Bruno's reply to his judges deserves to be printed in letters of gold whenever it can be recorded;—"Greater perhaps is your fear in pronouncing my sentence than mine in hearing it."
Let us spare ourselves a too minute account of his execution. Some reports are to the effect that his tongue was tied, because he refused to listen to the exhortations of those members of the Company of St. John the Beheaded, better known as the Brothers of the Misericordia, who accompanied the condemned to the scaffold or the stake, resorting to the most cruel methods in order to provoke at least some appearance of recantation or repentance during the last moments of life.
Right here let it be said of Bruno that whatever may have been his weaknesses before the Inquisition at Venice, he stood firmly by his creed when put to the final test, and died an ideal martyr's death because his creed did not agree with that of his persecutors.
And so terminated the life of one of Italy's greatest ornaments and scholars. The occasion had not then the importance we assign it now. The burning of a heretic was a frequent spectacle, and the year 1600 was the year of Jubilee, in which the death of one unbeliever more was but the incident of a day. He had himself foreseen it, saying, "Torches, fifty or a hundred, will not fail me, even though the march past be at mid-day, should it be my fate to die in Roman Catholic Country."
There remains yet to comment on his character and to analyze his views.
The greatest blot upon the former is his attitude before the Venetian Tribunal. Here he was at first defiant, even polemical, strong in his asserted right to use the natural light of sense and reason. Under greater stress he modified this to one of absolute and indignant denial, and finally became submissive to the last degree, cringing and finally begging for pardon on bended knees. That this attitude changed with his better realization of his predicament is undeniable. Moreover what keen and sensitive natures may do under the influence of torture is never to be predicated. How many of us could resist the persuasiveness of the rack when it came to modifying our beliefs? But whatever may have been his weakness at that time, he completely rehabilitated himself before his end, for were not his ashes scattered to the winds as a token that he completely failed to recant? Surely no martyr to science or dogma ever died a more dignified death, for the edification or example of others.
What shall be said of his persecutors and prosecutors? Let us here be charitable; let us be just. Have we yet that absolute knowledge of right and wrong which can enable us to pass final judgment on men of the past, their motives and actions? Moral perceptions are the product of the race, the age and the environment; they vary greatly with the times. There is no crime in or out of the Decalogue which has at all times and by all peoples been regarded as such. The Church during several centuries enjoyed a monopoly of wisdom or learning as well as of opportunities for acquiring them. Zealotry, bigotry, intolerance, fanaticism, were the natural products of such conditions. So were cruelty and disregard of human life. Join the mind of a bigot to the body of one who knows not fear, and the result will be a Loyola, or a St. Louis of France, who held that the only argument a layman should engage in with a heretic should be a sword thrust through the body. If then heresy was a crime, punishable by a cruel death in all the capitals of Europe, let us blame less the men who were trained and grew up with these notions, but rather more the Church which preached them, whether Catholic or Protestant. Only if one of these really were, as it still claims to be, infallible, then what has become of its infallibility? Or if heresy be held still a crime then what shall we say of the Church's ethics? If one were God-given the other is un-Christ-like. But no free thinker can engage in theological polemics, or with jesuitical sophistries, without letting his reason excite his emotions; and when the emotions enter the door logic flies out of the window.
Let us say then that Bruno was in some respects so far ahead of his day and generation that they understood him not. And yet he was a torch bearer, save at his own last funeral pyre, shedding forth a light which illumed the centuries to come, and helping to make the period of the Italian Renaissance one of the most important and glorious in the world's history. If better known and more widely studied, he would be by English and American students placed on that pinnacle which he deserves in the Hall of Fame.
What shall be said of Bruno as a philosopher? He, first of all men in the middle ages, taught that Nature was lovable and worthy of study. Loving her, trusting, confiding in her, he found himself at outs with all the mental processes of his fellow scholars. In this way the natural method was brought into direct opposition with the ponderously artificial and strained methods of his day. He held that our eyes were given us that we might open and look upward. "Seeing, I do not pretend not to see, nor fear to profess it openly," he says. His philosophy was rather a product of intuition than of ratiocination, which became his real religion, for which Catholicism was a cloak, because in those days one was compelled to wear a cloak or live but a short life, and that within prison walls. What the medieval church, Catholic and even Protestant, has to answer for, as to the suppression of truth and provocation of hypocrisy, is beyond the mensuration of man. For the argument from authority he had the greatest contempt, and herein he set the world of thinkers a valuable lesson. "To believe with the many because they were many, was the mark of a slave," (McIntyre). Before Bacon, before Descrates, he saw the necessity of "first clearing the mind of all prejudice, all traditional beliefs that rest on authority." He thus begins one of his sonnets:—
"Oh, holy assinity! Oh, holy ignorance, holy folly and pious devotion; which alone makest souls so good that human wit and zeal can go no further," etc.