Giordano Bruno

by J. Lewis McIntyre

It is foreshadowed in the Heroici Furori,[575] where the pursuit of an infinite object by a finite intelligence is justified from the infinite potentiality of the latter, as eternal and unlimited in its capacity for delight and blessedness. The infinite desire is itself a pledge of its fulfilment in an eternal life.[576] The individual, finite as it is, must realise in itself the whole nature of the universe to which it belongs; each thing, each substance or monad, realises in the course of its life all other possible existences. Each takes on successively all possible forms, just as at every moment all possible forms are actually realised in the universe as a whole. Each thing, and every part of each, present to us the “similitude,” the image of the universe. It is precisely the thought which afterwards loomed so largely in the philosophy of Leibniz, that each monad is a mirror of the universe. The transmigration of the earlier philosophy appears in a far nobler light in this phase. The soul of man does not change in itself as it passes through its innumerable forms; now it is endowed with the “instruments” or members of the human body; anon it will take up the members of another body; “for the soul which has now the bodily organs of a horse there await the bodily members of a man and of all other kinds of being, in regular series, or in confused order; the death of the present members has no bearing upon the future life and its innumerable forms. The soul would not suffer if this were known to it; the wise soul does not fear death, sometimes desires it, and goes to meet it. Before every substance lies eternity for duration, immensity for place, omniformity for realisation.”[577] The soul is not limited to the earth alone, but has the infinite worlds before it, for its dwelling-place. It is owing to this individual (indivisible, therefore unchanging) substance—the soul—that we are what we are; about it as a centre there occur in each life continuous “massing and unmassing” of corporeal atoms, through which the changes of form are brought about. “By birth and growth the spirit-architect expands into this mass of which we consist, spreading outwards from the heart. Thither again it withdraws, winding up the threads of its web, retiring by the same path along which it advanced, passing out by the same gate through which it entered. Birth is expansion of the centre, life consistency of the sphere, death contraction to the centre.” It is the soul that gathers about it, groups and vivifies the atom-mass; and the strongest argument for its immortality is that it cannot be of less value, of inferior condition, than the atoms themselves of which it avails itself to its own ends, and which are in their nature imperishable.[578] Each soul exists apart in its own unity and individuality; the soul of the universe does not impart anything of itself to the souls of its members.[579] The hierarchy of souls is not a scale of beings within beings, but a multitude of realities, co-existent to all eternity, the Monas Monadum at their head, representing perfectly, completely, at every moment (i.e. timelessly), the reality of all the others, yet separable from them. Of the others that is higher which knows more perfectly, and in closer unity—that is, more adequately—the universe to which it belongs. Thus there is the daemon or soul “which is wholly in the whole extent of the life of the earth, by the life of which we live, and in the being of which we are;” above it is the individual soul or substantial nature which is in the wider extent of the solar system to which the earth belongs; above it again the soul of the whole system of the universe; and highest of all the mind of minds—God, the one spirit filling all things wholly.[580]

So in the Lampas the Intellectus primus is said to be separable from particular finite intelligences. It does not belong to their substance: it works in them, but not as a part of them. It does not gradually leave the being to which it has presented itself when that begins to decay, but simply ceases to operate, just as it comes also suddenly to each, if at all.[581]

It follows that each of the lower monads is so far imperfect that it is never at any one time all that it has the possibility of being; the eternal essence of humanity, for example, the truth of humanity, its ideal, is realised not in any one individual, but only in the species as a whole,[582] and this is true of the perfection of every other species. But Bruno’s optimism surmounts this difficulty. The evil, the imperfection, is so only to the individual, and in that particular phase of its life. Each thing has a double tendency and a double striving—to remain in the state in which it is, and to press beyond that to realise new forms. But each thing has in itself the nature of the whole—is therefore in its inmost nature perfect. It is imperfect only in its explicit nature—on its outward side. The striving after new life is due to the felt conflict, or want of harmony, between what it has in it to become—its inner self—and what it has actually become, the limited form in which it appears. On the one hand evil is necessary for good, for were the imperfections not felt, there would be no striving after perfection; all defect and sin consist merely in privation, in the non-realisation of possible qualities. “It would not be well were evil non-existent, for it makes for the necessity of good, since if evil were removed the desire of good would also cease.”[583] In its whole life, however, the soul will realise all good, and therefore is only per accidens imperfect. On the other hand, however mean in itself at any moment, it is a necessary part of the whole, and therefore, relatively to the whole it is good. “If we look to the order of the universe it will appear that every action and effect is good by way of necessity, for even the things which appear the most trifling and sordid are parts of greater and more noble things, as the formless are parts of the formed, the least are necessary elements of the great, the great of the greatest; and as the less cannot subsist without the least, so neither can the greatest without the great. All beings, therefore, of whatsoever nature, are good, if they are rightly considered, not less good than greater things, if we take into account the fact that the goodness of the whole depends on the goodness of its parts.”[584]

Every part, every individual in the universe, differs from every other; each has its own inalienable individuality by which it stands out from all others and is itself. So far was this principle carried by Bruno that, as we have seen, he denied that any body could ever occupy the same place twice; the planets moved not in circles or regular paths, but ever in spiral course, so that at each moment their places were other than at any prior or later moment. No two circles, no two lines in nature, were ever exactly equal; hence there was never a perfect circle nor a perfectly straight line. The principle is not at all an epistemological one. It does not mean that we could not distinguish between two precisely equal things, but that two such things could not exist, not even in the minutest forms of nature, since the infinite variety of the infinite all must reflect at every moment the infinite, eternally realised, thought of the One Mind.

God in nature.There are accordingly three aspects of God in Bruno’s philosophy—three different standpoints from which He may be approached. The first is that of natural religion—God in Nature. Nature is “the omniform image of the omniform God—His great living semblance (simulacrum).”[585] Its order reveals the mind from which it springs—the stars “declare the glory of the majesty of God and the works of His hands. Thence we are uplifted to the infinite cause of the infinite effect.”[586] Nature is God in things,[587] His infinite mirror, the explicate, unfolded, extended, immeasurable world, and He is implicitly everywhere in the whole.[588] There is, however, no argument from the world to God’s existence. From the first the infinite power and goodness are assumed, and the universe, in Bruno’s thought, is simply a broad general revelation of what each one of us may find in himself.[589]

The form which the cosmological argument takes in Bruno is that as individual things, taken singly, must be referred each to a finite principle and cause, a finite effect implying a finite power; so from the point of view of the universe of things, the innumerable individuals in immeasurable space must be referred to an infinite first cause. But to our thought the universe is only an inciting cause; we cannot know God or anything of God’s nature from it further than an architect or sculptor can be known from one or all of his works. The beauty and majesty of external nature leads us to aspire to God, its source; but a nearer spring of knowledge is in ourselves. God in us.“We are led to regard divinity not as without us, separate or distant from us, but as within ourselves (since it is everywhere wholly), for it is more intimate to us than we can be to ourselves, since it is the substantiating and most essential centre of all essences and of all being.”[590] It is from these two aspects of his philosophy, the identifying of nature with God, and the identifying of the true being of each of us with God, that Bruno has been described as a Pantheist. So far, however, as this term implies the identity of the individual things with each other, the conception that all things are one, not in the sense of forming a unity of differents, but in the sense of an indifference or uniformity of all, the term “Pantheism” would give a very false impression of Bruno’s religious belief. It is neither the Pantheism which reduces all to a lifeless one, in which all differences are merged, nor that which breaks up the one into a many in which all differences are lost; but the Pantheism of a living, self-manifesting One, which is throughout eternity unfolding itself in the diverse units of the world—a pantheism not different from that of any of the higher religions.

God in Himself.Neither in nature, however, nor in ourselves, in the soul of man, is the whole being of God to be found. Could we indeed see the substance, the truth of ourselves, could our eye in seeing itself see all things, as the eye of God in seeing other things sees itself,—then it would be possible to understand all things and to create all things, for we should then in reality be God. We never penetrate to the deep-lying individual in ourselves, but see only the accidents, the externals; as we never see our own eye, but only its reflection from a mirror, so our intellect cannot see itself in itself, nor anything else in itself, but always some external form, semblance, image, figure, sign.[591] The truth of things—God—everywhere eludes our sense and our reason, our discursive intelligence. It is revealed, as we have seen, only to our intuitive, comprehensive glance—a sudden insight for which reason only prepares the way. Yet even this insight, “comprehension,” is not “comprehending.” We are brought, perhaps, through it into contact and into harmony with Him, but He is never, even to intuition, knowable. To be known would mean to be comprehended, limited, and therefore finite.

First, then, God, the Monad, or Mind, is the true, innermost nature of things; “in themselves things are in motion, in matter, dependent, defective, are rather non-entia than entia, for as from not-being they become, so from being they may cease to be; hence they truly exist only where they cannot cease to be, i.e. in the first cause and unfailing principle, which has power to bring them forth when it will. Therefore they are more truly in the Monad itself, and consequently are more truly known in it, in simplicity and togetherness, where all things are one in an ineffable sense, without distinction, distribution, or number.”[592] God is the source of the determinations, the forms of all things. “The first measure is Mind itself: for all measure receives its denomination from mind”[593] (mensura, mens). “One is mind, everywhere wholly, giving measure to all things; one intellect, giving order to all things; one love, producing harmony between all things.”[594] The first section of the Praxis Descensus sums up the relation, the meaning of “creation,” thus:[595]—“God is the universal substance, being, by which all things are; essence, the soul of all essence, by which whatever is, is; more intimate in every being than its form or its nature; for as nature is the ground of the being of each thing, so the deeper ground of the nature of each thing is God.”

In the second place, the order and life of things has its source in God, as the Monas ordinatrix; the whole order of nature, both as it is simultaneously, as it has been, and as it shall be, lies “complicitly,” grasped in one thought, and realised in one act, in his Mind. “What immutable substance wills, it wills immutably, i.e. it wills necessarily, not as determined by an alien will, which enforces the necessity, but of its own will; this necessity is far from being contrary to liberty; liberty itself, will, and necessity are one and the same” (in God).[596] Divine necessity differs from natural causation, the sequence of causes and effects, in that in nature the causes, will, and knowledge may be frustrated, the effect averted; but divine necessity is necessity in all respects—to will, to know, to act, are one. Theism.In the third place, God is above and beyond both natural things and their order in the universe as a whole. In the later works, it is no longer as a mystical being—inaccessible, because wholly abstract, empty of content, the sublimated unity of things—that God is posited. The Neoplatonism of the earlier works, although remaining in the language and even in much of the thoughts of the later, has been overcome in fact.[597] God is indeed transcendent, beyond the world, but He is so only as comprehending the world in Himself, its source, its truth—yet more than the source of things or of their order. In all other things we may distinguish between existence and essence (i.e. the fact of their being, their historical presence in the world, and their nature, through which they are what they are); in God alone these are one or indistinguishable.[598] God and things differ by a greater difference than substance and accident—i.e. things are not accidents, or “modes” of God. They differ from one another by their special differentiae, but resemble in other respects. God differs, not as marked off, limited by them, but as containing them all in essence, presence, power and eternity.[599] He is not apart from things, but in them; in them not as comprehended or contained by them, but as comprehending and containing them, and as the essential basis of all things, the centre of the universal life and substance.[600] He is all things in all, because He gives existence to all; He is none of them, because above all, transcending each and all in essence, nobility and power.[601] He comprises all things, not as excluded and, as it were, looking upon them from apart and from above, for He is also comprised by all things. He is comprised also not as included, contained, repressed within alien limits, for He also comprises all things. He is therefore within all things, as He who gives essence to all things; and is the basis of all being, the heart and source of all life. He comprises all things, as excelling them, governing, moving, disposing, limiting—Himself unlimited.[602] Hence, also, as we saw, He is nameless; names are for distinguishing, defining, separating from other things, but He is above all difference, otherness, diversity, multitude[603]; or again, all names, all predicates, attributes, are equally true of Him, because He comprises all in Himself. It is in this sense that He is Monad of Monads, entity of entities, “in whom are all things, who is in none, not even in Himself, because He is indivisible, and is simplicity itself.”[604]