Giordano Bruno
He said the universe is infinite, filled with infinite worlds, and not centered on anything. Rome burned him for it.
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.
Places
Ideas
Words
“Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.”
“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.”
Works
Life & Moments
Born in Nola, near Naples
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.
Flight across Europe
Fled the order at twenty-eight under suspicion of heresy and spent sixteen years crossing Europe (Geneva, Toulouse, Paris, London, Wittenberg, Prague), teaching the art of memory, quarreling with the learned, and publishing wherever a press would have him.
The London dialogues
In two London years under the French ambassador's roof he wrote his six Italian dialogues, including On the Infinite: the boldest cosmology in Europe, composed in a city where he never learned the language.
The stake at Campo de' Fiori
Lured back to Italy, he was denounced to the Inquisition and imprisoned for nearly eight years. Refusing a full recantation, he was burned at the Campo de' Fiori in February 1600; a statue of the hooded philosopher has stood on the spot since 1889.
Influence
Influenced by
- Nicholas of Cusa
Bruno explicitly drew on Cusa's coincidence of opposites and his suggestion that the earth is not a fixed center, extending both into a full cosmology of an infinite universe with no center at all, a debt Bruno acknowledged directly in his own writing.
- Lucretius
The Epicurean universe Lucretius described, unbounded and full of other worlds, gave Bruno both the cosmology and much of the nerve for his own claim that the stars are suns with earths of their own.
Influenced
- 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.
