Thus the blessed or perfect life for Bruno meant a permanent, continuous absorption of the individual soul in the divine goodness—a permanence or eternity which was also one with the instant of time. There was no greater value at any later moment than at the first union of the soul with its divine object: the soul was thereby removed, once for all, out of the constant flux of things, the incessant renewal and rebirth of the soul throughout the ages, and lifted up into the calm of the eternal and immutable.
Soul and body.Even the heroic soul, however, is, as other souls, on the border line between corporeal and incorporeal nature; in part it tends to rise towards the upper world, in part inclines towards the lower world. If sense ascends to imagination, imagination to reason, reason to intellect, intellect to mind, then the soul is wholly converted into God, and its dwelling-place is the intelligible world. In the contrary direction it descends through conversion to the sensible world, by way of intellect, reason, imagination, sense, and the vegetative faculty. Mind (the highest faculty in Bruno’s psychology:—the intuitive perception of unity with the supreme ideal world) is oppressed by its conjunction with the more material faculties of the soul; knowing of a higher state to which the soul might rise, it despises the present in favour of the future. If a brute had sense of the difference between its condition and that of man, and between the baseness of its state and the nobility of that of man, to which it did not feel it impossible to rise, it would prefer death which should put it on the way to that state, to life which held it fast in its present one. So the soul, compelled by its loftier thoughts, as if dead to the body, aspires upwards. Although living in the body, it “vegetates” there as dead—is present in it so far as animation is concerned, but absent from it in its proper action.[513]
Thus the heroic soul, although present in the body, is absent from it with the better part of itself, and unites itself in an indissoluble bond with divine things. It feels neither love nor hatred of mortal things, considering itself too great to be the slave and servant of its body: the latter it regards simply as a prison-house within which its liberty is closed in; a snare that holds its wings entangled; a chain that binds its hands; fetters that hold its feet fast; a veil that bewilders its vision. Yet it is neither slave, nor captive, nor entangled, nor chained, nor held fast, bound nor blind, for the body cannot tyrannise over it further than itself allows. It has spirit allotted to it proportionally to its nearness to divinity, since the corporeal world and matter are subject to divinity and nature. So it may make itself strong against fortune, magnanimous against injustice, bold in face of poverty, disease, and persecution.[514]
The soul.The soul of man, in Bruno’s psychology, as in Aristotle’s, performs a double function:—“the one is to vivify and actuate the body, and the other to contemplate the higher world. It has a receptive faculty towards the spiritual, an active faculty towards the corporeal. Body is as dead, a thing privative towards the soul, which is its life and perfection, and the soul is as dead, a thing privative to the higher illuminating intelligence from which its intellect derives both its tendency or nature, and its actual form, its realisation.”[515] The soul is not locally in the body, but is related to it as intrinsic form, and as extrinsic giver of form: moulding the members, and giving shape to the composite result from within and from without. “Body is in soul, soul in mind, and mind either is, or is in God, as Plotinus said.”[516] The dualism of nature and divinity, of corporeal and spiritual, intellect and sense, permeates the ethical as it permeates the earlier philosophical thought of Bruno: nowhere is the Neoplatonist effort to overcome the dualism inherent both in Plato and in Aristotle less effective than here. Distraction of the body.Thus the body remains—in spite of the continuity seemingly maintained between the highest and the lowest of the emanations from the supreme, or the identity asserted between sense, imagination, reason, intellect,—the chief hindrance to the aspiration of the soul. For the body is in continual movement, change, alteration, and its faculties are conditioned by its inherent nature, its operations by its faculties. “How then can immobility, subsistence, entity, truth, be understood by that which is always different from itself, always acting and becoming in different ways? What truth, what representation can be depicted or impressed when the pupils of the eyes are dispersed into water, the water into vapour, the vapour into flame, the flame into air—that into other things and again other, the object of sense and sense-knowledge passing endlessly through the infinite cycle of changes?” Thought and passion take their character from their object, or the sense-data on which they are based: but “that which has always before it now one thing now another, now in one way now in another, must necessarily be quite blind in regard to that beauty which is always one, and in one manner, which is unity itself, entity, identity.”[517]
Into the very life of the generous soul there enter, accordingly, the contrarieties by which on a lower plane the soul is governed:—“the skilfulness and art of nature cause it to faint with desire for that which destroys it, to be content in the midst of torment, to be tormented in the midst of all content. For nothing derives from principles of peace, but everything from contrary principles, through the victory and dominance of one side of the contrariety. There is no pleasure of generation on one side without the pain of corruption on the other; and the things that are becoming and those that are decaying are conjoined in one and the same composite being. The sense of joy and the sense of sorrow go ever together; it is called joy rather than sorrow if the former predominates and has greater force to solicit the sense.”[518] The life in death of the more divine soul is only an extreme instance:—“it is the death of lovers from an extreme of joy, the Cabalist mors osculi, and is at the same time eternal life, such as man may have potentially, in disposition, in this world, but actually, in effect, in eternity alone.”[519] Again it is the contrast of infinite desire and finite power:—“the weakness of the human mind which is intent on its divine enterprise, and suddenly is engulfed in the abyss of incomprehensible excellence. Sense and imagination are confused and absorbed, the soul can neither go forward nor backward, nor know where to turn, but loses its being just as a drop of water vanishes in the sea, or a little vapour thins out and loses its proper substance in the spacious immeasurable air.”[520]
Intelligence and love.As the height of our intelligence, so is the depth of our love or passion; the higher, i.e. the more comprehensive, the object of knowledge, the more absorbed become feelings and emotions in its contemplation.[521] The most complete absorption is that of the heroic mind in its infinite and all-comprehensive object. That is not perfect divine heroic love which feels the spur or the bridle, or regret or grief for any other love; but that which is entirely without sense or feeling of other passions. It is so deep in its delight that nothing can displease or divert it or cause it to stumble in the least, and this is to reach the highest blessedness in our present state—to have pleasure without any sense of pain.[522] The loss of sense is caused by the absorption of the whole being in virtue, in the truly good, and in felicity. Regulus, Lucretia, Socrates, Anaxarchus, Scaevola, Cocles, are instanced as noble human beings who had no feeling or sense of the greatest tortures, or what would be such to baser human natures.[523] “A keener joy, or fear, or hope, faith, or indignation, or contempt, turns the mind away from any present, less vivid, passion.” “One who is more deeply moved by the sight of some other thing, does not suffer the pangs of death. The truly wise and virtuous man, not feeling pain, is perfectly happy, so far as the present life admits, at least in the eye of reason.”
In its aspiration the soul need not go beyond itself, need only enter into the depths of its own mind (mens); “for this it is unnecessary to open the eyes wide upon the heavens, to raise aloft the hands, to wend one’s way to the temple, to intone to the ears of idols, that one may best be heard; rather we should enter into the innermost heart of ourselves, for God is near to us, with us, within us, more truly than we are in ourselves; being soul of souls, life of lives, essence of essences.” Divinity is not more nor less present in the other worlds than in our own or in ourselves.[524] Therefore the heroic soul withdraws from the many, neither hating them nor seeking to be like them, associating only with those whom it may make better, or who may make it better; Aspiration.but aiming ever to be self-sufficient in its own wisdom. “The soul must come to the point when it no longer regards but despises fatigue, and the more the contest of passions and vices rages within, the struggle of vicious enemies without, the more it must aspire and rise, and pass, with one breath (if it may be) over this mountain of difficulty. Here there is no need for other arms or shield than the grandeur of an invincible mind, the endurance of a spirit which maintains the even tenor of its life, proceeds from knowledge, and is regulated by the art of speculating upon things high and low, divine and human, in which its highest good consists.”[525]
Love of God.To the love in the human soul there corresponds love in the divine nature, because love is of the essence of divinity. It precedes, in the mythology of the ancients, all the other gods. Hence there is a natural instinct or tendency of all things towards the beautiful and good. Love is that by virtue of which all things are produced, which is in all things, and is the vigour of all things; by its guidance souls rise to contemplation, by the power of flight it inspires, the difficulties of nature are overcome, and men become united with God.[526] To see God is to be seen by God; to be heard by divinity is to hear the voice of divinity; to be favoured by its grace is the same thing as offering oneself to it. The divine potency that is wholly in everything does not offer nor withdraw itself except through the conversion of the other, its object, to it, or aversion from it.[527] To love God is to be loved by God. It is only through love, again, that we can approach the inmost nature of God; we cannot reason or even think of the divine without detracting from it rather than adding to its glory.[528] To think of God is to limit Him, and, therefore, as we have seen, every conception of Him is inadequate: the deepest, the highest knowledge of divine things is by way of negation, never by affirmation. For the divine beauty and divine goodness can never fall within our understanding (our conceptual knowledge), but are ever beyond and beyond in absolute incomprehensibility. No finite intelligence ever perceives the substance of divinity, but always its similitude, its image; even the highest intelligences are, in the language of the schools, not formally, but only denominatively, gods, or divine,—divinity and the divine beauty remaining one and exalted above all things.[529] Being itself eternal, unchangeable, the divine truth reveals itself to the few to whom it is revealed—not as in the physical sciences, which are acquired by the natural light of sense and reason, proceeding from the known to the unknown, in successive stages, but—suddenly and at one stroke. There is no need of expense of time, laborious study, active inquiry, to secure it; but it enters into us as readily as the solar light is present, without lapse of time to him who turns to it, and lays himself open to receive it.[530] When the soul is thus wholly turned to God—to the Idea of Ideas—the mind is lifted up to the unity above essence, and becomes all love, all simplicity and unity. The soul is permeated at once with the desire or love of the divine beauty in itself, “without similitude, figure, image, or form”—a desire or love which is its own realisation.