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Two thinkers, side by side

Life

Portrait of Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno

1548 CE – 1600 CE

Early ModernNatural PhilosophyPantheist

Born Naples

He said the universe is infinite, filled with infinite worlds, and not centered on anything. Rome burned him for it.

Portrait of Spinoza
Spinoza

1632 CE – 1677 CE

Early ModernRationalist

Born Amsterdam

God and Nature are the same thing. He was excommunicated for saying it, ground lenses to earn a living, and published his masterwork after he died.

Connection

Giordano Bruno God identified with nature Spinoza — Bruno's insistence that the divine is not outside the world but is the world's own infinite life anticipates the position Spinoza would argue for more rigorously a century later.

Shared Ideas

Nature

Ideas

NatureBeing
NatureInner FreedomReasonThe Mind-Body Problem

Words

“Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.”

— Giordano Bruno

“There is a single vast immensity which we may freely call Void: in it are innumerable globes like this one on which we live and grow.”

— Giordano Bruno

“I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.”

— Spinoza

Key Moments

1548 CE

Born in Nola, near Naples

1576 CE

Flight across Europe

1584 CE

The London dialogues

1600 CE

The stake at Campo de' Fiori

1632 CE

Born in Amsterdam

1656 CE

Excommunicated from the Jewish Community

c. 1660 CE

Grinding Lenses

1677 CE

Ethics Published Posthumously

Works

On the Infinite, the Universe and Worlds

Ethics

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Volume I · Ancient Greece · 624-262 BCE