Meanwhile literature in France and England had not lost sight of Bruno.[653] In 1633 there was published in the former a play, Boniface et le Pédant, which has been described as a refined and Gallicised imitation of the Candelaio; in its turn it suggested, perhaps, the Pédant Joué of Cyrano de Bergerac, and some of the pedant-scenes in Molière.[654] In 1634 in England a masque by Thomas Carew—the Coelum Britannicum—was played in English by Charles I., which was based, partly at least, upon the Spaccio, with Charles I. in the place of Truth.[655]

Bayle.Pierre Bayle, by the article in his Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1697), which had a very wide influence, probably damned Bruno’s reputation for a century. The article on Spinoza also did the same service for the Dutch philosopher, with whom, indeed, Bayle joined Bruno, as having held the same “abominable doctrine” of atheism. He had no real knowledge of Bruno, the biography is frivolous and inexact, and the philosophy—a garbled version—is reported on hearsay.[656] It was Bayle’s authority which stamped Bruno with the sarcastic description of “a knight errant in philosophy,” which has sometimes been spoken of as a happy touch of Hegel’s invention, but really dates back to one Lionardo Nicodemo (1683), who described Bruno as “playing the part of a wandering knight (i.e. a travelling scholastic), now here, now there, at different universities in France, England, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, with shield pendant, and lance in rest, challenging the Aristotelians to learned combat.”[657] Budgell.In England the same aspersion upon Bruno’s name was stereotyped by an article in the Spectator of May 27, 1712 (one of Budgell’s). The writer, however, had the fairness, which Bayle had not, to read Bruno’s Spaccio before making reflections upon it. Contrary to his expectations, for Bruno was “a professed atheist, with a design to depreciate religion,” he found “very little danger” in it. This did not prevent him from taking Bruno as a text for a would-be humorous disquisition on Atheism. Toland.It was John Toland,[658] the “poor denizen of Grub Street,” and once famous, or infamous, author of Christianity not Mysterious, who in England first paid Bruno something of the respect he deserved. His championship was not, perhaps, of the most discerning or of the most valuable, but it was honest. A copy of the Spaccio had come into his possession,—one which he believed to be the only one then in existence,—and as a result of his reading he claimed Bruno as the founder of free thought. He had studied the sayings on Divine Magic in that work, and had fastened on the fact that Bruno “regarded magic as nothing but a more recondite, non-vulgar, although perfectly natural wisdom.” This was certainly true; but Toland added, “So he sometimes calls the eternal vicissitude of material forms Transmigration,” which was at least misleading. Among his manuscripts Toland left “an account of Giordano Bruno’s Book of the Universe” (De l’ Infinito), along with a translation of the introductory epistle.[659] And somewhat earlier, in 1713, a translation of the Spaccio was made into English by W. Morehead,[660] who may have been one of Toland’s brethren, as the Quarterly Reviewer suggests. Toland himself was, however, believed to be the author. He had visited Lacroze at Berlin in 1706, and had defended the Nolan against that virulent searcher-out of atheists, deists, pantheists, and the like “miscreants and libertines.” To a fellow-enthusiast in Germany (Baron Hohendorf) Toland wrote three years later, giving the proofs of Bruno’s punishment, with a translation of Schopp’s account, and stating his belief as to Bruno’s real doctrine (viz. free-thinking).[661] “The author,” he wrote, “gives full play to his spirit, which is always diverting, but at the same time very powerful; he is often diffuse, but never wearisome. In a very small space he has expounded a complete system of natural religion, the theory of ancient cosmography, history, comparison and refutation of different opinions, besides many curious observations on diverse subjects. But the author abounds in pleasantries, and in satirical traits: he is impious in a sovereign degree, and does not always keep himself within the limits of allegory.” And so Bruno, like Spinoza in this also, went down to posterity as a worthless, impious atheist, one of the reputed authors of the mythical work De Tribus Impostoribus, which no one had ever seen, but in which the three founders of the great religions of the world were attacked as conscious cheats! So far was the world as yet from understanding the martyr for truth and for “the religion of thought.”

It was from Germany that the reaction came. The story of the restoration of Bruno’s name (his Ehrenrettung) has been told by Bartholmèss, and needs but a very brief sketch here. Heumann[662] repudiated Lacroze’s description of him as an atheist and forerunner of Spinoza’s pantheism, describing him as a martyr for the Lutheran faith and as an eclectic in philosophy. Brucker[663]—without the historical sense, but a painstaking and learned, if diffuse, analyst, judging all philosophies by the standard of orthodox Protestantism and the Leibnizian philosophy—yet sympathised with Bruno, described him as an “eclectic, combining ideas of the Eleatics with those of Democritus and Epicurus, Copernicus and Pythagoras, not an impostor, but an intellectual enthusiast—cum ratione insanivit.” Throughout the remaining part of the century a number of monographs appeared, by Jordan, Christiani, Kindervater; with, on the contra side, Lessman and Lauckhard. Adelung thought Bruno worthy of a place in his History of Human Folly (1785). In the same year (1785) appeared F. H. Jacobi’s Letters on Spinoza’s Philosophy, which contained a “restoration” at one stroke of both Bruno and Spinoza to their place among the great names of the history of thought.[664] This fine thinker—if not great thinker—penetrated by the beauty and calm of Spinoza’s pantheism, saw in Bruno a true forerunner. Bruno had “taken up the substance of the ancient philosophy, transformed it into flesh and blood, was wholly permeated by its spirit, without ceasing to be himself.” Naturally it was in the Causa that Jacobi found the greatest affinity with Spinoza, as in it the starting-point of Bruno is from the One, the Highest, which is at the same time the All—the universe, the unity of the One and Many, of Spirit and Nature. Jakobi’s friend, Hamann, the “Wizard of the North,” the mystical critic of Kantianism, went a step further than Jakobi himself; Bruno’s principle of the coincidence of opposites, he said, was of more value to him than all the Kantian criticism. In the pantheistic or monistic side of Bruno’s philosophy he found sympathy with his own revolt against the excessive intellectualism and rationalism which seemed to him to be the chief danger of the Kantian philosophy.[665] Goethe also was carried away by the flowing tide of enthusiasm, and, indeed, his own philosophical conception had much affinity with that of the Nolan, although in their inner natures the two men differed toto coelo.[666] Buhle—first in his Comment on the Rise and Progress of Pantheism (1790), afterwards in his learned and careful History of Philosophy[667]—placed Bruno amongst the highest of pantheistic writers. Even Tennemann[667] grows eloquent over the brilliant effort of Bruno, by which he almost achieved a philosophy of the Absolute two centuries before Schelling and Hegel.[668] Fulleborn is more cautious and critical, but in his Contributions to the History of Philosophy he gives analyses and extracts from several of Bruno’s works.[669] Schelling himself, as is clear from the dialogue which he wrote bearing Bruno’s name, regarded the Italian as nearest to himself among his forerunners in the philosophy of the absolute. There is obviously a close analogy between the two; and Schelling may be said to take, with regard to the course of philosophy after him, the same place which Bruno took as regards the lines of development in the philosophy of the seventeenth century. Both had a wider view, and perhaps a deeper insight, than their successors, while lacking the power of strenuous thought necessary to carry out their views into the completeness of a philosophical system. It is doubtful, however, whether Schelling knew much more of Bruno than Jakobi’s essay and his abstract of the Causa had to tell.

Hegel took a much less enthusiastic view of Bruno’s philosophy than did his contemporary and sometime partner—to place Bruno on a level with Spinoza was to give him a higher reputation than he deserved: his doctrine was a mere re-echo of the Alexandrine. Yet Hegel, too, saw something to admire in this “Bacchantic” spirit, revelling in the discovery of its oneness with the Idea, and with all other beings, with the all of nature which is an externalisation of spirit. It was under the influence of Hegel or of the Hegelian philosophy that the first really complete and satisfactory studies of Bruno appeared:—Christian Bartholmèss’ Jordano Bruno,[670] and Moritz Carrière’s Philosophische Weltanschauung der Reformationszeit.[671] The quick and generous enthusiasm of the first, the wide philosophic comprehension of the second have probably done more to attract public attention to the forgotten Nolan, and to guarantee him a permanent place in the history of philosophy, than any other writings about him. Since their time the literature upon Bruno has steadily increased, and with it has grown the comprehension of and sympathy with the man as well as with the idea he so fearlessly proclaimed, and so strenuously defended. It is no part of the purpose of this work to parallel Bruno with any of the more modern philosophers. It is foolhardy to say, for example, as Brunnhofer does, that Schopenhauer alone reaches the same height of literary style in modern philosophy, “although the Nolan leaves the Frankfort philosopher far behind him through the strength of his philosophical conception of the universe, which holds its own against pessimism and optimism alike.”[672] It is foolhardy, and it is misleading, to place him in comparison with philosophers who have nearly three centuries of thought, of social, industrial, and literary growth, between him and them. Like all the philosophers whom a touch of poetical imagination has redeemed, Bruno stands more or less alone, and he overtops all the others of his century. None of the ordinary rubrics of historical terminology in philosophy apply to him, not even that of “Eclectic.” He is far more than that. His philosophy, as perhaps these pages have shown, bears the stamp of individuality, the individuality of a strong mind, fed with nearly all the knowledge, and all the out-reaching guesses at truth of its own time, and of the times that had gone before, striving to turn this difficult mass into nourishment for itself, and to transmit the achievement to others. He was an eclectic, just as every great thinker is an eclectic, but it is the bricks merely, not the style of architecture, that he has borrowed from others. He never founded a school, not merely because the circumstances of his life, and the fate of his writings, precluded him from being widely known or studied in any country, but also because his philosophy was too much a thing of himself to be readily attractive to many of his hearers or readers. Yet it has been a force making for the progress of thought and of liberty, and it is still an active force. Human nature has not yet lost the tendency to rest calmly in its “habit of believing,” to shut itself up in its finite world, refusing either to look abroad, or to look at itself from an external point of view; it is still apt to think “geocentrically,” to take its molehills for mountains, while “underlooking,” if the term may be allowed, the real mountains that are before it, to hold doggedly to one contrary, reject utterly the other, whereas the truth always lies in their unity. To these recurring foibles of humanity, and more especially, perhaps, of philosophic humanity, the fresh and vigorous writings of the Dominican monk and martyr of the sixteenth century will ever form a healthy counterpoise.

ADDITIONAL NOTES

1. To p. 5 and p. 27, Bruno’s upbringing.—In the Infinito, Lag. 362. 34, Burchio, the Aristotelian pedant of the dialogue, addresses Fracastorio in the following polite terms:—“You would be more learned than Aristotle—you, a beast, a poor devil, a beggar, a wretch, fed on bread of millet, perishing of hunger, begotten of a tailor, born of a washer-woman, nephew to Cecco the cobbler, figol di Momo, postiglion de le puttane, brother to Lazarus that makes shoes for asses!” It is almost incredible that any one should have taken these words as biographical or rather auto-biographical. They are in the mouth of a pedant and enemy: they are addressed not to the Bruno-character of the dialogue (“Philotheo”), but to Fracastorio, who temporarily takes his place as a well-trained disciple. Yet Lagarde, that amazing editor, gravely wonders whether the Dominicans did not know that their novice had been “postiglion de le puttane,” or whether they were glad to forget it when they saw the pure and attractive young face! (v. Lagarde’s edition of the Italian works, pp. 789, 798).

2. To p. 10. The Arian heresy.—Before the Venetian tribunal Bruno explained his position with regard to the Arian heresy thus:—“I showed the opinion of Arius to be less dangerous than it was generally held to be, because generally it is understood that Arius meant to say that the Word was the first creation of the Father, and I declared that Arius said the Word was neither Creator nor Creation, but intermediary between the Creator and the Creation, as the word is intermediary between the speaker and what is spoken, and therefore it is said to be first-born before all creatures; through it, not out of it, have all things been created....” (Doc. xi. Bert. i. p. 403).