Part 7

But, anyhow, we know now that a man’s deeds and his loyalty to his own convictions are far more important than any declaration he may make of his beliefs, especially when such a declaration is forced from him or made to please others. Some people find it very difficult to believe things of which they cannot see the clear explanation. Other people, with very little effort, can believe almost anything they are told. They are like the White Queen in “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” who, when Alice said she could not believe impossible things, replied, “I dare say you haven’t had much practice. When I was your age I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

In the sixteenth century doubt and disbelief in any of the hard-and-fast rules and dogmas of the Church was not tolerated. Any one who was bold enough to refuse to say he believed what he conscientiously knew he could not believe was liable to be punished with the utmost severity.

In the Campo dei Fiori, the largest open space in Rome, a vast concourse of people assembled on February 17th in the year 1600. In the center of the place stood a huge pile of faggots: from the midst of its logs and branches there rose a stake. On many of the eager and expectant faces which crowded round might have been seen an expression of malignant triumph. The Church was taking revenge on a heretic who had refused to accept all the doctrines laid down by its authority, a heretic who actually taught that the earth moved round the sun.

Soldiers clear the way for the procession which advances solemnly to the spot. A small, thin man with a black beard, clothed in the garb of a condemned victim of the Inquisition—a sulphur-colored cloak painted with flames and devils—is led up to the pile. The priests even now, at the last moment, argue with him and attempt to make him acknowledge his error. With a look of melancholy but unconquerable determination he refuses to listen to them or to receive any consolation from them. A jeer rises from the multitude. He is taken and chained to the stake. Will he not at the last moment recant? Will he not utter the words that will save him from such cruel torture? Will he not pray for mercy? They wait a moment, but he remains silent, calm, and obdurate. The faggots are lit, the branches crackle; flames leap up; the victim writhes, but not a single cry escapes him. Amid frantic shouts from the crowd the smoke envelops him. In a few moments all that remains is a pile of ashes, which are scattered to the winds.... This was the end of Giordano Bruno, the Italian philosopher and poet, who refused to consent to what he thought was false and refused to deny what he thought was true.

It has been said that men resemble the earth which bears them. The volcanic slope of Mount Vesuvius was the birthplace of this fiery and unconquerable fighter. He was born in 1548 at Nola, and was the son of a soldier. Not only does he seem in his early youth to have had a great love of learning, but he was able to get the very best tuition in Naples, where he lodged with an uncle who was a weaver of velvet. His knowledge of science, mathematics, and the classics, as well as of poetry and music, was astonishing even when he was quite young. Besides Italian, he spoke Latin and Spanish fluently and knew something of Greek. In spite of his ardent nature, his first step was to shut himself up as a Dominican monk at the age of fourteen. He remained for thirteen years in monastic seclusion, and was duly promoted to holy orders and to the priesthood. He pursued his studies all this time with the greatest diligence. He laid in stores of learning which were the foundation of his independent views and writings in after-life. But it was impossible that a man of such fire and energy should tamely settle down to a quiet life of prayer and contemplation. The Church was in a pitiable state of ignorance and corruption. Young Giordano’s keen intelligence, strengthened by study and roused by his restless energy, soon drove him into conflict with his superiors. This was the first of a series of conflicts in which he combated the forces of authority wherever he went all his life through. He was accused of impiety because of the broad views he expressed about some of the principal doctrines of the Church. His position became intolerable, so he cast off his monkish robe and fled to Genoese territory, where he remained a few months supporting himself by teaching grammar to boys and occupying his leisure in reading astronomy. In this latter science he at once accepted the views of Copernicus. “The earth,” he said, “moves; it turns on its own axis and moves round the sun.” But what is now taught to every school child was thought then a dangerous doctrine, contrary to the teaching of Aristotle, which the Church supported. He also went further than any of his predecessors in suggesting that there were other worlds which were inhabited. The revival of learning which had been going on during the previous hundred years, while it had encouraged the more educated and cultured few to pursue their studies and think out new ideas, had also had the effect of making the many who mistrusted reform and were frightened of change much more particular and severe about the opinions and beliefs which men should be allowed to hold. The new ideas ultimately prevailed, but only after a desperate struggle. Had the school of thought which Bruno represented been allowed to develop without hindrance, the advance of enlightenment in Europe would have been far more rapid than was actually the case.

Giordano Bruno wandered over Europe alone like a knight-errant of truth. Persecuted in one country, he fled to another, everywhere stirring up dispute and controversy, urging men to _think_, and denouncing the fanatical and pretended beliefs which were making them thoughtless and cruel. Geneva, Lyons, Paris, London, Oxford, Wittenberg, Helmstedt, and Venice—these were some of the places he visited, the centers of the world’s active thought, where he could meet the leading men of the day.

Now, we cannot enter into the very difficult question of religious belief as it was understood in those days. Nor, indeed, would such a study be very profitable to any one. The wrangling of theologians has very little to do with true religion. Bruno knew this. While he was opposed to the Roman Catholic Church, of which he had been accepted as a member in his youth, he hated just as much at the other extreme the narrow intolerance of the followers of Calvin, the French Reformers, who also treated those who disagreed with them with great harshness and cruelty. Besides, there was almost as much stupid wrangling and brutal intolerance between Calvinists and Lutherans as there was between Catholics and Protestants. Bruno therefore did not stay long in Geneva, which was the headquarters of the Calvinists. Even in Wittenberg, where he was very well received, while admiring the attitude of the great Reformer Luther, who a few years before had been the foremost figure in the great struggle with the Roman Catholic Church, known as the Reformation, he by no means sympathized with the teaching of Protestantism. On the contrary, he referred to the German Reformers, when he was before the Inquisition in Venice, in the following way: “I regard them as more ignorant than I am; I despise them and their doctrine. They do not deserve the name of theologians but of pedants.”

Before we follow the wandering philosopher on his travels, let us try to understand a little of what he thought himself. He was not, as he was accused of being, just a blasphemous atheist who went about offending the religious feelings of all with whom he came in contact. He was not a rude, untutored sceptic or disbeliever who shocked people by laughing at their beliefs. He did not merely indulge in abuse and spiteful criticism. Though this is the view which was spread about him by many of his contemporaries and taught about him for many years after his death, nothing could be further from the truth. Giordano Bruno was extremely spiritual-minded. So far was he from being an atheist (which would have been just as narrow and dogmatic a point of view as that of any of the other extremes), he saw God everywhere and in everything, and his vision extended to the whole universe. He saw the essence of Divine perfection in man, but deplored the many causes which prevented it from showing itself. He wanted the mind of man to be free, and not fettered by all sorts of elaborate creeds and regulations. This freedom he demanded for himself, and he insisted that all questions should be considered as open. What he detested most were the disputes about religion of the various sects, the bitter and angry spirit they produced, and the ruthless persecutions carried on by religious bodies on all sides. Through freedom and enlightenment alone he saw that mankind could progress, and not through submission and ignorance. But all this was quite unintelligible to the vast majority, who took the narrow and bigoted views on religion which were common in those days. He was not a mere student of books, nor was he content with thoughts alone on the great problems of religion and philosophy: he taught, he wrote, he lectured, he spoke with such lively eloquence and striking persuasiveness, and sometimes with such violence of language, that it was impossible to ignore him. His views were fascinating by their novelty and boldness, but he entirely lacked caution and prudence. In these circumstances it is not surprising that he was excommunicated from the Church, expelled from universities, and driven out of the towns he visited.

For sixteen years he wandered about Europe at a time when to travel meant spending eight days on the road from Paris to Calais: he had to put up in inns with very rough fare and sometimes only a bed of straw. Books were now printed, but they still circulated very slowly, and the fame of a professor was made more by “disputation,” that is to say, lecture and debate, than by the publication of his writings. Nevertheless, the wandering Italian published several books in every town he visited. With the exception of a few that have been lost, most of his philosophical writings and poems have been collected together and preserved.

Bruno found France torn by internal quarrels between the Protestant Huguenots and the Roman Catholics, which had been going on for some years in the shape of a destructive civil war. Only eight years before, in 1572, there had been a wholesale massacre of Protestants in Paris on St. Bartholomew’s Eve, when Charles IX was king. All this served to show Bruno to what excesses men could be driven in religious strife. After a visit to Toulouse, where he taught astronomy and philosophy, he proceeded to Paris. Here, although he refused to attend Mass, he managed to become a professor, chiefly by the favor of King Henry III, who, however, required to be satisfied first of all that Bruno’s wonderful memory came “by knowledge and not by magic arts.” In gratitude for these favors the philosopher referred to the King in his writings with exaggerated praise. It was indeed one of the charges against him, when he came to his trial in Venice, that he had praised the heretic prince, the news of whose assassination in 1589 was received in Rome with a salute of cannon.

Bruno’s method of lecturing must have been very startling to those who were accustomed to the grave airs of the learned professors. He was enthusiastic and eloquent, and so eager that his hearers should grasp his meaning that he would adopt every sort of different manner of addressing them. Sometimes grave and prophet-like, at other times lively and gay: sometimes fierce and combative, and then, again, indulging in gross buffoonery. He was bent on attracting attention and rousing the indifference of his audiences. In his writings, too, he showed varying moods. The wit, the scoffer, the poet, the mystic, and the prophet all appear. Great as his learning was, he depended more on his intuitions; that is to say, the imaginative poet in him was stronger than the scientific scholar. But some of the wisest philosophers in after-years owed a great deal to his wonderfully far-reaching thoughts and ideas.

In 1583 he went to London with letters furnished by the King of France to his Ambassador. He found Queen Elizabeth very sympathetic. A friendly welcome was extended by her court to all foreigners, and she herself spoke Italian fluently. He was also fortunate in having a cultured and liberal-minded patron in the Ambassador, M. Castelnau de Mauvissière, who was endeavoring to negotiate a marriage between Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Anjou. Bruno, who was excused from attending Mass in the Embassy chapel, was no doubt grateful for the considerate way in which he was treated, for several books produced by him during his stay in England were dedicated to the Ambassador. He also alludes to the Ambassador’s wife with respectful praise, and remarks enthusiastically about his little daughter: “Her perfected goodness makes one marvel whether she be flown from heaven or be a creature of this common earth.”

London had only a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants in those days, and was not such an important place as Paris or even Lisbon. Foreign visitors were not well received as a rule by the people, and English students seldom traveled abroad. Though the Queen prided herself on her learning, very little education and no freedom of discussion were allowed among her humbler subjects. Printers were only licensed in London, Oxford, and Cambridge, and every publication was rigorously examined. Without his introduction to the court, Bruno would probably have been silenced after a very short time. As it was, in England no more than elsewhere could the philosopher take things quietly, though he very much appreciated the comparative liberty of thought and speech he was allowed. He had no sooner arrived in London than he sent to Oxford University a challenge which he appropriately called “The Awakener.” With a loud flourish of trumpets, he described himself as:

a doctor in perfected theology; a professor of pure and blameless wisdom; a philosopher known, approved, and honorifically acknowledged by the foremost academies of Europe; to none a stranger except to the barbarians and the vulgar; a waker of slumbering souls; a breaker of presumptuous and stubborn ignorance.

Both to the Sorbonne in Paris and the Wittenberg University he addressed himself in much more dignified and modest language. He evidently did not take Oxford very seriously, and indeed there was very little intellectual life in that University, which was under the rule of the Queen’s favorite, Lord Leicester. The professors were court nominees, and Bruno describes them as “men arrayed in long robes of velvet, with hands most precious for the multitude of costly rings on their fingers, golden chains about their necks, and with manners as void of courtesy as cowherds.” He also thought they knew a good deal more of beer than of Greek. The students were very young, ignorant, and boorish, occupied in drinking, dueling, and toasting in ale-houses and country inns. However, he had a very high opinion of the University as a whole, and consented to deliver a series of lectures and also held a public disputation before the Chancellor and an illustrious foreign visitor. He appears to have aroused the pedagogues to fury, and, by his own account, fifteen times he worsted his chief adversary, who could only reply by abuse. He stood up in the assembly a small man, “rough hewn,” with disheveled hair, wearing an old coat with several buttons wanting, while the Oxford doctors, whose opposition he describes as based on “ignorance, presumption, and rustic rudeness,” wore “twelve rings on two fingers and two chains of shining gold.” While they were attempting to defend the old teaching of Aristotle from the attacks of a man they regarded as an eccentric charlatan, he explained his new ideas, which were to them startling and highly objectionable.

Small wonder that after three months his public lectures were brought to an end and he returned to London. Here he made several friends, among them Sir Philip Sidney, the poet-soldier, of whom he had already heard in Italy, for Sidney had studied at Padua. Fulk Greville, who described himself on his epitaph as “Servant to Queen Elizabeth, Councilor to King James, and friend to Sir Philip Sidney,” also became intimate with him, and at his house Bruno held a second disputation, at which he again seems to have aggravated his hearers. He had a sincere admiration for Sidney and dedicated a book of sonnets to him. The protection given to him by Queen Elizabeth he repaid by referring to her in his poems in terms of the highest flattery, which no doubt she appreciated. But this praise of a Protestant Queen, who herself was excommunicated, was eventually brought against him by his judges. He was greatly impressed by the beauty and bearing of English women and by “the Briton’s terrible energy, who, regardless of the stormy deep and the towering mountains, goes down to the sea in ships mightily exceeding Argonautic art.” After two years in England he returned to Paris with the French Ambassador, who, he says, “saved him from the Oxford pedants and from hunger.” But he did not stay long in Paris, “because of the tumults,” and proceeded on his wanderings into Germany.

At Marburg, the rector of the University refused Bruno permission to hold public disputations on philosophy, at which, the rector himself says, “he fell into a passion of anger and he insulted me in my house.” No doubt he made it very unpleasant for any one who attempted to thwart him, for he was headstrong and impetuous. At Wittenberg he was permitted to enter his name on the lists of the University, and also to give private lectures. The professors of Toulouse, Paris, and Oxford, he declared, received him “with grimaces, upturned noses, puffed cheeks, and with loud blows on the desk,” but the learned men of Wittenberg showed him courtesy and left him in peace. In fact, he was able to remain there working for two years, until, owing to the feud between the Lutherans and the Calvinists, in which the latter got the upper hand, he found himself compelled to quit the city. On his departure he pronounced a great oration in praise of wisdom, which malicious public opinion described as a speech in favor of the devil.

His next halt was at Prague, where he was received by the Emperor Rudolph II, the patron of Tycho Brahe and Kepler, and a student of philosophy and astronomy as well as of magic and astrology. The Italian philosopher addressed a small work to His Majesty, in which he repeats that his mission is to free the souls of men and to triumph over ignorance: he laments the hateful quarreling of different creeds, and proclaims charity and love to be the only true religion. As he did not meet with sympathy or support in Prague, he passed on to Helmstedt, where the Duke of Brunswick charged him with the education of his son. But here again he got at cross-purposes with the authorities, and this brought down on him a sentence of excommunication. He justified himself, and wrote a scathing attack on the pastor and rector of the University, who were his chief enemies. But it was not possible for him to remain, so he turned his steps toward Frankfort. This town was the center of the German book trade: fairs were held at Easter and Michaelmas, and people came from other countries to try and exchange books, which were still very rare. Bruno published several books here, and one might think he would have been left to pursue his studies without interference. But the burgomaster, or mayor, sternly refused to allow him to lodge with his printer. A convent of Carmelites therefore gave him shelter, and there he is said to have been “busied with writing for the most part all day long, or in going to and fro indulging in subtle inquiries, wrapt in thought and filled with fantastic meditations upon new things.”

It is very curious that Giordano Bruno should ever have been persuaded to return to Italy. But he seems not to have thought it impossible that he could become reconciled to the Church while retaining for himself a certain freedom of thought. No doubt he was also tempted to return by his love of his native land. Yet he must have had a foreboding of the danger he was running when he wrote, on leaving Frankfort: “The wise man fears not death; nay, even there are times when he sets forth to meet it bravely.”

Bruno now made the acquaintance of the traitor by whose falseness he was eventually to be handed over to a cruel fate. Giovanni Mocenigo was a member of one of the foremost Venetian families. But the wisdom of his ancestors, seven of whom had been Doges—that is, chief magistrates—of Venice, had degenerated in him into cunning. He came across Bruno’s books, and out of curiosity, believing that there was something occult and supernatural about Bruno’s teaching, he invited him to come and stay with him in Venice. The philosopher innocently accepted the invitation. His reputation as a man of lively conversation preceded him, and he found himself cordially received in Venetian literary society. But very soon Mocenigo began to grow discontented with his master. He was quite unable to understand his teaching or to profit in the smallest degree by the Art of Memory, which was one of Bruno’s favorite principles of instruction. In fact, the two were completely out of sympathy, and the patron began to insist that he got no return for his generous hospitality. Bruno at first tried to reason with him, but finding him hopelessly dense and narrow-minded, became exasperated and begged he might be set at liberty to return to Frankfort. Mocenigo then determined to betray him because of his religious opinions. He consulted his confessor, and then denounced his unfortunate guest to the Father Inquisitor at Venice as a wicked and irreligious man. Accompanied by his servant and five or six gondoliers, he burst in upon Bruno while he was in bed and dragged him to a garret, where he locked him up. The trial took place in 1592. The charges brought against Giordano Bruno were that he had criticized the methods of the Church, desired and foretold its reform, disputed its doctrines, consorted with heretics, and taught principles which were repugnant to Catholics. The culprit gave a complete account of his life; he said he was sorry if he had done what was wrong or taught what was false, and was ready to atone for any scandal he had given in the past, but he did not retract a single one of his convictions.

It may be well here just to say a word about the Inquisition, which has been so often mentioned and figures so prominently in the history of these times.