* * * * *
Ma legge aurea et felice
Che natura scolpi. S’ ei piace, ei lice[470]
Bruno was no imperialist. Nature seemed to him to have fixed definite boundaries to the extension of the different races, by which the special genius of each was kept pure. In the Cena (126. 9) Tiphys and his successors (Columbus, Vespucci, and others are meant, although not named) are said to have “discovered means of disturbing the peace of peoples, violating the natural trend of the genius of countries, confounding what foreseeing nature had distinguished, doubling, through commerce, evil feelings, adding the vices of one race to those of another, propagating new incitements, instruments, methods of tyranny and assassination, which in time, by the natural vicissitude of things, would recoil upon our own heads.”[471] It was really, he thought, for the advantage of men themselves that the world-regions should be kept as distinct in their usages and customs as they are physically distinct by the natural divisions of mountains and tracts of sea. From region to region, vice and the poison of perverse laws and religions, the materials of discord and extermination, were propagated and disseminated to the suffocation of every good fruit; there were no advantages which could compare with these evils.[472] It should be remembered that the colonists of the day were the Spaniards, with the corruption and cruelty of whose rule Italians were only too familiar; and their misdeeds were far greater in the new world.
Progress.The age of gold, however, of idleness, and peaceful happiness, was far from Bruno’s ideal; the reply of Momus to Otium showed that it had not made men virtuous in the golden age any more than the brutes were virtuous now—that men were perhaps originally more stupid than many of the latter; but in their emulation of divine actions and their attempts to satisfy spiritual desires, difficulties had arisen and needs sprung up; through these their minds were sharpened, industries had been discovered, arts invented; and so from day to day out of the depth of the human intellect necessity brought forth new and marvellous inventions.[473] Thus more and more they advance, through pressing and earnest occupation, from the bestial nature, and approximate more and more nearly to the divine. That injustice and vice increase along with industries is only a corollary of the increase of justice and of virtue. If oxen or apes had as much virtue and spirit as man, they would have the same apprehensions, the same passions, and the same vices. So in men those that have in them somewhat of the pig nature, or of the ass or ox nature, are certainly less wicked, not infected by so criminal vices as more highly developed men might be; but they are not for that more virtuous, unless the brutes also are more virtuous than men, being infected with fewer vices.[474] In this generous conception of human progress, and of its spur—solicitude, necessity, pain—Bruno is quite at one with modern theories of human evolution; Evolution.it can hardly be said, however, that he anticipated the evolution theory so far as it involves an identity of origin for human beings and lower animals. The idea that different human beings express different animal types was not a new one. It means in Bruno that such men have animal souls, but this is not because their bodies have reverted to the animal type. It is the soul that moulds the body and gives, in these cases, the animal expression to the face—the look of wolf, or bear, or fox, or serpent. There is no question of a physical continuity between animal and man, but there is a psychical continuity, since a soul which is that of an animal in one generation may become that of a man in another.[475] Man and the animals.A much nearer approach to the evolution-theory is to be found in the Cabala,[476] where it is said that if a serpent could have its head moulded into that of a man, its tongue widened, its shoulders broadened, arms and hands branching out from it, and, where the tail now is, a pair of legs, it would think, look, breathe, speak, work, and walk just as a man does, for it would be nothing but a man. Or if the reverse process occurred, in a man (involution), in place of talking he would hiss, in place of walking he would creep, in place of building a palace he would hollow out a hiding-place for himself. This is not, however, because the body of the one had been transformed into that of the other animal, function following structure; the soul with all its qualities is unchanged—it is one and the same in both; the differences are only in the power of expression. A serpent or any other animal might have a higher intelligence than man, yet remain inferior to him through poverty of instruments. If man had not hands, but two feet in their stead, however high his intelligence, family and social life would have been no more enduring with him than with the horse, the deer, or the pig; it would only have exposed him to greater danger and more certain ruin; and, in consequence, there would have been none of the institutions of doctrine, the inventions of discipline, the congregations of citizens, the raising of edifices and other things that represent human greatness and excellence, and make man the invincible superior over all other species. All this is referred not so much to his mind as to his hand, the organ of organs.[477] It is in the development of the hand, also, that modern anthropology has sought one of the chief conditions of human development. It is clear, however, that in these theories there are two positions not distinctly separated: one that the soul gives form to the body, the other that all difference comes from the body, the soul remaining apart, and in its essence untouched by the changes its body undergoes. We shall have to return to this question in the following chapter.
Riches and poverty.Another digression occurs under Hercules,[478] where Riches, Poverty, and Fortune contend for the place of honour that is finally given to Courage or Fortitude. Such personifications of the virtues had been familiarised in Italian philosophy by Petrarca (Remedium utriusque fortunae), but Bruno refers back to Crantor’s discussion of the relative value for the soul of Riches and other goods.[479] In our dialogue Riches is decided to be neither good nor bad in itself; it may be indifferently either, according to its possessor: therefore it is to incur neither disgrace nor honour, neither be condemned to Hades, nor raised up to Heaven, but to wander from place to place. It shall be found by no one who has not first repented of his good mind and healthy brain; he must give up, according to Momus, all thought of prudence, “not trusting in Heaven, regarding not justice or injustice, honour or shame, calm or storm, but committing all to chance. As a general rule Riches are to go to the most insensate, the most foolish, careless, silly—to beware of the wise as of fire. Poverty, on the other hand (in inferior or corporeal goods), may be conjoined with riches in goods of the mind, as riches in inferior goods may never be, for no one that is wise or wishes to gain knowledge can ever achieve great things by their means. To philosophy Riches are an impediment, while Poverty offers it a safe and easy road. He will be great who in poverty is rich because he is content; and he is a slave who in riches is poor because he has not enough. Not he that has little but he that desires much is really poor. The friends of Poverty are open, the enemies of Riches are secret; the poor man by repressing desire may rival Jove in happiness; the rich, ever spreading more and more widely the nets of cupidity, is plunged more and more into depths of misery. Avarice.Avarice is the dark side, the shadow, of both Riches and Poverty, ever fleeing Poverty and pursuing Riches, but ever eluded by the latter, and ever caught by the former; far from Poverty in reality, she is ever close by it in imagination; it is this darkness or shadow that make Poverty and Riches alike to be evil. Fortune.One may be poor in virtue of affect (feeling, emotion) as well as in virtue of effect (actual, material want). Fortune also is rejected, in spite of her claim to be absolutely just; as all things are ultimately or really one, no part of the world, she claims, should be treated as more worthy or unworthy than another, and fortune regards all equally, or does not respect any particular person more than another, which is really justice!
Courage.To the place for which these have striven succeeds Fortitude, the servant of the higher virtues: “Constant and brave must be he that administers judgment, with prudence, by the law, and according to truth. He shall be guided by the book in which is the catalogue of the things the brave man ought not to fear, viz.: those which do not make him worse, as hunger, nakedness, thirst, pain, poverty, solitude, persecution, death; and that of other things which, as they make him worse, must be avoided at all cost,—gross ignorance, injustice, infidelity, lying, avarice, and the rest.”[480] Simplicity.Beside Fortitude may be placed Simplicity,[481] between the vicious extremes of Boastfulness on the one hand and Dissimulation on the other, the latter being the less hateful of the two: “sometimes even the gods must make use of it, and to escape envy, reproach, outrage, Prudence is wont to cover Truth with her vestments.” Self-consciousness.Simplicity is pleasing to the gods, for it has in a manner the likeness of the divine countenance, being always the same and unconscious of itself. That which reflects upon or is conscious of itself, makes itself in a sense to be many, to be other and other, becoming both object and faculty, the knowing and the knowable, whereas in the act of intelligence many things concur in one. The most simple intelligence does not know itself, by reflection, because it is absolute, pure light: and again it alone knows itself, negatively, for it cannot be hidden.[482]
Solicitude.The transition from ordinary morality,—the virtue of the everyday life of human society,—to the divine aspiration of the “heroic” soul, is to be found in the virtue of Solicitude, and the primary triad of Truth, Prudence, and Wisdom. On the feet of Solicitude (Diligence, Endurance) “are the winged sandals of the divine impetus, through which she leaves beneath her the vulgar good, and contemns the soft caresses of pleasures, that, like insidious sirens, try to delay her in the pursuit of the works she seeks.” On labour and fatigue she nurses the generous mind,—enables it not only to subdue itself, but to attain the highest state—that of not feeling fatigue, or pain, when fatigue or pain must be undergone. In noble work fatigue is pleasure and not fatigue to itself, but in other than in such work or virtuous activity, it is not pleasure to itself, but intolerable fatigue. “Be with me” Solicitude concludes, “generous, heroic, anxious Fear, stimulate me that I do not perish from the number of the illustrious before I perish from that of the living. Before torpor or death take from me my hands, grant that the glory of my works may not be in their power to take. Anxiety, grant that the roof be finished before the rain come: that the windows be whole before the winds of treacherous and unquiet winter blow. Memory of a well-spent life, thou shalt make old age and death destroy my soul before they disturb it. Fear of losing the glory acquired in my life shall make old age and death not bitter to me, but dear and desirable.” Truth.The end which this strenuous virtue seeks is that of the intellectual triad placed in the highest part of the heavens by the gods,—Truth, Prudence and Wisdom, which in reality are one and the same.[483] Truth is the unity which stands above the all of things, and the goodness which is pre-eminent over all things, for being, goodness, and truth are one:—in other words, it is the Eleatic One,—the “implicit universe,”—of the metaphysical works.[484] It is before things as cause and principle, and things have dependence upon it: it is in things, as their substance, and through it things subsist: it is after things, for through it things are known without error. These three aspects represent metaphysical, physical, and logical truth respectively. What is presented to our senses and may be grasped by our intelligence, is not the highest truth, but only the figure, image, resplendence, or appearance of it. Prudence also is both above and in us. It is above as Providence, when it is also truth itself, and there Liberty, Necessity, Essence, Entity, all are one, the Absolute. In us Prudence is the virtue of the consultative and deliberative faculty,—“it is a principal form of reason dealing with the universal and the particular,[485] has for its maid-servant dialectics, and for guide acquired wisdom, vulgarly called metaphysics, which deals with the universals of all things that fall within human knowledge.”[486] So too Wisdom, Sophia, is at once supra-mundane,—when it is one with Providence itself, light and eye in one,—and mundane, inferior, not truth itself, wisdom itself, but participant in truth and in wisdom,—an eye that is illuminated by a foreign light. The first is invisible, infigurable, incomprehensible; the second is figured in the heavens, reflected in finite minds, communicated by words. The earthly or inferior forms, however, as Bruno makes clear, are of value only for the sake of the higher unity, to attain which is the real end of the philosophic life. “He who pretends to know what he does not know, says Wisdom, is a wanton Sophist: he who denies knowing what he knows, is ungrateful to the Active Intelligence, insults truth, and outrages me, as do all those who seek me—not for myself, or for the supreme virtue and love of that divinity which is above every Jupiter and every heaven,—but either to sell me for money, honour, or other gain, or to be known rather than to know, or to detract from and be able to destroy the happiness of others.... They that seek me for love of the supreme and first truth are wise, and therefore blessed.”[487] Bruno’s Summum Bonum is therefore knowledge, an intellectual comprehension of the All of things, as it is in the supreme Unity or source of the world. It is for the sake of this end of the few, the wise, that the many, the vulgar, and foolish, are to be kept at peace, in harmony with one another, following obediently their higher guides in religion or in the state. There is not in Bruno any more than in Spinoza any sense of the infinite worth, or the infinite pitifulness of man as an earth-born creature of hopes and fears, creeping towards the light, with the clogging darkness behind, groping in childish terror and childish trust, for the hand of a loving, human God. Therefore, although he lived in the midst of the Reformation, its true meaning passed him by.