Giordano Bruno

Jetzo, da ich ausgewachsen, Viel gelesen, viel gereist, Schwillt mein Herz, und ganz von Herzen, Glaub' ich an den Heilgen Geist. —Heine+
Returning to this ancient pantheism, after so long a reign of a seemingly opposite faith, Bruno unfalteringly asserts the vision of all things in God to be the aim of all metaphysical speculation, as of all inquiry into nature: the Spirit of God, in countless variety of forms, neither above, nor, in any way, without, but intimately within, all things—really present, with equal integrity, in the sunbeam ninety millions of miles long, and the wandering drop of water as it evaporates therein. The divine consciousness would have the same relation to the production of things, as the human intelligence to the production of true thoughts concerning them. Nay! those thoughts are themselves God in man: a loan, there, too, of his assisting Spirit, who, in truth, creates all things in and by his own contemplation of them. For Him, as for man in proportion as man thinks truly, thought and, being are identical, and things existent only in so far as they are known. Delighting in itself, in the sense of its own energy, this sleepless, capacious, fiery intelligence, evokes all the orders of nature, all the revolutions of history, cycle upon cycle, in ever new types. And God the Spirit, the soul of the world, being really identical with his own soul, Bruno, as the universe shapes itself to his reason, his imagination, ever more and more articulately, shares also the divine joy in that process of the formation of true ideas, which is really parallel to the process of creation, to the evolution of things. In a certain mystic sense, which some in every age of the world have understood, he, too, is creator, himself actually a participator in the creative function. And by such a philosophy, he assures us, it was his experience that the soul is greatly expanded: con questa filosofia l'anima, mi s'aggrandisce: mi se magnifica l'intelletto!
The Dominican brother was at no distant day to break far enough away from the election, the seeming vocation of his youth, yet would remain always, and under all circumstances, unmistakably a monk in some predominant qualities of temper. At first it only by way of thought that he asserted his liberty—delightful, late-found privilege!—traversing, in mental journeys, that spacious circuit, as it broke away before him at every moment into ever-new horizons. Kindling thought and imagination at once, the prospect draws from him cries of joy, a kind of religious joy, as in some new canticle of the creatures, a new monkish hymnal or antiphonary. Nature becomes for him a sacred term. Conform thyself to Nature —with what sincerity, what enthusiasm, what religious fervour, he enounces the precept to others, to himself! Recovering, as he fancies, a certain primeval sense of Deity broadcast on things, in which Pythagoras and other inspired theorists of early Greece had abounded, in his hands philosophy becomes a poem, a sacred poem, as it had been with them. That Bruno himself, in the enthusiasm of the idea, drew from his axiom of the indifference of contraries the practical consequence which is in very deed latent there, that he was ready to sacrifice to the antinomianism, which is certainly a part of its rigid logic, the purities of his youth for instance, there is no proof. The service, the sacrifice, he is ready to bring to the great light that has dawned for him, which occupies his entire conscience with the sense of his responsibilities to it, is that of days and nights spent in eager study, of a plenary, disinterested utterance of the thoughts that arise in him, at any hazard, at the price, say! of martyrdom. The work of the divine Spirit, as he conceives it, exalts, inebriates him, till the scientific apprehension seems to take the place of prayer, sacrifice, communion. It would be a mistake, he holds, to attribute to the human soul capacities merely passive or receptive. She, too, possesses, not less than the soul of the world, initiatory power, responding with the free gift of a light and heat that seem her own.