MEET A HERETIC: Giordano Bruno (1548 - 1600)
Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer
Bruno entered a Dominican monastery at age 14 and wore the habit for many years. But he was ill fitted for the cloister and the life of contemplation. By the time he was eighteen he was already doubting the Trinity. To fellow monks he was so incautious as to speak warmly about certain heretics. He threw away his images of the saints and advised one of the brethren to read a more sensible book than the Lives of the Holy Fathers. The inquisition began to take an interest in Bruno. In order to avoid it, he broke his monastic vows and took to his heels. He went to Geneva and there he found that he was even less in sympathy with Calvinistic spirituality. He moved to Germany and stirred up a hornet's nest by his attacks upon the academics, whom he despised for making a trade out of philosophy. His life of restless wandering came to a sudden end when, seduced by longing for his native land, he went to Venice. He had been thinking of a reconciliation with the Catholic Church. He would, in his writings, at times confess that the Catholic Church was "after all dearest" to him. In Venice he was handed over to the Inquisition by a piece of shameful treachery, and thrown into prison to await his trial. At his trial he expressed deepest sorrow and rejected all charges that he was anti-Christian. By means of concessions he hoped to propitiate the Inquisition. The trial ended without a verdict, but Venice turned him over to the Inquisition in Rome. After years in a dark dungeon, he declared at his trial that he had nothing to repent of and nothing to recant. The tribunal found, instead of a broken man, a wonderfully composed heroic soul. The verdict was that he was an impenitent apostate. When the death sentence was announced, Bruno replied proudly to the judges: "Perhaps you proclaim your verdict against me with greater fear than I receive it." He died at 51 years of age on a pile of burning faggots on February 17, 1600.
To understand Bruno, we must think of him primarily as a poet-philosopher. He himself felt that a wondrous spiritual affinity existed among true poets, musicians, painters, and philosophers. Philosophy was poetry, and poetry divine truth. For Bruno, thinking was a matter of sketching the images born to his fiery imagination, and for that reason we must not expect precise concepts and definitions in his works. "He aims at the intuitive thinking, at conceptual images of things, at illustration of ideals."
Bruno's philosophical views sprang first and foremost from his reading of Copernicus' works. Copernicus dedicated his Of the Revolutions of Heavenly Bodies to the Pope, only to incur the displeasure of the church in spite of this. Luther was equally adamant toward the astronomer. In his studies of the Copernican system Bruno was struck by the concept of infinity. Consciousness of infinity, which comes to men through the study of astronomy, is one of the most powerful of human experiences. The idea of infinity is a metaphysical concept extremely difficult for the mind to grasp. Herein lay Bruno's real heresy. It was this affirmation of infinity which the Church felt to be the stupendous threat to its system. For, sweep away all boundaries and what was left of high and low? How could they go on speaking of the abode of the blessed and of a heaven to which Christ ascended? The Church had already indicted Copernicus' theory because it saw it as ruinous to its philosophical structure. This was even more true of Bruno's doctrine of infinity, which threatened to dissolve into nothingness the comfort offered by Christianity. The arching firmament of heaven, to which the Christian had looked up beseechingly, would be lost to him, and with it, his last safety. Instead of feeling that he enjoyed God's protection, he would be face to face with a yawning void. The dread inspired by such a view emerges in the outcry of Pascal: "The eternal silence of those infinite spaces makes me tremble.
Above was excerpted from The Heretics by Walter Nigg
In the year 2000AD, on the 400th anniversary of Bruno's death, the Roman church reviewed his trial. Cardinal Angelo Sodano defended Bruno's prosecutors, maintaining that the Inquisitors were motivated by the desire to serve the truth and promote the common good.