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Giordano Bruno
Philosopher/Heretic
By Ingrid D. Rowland Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2008 Ingrid D. Rowland
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-9584-3
CHAPTER 1
A Most Solemn Act of Justice
CAMPO DE' FIORI, ROME, FEBRUARY 17, 1600
If you will not accompany [the Nolan] with fifty or a hundred torches — which shall certainly not be lacking should he come to die in Roman Catholic territory — at least give him one; or, if even this seems too much for you, press upon him a lantern with a tallow candle inside.
— The Ash Wednesday Supper, dialogue 5
For a public execution, it was a strangely rushed affair. In the feeble light of a winter dawn, the parade of officials, inquisitors, and priests could hardly be seen as it pulled away from the prison of Tor di Nona. Not many people were about to see it in any case; shops and market stalls were only beginning to set up for the day. Nothing blocked the procession's brisk progress down the Via Papale to Campo de' Fiori, the "Field of Flowers" that served Rome as both marketplace and execution ground.
As tradition demanded, a mule carried the prisoner. Tradition had its roots in practicality; by the time they had been sentenced to death, many of the condemned could no longer walk on their own. Some, indeed, were already dead, garroted before their bodies were ceremonially burned at the stake. But this prisoner, Giordano Bruno, was physically healthy, and when he reached the Campo de' Fiori, he would be burned alive. There was no other suitable punishment for the heresies he had continued to proclaim during his eight days in Tor di Nona, and for eight previous years in the prisons of the Inquisition. For more than a week, day and night, teams of confessors had tried to change his mind; Dominican, Augustinian, and Franciscan friars succeeded each other in shifts, begging him to save his soul by recanting — because for his body, as they knew, there was no longer any hope. That morning, however, the last team of religious had given up. They handed over their charge once and for all to the black-hooded lay brothers of the Confraternity of Saint John the Beheaded, volunteers who carried out one of their faith's seven works of mercy by providing last-minute companionship for prisoners condemned to death. After offering Bruno the traditional breakfast of almond biscuits dipped in dense brown Marsala wine, the brothers of Saint John prayed over him as the jailers stopped his tongue with a leather gag and set him on his mule. When the procession began to move down the Via Papale, they held high a painting of the crucifix, hoping to catch the gagged man's eye with their gold-framed image of the suffering Christ.
The records for that morning — February 17, 1600 — report that Bruno "was led by officers of the law to Campo de' Fiori, and there, stripped naked and tied to a stake, he was burned alive, always accompanied by our company singing the litanies, and the comforters, up to the last, urging him to abandon his obstinacy, with which he finally ended his miserable and unhappy life."
The inquisitors who ordered this strangely ambivalent execution were afraid of what they were doing, and Bruno knew it. Eight days earlier, when they read him his verdict, an eyewitness reported that "he made no other reply than, in a menacing tone, 'You may be more afraid to bring that sentence against me than I am to accept it.'" Sixteen hundred was a jubilee year, when pilgrims from all over the Catholic world came to Rome to earn reprieves from purgatory by visiting seven churches on one day, but not every visitor came to collect the indulgence. Protestant troublemakers had already disrupted services several times this Holy Year, crying "Idolatry!" as the priest held up the Host for consecration, or murmuring and jostling among the congregation until completing the Mass became all but impossible. Bruno himself had spent years in Protestant countries, almost always moving at the highest levels of society, among kings, ambassadors, dukes, and electors. No one knew what political connections he might still have or who might object to the sight of him burning alive. His execution had already been aborted once, as an agent for the Duke of Urbino had reported earlier in the week:
Today we thought we would see a most solemn act of justice, and we don't know why it was stopped; it was a Dominican friar from Nola, a most obstinate heretic, whom they sentenced Wednesday in the house of Cardinal Madruzzi as the author of various terrible opinions which he obstinately continued to maintain, and is still maintaining them. Every day theologians visit him. They say that this friar was in Geneva two years, and then he went on to lecture at Toulouse, and afterward at Lyon, and from thence to England, where they say that his opinions were not at all well received. For that reason he went on to Nuremberg, and from there returning to Italy he was captured, and they say that in Germany he disputed with Cardinal Bellarmine on several occasions, and all told, if God doesn't help the wretch, he wants to die obstinate and be burned alive.
The agent's factual information, like most Roman gossip, was not quite correct (Bruno had never met Cardinal Bellarmine in Germany), but he grasped the essentials of the case and the inquisitors' fears: Bruno's ideas terrified them as much as his possible political clout, and they were desperate to find an alternative to public immolation. It was a violent age, and the reigning pope, Clement VIII, had approved some horrific executions in the recent past, like the burning of a Scottish heretic in 1595, dutifully reported to the Duke of Urbino by the same agent who would report on Bruno:
The execution was carried out in Campo de' Fiori, where to terrify him a huge pile of firewood, charcoal, kindling, and more than ten cartloads of pitch had been prepared, and for the occasion a shirt of pitch was made for him that extended from his waist to his feet, black as coal, and then it was put over his naked flesh so that he would not die as quickly, and his life would be consumed in the fire as painfully as possible. He was conducted to the scaffold with a large escort, and made to sit on an iron chair next to the fire, which had already been lit. The usual protest was made on his behalf, as one does for good servants of God, in order to see him repent: that there was still time to obtain grace, but, as soon as he had mounted the iron chair, he threw himself with a great hurry into the burning flames, and buried in them, he died in these earthly flames to spend an eternity in those other flames of hell.
Giordano Bruno's execution, by contrast, would be quick and quiet, a pageant to be forgotten. There must have been some fear that the show would be seen as barbaric, if one of its witnesses, the Catholic convert Gaspar Schoppe, could rush home to reassure the Lutheran Conrad Rittershausen, his onetime mentor, that it had all been perfectly civil:
This very day prompts me to write, in which Giordano Bruno, because of his heresy, was publicly burned in Campo de' Fiori before the Theater of Pompey ... If you were in Rome now, you would hear from many Italians that a Lutheran had been burned, and thus you would find no small confirmation for your opinion of our savagery.
The ten cardinals who made up the Roman Inquisition lacked Schoppe's certainty about what they were doing. Bruno's execution gave public proof that they had failed in their mission, which was not to terrify but to "admonish and persuade." The guiding spirit of the Inquisition's endgame, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, may have enjoyed an earthly reputation as the greatest living theologian, but he had not been able to wield Mother Church's theology with enough skill to persuade Bruno — himself a trained inquisitor — to change his mind. Neither could Bellarmine claim to have carried out the basic mission of his own order, the Society of Jesus, to "comfort souls." Instead, the cruelties to which the cardinal (and future saint) had subjected his victims, Bruno included, would haunt him to the grave. So, perhaps, would the narrowness of his own Christian vision; Bellarmine, no less than Bruno, had been fascinated as a young man by the stars and the new astronomy, but he could not imagine those stars, as Bruno did, set within a heaven of infinite vastness, governed by a God who, as Bruno insisted, would one day pardon every creature. Yet somehow the heretic's ideas moved the inquisitor, so that when Galileo Galilei began to interest the Inquisition in 1616, Bellarmine used all his authority to warn Galileo away from the conflict.
Even today, Bruno's death still haunts the Catholic Church, which has long since accepted his infinite universe but not his challenge to its own authority. It is not only a matter of Bruno's own conduct and John Paul II's refusal to condone it in the year 2000. To make matters still more complicated, Bruno's inquisitor Cardinal Bellarmine was canonized in 1930; how could an inquiry have gone wrong if guided by a saint? Yet as Robert Bellarmine sensed himself, by proceeding against Giordano Bruno with scrupulous correctness, the Inquisition had made him a martyr.
A martyr to what? That was, and is, the question.
CHAPTER 2
The Nolan Philosopher
BLDNOLA, KINGDOM OF NAPLES, 1548–1562
Bruno never made any secret of his profession; from beginning to end, with unfailing consistency, he called himself a philosopher. Sometimes, more specifically, he described himself as il Nolano, "the Nolan," and his philosophy as "the Nolan philosophy," after the small city east of Naples where he spent the first fourteen years of his life.
Bruno's home in fact lay outside the city walls of Nola, in a minuscule settlement beneath the hill that he and his neighbors, with affectionate exaggeration, called Monte Cicala — "Cicada Mountain" — perhaps because its wooded slopes buzzed with the whirr of these insects in the summertime. The hamlet is gone now, although present-day Nolani will point out a ruined farmhouse where they boast that Giovanni Bruno and his wife, Fraulissa Savolino, once lived among other members of her family, a clan given to extravagant names: Preziosa, Mercurio, Morgana, Laudomia. Oddest of all was the name Fraulissa; Nola's census takers usually recorded her as "Flaulisa," the only one of her kind.
Giovanni Bruno earned his living as a soldier serving the Spanish crown, for the Kingdom of Naples, since 1503, had been a possession of Spain, ruled by a series of viceroys. Both the Spanish lords and the local nobility competed to exploit the region's agricultural riches, with the help of mercenary soldiers who fought for Spain or the local "barons," or, most often, subdued rebellious peasants (it was to protect against these constant pressures that Spanish-dominated Sicily developed its Mafia and Naples its Camorra). In addition to their salaries, these hired soldiers lived by what they could take from local populations; theirs was not a popular profession, but it paid relatively well. In addition, Giovanni Bruno's position in the military enabled him, if only barely, to claim status as a gentleman. This slight social advantage would prove crucial for his son's future.
When their only child was born in 1548, Giovanni Bruno and Fraulissa Savolino named the boy Filippo, perhaps to honor Bruno's commander in chief, His Most Catholic Majesty Philip II, king of Spain and Naples (Giordano was the younger Bruno's religious name, assumed when he was seventeen). Giovanni Bruno also provided the future Nolan philosopher with his first glimpse of philosophy, at least if we are to credit an anecdote reported by the mature Giordano Bruno in 1585. Here, in a philosophical dialogue, two personalities from Bruno's Nolan childhood, the poet Luigi Tansillo and the soldier Odoardo Cicala, discuss how to live wisely:
Tansillo: When a certain neighbor of ours said one evening after dinner: "I was never as merry as I am tonight," Giovanni Bruno, the father of the Nolan, replied, "Then you were never as crazy as you are at this moment."
Cicala: Then you mean to say that a gloomy man is a wise man, and a gloomier man is wiser still?
Tan: No, in fact I think that the first one is crazy, and the other one is worse.
Cic: Who, then, would be wise, if the happy man is crazy and the gloomy one is crazy as well?
Tan: The one who is neither happy nor sad.
Cic: Who is that? The one who's asleep? The one who's unconscious? The one who's dead?
Tan: No, rather it's the one who is alive, who sees and understands, and who, taking good and evil into consideration, regards each of them as variable ... Therefore he neither despairs nor puffs up his spirit, and becomes restrained in his inclinations and temperate in his pleasures — for him pleasure is no pleasure, because its goal is in the present. Likewise, pain for him is no pain, because by force of reasoning he is mindful of its end. Thus ... I will declare that the wisest man of all is the one who is sometimes able to declare the opposite of what that man said: "I was never less merry than now," or "I was never less unhappy than now."
Bruno never quite managed his father's philosophical detachment. He would remember his youth as melancholy; physically small and mentally swift, with an absent father and a lonely mother, he seems to have spent his time, like many a misfit child, watching, reading, and thinking things over. Almost thirty years after he had left Nola forever, he wrote of Monte Cicala as if the mountain had been his confidante:
Once, when I was a boy, dear hospitable Monte Cicala,
And in your genial lap you fostered my early affections —
How you were wreathed around in ivy and branches of olive,
Branches of cornel and bay, of myrtle, and boughs of rosemary!
You were girded in chestnut, and oak, poplar, elm, in a happy
Coupling with grape-bearing vines; it was almost as if you extended
Your leafy hand, full of grapes, to my tender hand.
Filippo Bruno was also precocious. When a snake crawled into his cradle, at least so he said, he called for help in complete sentences, the first words he ever spoke. A few years later, he could still recall the incident with a clarity that unnerved his parents. The story may have been a family anecdote, embellished over time, but the adult Bruno would become famous for his feats of memory. His first experience of school only gave him a lifelong contempt for schoolmasters. Like soldiers, grammar-school teachers clung to meager salaries and the slight social advantage that came with their education. Students traditionally lampooned them as dull, brutal, and raging with lust, but Bruno gave the caricature a bitter insistence that suggests genuine experience.
Before he left Nola at fourteen, he seems to have fallen in love with one of his Savolino cousins — perhaps this was one of the "early affections" he mentioned in verse. He also nurtured an abiding passion for his native city and its little mountain. In 1585, twenty-three years after he had left Nola, he described it as if he were still there:
Mercury: [Jove has] ordered that today at noon two of the melons in Father Franzino's melon patch will be perfectly ripe, but that they won't be picked until three days from now, when they will no longer be considered good to eat. He requests that at the same moment, on the jujube tree at the base of Monte Cicala in the house of Giovanni Bruno, thirty perfect jujubes will be picked, and he says that seven shall fall to earth still green, and that fifteen shall be eaten by worms. That Vasta, wife of Albenzio Savolino, when she means to curl the hair at her temples, shall burn fifty-seven hairs for having let the curling iron get too hot, but she won't burn her scalp and hence shall not swear when she smells the stench, but shall endure it patiently. That from the dung of her ox fifty-two dung beetles shall be born, of which fourteen shall be trampled and killed by Albenzio's foot, twenty-six shall die upside down, twenty-two shall live in a hole, eighty shall make a pilgrim's progress around the yard, forty-two shall retire to live under the stone by the door, sixteen shall roll their ball of dung wherever they please, and the rest shall scurry around at random. Laurenza, when she combs her hair, shall lose seventeen hairs and break thirteen, and of these, ten shall grow back within three days and seven shall never grow back at all. Antonio Savolino's bitch shall conceive five puppies, of which three shall live out their natural lifespan and two shall be thrown away, and of these three the first shall resemble its mother, the second shall be mongrel, and the third shall partly resemble the father and partly resemble Polidoro's dog. In that moment a cuckoo shall be heard from La Starza, cuckooing twelve times, no more and no fewer, whereupon it shall leave and fly to the ruins of Castel Cicala for eleven minutes, and then shall fly off to Scarvaita, and as for what happens next, we'll see to it later. That the skirt Mastro Danese is cutting on his board shall come out crooked. That twelve bedbugs shall leave the slats of Costantino's bed and head toward the pillow: seven large ones, four smaller, and one middle-sized, and as for the one who shall survive until this evening's candlelight, we'll see to it. That fifteen minutes thereafter, because of the movement of her tongue, which she has passed over her palate four times, the old lady of Fiurulo shall lose the third right molar in her lower jaw, and it shall fall without blood and without pain, because that molar has been loose for seventeen months. That Ambrogio on the one hundred twelfth thrust shall finally have driven home his business with his wife, but shall not impregnate her this time, but rather another, using the sperm into which the cooked leek that he has just eaten with millet and wine sauce shall have been converted. Martinello's son is beginning to grow hair on his chest, and his voice is beginning to crack. That Paulino, when he bends over to pick up a broken needle, shall snap the red drawstring of his underpants, and if he should blaspheme for that reason, I mean for him to be punished thus: tonight his soup shall be too salty and taste of smoke, he shall fall and break his wine flask, and should he swear on that occasion, we'll see to it later. That of seven moles who set out four days ago from deep within the earth, taking different paths toward the open air, two shall reach the surface at the same time, one at high noon, and the other fifteen minutes, nineteen seconds later, and one shall emerge three yards, one foot, and half an inch from the other in Anton Favaro's garden. As for the time and place for the other two, we'll see to it later.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Giordano Bruno by Ingrid D. Rowland. Copyright © 2008 Ingrid D. Rowland. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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