Giordano Bruno

Giordano Bruno

Laura Miller in The heretic Salon 08/25/08 discusses a biography of the famed heretic Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic by Ingrid Rowland. Bruno was an Italian philosopher and priest (for part of his career) who wound up being burned at the stake for his ideas on science and religion with which he irritated both the Catholic and Calvinist Reformed Church during his lifetime. Miller summarizes his ideas on the world that the Catholic Church found particularly uncomfortable:

Bruno, too, [like Galileo] thought that the Earth circled the sun, and subscribed to many other than heterodox ideas as well: that the universe is infinite and that everything in it is made up of tiny particles (i.e., atoms), and that it is immeasurably old.

Italian democrats in 1889 placed a statue of Bruno in the Campo de Fiori in Rome, the place where he was executed, to honor him as a kind of martyr to science and as a criticism of the Church's suppression of free thought.

Rowland argues, in Miller's summary, that "Bruno was no martyr for science. What got him killed was a murky mixture of spiritual transgression and personal foibles, combined with a large dose of bad luck." I'm not familiar enough with his story to take sides on that question one way or the other. You could probably say that Joan of Arc wound up being executed for a mixture of reasons including "a large dose of bad luck". Martin Luther avoided a similar faith in part due to a large dose of good luck. I'm not sure that tell us much. In any case, the Christian churches shouldn't have been executing people, much less torturing them to death by fire, because of real or imagined shortcomings in their attitude toward the Christian religion.

One of Bruno's favorite topics for his writing was "mnemotechnical" themes. And what I found particularly intriguing about Miller's article was this description of how Bruno conceived the thought process with particularly reference to training the memory:

Bruno's achievements in the "art of memory" were legendary. (The Dominicans had once sent him to Rome where he recited a psalm in Hebrew before the pope, then repeated it backward word for word.) It's this aspect of the philosopher's work that most interests scholars of the Renaissance today, particular the distinguished late British historian Frances Yates, author of "The Art of Memory" and other books on what's known as the hermetic tradition: gnosticism, Neoplatonism, magic and alchemy. Her 1964 book, "Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition," insisted that it was Bruno's interest in such forbidden matters that led to his execution. Rowland apparently doesn't agree, downplaying Bruno's contact with figures like the Elizabethan "magician" Dr. John Dee and arguing that Bruno's idea of magic was "pointedly natural and physical" rather than occult.

Still, the mental powers of Bruno and his fellow memory artists seem almost superhuman today. The basic principle, Rowland explains, is simple enough, "to link words with images." Nevertheless, the structures employed were mind-boggling: vast, elaborate patterns and nested wheels within wheels (like the color wheels used by visual designers) that could be used to juxtapose and rearrange huge quantities of information without recourse to any extra-mental form of storage (like writing). This ability makes the minds of Renaissance intellectuals radically different from our own, almost incomprehensibly so. Some of the more outlandish things that some of them believed - such as the conviction that the universe is a series of rotating crystalline spheres with planets embedded in them, or that the space in outer space is a liquid - seem merely eccentric by comparison. [my emphasis]

It's a real reminder that people in other eras organized their understandings of the world and their realities in ways that may be drastically different from ours. That's a mundane observation in itself. But it means that its not necessarily so easy to read something written centuries ago and understand it in anything like the way the original readers and hearers understood it.

Miller also writes:

He reached his conclusions - about the universe's infinite size and age - largely through abstract contemplation. Unlike Galileo, Bruno had no gift for calculation or meticulous empirical observation; geometry and poetry were more in his line, and Rowland's own translations of his writings, amply quoted in this biography, testify to his literary talent. Bruno's mind inhabited the blurry territory between art and science, which at that time weren't seen as necessarily separated; his treatise "On the Immense," for example, is written in verse. Perhaps it's all the more impressive that, in spite of his own mathematical limitations, Bruno perceived the need for calculus (invented during the next century by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz) to deal with numbers of great and infinitesimal sizes.

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