Bruno entered a Dominican monastery in Naples as a teenager and began reading Copernicus and the ancient atomists and working out what they implied: if Copernicus had dethroned the earth, why should the sun be central? The universe, he concluded, has no center because it is infinite. Infinite space, infinite worlds, infinite souls: the universe as the body of God, alive throughout. He also thought the world's religions were corrupted forms of a universal ancient wisdom that could be recovered. This combination of pantheism and cosmological radicalism made him impossible to contain. He fled the monastery and wandered Europe (Geneva, Paris, London, Wittenberg), arguing with Calvinists, Anglicans, and Lutherans alike, offending nearly everyone. He returned to Italy in 1591 and was arrested by the Inquisition. After eight years of imprisonment and trial, he refused to recant his cosmological views. He was burned in Rome's Campo de' Fiori in 1600. A statue now stands where the fire was.
Born in the small town of Nola under Vesuvius and sent to Naples to study; at seventeen he entered the Dominican convent of San Domenico Maggiore, where Aquinas had once taught, and where his doubts began.
Words
“Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.”
