Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

Regarded from the point of view of the student of intellectual development, this conflict of two thousand years has the fascination of a great drama of which the protagonist is the mind struggling to free the spirit from its subjection to the evil aspects of the imagination. Great thinkers in the field of science, philosophy, and religion are the dramatis personæ, and in the onward rush of this world-drama the sufferings of those who have fallen by the way seem insignificant.

But when the student of history takes his more intimate survey of the purely human aspects of the struggle, heartrending, indeed, become the tragedies resulting from the exercise of human bigotry and stupidity.

Indignation and sorrow take possession of us when we think upon such a spectacle as that of Roger Bacon, making ready to perform a few scientific experiments before a small audience at Oxford, confronted by an uproar in which monks, fellows, and students rushed about, their garments streaming in the wind, crying out, “Down with the magician!” And this was only the beginning of a persecution which ended in his teaching being solemnly condemned by the authorities of the Franciscan order and himself thrown for fourteen years into prison, whence he issued an old and broken man of eighty.

More barbarous still was the treatment of Giordano Bruno, a strange sort of man who developed his philosophy in about twenty-five works, some prose, some poetry, some dialogues, some comedies, with such enticing titles as “The Book of the Great Key,” “The Explanation of the Thirty Seals,” “The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast,” “The Threefold Minimum,” “The Composition of Images,” “The Innumerable, the Immense and the Unfigurable.” His utterances were vague, especially to the intellects of his time, yet not so vague that theology, whether Catholic or Calvinistic, did not at once take fright.

He held that the investigation of nature in the unbiased light of reason is our only guide to truth. He rejected antiquity, tradition, faith, and authority; he exclaimed, “Let us begin by doubt. Let us doubt till we know.” Acting upon these principles, he began to unfold again that current of Greek thought which the system imposed by the Church had intercepted for more than a thousand years, and arrived at a conception of evolution prefiguring the modern theories.

He conceived the law of the universe to be unceasing change. “Each individual,” he declared, “is the resultant of innumerable individuals; each species is the starting point for the next.” Furthermore, he maintained that the perfecting of the individual soul is the aim of all progress.

Tenets so opposite to the orthodox view of special creation and the fall of man could not be allowed to go unchallenged. It is to be remembered that he was a priest in holy orders in the Convent of St. Dominic, and in the year 1576 he was accused by the Provincial of his order of heresy on one hundred and thirty counts. He did not await his trial, but fled to Rome, thence to northern Italy, and became for some years a wanderer. He was imprisoned at Geneva; at Toulouse he spent a year lecturing on Aristotle; in Paris, two years as professor extraordinary in the Sorbonne; three years in London, where he became the friend of Sir Philip Sidney, and influenced the philosophy of both Bacon and Shakespeare. Oxford, however, was unfriendly to his teachings and he was obliged to flee from England also. Then he wandered for five years from city to city in Germany—at one time warned to leave the town, at another excommunicated, at another not even permitted to lodge within the gates. Finally, he accepted the invitation of a noble Venetian, Zuane Mocenigo, to visit Venice and teach him the higher and secret learning. The two men soon quarreled, and Bruno was betrayed by the count into the hands of the Inquisition. He was convicted of heresy in Venice and delivered to the Inquisition in Rome. He spent seven years in its dungeons, and was again tried and convicted, and called upon to recant, which he stoutly refused to do. Sentence of death was then passed upon him and he was burned at the stake on February 17, 1600, on the Campo de’ Fiori, where there now stands a statue erected by Progressive Italy in his honor.

His last words were, “I die a martyr, and willingly.” Then they cast his ashes into the Tiber and placed his name among the accused on the rolls of the Church. And there it probably still remains, for no longer ago than 1889, when his statue was unveiled on the ninth of June, on the site of his burning, in full view of the Vatican, Pope Leo XIII, it is said, refused food and spent hours in an agony of prayer at the foot of the statue of St. Peter. Catholic, and even Protestant, denunciation of Bruno at this time showed that the smoke from this particular battle in the war of mind with spirit was still far from being laid.

With the fate of Giordano Bruno still fresh in his mind, Galileo succumbed to the demands of the Inquisition and recanted, saying that he no longer believed what he, himself, with his telescope had proved to be true.

“I, Galileo, being in my seventieth year, being a prisoner and on my knees, and before your Eminences, having before my eyes the Holy Gospel, which I touch with my hands, abjure, curse, and detest the error and the heresy of the movement of the earth.”