Giordano Bruno (1548–1600). The neo-Platonic spirit of the Humanistic Period reached its most complete development in the æsthetic philosophy of Giordano Bruno. He sang the world-joy of the æsthetic Renaissance. Italy ordained him priest, exiled him as heretic, and then burned him at the stake as recalcitrant. Italy has produced very few great speculators since his day. The Council of Trent met when he was fifteen years old; already the counter-Reformation had begun in Italy, and Italy was soon to become an intellectually arid waste. The influence of Bruno appears in Spinoza and perhaps in Leibnitz. His one contribution to modern science wasin his inspired conception that because God is infinite, the world is infinite in space and time. The philosophers who influenced his thought were Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, and Lucretius.
The fundamental thought of the Humanistic Period was expressed by Bruno in his imaginative conception of the divine beauty of the living All. Poet as well as philosopher, he was consumed by a love for nature as a beautiful religious object. He revolted from all asceticism and scholasticism. The “new world” in which he found himself was to him the emblem of God. The thought of that chief of neo-Platonists, Plotinus, of the beauty of the universe had never been so sympathetically regarded as by the Renaissance; in the hands of Bruno this beauty became the manifestation of the divine Idea. Philosophy, æsthetics, and religion were identical to him. To express his thought he employed the usual neo-Platonic symbol of the all-forming and all-animating light. Bruno was no patient student of natural phenomena as such, but a lover of the great illumination of nature facts by the great soul behind them. He was not interested in any single group of phenomena, as was Paracelsus; but he loved them all as a religion. Not only externally but internally is the universe an eternal harmony. When one gazes upon it with the enthusiasm of a poet, its apparent defects will vanish in the harmony of the whole. Man needs no special theology, for the world is perfect because it is the life of God. Bruno is a universalistic optimist and a mystic poet. Before this cosmic harmony man should never utter complaint, but should bow in reverence. True science is religion and morality.
Since Bruno conceived no theodicy (proof of thegoodness and justice of God) to be necessary, he did not define in exact terms his conception of God. Nevertheless, to escape the charge of atheism, he distinguished between the universe and the world. For him God = the universe = nature = matter = the principle immanent in the world. The “world,” on the other hand, = the sum-total of nature phenomena. The “world” is the body of God, and God is the soul of the “world.” God is natura naturans; the world is natura naturata[4]. Just as the sum of the parts of man’s body does not equal the man himself, so to identify God with the totality of objects of nature is atheism in the true sense. It is to make God a finite being, although very big. In opposition to this, Bruno conceives God as the one substance manifesting himself through all things. This is to magnify God and to make him really omnipresent.
Nevertheless, Bruno is involved in all the inconsistencies of the Mystic. In a neo-Platonic fashion he frequently speaks of God as if he were a plural number of atoms. God is not only the world unity, but in every particle of the world is He writ small. The elements of the world are monads, and each is the mirror of the All. The Absolute is the primal unity; and yet in the paradoxical fashion in which the neo-Platonist is so successful, Bruno says that all creation is unfolded out of God and is included in him. The speculative poet is so in love with the world that he does not stop to make consistent the distinctions which he hasdrawn. The natura naturans and the natura naturata, the unity and plurality of the world, are the two aspects of the reality in his own life—and that reality is God.
MAP SHOWING THE BIRTHPLACES OF THE CHIEF PHILOSOPHERS OF THE RENAISSANCE
(The names of the philosophers are given in brackets beneath the towns in which they were born)
CHAPTER IV
THE NATURAL SCIENCE PERIOD OF THE RENAISSANCE (1600–1690)[5]
The Philosophers of the Natural Science Period.