Giordano Bruno
Pater, Walter, 1839-1894
English
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Below is a summary of Giordano Bruno
This etext was produced by Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.
GIORDANO BRUNO, PARIS: 1586.+
WALTER HORATIO PATER
"Jetzo, da ich ausgewachsen,
Viel gelesen, viel gereist,
Schwillt mein Herz, und ganz von Herzen,
Glaub' ich an den Heilgen Geist." -- Heine+
[234] IT was on the afternoon of the Feast of Pentecost that news of
the death of Charles the Ninth went abroad promptly. To his
successor the day became a sweet one, to be noted unmistakably by
various pious and other observances; and it was on a Whit-Sunday
afternoon that curious Parisians had the opportunity of listening to
one who, as if with some intentional new version of the sacred event
then commemorated, had a great deal to say concerning the Spirit;
above all, of the freedom, the independence of its operation. The
speaker, though understood to be a brother of the Order of St.
Dominic, had not been present at the mass--the usual university mass,
De Spiritu Sancto, said to-day according to the natural course of the
season in the chapel of the Sorbonne, by the Italian Bishop of Paris.
It was the reign of the Italians just then, a doubly refined,
somewhat morbid, somewhat ash-coloured, Italy in France, more Italian
still. Men of Italian birth, "to the great suspicion of simple
people," swarmed in Paris, already "flightier, less constant, than
the girouettes on its steeples," and it was love for Italian fashions
that had brought king and courtiers here to-day, with great eclat, as
they said, frizzed and starched, in the beautiful, minutely
considered dress of the moment, pressing the university into a
perhaps not unmerited background; for the promised speaker, about
whom tongues had been busy, not only in the Latin quarter, had come
from Italy. In an age in which all things about which Parisians much
cared must be Italian there might be a hearing for Italian
philosophy. Courtiers at least would understand Italian, and this
speaker was rumoured to possess in perfection all the curious arts of
his native language. And of all the kingly qualities of Henry's
youth, the single one that had held by him was that gift of
eloquence, which he was able also to value in others--inherited
perhaps; for in all the contemporary and subsequent historic gossip
about his mother, the two things certain are, that the hands credited
with so much mysterious ill-doing were fine ones, and that she was an
admirable speaker.
Bruno himself tells us, long after he had withdrawn himself from it,
that the monastic life promotes the freedom of the intellect by its
[235] silence and self-concentration. The prospect of such freedom
sufficiently explains why a young man who, however well found in
worldly and personal advantages, was conscious above all of great
intellectual possessions, and of fastidious spirit also, with a
remarkable distaste for the vulgar, should have espoused poverty,
chastity, obedience, in a Dominican cloister. What liberty of mind
may really come to in such places, what daring new departures it may
suggest to the strictly monastic temper, is exemplified by the
dubious and dangerous mysticism of men like John of Parma and Joachim
of Flora, reputed author of the new "Everlasting Gospel," strange
dreamers, in a world of sanctified rhetoric, of that later
dispensation of the spirit, in which all law must have passed away;
or again by a recognised tendency in the great rival Order of St.
Francis, in the so-called "spiritual" Franciscans, to understand the
dogmatic words of faith with a difference.
The three convents in which Bruno lived successively, at Naples, at
Citta di Campagna, and finally the Minerva at Rome, developed freely,
we may suppose, all the mystic qualities of a genius in which, from
the first, a heady southern imagination took the lead. But it was
from beyond conventional bounds he would look for the sustenance, the
fuel, of an ardour born or bred within them. Amid such artificial
religious stillness the air itself becomes generous in undertones.
The vain young monk (vain of course!) would feed his vanity by
puzzling the good, sleepy heads of the average sons of Dominic with
his neology, putting new wine into old bottles, teaching them their
own business--the new, higher, truer sense of the most familiar
terms, the chapters they read, the hymns they sang, above all, as it
happened, every word that referred to the Spirit, the reign of the
Spirit, its excellent freedom. He would soon pass beyond the utmost
limits of his brethren's sympathy, beyond the largest and freest
interpretation those words would bear, to thoughts and words on an
altogether different plane, of which the full scope was only to be
felt in certain old pagan writers, though approached, perhaps, at
first, as having a kind of natural, preparatory kinship with
Scripture itself. The Dominicans would seem to have had well-
stocked, liberally-selected, libraries; and this curious youth, in
that age of restored letters, read eagerly, easily, and very soon
came to the kernel of a difficult old author--Plotinus or Plato; to
the purpose of thinkers older still, surviving by glimpses only in
the books of others--Empedocles, Pythagoras, who had enjoyed the
original divine sense of things, above all, Parmenides, that most
ancient assertor of God's identity with the world. The affinities,
the unity, of the visible and the invisible, of earth and heaven, of
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