BRUNO (GIORDANO) (1548- 1600), nacido en Nola (Nápoles)[i], discípulo de Francesco Patrizzi, maestro de la Academia Florentina, ingresó en la Orden de los Dominicos[ii], pero la abandonó después de haber sido acusado de herejía, y viajó por Francia, Inglaterra y Alemania, regresando a Italia (Roma), en donde fue encarcelado por la Inquisición y quemado vivo en la hoguera[iii] al negarse a la abjuración de su doctrinas.
Influido muy poderosamente por el neoplatonismo y por la admisión de la teoría copernicana, pero acogiendo asimismo otros múltiples elementos —estoicismo, mística, monadismo—, Bruno defendió con exaltación poética la doctrina de la infinitud del universo, el cual es concebido, por otro lado, no como un sistema de seres rígidos, articulados en un orden dado desde la eternidad, sino como un conjunto que se transforma continuamente, que pasa de lo inferior a lo superior y de éste a aquél, por ser, en el fondo, todo una y la misma cosa, la vida infinita e inagotable. En esta vida quedan disueltas todas las diferencias, las cuales son propias únicamente de lo superficial, de lo finito y limitado. La infinitud espacial y temporal del universo astronómico corresponde a la infinitud de Dios, que se halla a la vez en el mundo y fuera del mundo, que es causa inmanente del mundo y está infinitamente por encima de él, oposiciones que sólo son paradójicas para Bruno cuando no se comprenden desde el mismo punto de vista que Nicolás de Cusa atribuye a la razón especulativa: el punto de vista de la coincidencia de los opuestos en lo infinito.
El Universo está penetrado de vida y es él mismo vida, esto es, organismo infinito en el cual se hallan los organismos de los mundos particulares, de los infinitos sistemas solares análogos al nuestro. Lo que rige esta infinitud de mundos es la misma ley, porque es la misma vida, el mismo espíritu y orden y, en última instancia, el mismo Dios. Dios está presente en todas las cosas, con su infinito poder, sabiduría y amor, porque es todas las cosas, el máximo y el mínimo o, como dice Bruno, la mónada de las mónadas.
La concepción monadológica es el complemento de esta visión de un universo-vida infinito; las mónadas son los componentes del organismo del mundo y no los átomos, que son disolución y muerte. La misión del hombre es el entusiasmo ante la contemplación de esta infinitud, la adoración del infinito, que es Dios, adoración en la cual puede hallarse la verdadera unidad de las creencias religiosas más allá de todo dogma positivo. Tal entusiasmo es, al mismo tiempo, una heroicidad, un "entusiasmo heroico" que Bruno debió experimentar del modo más completo al morir justamente por haberlo defendido hasta el fin. La filosofía de Bruno manifestaba así, de manera eminente, esta peculiar condición del pensamiento renacentista: la aspiración a una filosofía dinámica construida con los materiales clásicos y, sobre todo, con aquellos materiales que eran con frecuencia formalmente rechazados, los aristotélicos. Condición que se revela particularmente en la doctrina de la materia, sometida en el pensamiento de Bruno a un proceso de disolución que la lleva al ser pleno, del mismo modo que el ser pleno es dialécticamente transformado en materia y en nada. De ahí la afirmación de que "en nada se diferencian la absoluta potencia y el acto absoluto"; y de ahí también la tesis de que "en definitiva, bien que haya individuos innumerables, todo es uno, y conocer esta unidad es el objeto y término de toda filosofía y contemplación natural" (Causa, principio y uno, IV).
Ver también: Nicolás Copérnico
Bruno, Giordano
(1548–1600)
Giordano Bruno, the most famous of the Italian philosophers of the Renaissance, was born at Nola, near Naples.
At an early age he entered the Dominican order and became an inmate of the Dominican convent in Naples.
In 1576 he was accused of heresy and fled, abandoning the Dominican habit. Thereafter he wandered through Europe. After visiting Geneva, and lecturing on the Tractatus de Sphaera Mundi of Sacrobosco at Toulouse, Bruno reached Paris in 1581. Here he gave public lectures that attracted the attention of King Henri III, and published two books on the art of memory that reveal him as greatly influenced by that textbook of Renaissance magic, the De Occulta Philosophia of Henry Cornelius Agrippa, from which he quotes lists of magic images of the stars, incantations, and other occult procedures. Bruno as a Renaissance magus, in line of descent from the learned philosophical magic inaugurated by Marsilio Ficino, is already present in these books. The title of one of them, De Umbris Idearum (Shadows of Ideas), is taken from the necromantic commentary on the Sphere of Sacrobosco by Cecco d’Ascoli, whom Bruno mentions admiringly in other works. It may be inferred that the lectures at Toulouse were probably based on this commentary.
Early in 1583 Bruno went to England with letters of recommendation from Henri III to the French ambassador in London.He lived in the French embassy during the two years he spent in England, and the ambassador protected him from the tumults aroused by his writings, which were clandestinely printed in London. These included the Triginta Sigilli (Thirty seals), an extremely obscure work on his magic art of memory; those who manage to reach the end of it find an advocacy of a new religion based on love, art, magic, and mathesis. It is dedicated to the vice-chancellor and doctors of the University of Oxford in high-sounding terms in which Bruno announces himself as “the waker of sleeping souls, tamer of presumptuous and recalcitrant ignorance, proclaimer of a general philanthropy.”
In June 1583 the Polish prince Albert Alasco (Laski) visited Oxford and was entertained with public disputations. Bruno was in his train, and, according to a recently discovered account by George Abbot, afterward archbishop of Canterbury, Bruno returned to Oxford after the party had left and delivered, uninvited, lectures that were largely a repetition of Marsilio Ficino’s work on astral magic, the De Vita Coelitus Comparanda (On drawing down the life of heaven), although he also maintained Nicolas Copernicus’s opinion “that the earth did go round and the heavens did stand still.” Abbot says that Bruno was induced to discontinue the lectures when the plagiarism from Ficino was pointed out to him.
While in England, Bruno published five dialogues in Italian. In La cena de le ceneri (The Ash Wednesday supper; 1584) he defends his version of the Copernican theory against Oxford “pedants,” a reflection of his visit to Oxford. In De la causa, principio e uno (1584) he apologizes for the storms aroused by his attack on Oxford, but makes matters worse by defending the friars of pre-Reformation Oxford, whom he prefers to their Protestant successors.
The De l’infinito, universo e mondi (1584) is an exposition of his vision of an infinite universe and innumerable worlds. The Spaccio de la bestia trionfante (The expulsion of the triumphant beast; 1584) envisages a universal moral and religious reform and is dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. The Cabala del cavallo pegaseo (Cabal of the horse Pegasus; 1585) indicates Bruno’s adaptation of the Jewish kabbalah. The De gli eroici furori (On heroic enthusiasms; 1585) also dedicated to Sidney, is in the form of a sonnet sequence with commentaries expounding the philosophical and mystical meanings of the poems. It is upon this series of most striking and brilliant works, in which Bruno appears as the propagator of a new philosophy and cosmology, a new ethic and religion, that his fame largely rests. They are all full of Hermetic influences and are bound up with a complex religious, or politico-religious, mission for which Bruno believed he had the support of Henri III, and which cannot have been uncongenial to the French ambassador,Michel de Castelnau de Mauvissière, to whom three of the books are dedicated.
Sidney’s reactions to Bruno are unknown.
Late in 1585 Bruno returned to Paris, where he delivered an address on his philosophy in the Collège de Cambrai, arousing strong opposition, and where he had a curious controversy with Fabrizio Mordente about the compass that Mordente had invented. Paris was in a disturbed state, on the eve of the wars of the League, and Bruno’s activities added to the “tumults,” from which he fled in 1586 and began his travels through Germany. He was favorably received at the University of Wittenberg, and during his stay there he wrote a number of works, particularly on the art of Ramón Lull, to which he attached great importance and which he believed he understood better than Lull himself. From Wittenberg he went to Prague, where he tried to obtain the favor of Emperor Rudolph II with his Articuli Adversus Mathematicos (1588), in which he states that he is strongly against mathematics, which he regarded as a “pedantry” lacking in deep magical insight into nature. His objection to Copernicus as a “mere mathematician” had been on similar lines. The work is illustrated with magical diagrams, representing what he called his mathesis, and its preface outlines a movement of tolerance and general philanthropy that is to replace sectarian bitterness. He next spent some time at Helmstedt, where he enjoyed the favor of the reigning duke, Henry Julius of Brunswick- Wolfenbüttel, and made a speech in praise of the late duke in which he outlined his program of moral reform in language similar to that used in the Spaccio de la bestia trionfante. It was probably while at Helmstedt that Bruno wrote the De Magia and other works on magic unpublished in his lifetime.
With the money Henry Julius gave him for the oration, Bruno went to Frankfurt to have printed the Latin poems he had written during his wanderings. These were the De Innumerabilibus, Immenso et Infigurabili, the De Triplici Minimo et Mensura, and the De Monade Numero et Figura, all of which were printed by John Wechel in 1591. In these Latin poems, written in a style imitating Lucretius, Bruno expresses his philosophical and cosmological speculations in their final form. Like the Italian dialogues on these themes, the Latin poems are full of Hermetic influences, particularly of the mathesis, or magical numerology, which Bruno had been further developing during his travels. He also published the last of his books on his magical arts of memory at Frankfurt.
In August 1591, Bruno returned to Italy at the invitation of a Venetian nobleman who wished to learn the secrets of his art of memory. There can be little doubt that Bruno was encouraged to take this step by the hopes of greater religious toleration aroused by the conversion of Henri IV of France. Bruno had in his baggage the manuscript of a book he intended to dedicate to Pope Clement VIII. It is strange that one who had stated in his published Works that Christ was a magus and that the magical religion of the Egyptians was better than Christianity should have felt that he could place himself with impunity within reach of the Inquisition. Bruno seems, however, always to have sincerely believed that his religious and moral reform could take place within a Catholic framework. He was arrested in Venice and thrown into the prisons of the Inquisition. At the end of the Venetian trial he recanted his heresies, but was sent to Rome for another trial. Here he remained in prison for eight years, at the end of which he was sentenced as a heretic (having refused, this time, to recant) and was burned alive on the Campo de’ Fiori.
Although the actual processo stating on what grounds he was condemned is not extant, it seems most probable that Bruno was burned as a magician, as an “Egyptian” who had been propagating throughout Europe some movement the nature of which remains mysterious, although it may well be connected with the origins of Rosicrucianism and of Freemasonry. His philosophical views in themselves can have had little to do with the condemnation, unless insofar as they, too, were associated with the movement.
[i] Su nombre de nacimiento era Filipo, que posteriormente habría de cambiarse a Giordano.
[ii] En 1572 fue ordenado sacerdote.
[iii] Muere en campo de Fiori como «hereje imprtinente, contumaz y obstinado».
Influido muy poderosamente por el neoplatonismo y por la admisión de la teoría copernicana, pero acogiendo asimismo otros múltiples elementos —estoicismo, mística, monadismo—, Bruno defendió con exaltación poética la doctrina de la infinitud del universo, el cual es concebido, por otro lado, no como un sistema de seres rígidos, articulados en un orden dado desde la eternidad, sino como un conjunto que se transforma continuamente, que pasa de lo inferior a lo superior y de éste a aquél, por ser, en el fondo, todo una y la misma cosa, la vida infinita e inagotable. En esta vida quedan disueltas todas las diferencias, las cuales son propias únicamente de lo superficial, de lo finito y limitado. La infinitud espacial y temporal del universo astronómico corresponde a la infinitud de Dios, que se halla a la vez en el mundo y fuera del mundo, que es causa inmanente del mundo y está infinitamente por encima de él, oposiciones que sólo son paradójicas para Bruno cuando no se comprenden desde el mismo punto de vista que Nicolás de Cusa atribuye a la razón especulativa: el punto de vista de la coincidencia de los opuestos en lo infinito.
El Universo está penetrado de vida y es él mismo vida, esto es, organismo infinito en el cual se hallan los organismos de los mundos particulares, de los infinitos sistemas solares análogos al nuestro. Lo que rige esta infinitud de mundos es la misma ley, porque es la misma vida, el mismo espíritu y orden y, en última instancia, el mismo Dios. Dios está presente en todas las cosas, con su infinito poder, sabiduría y amor, porque es todas las cosas, el máximo y el mínimo o, como dice Bruno, la mónada de las mónadas.
La concepción monadológica es el complemento de esta visión de un universo-vida infinito; las mónadas son los componentes del organismo del mundo y no los átomos, que son disolución y muerte. La misión del hombre es el entusiasmo ante la contemplación de esta infinitud, la adoración del infinito, que es Dios, adoración en la cual puede hallarse la verdadera unidad de las creencias religiosas más allá de todo dogma positivo. Tal entusiasmo es, al mismo tiempo, una heroicidad, un "entusiasmo heroico" que Bruno debió experimentar del modo más completo al morir justamente por haberlo defendido hasta el fin. La filosofía de Bruno manifestaba así, de manera eminente, esta peculiar condición del pensamiento renacentista: la aspiración a una filosofía dinámica construida con los materiales clásicos y, sobre todo, con aquellos materiales que eran con frecuencia formalmente rechazados, los aristotélicos. Condición que se revela particularmente en la doctrina de la materia, sometida en el pensamiento de Bruno a un proceso de disolución que la lleva al ser pleno, del mismo modo que el ser pleno es dialécticamente transformado en materia y en nada. De ahí la afirmación de que "en nada se diferencian la absoluta potencia y el acto absoluto"; y de ahí también la tesis de que "en definitiva, bien que haya individuos innumerables, todo es uno, y conocer esta unidad es el objeto y término de toda filosofía y contemplación natural" (Causa, principio y uno, IV).
Ver también: Nicolás Copérnico
Bruno, Giordano
(1548–1600)
Giordano Bruno, the most famous of the Italian philosophers of the Renaissance, was born at Nola, near Naples.
At an early age he entered the Dominican order and became an inmate of the Dominican convent in Naples.
In 1576 he was accused of heresy and fled, abandoning the Dominican habit. Thereafter he wandered through Europe. After visiting Geneva, and lecturing on the Tractatus de Sphaera Mundi of Sacrobosco at Toulouse, Bruno reached Paris in 1581. Here he gave public lectures that attracted the attention of King Henri III, and published two books on the art of memory that reveal him as greatly influenced by that textbook of Renaissance magic, the De Occulta Philosophia of Henry Cornelius Agrippa, from which he quotes lists of magic images of the stars, incantations, and other occult procedures. Bruno as a Renaissance magus, in line of descent from the learned philosophical magic inaugurated by Marsilio Ficino, is already present in these books. The title of one of them, De Umbris Idearum (Shadows of Ideas), is taken from the necromantic commentary on the Sphere of Sacrobosco by Cecco d’Ascoli, whom Bruno mentions admiringly in other works. It may be inferred that the lectures at Toulouse were probably based on this commentary.
Early in 1583 Bruno went to England with letters of recommendation from Henri III to the French ambassador in London.He lived in the French embassy during the two years he spent in England, and the ambassador protected him from the tumults aroused by his writings, which were clandestinely printed in London. These included the Triginta Sigilli (Thirty seals), an extremely obscure work on his magic art of memory; those who manage to reach the end of it find an advocacy of a new religion based on love, art, magic, and mathesis. It is dedicated to the vice-chancellor and doctors of the University of Oxford in high-sounding terms in which Bruno announces himself as “the waker of sleeping souls, tamer of presumptuous and recalcitrant ignorance, proclaimer of a general philanthropy.”
In June 1583 the Polish prince Albert Alasco (Laski) visited Oxford and was entertained with public disputations. Bruno was in his train, and, according to a recently discovered account by George Abbot, afterward archbishop of Canterbury, Bruno returned to Oxford after the party had left and delivered, uninvited, lectures that were largely a repetition of Marsilio Ficino’s work on astral magic, the De Vita Coelitus Comparanda (On drawing down the life of heaven), although he also maintained Nicolas Copernicus’s opinion “that the earth did go round and the heavens did stand still.” Abbot says that Bruno was induced to discontinue the lectures when the plagiarism from Ficino was pointed out to him.
While in England, Bruno published five dialogues in Italian. In La cena de le ceneri (The Ash Wednesday supper; 1584) he defends his version of the Copernican theory against Oxford “pedants,” a reflection of his visit to Oxford. In De la causa, principio e uno (1584) he apologizes for the storms aroused by his attack on Oxford, but makes matters worse by defending the friars of pre-Reformation Oxford, whom he prefers to their Protestant successors.
The De l’infinito, universo e mondi (1584) is an exposition of his vision of an infinite universe and innumerable worlds. The Spaccio de la bestia trionfante (The expulsion of the triumphant beast; 1584) envisages a universal moral and religious reform and is dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. The Cabala del cavallo pegaseo (Cabal of the horse Pegasus; 1585) indicates Bruno’s adaptation of the Jewish kabbalah. The De gli eroici furori (On heroic enthusiasms; 1585) also dedicated to Sidney, is in the form of a sonnet sequence with commentaries expounding the philosophical and mystical meanings of the poems. It is upon this series of most striking and brilliant works, in which Bruno appears as the propagator of a new philosophy and cosmology, a new ethic and religion, that his fame largely rests. They are all full of Hermetic influences and are bound up with a complex religious, or politico-religious, mission for which Bruno believed he had the support of Henri III, and which cannot have been uncongenial to the French ambassador,Michel de Castelnau de Mauvissière, to whom three of the books are dedicated.
Sidney’s reactions to Bruno are unknown.
Late in 1585 Bruno returned to Paris, where he delivered an address on his philosophy in the Collège de Cambrai, arousing strong opposition, and where he had a curious controversy with Fabrizio Mordente about the compass that Mordente had invented. Paris was in a disturbed state, on the eve of the wars of the League, and Bruno’s activities added to the “tumults,” from which he fled in 1586 and began his travels through Germany. He was favorably received at the University of Wittenberg, and during his stay there he wrote a number of works, particularly on the art of Ramón Lull, to which he attached great importance and which he believed he understood better than Lull himself. From Wittenberg he went to Prague, where he tried to obtain the favor of Emperor Rudolph II with his Articuli Adversus Mathematicos (1588), in which he states that he is strongly against mathematics, which he regarded as a “pedantry” lacking in deep magical insight into nature. His objection to Copernicus as a “mere mathematician” had been on similar lines. The work is illustrated with magical diagrams, representing what he called his mathesis, and its preface outlines a movement of tolerance and general philanthropy that is to replace sectarian bitterness. He next spent some time at Helmstedt, where he enjoyed the favor of the reigning duke, Henry Julius of Brunswick- Wolfenbüttel, and made a speech in praise of the late duke in which he outlined his program of moral reform in language similar to that used in the Spaccio de la bestia trionfante. It was probably while at Helmstedt that Bruno wrote the De Magia and other works on magic unpublished in his lifetime.
With the money Henry Julius gave him for the oration, Bruno went to Frankfurt to have printed the Latin poems he had written during his wanderings. These were the De Innumerabilibus, Immenso et Infigurabili, the De Triplici Minimo et Mensura, and the De Monade Numero et Figura, all of which were printed by John Wechel in 1591. In these Latin poems, written in a style imitating Lucretius, Bruno expresses his philosophical and cosmological speculations in their final form. Like the Italian dialogues on these themes, the Latin poems are full of Hermetic influences, particularly of the mathesis, or magical numerology, which Bruno had been further developing during his travels. He also published the last of his books on his magical arts of memory at Frankfurt.
In August 1591, Bruno returned to Italy at the invitation of a Venetian nobleman who wished to learn the secrets of his art of memory. There can be little doubt that Bruno was encouraged to take this step by the hopes of greater religious toleration aroused by the conversion of Henri IV of France. Bruno had in his baggage the manuscript of a book he intended to dedicate to Pope Clement VIII. It is strange that one who had stated in his published Works that Christ was a magus and that the magical religion of the Egyptians was better than Christianity should have felt that he could place himself with impunity within reach of the Inquisition. Bruno seems, however, always to have sincerely believed that his religious and moral reform could take place within a Catholic framework. He was arrested in Venice and thrown into the prisons of the Inquisition. At the end of the Venetian trial he recanted his heresies, but was sent to Rome for another trial. Here he remained in prison for eight years, at the end of which he was sentenced as a heretic (having refused, this time, to recant) and was burned alive on the Campo de’ Fiori.
Although the actual processo stating on what grounds he was condemned is not extant, it seems most probable that Bruno was burned as a magician, as an “Egyptian” who had been propagating throughout Europe some movement the nature of which remains mysterious, although it may well be connected with the origins of Rosicrucianism and of Freemasonry. His philosophical views in themselves can have had little to do with the condemnation, unless insofar as they, too, were associated with the movement.
[i] Su nombre de nacimiento era Filipo, que posteriormente habría de cambiarse a Giordano.
[ii] En 1572 fue ordenado sacerdote.
[iii] Muere en campo de Fiori como «hereje imprtinente, contumaz y obstinado».
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