The hostility which the Italian and some of the Latin writings of Bruno showed towards the positive religions of his day, alike the Catholic, the Reformed, the Jewish, and the Mahomedan, had two grounds: his belief that religious or sectarian strife was the chief cause of the evils of war and civil discord that were rife throughout Europe, and the fact that one and all of these Churches claimed the right of limiting thought as well as of dictating practice, and in their exercise of this right formed an unendurable barrier in the way of human progress. Of the Roman Catholic Church, to which all his life Bruno belonged in spirit if not in outward conformity, he never expressly denied any of the essential doctrines, as he maintained before the Inquisition at Venice. On the other hand, he admitted that he had occasionally made indirect criticism of these doctrines, speaking or writing “philosophically,” not “theologically.” To the doctrine of the Trinity, for example, he had given a rationalist, half-mystical interpretation, seeing in it a figure or metaphor of the coincidence in God of the three highest principles—Mind (the Father), Intellect (the word, the Son), and Love, the creating, vivifying force of the Universe (the Comforter or Holy Spirit). It is quite clear that he did not accept as “philosophically” true the distinction of Persons, or the special divinity of Christ. Only once, perhaps, does he write seriously of Christ as the Son of God, and that in one of the posthumous works, the Lampas Triginta Statuarum.[531] “Charity is the most perfect and consummate harmony, by which the soul in us becomes so harmonious in itself that it is attuned both to God and to all men equally, not only to friends but even to enemies; to this perfection we are drawn, impelled, invited by the Son of the almighty God, to raise us up to the likeness of the Father, ‘who maketh His sun to rise upon good and evil, and sends His rain upon the just and the unjust,’ uplifting us from the savage condition of life common to brutes and to the uncivilised, who love their friends and neighbours, but hate strangers and enemies.” On the other hand, this very law is elsewhere spoken of as coming not from the “evil spirit or genius of any one race,” but from God, the Father of all, as being in harmony with universal nature, and as teaching a general philanthropy; “that we should love our very enemies, not be like brutes and barbarians, but transform ourselves after the image of Him who makes His sun to rise upon good and evil, and makes the rain of His mercies to fall upon just and unjust. This is the religion which I observe, as beyond all controversy, and above all disputation, both from the conviction of my mind, and in accordance with the custom of my fatherland and race.”[532]
What Bruno rejected in Christianity was the whole mass of doctrine which suggested a miraculous or supernatural interference with the order of nature, for the benefit either of a particular person, or of a particular race. That is the nerve, for example, of his satire upon the popular idea of Providence in the Spaccio.[533] There Mercury, on one of his visits to Sophia, relates a number of things he has to see carried out, by the order of Providence, about the little hamlet of Cicala. They are none of the cleanest—the number of melons that are to ripen in Franzino’s garden and that are not to be gathered till over-ripe, of jujubes that are to be picked from Giovanni Bruno’s tree, that are to fall to the earth, or that are to be eaten by worms; how Vasta, in curling the hair on her temples, is to overheat the iron and burn fifty-seven of them, but is not to scorch her head—and so on. These unpleasant details, however, are only a prelude to a philosophical conception of the divine action. God, it is said, does not provide for this and that individual as occasion arises.[534] He “does all things without deliberation, anxiety, or perplexity: provides for innumerable species and an infinite number of individuals, not in any order of succession, but at once and all together: He is not like a finite agent, doing things one by one, with many acts, an infinite number of acts for an infinite number of things, but does everything, past, present, and future, with one simple and unique act.”[535] So the knowledge of God is simple, containing implicitly in itself all things that are or happen in the extended universe (the explicate unity). It is only to our confused vision that this divine government does not appear just and holy. Mercury advises Sophia to put more strength and warmth into her prayers, for to the mind of the infinite the small is as important as the great! “The least things are just as much a care to the gods as the principal things, for the greatest and chiefest cannot subsist without the least and lowliest.” The minutest trifle in the order of the universe is important, for great things are composed of little, little things of least things, and these of atoms and minima.[536] The act of the divine knowledge is the substance of all things: all are therefore known, ordained, foreseen. “Divine knowledge is not as human, which comes after things, but is before and in all things, and if it were not so, things could not be causes or agents, either proximate or secondary.”[537]
Thus the order of nature is fixed and eternal, ordained and foreknown from all time. We have seen that Bruno rejected the superstitious idea that comets and other heavenly wonders had a supernatural meaning; and that he found the truest signs of divinity in the orderly course of nature.[538] Miracles he explained either through imposture or through sympathetic magic. Along with these he rejected also what may be called the morbid side of mediæval Christianity—its constant dwelling upon the physical, sensational aspects of Christ’s life, sufferings, and death,[539] its appeal to the hysterical in man. Against a religion of incoherent personal emotion and brute ignorance, he would set one of humane love and of reasoned knowledge. The chief value of the New Testament, in his eyes, was its preaching of “the Gospel law of mutual love,” which the tyranny of Rome had violated.[540] The religion to which he gave his adherence was that which raised the dead, healed the sick, gave to the poor; not the contrary form to which the Inquisition had brought the Church in Catholic lands.
Man and God.With great boldness Bruno drew from his conception of the Infinite the consequence that there can be no action of the finite upon the infinite, no change or effect in God produced through man. A practical corollary of this was the argument for freedom of thought. The virtue of Judgment, in the Spaccio, has entrusted to it the defence of the true law, and the removal of unjust or false laws, dictated by enmity to the peace and happiness of the human commonwealth. It shall kindle and fan the appetite for glory in the human breast, as the only sure stimulus for inciting men to the heroic deeds that increase, maintain, or strengthen republics. But it shall not pay heed to what men imagine or think, provided their words and deeds do not corrupt the peace of the realm. Deeds are its only concern, and it has to judge the tree, not by the fineness, but by the goodness of its fruits. Heaven is not interested in any way in what does not interest man; it is moved and angered, not by anything done, said, or thought by men, except in so far as the welfare of republics is endangered. Gods would not be gods if they were either pleased or displeased, grieved or delighted, by what men did or thought; they would be more needy than men, would be as dependent on men as men are on themselves for utility and profit.[541] The gods are beyond all passion: they have active anger and pleasure only, not passive. Therefore they do not threaten punishment or promise reward for good or evil that results in them, but for that committed on peoples and in the human societies which they foster by their divine laws and statutes, since human laws do not suffice. The gods do not seek the reverence, fear, love, worship, or respect of men, for any other end or utility than that of men themselves. Glory cannot be added to the gods from without; they have made their laws not to receive glory but to communicate glory to men. The sole sphere of justice is the moral actions of men with regard to other men; inward sins are sins only so far as they have outward effect, and inward justice is not justice without outward practice.[542] The Bible,—not science but morality its aim.In the Cena Bruno had already made practical use of this principle in maintaining that the Scriptures teach not science, but an ideal of conduct, and therefore that any argument from them as to the actual constitution of the world is devoid of compelling force, while, on the other side, no scientific theory or hypothesis can be ruled out simply because it is contradicted by any statement in the Scriptures. They were written, not in the service of our intellect to instruct us in philosophy, but for the grace of our mind and heart, ordaining by their laws what should be our behaviour in the moral life. The Scriptures were written in the language and adapted to the intelligence of the vulgar, the people of the time. “A historian making use of words which the ordinary man could not understand, would be absurd; and still more so would be one who desired to give to a whole people a law and model of life, if he were to employ terms which he alone or very few could understand, and should waste time over matters indifferent to the end for which the laws were ordained. For this reason Alghazel said that the function of the books of the law was not so much to probe the truth of things, or speculation, as to promote good customs,” and to provide for the welfare of republics and of humanity. To use the terms of science where there is no need, is to ask that the vulgar, the foolish many, from whom only conduct is required, shall have a special comprehension,—to ask that the hand shall have the eye, whereas it is not made by nature to see, but to work, and to obey the eye.[543]
The revelation of the Scriptures is accordingly reduced to that of a moral ideal, to be enforced upon the ordinary man by the threat of future punishment and promise of future reward; but it is an ideal which the wise man would acquire by the light of reason alone, and which he would pursue for its own sake.
On the other hand, the ceremonies and worship of the Church were never attacked by Bruno, nor did he ever place himself in open hostility to it; while he submitted, formally at least, to the rites of the Protestant churches in Geneva and Helmstadt. The grounds of this outward conformity may have been various: Bruno had no interest in speculative theology, and probably kept an open mind towards the prevailing dogmas and the ceremonies that symbolised the truths contained in them. He believed with Pomponazzi, and others after him, that religion is a good thing for the many, the foolish and ignorant of the world, while knowledge or philosophy takes its place with the wise. The former must be governed by laws which they have blindly to obey, hence the supernatural sanction required; the latter pursue the true good without this stimulus, by virtue of reason. But for the sake of the many, the few must conform in outward practice with the religion of their state.[544] Brunnhofer goes so far as to see in this the idea of Lessing, that religion is a means whereby men are gradually educated upwards to a true knowledge of God,—leading them from the state of darkness and savagery to that of moral behaviour, at which point only the full light of science and philosophy takes the place of religion.[545] There was a religion, however, for the few as well as for the many, for the wholly civilised as well as for the semi-barbarians of Europe,—the philosophical religion of the Heroici Furori. Another reason for his conformity was that Bruno regarded the historical religions as allegories, or metaphors, of truth. Not that it was for every one to say what was metaphorical merely, what truth or fact: in the hands of Jews, Christians, and Mahomedans, and the many sects of each, the same Scripture met with as many interpretations as the number of the sects.[546] The interpretation of the divine words, uttered by inspired prophet or poet,—for the divine inspiration was not given at one place or one time only,—was again the work of the wise few.
Bruno’s own leaning was towards Rationalism,—as in his interpretation of the Trinity, of Creation, of the Incarnation, of Immortality, of Providence.[547] In this he was only following Lully and Nicolaus of Cusa, who also “demonstrated” some of the deepest of Christian doctrines, interpreted in their own way. Yet Bruno was by no means a thorough Rationalist: there remained always a sphere within which Faith only was available, to which neither reason nor intellect could penetrate. We remember that he ridiculed Lully for attempting to demonstrate some of the particular doctrines which “are revealed to the worshippers of Christ (Christicoli) alone, are contrary to all reason, philosophy, other faiths or superstitions, and are capable of no demonstration, but admit of faith only.”[548] It is improbable that any ironical meaning should be read into the words; for the distinction between faith and knowledge or science, between theological and philosophical discussion, between the supernatural light and the light of nature or reason, occurs again and again, not only in Bruno’s replies to the Inquisitors of Venice, but in the published works. Here and there he deprecates the taking of his statements, should they conflict with or tend to weaken the accepted faith, as “assertively” made, and claims, like Copernicus, the right of arguing for any thesis which is “more in harmony with our sense and reason, or at least less out of harmony with them than the contradictory thesis,” however high the authority of the latter may be.[549] Discreet theologians would fix no limit to natural reasonings, however far these went, provided they did not determine against the divine authority, but subordinated themselves to it.[550] Even the Heroici Furori disclaims any supernatural reasoning or revelation. “If there is another order, above the natural, which either destroys or corrects the latter, I believe in it, and may not dispute about it, for I do not reason in any other than a natural spirit.” He is dealing with Philosophy, not Theology.[551] In other words, Bruno refuses to dogmatise, just as he condemns dogmatism in others; philosophy or science should be allowed to pursue its own course, irrespective of religion, and untrammelled by the Church, so long as it does not attack the authority of the Church, and thereby weaken the forces that make for peace and harmony among men.[552] Short of that, entire freedom of thought should be allowed. Sometimes it might be well that the wise and heroic, as well as the others, should submit and humble the light of reason received from God, “the mark of divinity hidden in the substance of our nature,” if some higher light forbid or warn. But,—“In matters of philosophy at least, by whose free altars I have taken refuge from the threatening waves, I shall listen only to those doctors who bid us not close the eyes but open them as widely as we may.”[553] It has been suggested that Bruno, like many others who were unstable in the Church, made use of the subterfuge of the twofold truth;[554] in other words, that he professed to disbelieve theologically what he accepted as philosophical truth: or that he held one and the same proposition to be true to sense and reason, i.e. to harmonise with all other “natural” knowledge, and yet to be false to faith, i.e. inconsistent with revealed truth. But no theologian denied more strenuously than Bruno, in spite of occasional lapses, the possibility of two kinds of truth. There were indeed two kinds of evidence: “one from the light of our own senses and rational inference, such as we require in speculative sciences, in the arts, and in practical life, where true and false, good and evil, are apprehended by human reason and natural light;” the other, from light of a foreign, namely, a divine source. For as God neither deceives nor is deceived, and is not envious, but good in the highest degree—is indeed truth and goodness itself; so, when he speaks to us of occult things, of mysteries, it must be evident that everything he proposes for our belief is true, and that everything he proposes for our doing is good. But God is also the Author of nature, of our senses, of our eyes, and of that truth and evidence which is in them and according to them; truth does not contradict truth, goodness is not opposed to goodness. The word of God that is spread through the parts of nature, His hand and instrument,—for Nature is either God himself, or the divine force manifest in things,—is not opposed to the word of God, from whatever other part or principle it springs.[555] There could be no clearer assertion of the right of philosophy and science to pursue their own way in the discovery of truth. Nothing revealed from above can conflict with truth acquired by the discursive, slow-moving human reason, nor on the other hand can any real truth arrived at by science ever contradict the pure, genuinely-revealed, word of God. The sphere of faith is separated from that of reason; faith follows the authority of revelation, is an infallible certainty equal to, if not greater than, that of sense-knowledge and the intuition of first principles. Revealed truths are outside the sphere of sense and reason, not, however, as opposed or contrary to the truths belonging to that sphere, but as above them. While philosophical faith enables us to act according to reason and human nature, guiding us by principles innate in ourselves, to the perfection of our natural condition, theological faith leads us by supernatural principles to a supernatural end, to become formed in the likeness and in the knowledge of God.[556] Neither must we call to the bar of reason what is above reason, summon before our tribunal “cases” of eternity,[557] nor on the other hand must faith be allowed to prejudice the discovery of truth by natural methods: if so, it becomes a danger and a snare.[558] Bruno was therefore a Rationalist only in a limited sense: while he claimed for the philosopher entire freedom of interpretation of religious dogmas or legends, the interpretation was to be governed not by the facts of ordinary knowledge, but by the mystical intuition of divine truth, given, in inspired moments, to the heroic soul. There were two types of rationalism in mediaeval philosophy—that of Averroes, which sought to supplant the positive religions by a religion of philosophy, and that of Scotus Erigena, which aimed at upholding popular faiths while allowing the philosopher freedom of thought in interpreting the doctrines these faiths involved. Bruno’s rationalism is clearly of the second type, although personally he disliked all prevailing religions for the reasons already given.[559] All positive religions expressed for him one and the same truth, some more, some less adequately,—that the supreme end of human activity is the union of the soul with God, whereby it becomes one with God and is raised above the sphere of sense and reason, above nature, out of the ordinary cycle of human life and human death. Egyptian religion: Animism.That which of all others most nearly approached his ideal was the half-mythical religion of the Egyptians, from whom indeed he believed the later religions, as well as the earlier philosophies, to have been inspired. The Egyptian worship of the gods in the form of living animals was symbolic of the truth that God is in all things: “Animals and plants,” says Jupiter in the Spaccio, “are living effects of nature, and nature is nothing but God in things. Diverse things represent diverse deities, and diverse powers.”[560] God is in all things, but not fully expressed in each, “in some more, in some less excellently,” in some one divine attribute or power predominates, in some another. Thus the viper or the scorpion represents Mars, the cock or the lion the Sun, because of their greater affinity, respectively, with these deities, or rather with the divine powers which the deities embody. For as divinity is communicated in a divine scale downwards to nature, so from the light that is reflected in natural things we may rise to the divine life that is above them. It was on these sympathies between animals, plants, metals, on the one hand, and the various attributes of divinity on the other, that genuine magic and divination depended. The Magi ascended by the same scale of nature to the highest divinity, by which that divinity itself descended to the least of things, in its self-communication. Their ceremonies were not vain imaginations, but living voices that reached the very ears of the gods. “These wise men knew God to be in things, divinity to be latent in nature, acting in and scintillating diversely from diverse subjects, and making them to participate in itself, as in its being, life, and intelligence.”[561] Of Jupiter, Venus, and the rest is said what Bruno no doubt thought of Christ, and other founders of religion, that they had been mortal human beings. What men adored was not Jupiter, as a divine being, but divinity, as expressed in Jupiter: in this or that man were worshipped the name and symbol of a divinity which in their birth communicated itself to men, and with their death was thought to have completed its work and to have returned to heaven.[562] But divinity is communicated not only through these divinely chosen human vessels, but through earth, and sun, and moon, the planets, the stars, and all that is in them: one divinity under innumerable names, according to the innumerable modes in which it is diffused. Endlessly varied also are the methods by which it must be sought, under conditions appropriate to each thing, while it must be honoured and worshipped with endlessly different rites, because the kinds of favour we seek to obtain from it are beyond number. Later religions had transformed for the worse what to the Egyptians was merely a fable or metaphor, by which a mystery above the reach of sense was expressed, or presented to the mind in a sign or symbol.[563]
The finite and the infinite.How Bruno understood the relation of the finite human soul to the divine mind, or to the soul of the universe, it is not easy to determine, and it is doubtful whether he ever made it clear to himself. Men, as natural beings, enter into the determinate order of Nature, which, as we have seen, is the divine power that moves matter to life. This divine power is the soul in all things, everywhere “one mundane spirit, wholly in the whole and in every part of it, producing all things in each according to the conditions of matter, time, and place.” Men, for example, are not descended from one parent only, but have come to life in the ordinary course of nature, in different places and at different times; hence the difference between the races.[564] We have seen that Bruno also reverts repeatedly to the idea that various men present in their expressions various animal characters, which are an index to their inward nature, and at the same time point to a transition from a previous or towards a future state.[565] And again it was shown how animals differed from men not necessarily in degree or quality of mind, but only in the outward organism through which alone the mind could express itself. It is clear then that man should have no higher place than any other animal, should stand no nearer God than they; yet in a sense he does, for the human state appears to be the only one from which the soul may raise itself out of the incessant flow of earthly vicissitude, and enjoy the calm of eternal intellectual union with God.[566] The soul of any animal (or plant?) may in time, however, take the body of a man, when this outlet is given to it, just as that of a man, should he refuse his opportunity, may sink back, and indeed must sink back, to the animal state, in the never-ceasing cycle of change. But what precisely is this soul that passes from one body to another, perhaps from one star to another? In one passage we read that as in corporeal matter the body of the ass does not differ from that of the man, so in spiritual matter the soul of the ass remains the same as that of the man; the soul of either is not different from that which is in all things, i.e. the soul of the universe.[567] We should then have to assume that it is matter, not the form or soul, that differentiates individuals. According to the differences of the organised bodies are the souls that are in them; or, it is one and the same soul which constitutes the vital and cognitive principle in different animal bodies, and in different “worlds” or stars. The individual human and animal souls would be merely modes of the one earth-soul, just as the different star-souls would be merely modes of the one soul of the universe, the first and highest emanation of divinity. The immortality of the individual soul would mean accordingly its reabsorption, at the close of its bodily life, into the eternal; but it would be impossible then to ascribe any continuity or identity to the souls of two beings which succeed each other in nature. This impersonal immortality is that which is most prominent in the Italian dialogues; it gives place, so far as prominence is concerned, to quite another standpoint in the later Latin works. Thus we find in the Causa the comparison of the presence of the spiritual in matter to that of a voice in a room: it is wholly in the room and in every part of the room, yet it is only one utterance that is so heard in the different parts.[568] It might be added that the different degrees of perfection or of divinity in different things would correspond exactly with the differences in the intensity, vividness, of the sound in nearer and more distant parts of the room. As matter itself is ultimately one with spirit,[569] the outcome of this theory is an extreme Pantheism; especially as in the Causa the transcendent Unity, elsewhere distinguished from the soul of the universe, is disregarded. Divinity constitutes both existence and essence of all things, and all things are ultimately one—God, in whom individual beings have their reality, and in whom each is one with all other beings. “We have not to look for divinity at a distance from us, for we have it with us, more truly intimate to us than we are to ourselves”; and so with all other finite things.[570] It has been shown also that death from this standpoint is merely the dissolution of a composite thing into its immortal elements, spirit and matter;[571] death is a change of “accidents” to the substance (i.e. of qualities, conditions), never a change of substance itself.[572] Not only we, but all other substances, spiritual and corporeal alike, are beyond reach of death; but as all substances are ultimately one, this does not mean a peculiar, personal immortality for each of us as separate beings.
Optimism.It follows also from this aspect of Bruno’s philosophy, that as all things are divine, so all are good. The forms of all living things—men, animals, metals, even those of deformed creatures—are beautiful and perfect in heaven (i.e. sub specie aeternitatis).[573] All things being subordinated to the will of the best, everything is good, and tends towards good; the contrary is only apparent when we refuse to look beyond the present, as the beauty of a building is not manifest to one who sees only a part of it, a stone, a piece of cement, a partition wall, but is clearest to one who can see the whole, and is able to compare part with part.[574]
The worth of the finite individual.But there is another aspect of Bruno’s theory of the relation of the finite individual soul to the universal spirit, according to which every finite thing has an infinite worth from the very fact of its existence as a member, or part of the universe. It is in this phase, later in time than the other, but never completely dissociated from it, that the real contribution of Bruno to the history of philosophy appears.