Giordano Bruno by Ingrid D. Rowland

Author:Ingrid D. Rowland
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466895843
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

CHAPTER TWENTY

Canticles

LONDON, 1584–1585

Thus, great with childe to speak, and helplesse in my throwes,

Biting my trewand pen, beating myselfe for spite,

Fool, said my Muse to me, looke in thy heart, and write.

—Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, Sonnet 1

The sheer variety of Giordano Bruno’s writings shows how difficult he found it to convey his ideas about the universe. Leonardo and Galileo might write that the language of nature was mathematics, but sixteenth-century mathematics could barely be distinguished from arithmetic and geometry. These disciplines worked reasonably well for charting the movements of the stars and planets as seen from the earth, but they had yet to provide a good account for something as simple as the flight of a ball, let alone a bird. Bruno understood enough about the universe, and about contemporary mathematics, to realize that all the planetary systems propounded in his day, no matter whether they centered on the earth or on the sun, were only models; the real movements of the heavens took place on a much larger scale where, in the ancient formula of Hermes Trismegistus, repeated by Augustine and Cusanus, “the center was everywhere and the circumference nowhere.”

Bruno tried to convey his philosophy through pictures, both geometric diagrams and the mental images of the artificial memory. For the diagrams, there were always insurmountable limitations imposed by the size of a printed page and his own skill as an engraver—he seems to have made all his own illustrations for his books. For the artificial memory, he could only suggest images and how to combine them; the final result was always hidden away within the heads of his hearers and readers. As a writer, he used every kind of language at his disposal, poetry and prose, Italian and Latin, high rhetoric, expository prose, ribald vulgarity.

He faced a second problem because he believed that his findings about the universe should have consequences for human behavior. He began to outline those consequences first in his comedy, The Candlemaker, and then in his Italian dialogues. Living out the Nolan philosophy meant accepting the world as it was, which in turn implied accepting a much larger definition of life in which the earth, stars, and planets were also living things, infused with divinity. At the same time, Bruno still believed that the universe demanded moral behavior: no matter how huge and abstract its movements might seem, the world’s pervasive goodness demanded a matching goodness from all its creatures. The cosmos was not simply a huge mechanical system but something that he could only describe in emotional metaphors: a mother, a nursemaid, a wellspring, light, love, a creation truly worthy of an omnipotent God.

He did not describe any part of this creation as radically evil; he spent much more time denouncing pedant asses and rude Englishmen than he ever did inveighing against Satan. Although he had seen his share, and perhaps more than his share, of poverty, disease, bad government, cruelty, prejudice, intrigue, and religious hatred, he ascribed most of these calamities to

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