[Sidenote: Bruno, 1548-1600]
Born at Nola near Naples, he entered in his fifteenth year the Dominican friary. This step he soon regretted, and, after being disciplined for disobedience, fled, first to Rome and then to Geneva. Thence he wandered to France, to England, and to Wittenberg [Sidenote: 1569] and Prague, lecturing at several universities, including Oxford. In 1593 he was lured back to Italy, was imprisoned by the Inquisition, and after long years was finally burnt at the stake in Rome. [Sidenote: February 17, 1600]
In religion Bruno was an eclectic, if not a skeptic. At Wittenberg he spoke of Luther as "a second Hercules who bound the three-headed and triply-crowned hound of hell and forced him to vomit forth his poison." But in Italy he wrote that he despised the Reformers as more ignorant than himself. His Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, in the disguise of an {640} attack on the heathen mythology, is in reality an assault on revealed religion. His treatise On the Heroic Passions aims to show that moral virtues are not founded on religion but on reason.
[Sidenote: The new astronomy]
The enthusiasm that Bruno lacked for religion he felt in almost boundless measure for the new astronomy, "by which," as he himself wrote, "we are moved to discover the infinite cause of an infinite effect, and are led to contemplate the deity not as though outside, apart, and distant from us, but in ourselves. For, as deity is situated wholly everywhere, so it is as near us as we can be to ourselves." From Nicholos of Cusa Bruno had learned that God may be found in the smallest as in the greatest things in the world; the smallest being as endless in power as the greatest is infinite in energy, and all being united in the "Monad," or "the One." Now, Bruno's philosophy is nothing but the cosmological implication and the metaphysical justification of the Copernician theory in the conceptual terms of Nicholas of Cusa.
Liberated from the tyranny of dogma and of the senses, dazzled by the whirling maze of worlds without end scattered like blazing sparks throughout space, drunk with the thought of infinity, he poured forth a paean of breathing thoughts and burning words to celebrate his new faith, the religion of science. The universe for him was composed of atoms, tiny "minima" that admit no further division. Each one of these is a "monad," or unity, comprised in some higher unity until finally "the monad of monads" was found in God. But this was no tribal Jehovah, no personal, anthropomorphic deity, but a First Principle; nearly identical with Natural Law.
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