundary of the universe?
He has released the human spirit with its capacity for knowledge from its false prison of turbulent air where the distant stars could only be seen as if through narrow chinks.
Here, then, you see the man who has soared into the sky, entered the heavens, wandered among the stars, passed beyond the boundaries of the universe, effaced the imaginary barriers …
There is no such thing as a “logical” method of having new ideas, or a “logical reconstruction” of the process. So wrote Karl Popper in The Logic of Scientific Discovery. To illustrate his point, he quoted from the greatest revolutionary scientist of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein, who, when speaking of the search for those universal laws from which a picture of the world can be obtained by pure deduction, claimed: “there is no logical path leading to these … laws. They can only be reached by intuition, based upon something like an intellectual love of the objects of experience.”42 It is in terms such as these that Bruno presents his vision of a newly infinite universe, populated by an infinite number of solar systems similar to our own, almost as if he were overcome by the beauty of his own construction. He is aware of that universe as revolutionary, and concedes full recognition to the fact that the revolution that put the sun instead of the earth at the centre of our own solar system was ushered in by Copernicus, whom he considers a man capable of profound and mature reasoning: “He can be numbered among those whose fertile genius has enabled them to rise up and hold their heads high under the benign glance of the divine intelligence.” Yet Bruno is equally concerned to underline the originality of his own image of an infinite universal order that rejects many of the traditional characteristics of the closed Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology that were still accepted by Copernicus. It is this double dimension of Bruno’s work, as the presentation and defence of Copernicus’s new cosmology, which in both Catholic and Protestant Europe was still being bitterly derided and attacked – or at most accepted as a purely mathematical hypothesis – and, at the same time, as an extension of that theory into a different and original image of universal order, that makes of The Ash Wednesday Supper such a complex and crucial text.
Why, then, a supper of ashes? And as Bruno himself asks: What does a supper of ashes mean? As an ex-friar, Bruno was fully aware of the manifold Christian implications of Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent when Christians remember that Jesus spent forty days in the desert where he was repeatedly tempted by Satan. The ashes stand for repentance: “For I have eaten ashes like bread, and mingled my drink with weeping,” sang David in his Psalms (quoted by Bruno from the Latin Vulgate: “cinerem tamquam panem manducabam”).43 Bruno asks provocatively if ashes had been served at Fulke Greville’s supper, answering his own question with an unequivocal: “No.” Nevertheless, the Catholic ceremonial of covering the head with ashes to remind the believer of his mortality, and to initiate the period of penitence which will last throughout Lent, is recalled, often with ironical undertones, more than once in his text. But who is to do the penitence in this English and Protestant context? Perhaps the neo-Aristotelian doctors from Oxford who were so rashly assuming that the new cosmology was nonsense, if not worse? Or maybe Bruno himself? For in the narration in the second dialogue of the long and meandering journey through the turbid waters of the Thames and then through the muddy darkness towards the Strand and Whitehall – which takes him and his friends at least twice as long as it should – Bruno seems to be reproaching himself with losing precious time in the obscure labyrinths of scholastic dispute.44
And then, what kind of Ash Wednesday is this in Protestant London, where instead of fasting there is eating and drinking, and worldly vanity of all kinds, which Bruno mockingly condemns? But the model that inspires his condemnation is surely, once again, the Socrates of the Symposium, rather than a return to Catholic ideas of Lent and the Mass.45 For Bruno is the new philosopher who, on the mountaintop of rigorous speculation into universal truth, is writing in the ashes of a sacrificial fire (which has consumed the old Ptolemaic cosmology) the order of a new universe which is infinite and eternal, and contains within it the form of its own divinity. Bruno is hurt and disappointed that the other guests at the supper are unable to understand the extraordinary importance of what he is telling them. For, as he writes in Dialogue III of the Supper:
the whole of this island of Britannia is a mountain which rears its head above the waves of the Ocean. The crest of this mountain is to be considered the highest place in the island; and if this crest were to reach the zone of tranquil air, it would prove that this is one of those very high mountains, where the place of the happiest living things is perhaps to be found. Alexander of Aphrodisias writes about Mount Olympus, where the behaviour of the sacrificial ashes demonstrates it to be an example of a very high mountain, whose air lies above the limits and regions of the earth.
Alexander of Aphrodisias, in his comment on the Meteorology of Aristotle, repeats the well-known legend that characters traced in the ashes of fires lit on very high mountains have been found the next year undisturbed.46 Bruno is using the legend to show that high above the earth there is still air. Although purified air, it nevertheless moves around in an orbit together with the earth. At the same time, Bruno is also suggesting that the story he is telling, in “this island of Britannia,” like those sacrificial ashes on Mount Olympus, will remain intact for many years.
Yet there is clearly a sense in which The Ash Wednesday Supper remains a Lenten text. It is not without Christian reminiscences that Bruno describes his challenge to the traditional cosmology as, in Dialogue II of the Supper, he wryly pushes his way through the streets of what appears to him as an increasingly hostile and punitive London, towards his appointment with Fulke Greville and his friends:
This evening I have been in the desert where I have gained forty thousand years of full remission of my sins, not for one or three but for forty temptations …
Whatever public or private transgressions Bruno had in mind here, The Ash Wednesday Supper, which opens his sequence of philosophical dialogues in Italian, appears to be the moment in which he decides to dedicate himself to the purification of a rigorous intellectual inquiry. Furthermore, the passage quoted above would seem to indicate that his inquiry was linked in his mind to the number four and its multiple meanings. The number four in the context of Pythagorean number symbolism – which Bruno at times refers to as something deeply embedded in the culture of his time – signified the unlimited vastness of universal being, given that the monad (the one and all), the dyad (or the number two introducing plurality), with the triangle of the triad, all added together with the tetrad (a group of four) give rise to the number ten, or a decade, and with it to all possible numbers and unlimited measure.47 Bruno is thus ironically linking the number of his sins to the transgressive nature of his new cosmological inquiry, which proposes an infinite universe containing within it all possible forms of movement and life.
The Infinite Universe and Worlds
Pure di nuovo gli confermava che L’universo è infinito. Et che quello costa di una immensa etherea reggione. E’ veramente un cielo, il quale e’ detto spacio et seno, in cui sono tanti astri che hanno fissione in quello, non altrimente che la terra.
And so once again he repeated that the universe is infinite; that it consists of an immense, ethereal region; that it is really one sky called space, or a container, in which many stars are situated just like the earth.
The new cosmology proposed by the Nolan at Fulke Greville’s Ash Wednesday supper, and further developed and commented on by Theophilus and his companions in the principal dialogue of Bruno’s text, can be considered a radical but not uncritical reading, and an extension to infinity, of Copernicus’s astronomical revolution. It has been the source of an intensely debated discussion from Bruno’s time until ours.48
“A student of mathematics rather than of nature”: this stringent criticism of Copernicus, which Theophilus himself voices in the first dialogue of the Supper, underlies all Bruno’s reasoning when, in the third and fourth dialogues, the Nolan is finally presented at the supper table in debate with the two neo-Aristotelian doctors from Oxford, Nundinius and Torquatus. The Nolan disagrees with Nundinius, who argues, as almost all his contemporaries were doing, that Copernicus never believed in the earth’s movement anyway, but only assumed it as a mathematical supposition on which to base new and more precise astronomical calculations.49 This hypothetical interpretation of Copernicanism had been powerfully supported by the anonymous preface added just before publication to the dying Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres.50 The name of the author of this preface – the Protestant theologian Andreas Osiander – would only be revealed in public by Kepler in 1604. Bruno appears not to have known who wrote it, although he was the first to suggest in print that it was surely not written by Copernicus himself. For the Polish astronomer in his own introductory letter to Pope Paul III claims that he is proposing a physical thesis as well as a mathematical one.51 Theophilus (Bruno’s mouthpiece in the Supper) insists that Copernicus fulfilled not only the task of the mathematician who supposes but also that of the physicist who demonstrates the multiple movements of the earth. But if, on one hand, Bruno refuses to align himself with the reductive interpretation of Copernicanism proposed by Osiander and accepted by Nundinius, on the other he accuses Copernicus of having understated the physical implications of his astronomy. What Bruno is complaining of is the excessive caution that led Copernicus to make his book so mathematically sophisticated that it was only comprehensible to erudite astronomers.52 These, in turn, were prone to miss, or simply ignore, the new cosmological physics that it contained. It is a new cosmology that lies at the centre of the Supper, which Bruno supports with both reasoned arguments and imaginative vision, underlining – rather than understating – the revolutionary aspects, within the culture of his time, of the newly heliocentric universe that he is extending to infinite dimensions.
In the third dialogue of Bruno’s text, the Nolan and Nundinius are described during their discussion at the supper as not disagreeing only in their opinions of Osiander’s hypothetical reading of Copernicus’s astronomy. Theophilus, in his later conversation with his three friends, narrates the terms of a more complex clash of opinions, involving multiple aspects of the new cosmological theory. Theophilus himself then goes on to debate with his English companion Smithus about further aspects of Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, establishing the principal terms of Bruno’s reading of the new astronomy. After pointing out that the heliocentric theory had already been considered seriously by earlier philosophers such as the Pythagoreans, Plato in the Timaeus, and the fifteenth-century Cardinal Nicholas Cusanus in the second book of his De docta ignorantia, Theophilus points out that the Nolan’s reading of Copernicus rests on quite different principles from those put forward by the Polish astronomer. The following pages make it clear that these principles are based on physical and optical arguments rather than on mathematical calculation. Commentators have frequently pointed out that Bruno had little mathematical training, and proposed a mathematical doctrine that seemed eccentric within the cultural framework of his day. His mathematical naivety is sometimes considered so great as to be shocking to the modern mind.53 Yet he manages to make it into a virtue by insisting, at a delicate point in the reception of the Copernican astronomy, on the validity of the new theory as a physical and cosmological model rather than a mathematical one.
Theophilus tells Smithus that the Nolan’s cosmology is based on what he calls “a true optics” and “a true geometry.” These replace the false optics and false geometry which study the sky in terms of pure mathematics, determining the size and position of the heavenly bodies without taking into due consideration non-mathematical variables such as the degree of luminosity of the celestial bodies, or their relative positions with respect to each other and to the observer.54 Bruno’s “true optics” may be based on very elementary considerations, such as the matchstick held up to the eye in the light of a distant candle, which in certain positions disappears from view. However, he uses these considerations to great effect by claiming that there may be many bodies even in the visible ranges of the sky which defy our powers of vision, as well as many more beyond the range of human sight. This was denied by the traditional Aristotelian-Ptolemaic astronomy that identified the heavens with those bodies visible to the sight. It was, however, shortly to be confirmed by Galileo’s telescopic sightings of the moons of Jupiter, which are invisible to the naked eye.
Bruno gives his reader no idea of what sources he was using for his optical reasoning in the Supper. It seems very probable, however, that his Parisian years had brought to his knowledge the Praefatio de usu optices of Jean Pena, the preface to his edition of Euclid’s Ottica published in Paris in 1557.55 Although Pena formally repudiated the Copernican astronomy in the final lines of his Preface, he nevertheless refers to Copernicus’s great mind, and discusses his version of the movements of the earth. Pena considered these movements as being demonstrable through correct optical reasoning, as Bruno does in the third dialogue of the Supper. Furthermore, Pena’s demonstration that there is no refraction of light as it passes from the higher regions of the sky to the elemental regions below the moon (even if this would later prove to be mistaken, according to the more precise observations of Tycho Brahe) was influential in leading to the repudiation of Aristotle’s heavenly quintessence, as well as of the solid, revolving heavenly spheres which were presumed to carry the stars and planets around with them in the sky.56
Another book that Bruno seems to be using is the Optics of Alhazen (Ibn Al-Haytham), an Arabic astronomer and mathematician who was born in Iraq and was active in Cairo in the first half of the eleventh century. The Latin translation of his work, known as the Perspectiva, was published in a Renaissance edition of 1572 by Friedrich Risner at Basel, and was widely used by the natural philosophers of the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries.57 The Ninth Earl of Northumberland, whose library contained the most important collection of Bruno’s texts in Renaissance England, attributed to a reading of Alhazen’s book the change of his life from a frivolous courtier to a dedicated natural philosopher.58 In chapter 7 of the third book of the Perspectiva, in a section entitled “The Ways in Which Sight Errs in Inference,” Bruno could have found many of the arguments he uses to establish his new cosmology in the Supper. Alhazen, for example, would have taught him that “the distance from which sight can perceive visible objects and the distances at which they become invisible vary with the lights existing in those objects.” Alhazen would also have taught him that the most distant stars, or those that lie at what he calls “immoderate distances,” seem all to lie at roughly the same distance from us because we see them in the same plane, whereas in fact the distances between them may be enormously large. This is an argument that undermines the existence of the traditional eighth or outer sphere of the universe, containing within it all the so-called “fixed stars”; it opens the way for Bruno’s claim that universal space is infinite, containing an infinite number of largely unseen worlds.
Bruno’s strongest defence of heliocentricity itself comes at the end of the third dialogue that reports the Nolan’s discussion at the supper with Nundinius. Here he finds himself up against the objection that, as Theophilus sarcastically remarks, had already filled up innumerable scraps of paper; for it went back to Aristotle himself, and had been repeated by Ptolemy in the Almagest.59 That is the argument that if the earth revolves eastwards on its own axis, the clouds must always appear to move towards the west. Similarly, if the earth also moves around the sun, the clouds should all be left behind. In reply to this claim, Bruno finds precedents in other texts of Aristotle, particularly his Meteorology, and even more clearly in Plato’s Timaeus, to justify the idea that the winds and the clouds are part of the earth’s atmosphere and circle with it as if in a giant lung. At this point Smithus takes the argument further, asking how the Nolan would reply to another more cogent anti-heliocentric argument, also anticipated by Ptolemy: that if the earth moved, an object dropped perpendicularly from a height would be left behind by the movement of the earth.
Copernicus himself, as has been pointed out by Paul-Henri Michel in his study of Bruno’s cosmology, dealt with this point by calling to his aid the traditional Aristotelian concept of the natural place of things.60 That is to say, he posited the concept of an essential “sameness” between the object dropped and the matter of the earth that would ensure that they “stayed together.” Theophilus, however, talking to Smithus in Bruno’s dialogue, argues independently of both Aristotle and Copernicus. He imagines the earth as a ship in movement in the unbounded ocean of space. Then (probably going back to the fourteenth-century impetus theories developed in Paris) he deduces the fact that a man on the shore throwing a stone directly towards a moving ship will miss it, while a man on the mast who throws a stone perpendicularly into the air will (if the ship is not rolling) see it fall to the foot of the mast. Bruno’s explanation of this phenomenon refers to the impetus that the movement of the ship has impressed on the stone thrown from the mast. In this application of the impetus theory to a moving earth, Bruno is interested in the relativity of the situations presented by the man on the shore and the man on the mast. He understands that they represent two separate reference frames of movement, and that such relativity must be taken into account in the consideration of moving bodies in space.
The fourteenth-century Parisian debate on the impetus theory contemplated the possibility of a diurnal rotation of the earth around its own axis, rather than the Ptolemaic diurnal rotation of the sphere of the fixed stars around a stationary earth. There was, however, no questioning of the central position of the earth within the whole. Nevertheless there was much interest in the relativity of moving bodies in space. Buridan, in his comment on Aristotle’s Physics, developed a theory of impetus to account for moving projectiles: “Thus we can and ought to say that in the stone or other projectile there is impressed something which is the motive force of that projectile.” Nicholas Oresme applied this impetus theory to an explanation of the vertical drop of the stone from the mast of the ship, and studies by Marshall Clagett and others have demonstrated how the echoes of this fourteenth-century Parisian discussion were still distinctly present in the sixteenth-century, post-Copernican cosmological debates. This page of Bruno’s has been placed in a line of development that, from the French precedents, will pass through the Supper to Kepler and Galileo.61 It would, however, be a mistake to overemphasize Bruno’s dependence on these French precursors. Giovanni Aquilecchia has pointed out that the ship experiment can also be found in the translation of and comment on book I of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus by Thomas Digges, the Perfit Description of the Coelestial Orbes, added in 1576 to his father Leonard’s Prognostication everlastinge.62 Nevertheless, by applying an impetus theory to a post-Copernican universe where the earth not only revolves around its axis but also moves freely around the sun, Bruno’s concept of relative mechanical systems in space becomes one of his most advanced scientific intuitions, which justifies his claim that he is not just concerned in the Supper to provide a commentary on Copernicus’s book.
Bruno’s dialogue opens up the whole question of relative frameworks of motion within a universe that has lost forever the unique point of reference supplied by a central earth in the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology, and, in Copernicus’s universe, by the sun.63 In the fifth dialogue of the Supper, Bruno refines his doctrine of movement. Parts move in a straight line towards their respective wholes according to the force of gravity, while the whole bodies in universal space, or the stars and planets, move in circles (although never perfect ones) around their suns according to an internal thermodynamic impetus which satisfies the necessities of the life evolving on their surface. These principles governing the movements of the parts and the wholes of bodies in space bear a clear relationship to the thermodynamic cosmology of Bernardino Telesio of Cosenza, a contemporary natural philosopher whom Bruno much admired. They are also related to Copernicus’s theory of gravity, but are transposed by Bruno to the context of an infinite universe filled with an infinite number of solar systems similar to our own.64
In the central third proposal of the central third dialogue of the Supper, right at the heart of his work, the Nolan, arguing against his neo-Aristotelian opponent from Oxford, Nundinius, puts forward three arguments to justify his claim of an infinite universe: (1) that there is no perfectly circular movement in nature, and that therefore the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic universe of revolving spheres is no more than a fiction; (2) that when we contemplate the universe we are struck by no sense or evidence of limits or boundaries; (3) that the universe as the effect of an infinite cause must itself be infinite. Although Bruno merges all three arguments into one discourse, it may be noticed that they are not all of equal validity in support of his thesis. The appeal to experience in (2) is clearly primarily imaginative, and can carry little or no scientific weight given the kinds of distance involved. As for (1), it weighs against the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic “closed” cosmology, founded on the idea of perfect circular movements of the heavenly bodies, but fails to prove that an alternative cosmology would necessarily be infinite. The strongest argument of the three is certainly the third, the so-called argument of plenitude or sufficient reason, which Bruno returned to again and again throughout his life with undoubted rhetorical and logical efficacy.65 The argument is anti-Christian, for it binds God to create necessarily in infinite terms, and eliminates the idea of a specific act of creation in a definite moment of time. In his search for an alternative creationist (or anti-creationist) myth, Bruno constantly uses the Hermetic image of an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere: the infinite universe thus becoming, throughout, a seal or sign of God’s eternal and infinite goodness and power.66 The argument of plenitude is thus not without Hermetical implications, although it needs to be stressed that Bruno uses it as the starting point of a cosmology which, as Alexandre Koyré correctly noticed, implies a new cosmic physics. Robert Westman has also pointed out persuasively the ways in which Bruno’s cosmology differs radically from that of the other Renaissance Hermeticists. Nevertheless, Bruno never separated his naturalistic pantheism from his natural philosophy, uniting the two through his philosophical concept of the “contraction” of the divine into the infinite number of individual bodies that make up the universal whole.67
The argument of plenitude is open to an objection which, in another context, Bruno makes against Nundinius: that is, that it presupposes its own principle – i.e. that there is in fact an infinite, intelligible cause. Bruno considers this principle a logical and physical necessity, for without a principle of divine unity or light to bind together the infinite vicissitudes of infinite space, there would be no possibility of knowledge or of meaningful action within the natural world. However, it is clear that once the infinite universe becomes the place in which a divinely infinite cause unfolds itself eternally in physical terms, the tendency to identifiy the divinity with the infinite substance of the universe itself becomes increasingly strong. The precise relationship of such a universe to its metaphysical cause becomes a problem fraught with uncertainties, and it is to this problem that Bruno will address his philosophical speculation in his second and third Italian dialogues written and published in London: Cause, Principle and Unity and The Infinite Universe and Worlds.
By the end of the third dialogue of the Supper, it has become abundantly clear that Bruno is arguing from entirely different and new positions with respect to what in his day were considered the normal, cosmological paradigms. In the fourth dialogue of this work he debates against the theologian Torquatus rather than the more scientifically minded Nundinius; his problem is to persuade his opponent not only that more than one cosmological model may be reasonably contemplated, but also, more difficult still, that more than one theological context may be considered as the metaphysical basis and foundation of the models being considered. In this dialogue a number of passages occur which have been amply commented on by Frances Yates in her early essay on “The Religious Policy of Giordano Bruno.” They are exchanges between the Nolan and Torquatus that appear at first sight as “irrelevant questions” or “disconnected queries” within the cosmological discussion being developed.68 Yates believed that these passages acquire meaning within the dialogue only if they are interpreted as oblique references to a Hermetic religion which became, in her later reading of Bruno, the real purpose and meaning not only of these passages but of the whole of the Supper. The passages underlined by her are indeed of extreme interest, and not without Hermetic points of reference, although it is questionable whether Bruno is primarily concerned here with advancing any one religious or philosophical doctrine of his own. Rather he seems to be arguing for a logical relativity in the sphere of religion with which to complement the relativity that will necessarily characterize any form of scientific discourse within his new, infinite and centreless universe.69
The problems arise when Torquatus, quoting the title of a well-known adage of Erasmus, barks out in Latin to the Nolan: Anticyram navigat. Anticyra was the classical island of the mad, and Torquatus is impatiently branding Bruno’s new-fangled cosmology, as the dons had already done earlier at Oxford, as an extreme form of madness. Theophilus, in his comment on Torquatus’s insulting remark to the Nolan during the supper, replies: yes, the Nolan may be seen as one who travels to Anticyra, but he goes there to gather the herb hellebore, which was traditionally thought to cure madness. That is to say, Theophilus launches the same insult against Torquatus himself, claiming that he is the madman whom the Nolan is trying to heal. This may seem to get the discussion nowhere, but in the following pages Bruno explains that the kind of debate he wishes to develop will inevitably seem madness unless some attempt is made to accept that more than one paradigm or context of thought can be valid, in cosmological discussions as in theological ones. This logical relativity is totally incomprehensible to Torquato, who insists on reasoning only in his own Christian-Aristotelian terms, comforted by the fact that they were also the terms generally accepted by his culture and his times. He therefore asks Bruno where the apogee (or the most distant position of the sun from the earth) lies on the equinoxes of Cancer and Capricorn, and is surprised when he gets the apparently senseless answer that it can lie wherever he likes. When Torquatus repeats his question, Bruno’s reply becomes even more extravagant; he asks Torquatus in Latin how many sacraments there are in the Church. He then tells Torquatus what the positions of the apogee are, but finishes the exchange by claiming that they could be above the steeple of St Paul’s cathedral.
Although Frances Yates claims that these exchanges between the Nolan and Torquatus during the supper only become comprehensible if they are “translated” into a proposal for a Hermetic religious reform, Theophilus in the dialogue with his three friends comments on them in rather different terms. He explains to Smithus that Torquatus has formulated his question incorrectly; if someone is proposing a heliocentric cosmology, it is the apogee of the earth which is relevant, not that of a now stationary sun. It could similarly be pointed out that when the Nolan asks Torquatus how many sacraments there are, he is concerned to point out once again that the correct answer will depend on the relative position of the person who replies: in the Catholic religion and in the Protestant churches, the number of sacraments is different. Similarly, the steeple of St Paul’s does not represent the only possible or known religious doctrine, even within the context of Christianity. By invoking the sun over the steeple, Bruno is certainly reminding his readers of those forms of sun worship that governed the positions of Greek temples, or of Druid ones like Stonehenge, as well as the Egyptian sun worship praised in the Hermetic texts. However, his point here is clearly to establish a plurality of possibilities as the basis of a discussion of both cosmological and religious issues, rather than to affirm any one doctrine as dominant or unique. In this sense, these passages can be seen as the logical consequence of Bruno’s opening gambit in this dialogue, where the geocentric certainties of the cosmology of the Bible are referred to as the major obstacles to a serene discussion of the new heliocentric astronomy: a prophetic premonition of Bruno’s later trial and the Galileo affair of the coming century.70
Bruno’s reply to this problem is to underline how the biblical texts that were being used to support the traditional Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology had been interpreted over the centuries in numerous different ways – literally, allegorically, and metaphorically – by theologians of different religions and schools of thought. This bewildering plurality of interpretations suggests to him that the Bible should correctly be approached as a literary text deriving from a particular historical situation, useful for the moral instruction of the masses, rather than as a divine and unquestionable source book of natural philosophy. This stand makes Bruno into an interesting precursor of some more modern approaches to biblical studies, but was clearly well in advance of anything that could seriously be accepted by the Oxford dons at the end of the sixteenth century. The Catholic Inquisitors would be equally negative both with Bruno and with Galileo during their trials, insisting that biblical authority cannot be denied in questions pertaining to astronomy or cosmology. It is to the credit of the Sidney circle that they nevertheless agreed, although with considerable concern and occasional scorn, to listen to the Nolan’s story.
The Movements of the Earth
Peró se volete compiacermi venite presto ad specificarme i’ moti che convegnono á questo globo.
So that if you wish to do me a favour, you should now give me a precise account of the movements which are appropriate to this globe.
In the fifth and final dialogue of the Supper, composed almost entirely of the final exchanges in the dialogue between Smithus and Bruno’s mouthpiece Theophilus, the movements of the earth around the sun in the new cosmology are considered as the foundation stone of Bruno’s infinite universe. Smithus claims that they should not be treated as a digression, but as the principal matter of discourse, for it is precisely as an infinite series of solar systems that Bruno’s infinite universe is conceived.
These pages of Dialogue V constitute the second discussion by Bruno in this work of the earth’s movements around the sun. The first account is given at the end of the fourth dialogue, and is presented as matter of discussion during the supper itself. It is convulsed and agitated by the continuous, disbelieving exclamations of the neo-Aristotelian doctors, and the only slightly more courteous attention of the other guests. Moreover, it contains a mistaken reading on Bruno’s part of Copernicus’s account of the movement of the moon around the earth. It is not surprising if it has caused considerable confusion among Bruno’s commentators.71
Torquatus starts things off in Dialogue IV by calling for pen and paper and drawing an elementary diagram of both the Ptolemaic and the Copernican systems on the same piece of paper. The Nolan immediately accuses him of inaccuracy for his drawing of the Copernican system. Torquatus (the Nolan complains) puts the earth at the centre of the epicycle of the moon on the third sphere from a now central sun, and the moon on the circumference of the epicycle centred on earth. The Nolan objects – quite rightly – that such a solution would lead to the diameter of the sun appearing from earth the same throughout the year, given that the distance of the earth from a central sun would remain always the same. Copernicus had considered precisely this problem in book III of De revolutionibus, and had proposed two possible geometrical solutions. The first was that the sun should be placed slightly off centre with respect to the whole universe. If the earth then revolves around the geometrical centre in a perfect circle, its distance from the sun will vary constantly, and the sun’s diameter will appear to vary during the course of the year. An alternative solution, which gives the same mathematical results, is to keep the sun at the geometrical centre of the system, putting the earth on the circumference of an epicycle whose centre revolves around the sun (see fig. I).
Bruno, in the course of this discussion, fails to refer explicitly to book III of De revolutionibus, or to distinguish between these two ways in which Copernicus had proposed solving the problem of the sun’s apparently varying diameter. He presents the Nolan simply as warning Torquatus that, according to the illustration he has drawn, such a problem exists and requires a correction that he himself then incorporates into the diagram published in his text. The published diagram thus shows the earth on the circumference of the moon’s epicycle, and not at its centre, where Torquatus had placed it. Incredulous, Torquatus asks for Copernicus’s book to be called for, and triumphantly shows the guests that the diagram at the beginning of De revolutionibus is similar to his: that is, it places the earth (represented by the point at the centre of the moon’s epicycle) on the circumference of a perfectly circular orbit drawn around an exactly central sun (see fig. II).
Theophilus’s comment on this apparent defeat of the Nolan at the supper table is that the diagram in Copernicus’s book should not be read as astronomically valid. What matters is his text, which he doubts if Torquatus has read. It is not clear if Bruno himself was aware that the diagram of the new universe published in book 1 of De revolutionibus (as in fig. II) was not drawn by Copernicus himself, but almost certainly by his pupil Rheticus. It was only meant as a schematic representation of the Copernican universe, without the scientific exactitude supplied by the diagrams illustrating the two hypotheses considered in book III of his text.72 There, Copernicus claims that it is impossible to know which of his two hypotheses concerning the earth’s movement around the sun is correct as a description of the real shape of the universe. Bruno fails to comment explicitly on this point in the Supper, although the diagram he publishes at this point of his text (see fig. I) makes it clear that he is opting himself for a truly heliocentric universe that places the sun at its geometrical centre. This choice will be confirmed in the later De immenso et innumerabilis (On the Immense and Innumerable), where Bruno explicitly claims that the idea of the sun at an eccentric position with respect to the geometrical centre of the universe is not acceptable in realist terms. He must already have been of this opinion when he wrote the Supper, as in his diagram of the solar system he places the earth on the circumference of an epicycle centred on a circular orbit around a central sun. The problem arises when Bruno – having interpreted one aspect of Copernicus’s thought more correctly than Torquatus – then goes on to place the moon on the circumference of the same epicycle as the earth. This would seem to make nonsense of the phases of the moon and of its movement around the earth. In order to save these lunar phenomena, Copernicus himself had placed the moon on a further epicycle, or an epipicycle, centred on the circumference of the epicycle containing the earth.73
Bruno fails to correct his lunar mistake when he returns to the problem of the movements of the earth in Dialogue V of the Supper. Rather, he makes things simpler by entirely ignoring lunar theory. He is dealing now only with the movements of the earth around the sun. Furthermore, the discussion is now confined to the later dialogue, with Theophilus and Smithus as the principal speakers. The interference previously caused during the supper itself by the neo-Aristotelian doctors thus no longer confuses or distorts the issue of debate. The pages in Dialogue V of the Supper discussing the different movements of the earth around the sun are an important part of Bruno’s cosmology, and of his whole concept of an infinite universal vicissitude. Their essential importance to the whole work is stressed by Smithus, who claims that they should not be presented in the form of a digression, but as a major aspect of the central argument of the whole work.
Fig. I From La cena de le ceneri, Dialogue IV. The lower part of the diagram represents Bruno’s correction to Torquatus’s representation of the Copernican system. © The British Library Board, C.37.c.14.(2.) p. 56.].
Fig. II Diagram of the universe in Nicholas Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, Liber I, cap. X, fol. 9v. The diagram is reproduced from the 2nd ed. of 1566 (Basilea: Henricpetrina), permission of the Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome, call no. II XII 65. This copy contains a handwritten inscription that suggests it may have belonged to Bruno himself. By kind concession of MiBACT, Ministero dei Beni e Attività Culturali. Reproduction of this image by any means is forbidden.
Bruno’s definition of the four motions of the earth around the sun in Dialogue V of the Supper still has to receive a full and fair interpretation. The first to try to do so was Felice Tocco in his still essential volume of 1889, Le opere latine di Giordano Bruno esposte e confrontate con le italiane (Giordano Bruno’s Latin Works Compared with His Italian Works). An admirer of Bruno’s natural philosophy, which he considered a serious precursor of Galileo’s new science, Tocco admitted to being stumped by Bruno’s account of the motions of the earth. He therefore asked the opinion of Schiaparelli, one of the foremost astronomers of his time. Schiaparelli, however, simply brushed the problem aside impatiently as uninformed and confused, claiming that neither Bruno’s reasoning nor his terminology had any scientific value.74 This judgment, coming from such a scientifically prestigious source, has cast a long shadow over all future discussions of these pages. Several decades later, Frances Yates, in her Hermetic interpretation of Bruno, was equally keen – although within a different intellectual context – to deprive Bruno of any technically valid scientific reason. For Yates was convinced that Bruno’s Copernicanism functioned only as a “Hermetic seal hiding potent divine mysteries.”75 The so-called “Yates thesis” has contributed a further and – for many readers – final blow to any attempt to read these pages as a valid contribution to the post-Copernican astronomical discussion.
Here an attempt will be made to reverse these negative judgments. I will be claiming that in Dialogue V of the Supper Bruno defines the four motions of the earth around the sun on the basis of a serious reading of De revolutionibus, and particularly of book III, where Copernicus formulates his new account of the precession of the equinoxes. For Bruno correctly understood the Copernican revolution in astronomy as a new celestial physics that attributed to the earth movements around the sun (including very long-term ones such as the precession) that were previously understood and calculated as movements of the celestial spheres around a central earth. At times, indeed, Bruno corrected Copernicus in the light of new theories, particularly concerning comets, which had been emerging in the forty years that separated the publication of Copernicus’s book from his own Ash Wednesday Supper. On the other hand, Bruno made no attempt to follow Copernicus in his remarkable, if extremely complex, computational achievements. Clearly technically unprepared to do so, Bruno in this matter makes a choice that also derives logically from a judgment expressed in some previous pages of the Supper when he claims that Copernicus was too much of the mathematician and not enough of a natural philosopher. It was the new celestial physics that interested Bruno, not the calculations, which he was content to leave to the professional astronomers, both ancient and modern.
Not all discussion of Bruno’s four motions of the earth in The Ash Wednesday Supper has been negative. Paul Henri Michel, in his valuable volume on Bruno’s cosmology, first published in a final version in French in 1962 (so two years before Yates’s Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition), was still writing in the shadow of Schiaparelli’s savage attack on Bruno. Without even going into the details of Bruno’s definitions of the four motions of the earth, he agrees with Schiaparelli that the reasoning behind them is confused and seriously inexact. On the other hand, Michel does try to salvage some of the general principles supporting Bruno’s definition of the four motions of the earth. He underlines that Copernicus’s own account, in particular concerning the precession of the equinoxes, is in itself inexact; Copernicus continued to think of the circular orbit of the earth around the sun as requiring a movement that he called an “inclination” (motus declinationis) in order to maintain its axis at the same angle with respect to its orbit throughout its annual revolution.76 Copernicus himself illustrates this concept with a diagram (fig. III) showing the geometrical co-ordinates of the movement of inclination required (according to a cosmology founded on the idea of solid orbs to which each planet remains fixed) to account fully for the unvarying inclination of the earth’s axis during the circular path of the earth around a central sun. Bruno, however, was one of the first to claim that a body hanging freely in space (i.e. not fixed to a celestial orb as Copernicus still believed) would freely maintain its axis in the same position with respect to its orbit: a dynamic principle that would later be confirmed by Galileo. Bruno thus substantially modifies the Copernican discussion of the motions of the earth by eliminating the motion of “inclination.” Michel’s emphasis on the importance of Bruno’s correction to Copernicus in this sense makes a positive contribution to the discussion of Bruno’s motions of the earth that contrasts curiously with his still obsequious respect for Schiaparelli’s criticisms.
Alfonso Ingegno, in his volume of 1978 on Cosmologia e filosofia nel pensiero di Giordano Bruno, made another important contribution to the discussion by concentrating attention on Bruno’s third and fourth motions of the earth in The Ash Wednesday Supper. The first two motions, as Ingegno points out, follow quite closely the outlines of Copernicus’s discussion of the daily rotation of the earth about its own axis and of the annual rotation of the earth about the sun. The crux of the matter, however, concerns Bruno’s discussion of the third and fourth movements, which Ingegno correctly related to Copernicus’s account of the precession of the equinoxes in book III of De revolutionibus. Indeed, Ingegno was one of the first to claim that Bruno must have read these pages of Copernicus with care.77 At that point, however, Ingegno concentrated his attention on what he took to be essentially a criticism of Copernicus on Bruno’s part. Ingegno took the central aspect of Bruno’s reading of Copernicus on the precession of the equinoxes to be the affirmation (certainly present in Bruno’s text) of a biological cause of the third and fourth movements, necessary in Bruno’s opinion to ensure the long-term changes in the climate and aspect of the earth’s surface. By underlining so emphatically Bruno’s discussion of the causes of the third and fourth movements, only hinted at by Copernicus himself, Ingegno underestimated the importance of Bruno’s attempt to offer a technically valid discussion of the nature of the movements themselves.
In this editor’s own volume on Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science of 1999, a more stringent effort was made to relate Bruno’s discussion of the movements of the earth themselves, rather than their causes, to Copernicus’s definition of them in De revolutionibus, and particularly to book III, where he discusses the precession of the equinoxes. This effort was much aided by the essential contributions on Copernicus’s own treatment of precession by Noel M. Swerdlow and Otto E. Neugebauer, not yet available to Ingegno. However, although it may be claimed that this effort succeeded in establishing a closer relationship between book III of De revolutionibus and Bruno’s pages in The Ash Wednesday Supper than had so far been recognized, it failed to clarify completely some of the more complex aspects of Bruno’s third and fourth movements of the earth. In 2009, Pietro Daniel Omodeo published in Nuncius a detailed discussion of “Giordano Bruno and Nicholas Copernicus: The Motions of the Earth in The Ash Wednesday Supper.”78 Although appreciating the necessity of relating Copernicus’s discussion of precession more closely to Bruno’s third and fourth movements than had previously been recognized, Omodeo accuses this editor of mistranslating some of Bruno’s terminology, and mistaking some aspects of his third and fourth motions of the earth. However, Omodeo’s own discussion of the third and fourth movements (in the opinion of this editor) is only partially exact. He offers an important contribution by giving, possibly for the first time, a clear and correct account of Bruno’s third earth movement. Then, however, he finishes his account with a discussion of the fourth movement that introduces new confusions, making it necessary to reconsider once more Bruno’s pages on the third and fourth motions of the earth. My aim here is to offer a clear account of Bruno’s third movement (in support of the formulation already supplied by Omodeo) and his fourth movement (as a correction to Omodeo). In both cases, a clarification of the movements as Bruno formulates them bears directly on the translation of some important and previously misunderstood passages of Bruno’s text.
Fig. III From Nicholas Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, Liber I, cap. XI, fol. 11r. The diagram is reproduced from the 2nd ed. of 1566 (Basilea: Henricpetrina), permission of the Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome, call no. II XII 65. This copy contains a handwritten inscription that suggests it may have belonged to Bruno himself. By kind concession of MiBACT, Ministero dei Beni e Attività Culturali. Reproduction of this image by any means is forbidden.
Swerdlow and Neugebauer, in their essential publications on Copernicus’s treatment of precession, underline the difficulties encountered by the modern reader in understanding his reasoning in book III of De revolutionibus.79 These authors, indeed, have no difficulty in admitting that they are still unable to clarify completely some aspects of Copernicus on precession, particularly regarding his calculations. Such difficulties would have been even more present to a reader such as Bruno, only forty years after the publication of Copernicus’s book, and part of a generation still educated in the traditional Aristotelian-Ptolemaic, earth-centred astronomy. Bruno was by no means alone, among what may be considered the second generation of Copernicus’s readers, to find his account of precession bewildering. The Jesuit mathematician Christopher Clavius, who would later enter into debate with Galileo, wrote in the 1590s that Copernicus “speaks confusingly, and he explicates and describes with extreme difficulty, so that soon it appears to me to be written so that everything is in conflict with everything else.” For his part – even if as a more favourable reader of the new astronomy – Christopher Rothmann, in a frequently quoted letter to Tycho Brahe, described Copernicus’s book as “obscure and not easily comprehensible.”80 Nevertheless Bruno, although without Copernicus’s mathematical abilities, accepts the challenge of attempting to furnish in print an acceptable account of precession, as it needs to be understood within a new heliocentric universe. At times, Bruno continues to talk about precession as it used to be presented in terms of the traditional earth-centred astronomy: something that Copernicus occasionally does as well. Ingegno and Omodeo have both made useful contributions in underlining the texts that Bruno had probably been reading: Ingegno by pointing to Fracastoro’s Homocentrica (1538), Omodeo by pointing to Peuerbach’s Theoricae novae planetarum (1454). The real interest of Bruno’s pages, however, lies in his effort to disengage himself from the traditional astronomy and discuss the earth’s movements in Copernican terms.
Bruno’s principal problem in his attempt to understand and explain precession as Copernicus had done, in terms of long-term movements of the earth, was that in the meantime belief in a system of solid celestial orbs had started to be questioned by the sightings of new comets. By the 1580s, the earth was beginning to be thought of as hanging freely in the firmament (Bruno being among the first to claim this principle so firmly). There was thus no need for a movement of “inclination” to keep its axis parallel to itself throughout its annual revolution around the sun. Given that Copernicus had merged his movement of “inclination” with the precession as his third movement of the earth, Bruno had to reformulate a third movement in terms of precession only (even if he never uses the word “precession” itself). This is what he tries to do in defining a third movement of the earth:
Terzo per la rinovatione di secoli participa un altro moto per il quale quella relatione ch’há questo emisphero superiore della terra á l’universo, vengha ad ottener l’emisphero inferiore, et quello succeda á quella del superiore.
Thirdly, for the renovation of the earth over the centuries, it partakes of another motion by which the relationship that this upper hemisphere of the earth has to the universe is reflected in the lower hemisphere, which follows that of the upper.
In a second explanation, Bruno writes:
Il terzo moto si misura da la habitudine ch’há una linea hemispherica della terra, che vale per l’orizonte; con le sue differenze al universo, fin che torni la medesma linea, ó proportionale á quella, alla medesma habitudine.
The third motion is measured by the relation that a hemispherical line of the earth, which is the same as its horizon, has to the rest of the universe, until it returns to the same line or one proportional to it, establishing the same relationship.
Copernicus visualizes his third movement as a slowly progressive movement of the earth’s equator as it moves around the sun. This is exactly what Bruno is doing, referring to the equator with the somewhat old-fashioned terms of “a hemispherical line of the earth” and the earth’s “horizon.” Bruno simply eliminates any mention of the “inclination” here, although Copernicus had merged it with his account of precession. What Bruno does take from Copernicus is the idea that precession, in the terms proper to the new astronomy, involves a slowly changing relationship between the two hemispheres of the earth and the rest of the universe (for example, the North Pole will not always be orientated towards the star Polaris as it is at present, and the equinoxes and solstices will occur in very slowly varying positions with respect to the background of stars). The movement is a closed one, in the sense that ultimately the earth’s equator will return both hemispheres to the original relationships they had with the universe at the start of the process of precession. Omodeo was correct in claiming that Bruno is not contemplating any kind of “reversal” of the relative positions of the two hemispheres during the precession. The claim was an important one, as many readers have assumed that the above passages meant exactly that. On the contrary, Bruno is only pointing out that the two hemispheres reflect each other’s movements (and thus their changing relationships with respect to the rest of the universe) while remaining in their established positions with respect to the equatorial line that joins them. Precession remains, nevertheless, an extremely long-term process, which the traditional astronomy, in a compilation known as the Alfonsine tables, had calculated to take forty-nine thousand years to complete. Copernicus had recalculated precession to take much less time, (approximately twenty-six thousand years). But this was his time for mean precession (which included the “inclination” as well as other anomalies), so Bruno seems to have mistrusted it. Consequently, he reverted to the traditional tables. Actually, Copernicus’s figure for mean precession turned out to be uncannily close to modern estimations of its period.
Copernicus’s third movement was not only inclusive of both the inclination and regular precession. Because neither the inclination nor precession was traditionally considered to have a uniform rate, he also had to take account of the varying rates of both of them. Copernicus merges all these factors, as well as some other anomalies, into a single movement, which counts as his third movement. Bruno, however, having eliminated the inclination, also has to eliminate the variation in the rate of inclination, and take account only of the varying rate of the precession. He decides to do this by considering it as a movement in itself, his fourth movement, which has been the cause of much misunderstanding. The very fact that Copernicus only mentions three movements of the earth while Bruno counts them as four has led, from Schiaparelli onwards, to accusations of a serious misunderstanding on his part of Copernicus’s account of the motions of the earth. On the contrary, Bruno’s fourth movement amounts to an attempt to follow Copernicus’s account of the variation in the rate of precession, while eliminating any reference to the variation in the rate of an “inclination” that Bruno no longer accepted as real.
These two irregularities had been considered in the traditional astronomy as a kind of wobbling of the eighth sphere of the heavens around two circles forming something like a figure of 8 that were traced on a ninth or sometimes even tenth celestial sphere. Bruno was aware of this account, which he refers to in the fifth dialogue of the Supper using the traditional term of “trepidation.” Omodeo has usefully demonstrated that Bruno’s references to the traditional account of the trepidation stay very close to the description furnished by Peuerbach in his Theoricae novae planetarum.81 The problem that concerns us here, however, is whether Bruno was aware of Copernicus’s new account of the traditional movement known as “trepidation,” transposed by him into irregular, long-term movements of the earth which he refers to as “librations.” If so, how faithful did Bruno remain to Copernicus, or how far did he attempt to adapt the new libratory mechanism to his own vision of an earth hanging freely in the universe, unsupported by celestial orbs?
As we have seen, Bruno no longer thought in terms of an “inclination” of the equator towards the ecliptic, but of an earth hanging freely in the universe. His fourth movement is thus only concerned with the alleged irregularity of the precession, or with a single rather than a double movement of the earth’s poles, which he nevertheless describes as “very irregular.” It may be considered doubtful whether Bruno had in mind any very precise idea of this simplified libratory mechanism, as in his description of it he gives no idea of the kind of irregular movement involved. Also, he offers no diagrammatic account of it, which means that any interpretation of it can only be deduced from his words. Bruno’s explanation of the alleged irregularity of precession in terms of a fourth movement of the earth is given in the following terms:
Quarto per la mutatione di volti et complessioni della terra, necessariamente gli conviene un’altro moto, per il quale l’habitudine ch’hà questo vertice de la tera verso il punto circa l’Artico, si cangia con l’habitudine ch’há quell’altro verso l’opposito punto de l’Antartico polo.
Fourthly, for the mutation of the surfaces and complexions of the earth, it must necessarily partake of another motion according to which the position of this vertex of the earth that establishes its point in the Arctic circle changes in the same way as the opposite point on the Antarctic pole.
Shortly afterwards, in a second explanation, Bruno adds:
Il quarto moto si misura per il progresso d’un punto polare de la terra, che per il dritto di qualche meridiamo passando per l’altro polo, si converta al medesmo, ó circa il medesmo aspetto dove era prima.
The fourth motion is measured by the progress made by a polar point of the earth that, passing through the straight line of some meridian to the other pole, directs itself towards the same position, or nearly the same position, as it was in at the beginning.
The “position of this vertex of the earth that establishes its point in the Arctic circle” is clearly a somewhat elaborate way of referring to the North Pole, involved here in some kind of (unspecified) movement away from, or around, its regular position along the earth’s orbit around the sun. The North Pole, in Bruno’s formulation of this movement, is connected to the Antarctic (or South) Pole through the line formed by “some meridian” (an expression which can only be interpreted in geographical terms as meaning any longitudinal semicircular line drawn on the earth’s surface that terminates in the North and South Poles). It is interesting to notice that Bruno prefers to refer here to the material line of “some” (or any) meridian, running hemispherically over the earth’s surface, from pole to pole, rather than to the more abstract straight line formed by the earth’s axis joining the two poles. Omodeo had already pointed out, in his discussion of Bruno’s third earth movement, that regular precession, visualized by Bruno (and Copernicus) as a movement of the earth’s equator, should always be interpreted in Bruno as a movement of material points on the earth’s surface, not of abstract or purely geometrical points.82 For as Ingegno had already argued, Bruno is always thinking of the long-term effects of these movements on the life-cycle of the earth, and not only in terms of a definition of the movements as such.
Nevertheless, Bruno is attempting in these pages of the Supper to give a very synthetic description of multiple movements of the earth, following Copernicus in his general revolutionary transposition of the traditional astronomical movements of the heavens into earthly movements, while not accepting his account in all its details. All that Bruno is saying here is that a libratory oscillation of the earth’s surface communicated to its two vertices, or poles, constitutes a further movement of the earth which, once again, returns the poles – at the end of another centuries-long process – to their original positions. A crucial point that needs to be underlined is that Bruno is not contemplating here in his fourth movement – as he was not in his account of regular precession in his third movement – any inversion of the poles during this centuries-long oscillation. Omodeo is mistaken when he writes that “Bruno seems to consider – wrongly interpreting the mechanism of trepidation – that the fourth motion of the earth is a complete inversion of the terrestrial poles.”83 Once again, as in his definition of the third motion, Bruno is not claiming that the poles exchange their positions, but only underlining that both poles reflect or face each other along the line of “some meridian,” thus carrying out at their opposite ends of the earth’s axis exactly the same movement (if in opposite directions), which eventually returns them to their original position. Given that Bruno at this point provided no illustrations for his idea of the libratory mechanism, the question inevitably becomes one of his language of astronomical representation, and Omodeo’s argument here is quite simply that Bruno’s passages quoted above can only be translated as referring to a complete inversion of the two poles. Such a statement, however, is questionable. Bruno does not use the word “inversione” but rather “si converta.” Attention needs to be paid to the use of a reflexive verb in the singular. Bruno is not saying that there is an “inversion” of the two poles, but rather that each pole “converts itself,” at the end of the process of libration, to its original position: “si converta al medesmo o circa il medesmo aspetto dove era prima.” “Si converta” (from the Latin “con-vertere”) can mean “to move itself from different points towards a single limiting point,” which is surely what Bruno is saying here: he uses a reflexive verb in the singular because he is referring to each pole in its own irregular movement of libration during the process of precession, and not to an “inversion” of the positions of the two poles. Furthermore, there is a logical connection that needs to be underlined here between Bruno’s account of the third and fourth motions. If there is no inversion of the poles during the precession itself (as Omodeo convincingly argues), there will surely be no inversion either during a movement strictly related to the precession in so far as it represents the supposed variation in its rate.
Finally, having finished his description of his four earth movements, Bruno follows Copernicus in emphasizing how they should really be seen as a single composite movement. Bruno’s reasoning here is extremely difficult to follow in its particulars, given that he illustrates this idea with a diagram of a spinning ball moving through the air (see fig. IV).
Fig. IV From La cena de le ceneri, Dialogue V. Diagram showing the multiple movements of a spinning ball thrown up into the air. © The British Library Board, C.37.c.14.(2.), p. 125.
Considerable difficulties arise for all commentators when they attempt to clarify this diagram, as Bruno in his text refers to numbers that are lacking in the diagram itself, and to some letters that fail to correspond to those in the diagram as given. Bruno mentions in this page, with respect to the spinning ball – which also moves up and down from the thrower’s hand according to the force of gravity – both that I at some point becomes K, and that O at some point becomes V. This is perfectly possible for a spinning ball, but makes no sense as an exact representation of the earth’s movements around the sun. On the other hand, none of the earth’s four movements around the sun, as Bruno has just described them, are precisely represented by this diagram. It seems rather an attempt to represent movements in space according to pre-Cartesian co-ordinates. The best way to understand the diagram, in my opinion, is to consider the spinning ball an imperfect analogy of a moving earth, introduced to underline a concept that Bruno considered important. He is concerned to illustrate with this diagram the way in which all earth movements combine into a single movement, so complex that its individual components defy exact description. Bruno concedes that the earth’s movements do have a “certain order” or regularity, and are therefore measureable, but he is of the opinion (explicitly expressed in his text) that ultimately they can only be reduced to a mathematics of approximation.84 It is nevertheless worth pointing out that Bruno’s scientific imagery, at times eccentric and problematic as it is, has recently been considered as an important moment in the developing history of images in the context of early modern science.85
When Bruno returned to the subject of the movements of the earth in chapter 9 of book III of his later Latin masterpiece, On the Immense and Innumerable, he gave a slightly differently organized account.86 Some commentators have hypothesized a rethinking on his part, but it seems rather that he is taking up a different point of view here. Rather than attempting an account of his own, he is simply paraphrasing Copernicus’s synthetic account of the three earth movements in the Preface to De revolutionibus. When he gets to the third movement, Bruno explains how Copernicus incorporates into it the idea of an inclination (declinationis) in order to keep the earth’s axis parallel to itself in its annual movement around the sun. Bruno even goes so far as to illustrate Copernicus’s account of the inclination with a slightly re-elaborated version of the diagram supplied by Copernicus himself in De revolutionibus (see fig. III and, for Bruno’s version of the same diagram, fig. V).
Only in a brief final paragraph does Bruno mention that Copernicus’s third movement also included an account of the precession of the equinoxes, referred to by Bruno as a “modest difference” (modica differentia) in the inclination of the earth with respect to the zodiac. The account ends with the brief comment that this small shift, from Ptolemy to the modern astronomers, was being considered as a very slow movement of the sphere of the fixed stars, to account for which it was becoming necessary to add a ninth and even a tenth sphere. Such an account, Bruno concludes, is now obsolete. It has become necessary to reconsider the question of this long-term movement in terms of a movement of the earth, although Bruno here makes no attempt to do this in any detail. Nor does he make here any separate mention of Copernicus’s libratory mechanism (designed to take into account the irregular rate of the precession, or the traditional movement known as the “trepidation”), which, in The Ash Wednesday Supper, had constituted Bruno’s fourth earth movement.
Fig. V Bruno’s version in De maximo et innumerabilibus, Liber III, cap. IX, p. 334 of the Copernican diagram at fig. III. Reproduced from the copy held by the Biblioteca Alessandrina, Rome. By kind concession of MiBACT, Ministero dei Beni e Attività Culturali e del Turismo. Reproduction of this image by any means is forbidden.
Ingegno is concerned to underline that the lack of any specific mention of the libratory mechanism in these pages of On the Immense and Innumerable should not be taken as a sign that Bruno had abandoned it altogether, as there are numerous mentions of its long-term effects on the earth’s surface in other parts of that same work.87 It would appear rather that Bruno at this point had come to consider the libratory mechanism as a factor to be incorporated into his third movement, as Copernicus himself had done and as is the case in modern astronomical accounts of precession. Thus, having eliminated Copernicus’s idea of an “inclination” of the earth’s axis as it moves around the sun (a subject to which Bruno returns at greater length in the following chapter 10 of book III of On the Immense and Innumerable), and having incorporated the traditional “trepidation” into the movement of precession itself, Bruno is left with a third movement of the earth around the sun which he can now describe simply but correctly as “a modest difference” (or long-term movement, observable only over a lengthy period of time) in the inclination of the earth’s axis with respect to the rest of the universe.
Ultimately, what appears from Bruno’s discussion of the movements of the earth is that they were not, in themselves, the principal centre of his interest, either in The Ash Wednesday Supper or in his philosophical vision generally. The new heliocentric astronomy interested him only in so far as it opened up the horizon of a far larger universe than the traditional Aristotelian-Ptolemaic astronomy was able to contemplate. For Copernicus himself had already admitted that his new sun-centred universe placed the most distant stars at a far greater distance from earth than had previously been understood. He mentioned more than once, in De revolutionibus, the spaces of a newly “immense” universe. Copernicus’s universe, however, still remained closed by an outer sphere of fixed stars, limited in their number. It was Bruno who made the leap towards a new cosmic vision of an unlimited space that he defined as “infinitely infinite”: not only infinite in extent, but also filled with an infinite number of solar systems invisible to the naked eye. This new cosmic vision was far bolder, and far more innovative in terms of a new idea of cosmological space, than anything contemplated by Copernicus, or even by contemporary “infinitists” such as Thomas Digges or Palingenius.88 That is the reason why Bruno warns his reader in Dialogue I of The Ash Wednesday Supper not to think of him as a mere Copernican disciple. On the other hand, the new heliocentric astronomy offered Bruno the conceptual basis on which to elaborate his new vision of an infinite space. What was at stake can thus be thought of as a physical entailment, as well as a logical consequence, of the earth’s motions: the infinitude of the universe, and the eternal motion of its innumerable entities. It was therefore essential for Bruno not only to understand the new astronomy, at least in its most essential outlines, but also to argue strenuously in favour of Copernicus against the two “scarecrows” invited to challenge him by Fulke Greville. For they were attempting to frighten off a future where man’s place in the universe would become that of a tiny speck among galaxies of infinite stars, into which, as Bruno already foresaw, it would be possible to travel and discover new and entirely unfamiliar worlds. In his later On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, Bruno would thus be able to write about a newly immense space, a womb or universal container, in which “there are innumerable stars and orbs, and earths that we can see as well as an infinite number of others that can reasonably be deduced. This immense and infinite universe is what is meant by such a space, and by the bodies it contains.”89
