Ingrid Rowland. Giordano Bruno: Philosopher, Heretic

"Mercury: [Jove has] ordered that today at noon two of the melons in Frather 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. Luarenza, 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." (from Bruno's Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast; Rowland, p. 17)

"The stupid, insensitive idolaters had no reason to laugh at the magic and divine religion of the Eygyptians, who in every cause and every effect, according to the principles appropriate to each, contemplated divinity, and knew how to obtain the benefits of Nature by means of the species that are in her womb: just as she gives fish from sea and river, wild animals from the desert, metals from mines, fruits from trees, so from certain parts, certain animals, certain beasts, certain plants, there are offered certain destinies, powers, fortunes, and impressions. Hence the divinity in the sea was called Neptune, in the sun, Apollo, in the earth, Ceres, in the desert, Diana, and so differently in the other species, all of which refer back to a god of gods and wellspring of all ideas that exists above nature. That god, being absolute, has nothing to do with us, but inasmuch as he is communicated through the effects of nature and is more intimate to them than nature herself, if he is not nature per se, certainly he is the nature of nature and is the soul of the soul of the world...." (from Bruno's Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast; Rowland p. 166)

"It is truly, O most generous Sir [Sir Philip Sidney], the work of a low, filthy animal nature to have made oneself the constant admirer, and to have fixed a solicitous attachment upon or around the beauty of a woman's body. Good God! What more vile and ignoble vision can present itself to a clear-sighted eye than a man, brooding, afflicted, tormented, sorry, melancholy; who waxes now cold, now hot, now boiling, now trembling, now pale, now flushing, now in a pose of perplexity, now in the act of decisiveness, a man who spends the best season and the choicest fruits of his life distilling the elixir of his brain toward putting into thought and writ and sealing in public monuments those endless tortures, those grave torments, those reasoned arguments, those laborious thoughts and those bitter desires addressed to the tyranny of an unworthy, imbecilic, foolish and sordid smut?" (from Bruno's dedication to the Heroic Frenzies; Rowland, p. 175)

"It happens that, against every reason, state, and nature, human law and consequently the true order of Almighty God instilled in all things, the bonds of nature lie unbound, and by the suggestion of misanthropic spirits and the ministry of hell's Furies (who fan the flames among nations rather than bringing peace, and insert the sword of dissent between those who are most closely joined, selling themselves as Mercuries descended from heaven among their tricks and their many pretenses), it has come to the point that humanity quarrels most of all with itself, and is more contested by itself than by any other living creature, and that the law of love that is spread far and wide lies everywhere neglected, which derives not from some evil demon but certainly from God the father of all things, so that it is in harmony with all nature, and teaches a general philanthropy by which we love even our enemies, lest we become like brutes and barbarians, and are transformed into his image who makes his sun rise over good and bad, and pours out a rain of grace upon the just and the unjust. This is the religion that I observe...." (from Bruno's 120 Articles against Mathematicians and Philosophers; Ingrid Rowland. Giordano Bruno: Philosopher / Heretic. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, p. 207)

(Although the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1600 for his reservations about the nature of Christ, transubstantiation, and the Virgin Mary, among other things, he is often considered today as a martyr for science. Like Copernicus, he turned his back on the Ptolemaic, geocentric universe and its implicit hierarchies in behalf of a heliocentric universe. But more than that, he believed in a multiplicity of worlds -- that our earth and sun are no different from an infinite number of solar systems presided over by an infinite God, who has been worshipped by many religious traditions. Stressing Bruno's neo-Platonism, Rowland's biography draws on a rich wealth of materials; more of her literate, readable, fascinating essays on figures of the Italian Renaissance, first published in the New York Review of Books, are collected in From Heaven to Arcadia. (Incidentally, I take no particular pleasure in reproducing Bruno's misogynistic diatribe, which he wrote in response to Sidney's anxious love sonnets in Astrophil and Stella -- it's Bruno's attempt to persuade Sidney to seek out the love of God instead. For the roots of this anti-feminist tradition, see especially Francis Utley's The Crooked Rib.) At any rate, I thought this was a fascinating story of a Dominican monk who sought to free his God from the constraints of his age, and who was killed for his troubles. His books were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1603. 400 years later, during the papacy of John Paul II, the Catholic Church expressed its sorrow for Bruno's death.)