Home

Bruno Giordano 1548 - 1600 (52)

The Divine Light is always in man, presenting itself to the senses and to the comprehension, but man rejects it.


QUOTES

On the Infinite..

“Since I have spread my wings to purpose high, The more beneath my feet the clouds I see, The more I give the winds my pinions free, Spurning the earth and soaring to the sky.”

Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher, astronomer and poet. He was born as Philip Bruno in 1548, probably on February 3, in Nola, a small town near Naples. His father was a soldier in the service of Spanish army in Naples, where Giordano study philosophy, logic and dialectics. At 17 he entered the Dominican Order at the monastery of San Domenico Maggiore, taking the name Giordano, after his tutor. He continued his studies there and became an ordained priest in 1572 at age 24. Bruno was a free spirit and soon came in conflict with his superior, for his critical attitude towards images of saints, for his interest in the writings of Erasmus and for his scientific beliefs. In 1575 he left the Order and went to Rome. In 1576 he was accused of heresy and had to move in haste, he travelled all over Europe; Geneva, Paris, Wurttemberg. In Prague he worked as a proofreader in a printing house and joined Calvinism. In Toulouse he lectured on Aristotelian philosophy and in 1582 he published two important works on the art of memory. In 1584, he taught at the University of Oxford but the following year he was declared unwanted by the university’s principles because of his ideas assertion that philosophy is an elite science while theology had become a tool for controlling the ignorant people. He then went to Württemberg, where he taught for almost two years the philosophy of Aristotle.

In January 1589 the Protestants proceeded in his public excommunication because of his work "One hundred and sixty articles" (1588), in which he denounced the Christian intolerance and asked for freedom of all religious and philosophical views. In 1591 he lived in Frankfurt and in 1592 went to Venice invited by the nobleman Giovanni Mocenigo. He served as an in-house tutor to Mocenigo for about two months but when he announced his plan to leave Venice, Mocenigo denounced him to the Venetian Inquisition. Bruno was arrested on 22 May 1592, interrogated and tortured; he was deemed as blasphemous and heretic and sent in Rome where he was kept in prison for seven years, during which he suffered endless torture and humiliation to renounce his ideas. He remained stable in his believes until the end, that the world is infinite and has no limits, on the existence of many worlds in the universe, on his belief that Jesus was a prophet but not God. "I prefer a courageous death than a timid life," he wrote. On February 17, 1600, after the decision of the Inquisition, he was burned alive in front of a large crowd.