To this temple Bruno, eager in his pursuit of the ever-eluding Truth, had come,—“a foreigner, an exile, a fugitive, the sport of fortune, meagre in body, slender of means, destitute of favour, pursued by the hatred of the multitude and the contempt of fools and the base,” and could on leaving say to its people that he had become an “occasion, or matter, or subject in whom they unfolded and demonstrated to the world the beauty and wealth of their virtues of moderation, urbanity, and kindness of heart.” It was the last, or nearly the last, spell of happiness that life had in store for him.
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Prague: 1588.The court of the Emperor Rudolph II. was at Prague, in Bohemia; from there his fame as a Maecenas of the learned, and especially of those who claimed power to read the heavens or to work magic, had spread to many countries. Perhaps Sidney, who had visited him from Elizabeth on the death of Maximilian, may have spoken of him to Bruno: while two of Bruno’s friends, the Spanish Ambassador St. Clement and the mathematician Mordentius, were at Prague in 1588. Thither, accordingly, he now turned in the hope of settled quarters, introducing himself, as was his frequent habit, with a Lullian work, which he caused to be printed soon after his arrival, and dedicated to the Spanish Ambassador.[95] June 10, 1588.The introductory letter is dated from Prague, June 10, 1588, and is in praise of Lully, whose importance to philosophy Bruno values much more highly than his successors have done: it promised at the same time a future work, the Lampas Cabalistica, in which the inner secrets of Lullism were to be more fully revealed. This, so far as we know, never appeared, and Bruno tried to obtain the Emperor’s patronage by a mathematical work dedicated to him, of somewhat revolutionary type—“One hundred and sixty articles against the mathematicians and philosophers of the day.” The Emperor, however, had few funds to spare for any but the professed astrologists and alchemists in whom lay his real interest—not at all scientific, although Tycho Brahé and Kepler profited themselves and the world by it. With three hundred dollars, which the Emperor gave in recognition of his powers, Bruno left about the close of the year, and onJanuary 13, 1589.January 13, 1589, matriculated in the Julian university of Brunswick at Helmstadt.Helmstadt. This, the youngest university in Germany at the time, of only twelve years’ standing, had been founded for the Protestant cause by the reigning Duke Julius, a breezy and popular prince, who loved theologians little, Catholics not at all, and founded a model university on liberal principles. It was not, however, an unqualified success. Bruno received some recognition from the university, or from the Duke, and when the latter died in May 1589 he obtained permission to give a funeral oration some days after the official programme had been carried through (on the 1st of July)—the Oratio Consolatoria.[96]
Bruno professes as his reason for wishing to speak that he must express his gratitude to one who had made the university he founded free to all lovers of the Muses, even to strangers such as Bruno himself was:—an exile from his Italian fatherland for honourable reasons and zeal for the truth, here he had received the freedom of the university: in Italy he was exposed to the greedy maw of the Roman wolf—here he was in safety: there he had been chained to a superstitious and absurd cult—here he was exhorted to more reformed rites. What is remarkable in this speech is the bitterness of Bruno’s personal attack upon Rome, and “the violent tyranny of the Tiberine beast.” The constellations are allegorically treated as symbols of the virtues of Julius, or of the vices which he attacked and repressed: among them “the head of the Gorgon, on which for hair there grow venomous snakes, representing that monster of perverse Papal tyranny, which has tongues more numerous than the hairs of the head, aiding and serving it, each and all blasphemous against God, nature, and man, infecting the world with the rankest poison of ignorance and vice.” It was indeed strange that Bruno should have thought of entering Italy after publishing words like these.
Excommunication of Bruno in Helmstadt.However, he was not to find the Protestants much more tolerant than the Catholics. In the university archives there is extant a letter from him to the prorector of the academy, appealing against a public excommunication of himself by the first pastor and superintendent of the church at Helmstadt, Boethius. According to this letter, Boethius had made himself both judge and executioner, without giving the Italian a hearing at all: and the letter appealed to the senate and rector against the public execution of an unjust sentence, privately passed; it demanded a hearing, so that if any legal derogation were to be made from his rank and good name, he might at least feel it to be justly made, and demanded that Boethius be summoned to show he had not fulminated his bolt out of private malice, but in pursuance of the duty of a good pastor on behalf of his sheep. Oct. 6, 1589.The date of the letter is October 6, 1589. No further records of the affair have been found, so that the appeal was probably rejected. The meaning of the excommunication is not quite clear: Bruno does not seem to have been a full member of either the reformed or the Lutheran church, although attending services; and in all probability the sentence was a formal one, which, however, carried serious social inconveniences with it. The prorector, Hofmann, was not one to sympathise either with Bruno or with his philosophy; he was unhappy unless attacking some other person’s opinions: philosophy in general fell under his condemnation, although he professed knowledge of it. A few years after he drove Bruno from Helmstadt he himself was dethroned from his place of authority, “ordered to stick to his last,” and had to leave Helmstadt in the end (1601). No doubt it is against him that the invectives in De Immenso,[97] are directed:—“This scholarch, excelling director of the school of Minerva: this Rhadamanthus of boys, without a shadow of an idea even of ordinary philosophy, lauds to the skies the Peripatetic, and dares to criticise the thoughts of diviner men (whose ashes are to be preferred to the souls of such as these).” Later Boethius also had to be suppressed by the consistory.[98] 1590.The young Duke, with whom no doubt Bruno stood in favour, since he presented him with eighty scudi after the funeral oration, was of the opposite party to Hofmann, but even with this support the Italian could not struggle against his enemies, and towards the middle of 1590 he left for Frankfort, “in order to get two books printed.”
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Frankfort.These were the great Latin works he had been writing, perhaps begun in England itself;—the De Minimo, and the De Immenso, with the De Monade as a part of or introduction to the latter. The printing, however, was not begun till the following year: the censor’s permission was obtained for the first of them only in March 1591, and it appeared in the catalogue of the Spring bookmarket. He again sought and found patronage with an old friend of Sir Philip Sidney, one of the Wechels, famous printers of their day, in the house of another of whom (André) Sidney had lived. In the protocol-book of the council of Frankfort, under the date July 2, 1590, a petition of Jordanus Brunus of Nola is mentioned, in which he asks permission to stay in the house of the printer Wechel. This, as the book of the Burgomaster under the same date shows, was roughly refused:—“Soll man ime sein pitt abschlagen, und sagen, das er sein pfennig anderswo verzehre”—“his petition is to be refused and he is to be told go and spend his coin elsewhere.” In spite of this refusal, Wechel found Bruno lodging in the Carmelite Monastery, where he stayed, working with his own hands at the printing of his books, for some six months,—until December, perhaps, of that year. Frankfort was the main centre of the book world in those days; to its half-yearly book-marts printers and sellers came from all parts of Europe to see the new books of the world, to dispose of their goods, to stock their houses. Among others in this year came the booksellers Ciotto and Bertano, who afterwards were witnesses before the Inquisition, and who stayed in the monastery probably in September of that year, where they met Bruno. In the dedication of the De Minimo, of date February 13, 1591, Bruno’s publishers wrote that “he had only the last folium of the work to correct, when by an unforeseen chance he was hurried away, and could not put the finishing hand upon it, as he had done on the rest of the work: he wrote accordingly asking us to supply in his name what by chance it had been denied him to complete.” The “unforeseen chance” may, as Sigwart suggests, have been the final putting into effect of the Council’s refusal to allow him to stay in the town, which may till then have remained a dead letter; or it may have been the summons to Zurich. He had made the acquaintance of a young Swiss squire, Hainzel, an Augsburger by birth, at whose castle of Elgg in Switzerland a gay and open hospitality was extended to a number of the bizarre and the learned spirits of the time: Hainzel had leanings towards the Black Arts,—Alchemy and the rest,—but had interest to spare for any others about which an air of mystery clung, such as Bruno’s Art of Memory and of Knowledge. Zürich, 1591.Bruno spent a few months with him near Zürich and wrote for him the De imaginum compositione, etc.—as a handbook of these arts. Another of the Frankfort pupils would also be in Zürich, the brilliant but erratic Raphael Eglin, who published in 1609 at Marburg (where he was professor of theology), a work Bruno had dictated in Zürich,—the Summa Terminorum Metaphysicorum. Eglin suffered along with his friend Hainzel from the trickery of the Alchemists, to whom recourse was had in the hope of repairing the fortunes dissipated by the Squire of Elgg’s hospitality.[99] The Summa is dedicated in a letter of April 1595 (from Zürich) to Frederic a Salices, and in a personal reminiscence Eglin remarks on Bruno’s fluency of thought and speech—“standing on one foot, he would both think and dictate as fast as the pen could follow: so rapid was his mind, so forceful his spirit.”
March, 1591.In order perhaps to print the De Imaginum Compositione for Hainzel, or to complete the other works, Bruno returned to Frankfort about the beginning of March, 1591, and on the 17th of that month obtained permission to publish the De Minimo.[100] It is to this period probably that he referred when he spoke of himself before the Venetian tribunal, as having spent six months in Frankfort (Doc. 9). It was a second period of six months after his return from the Zürich visit, of which he omitted all mention—no doubt he had good reason for that.[101] At the autumn book-market his De Monade, De Immenso, and De Imag. Compositione, were ready[102]—the last works that he published. About the same time, on an evil day for himself, he responded to the invitation of a young Venetian patrician, and crossed over to his fatherland,—the last of his free journeyings.
The Frankfort works are fully dealt with in the chapters on Bruno’s philosophy that follow: in their order they were De Minimo.(1) the De triplici Minimo et Mensura:—“On the threefold minimum and measurement, being the elements of three speculative and of many practical sciences”:—dedicated to Duke Henry of Brunswick. It is the first of three Latin poems, written somewhat after the manner of Lucretius, but with prose notes to each chapter or section. The style unfortunately seldom approaches that of Lucretius, either in Latinity or in poetic imagery, but the works are full of vigorous verse, and the force of the ideas suffers little from the fact that they are pressed into the Procrustean bed of rhyme and rhythm. The others were De Monade.(2) the De Monade, Numero et Figura:—“On the Monad, number and figure, being the elements of a more esoteric (secret, or perhaps inward) Physics, Mathematics, and Metaphysics”; and De Immenso.(3) the De Immenso et Innumerabilibus:—“On the Immeasurable and the Innumerable, or on the universe and the worlds.” Both are dedicated to Duke Henry. The three works together contain Bruno’s finished philosophy of God and of Nature, of the universe and of the worlds within it, as well as a criticism of the prevailing and contrary doctrines of the time.
De Imag. Comp.In Frankfort appeared also, in 1591, (4) the De Imaginum, Signorum, et Idearum Compositione:—“On the composition or arrangement, of Images, Signs, and Ideas, for all kinds of inventions, dispositions, and memory.” It is dedicated to Hainzel, and is the last of the works published by Bruno himself. It sums up all those published earlier on the theory of knowledge and on the art of memory. It assumes an identity between the Mind from which the universe sprang, or which is expressed in the universe, and the mind of each individual by whom it is known or approached. It follows that the ideas in our own minds contain implicitly a knowledge of the inmost nature of reality. Here, however, it is chiefly the mnemonic corollaries of this thought that are developed—ideas are to be arranged or grouped about certain images or pictures, in such a way that when any one occurs to the mind, it may readily call up those others which are most closely associated with it, i.e. which belong to the same τόπος or “place” in the mind.