Mere existence he could purchase with the base coin of cowardice or casuistry; but that would be, not life, but a living shame, and he refused. Who can tell how hard instinct pleaded,—how the thoughts of freedom, how the longings for companions, how the recollections of that beautiful Neapolitan home which he loved and wished to revisit, how the desire to explore yet more freely the beauties and the mysteries of the divine universe, came to him with reasons and excuses to tempt him from his resolution? But conscience supported him. He took Truth by the hand, turned his back on the world and its joy and sunshine, and followed whither she led into the silent, sunless unknown. Let us dismiss the theory that he was impelled by the desire to escape in this way from an imprisonment which threatened to be perpetual; let us dismiss, and contemptuously dismiss, the insinuation of an English writer, that Bruno’s purpose was, by a theatrical death, to startle the world which had begun to forget him in his confinement. To impute a low motive to a noble deed is surely as base as to extenuate a crime. Bruno had no sentimental respect for martyrs; but on the day when he resolved to die for his convictions, he proved his kinship with the noblest martyrs and heroes of the race.
On February 8, 1600, he was brought before Cardinal Mandruzzi, the Supreme Inquisitor. He was formally degraded from his order, sentence of death was pronounced against him, and he was given up to the secular authorities. During the reading, he remained tranquil, thoughtful. When the Inquisitor ceased, he uttered those memorable words, which still, judging from the recent alarm in the Vatican, resound ominously in the ears of the Romish hierarchy: “Peradventure you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.” After nine days had been allowed for his recantation, he was led forth, on February 17, to the Campo di Fiora,—once an amphitheatre, built by Pompey, and now a vegetable market. When he had been bound to the stake, he protested, according to one witness, that he died willingly, and that his soul would mount with the smoke into paradise. Another account says that he was gagged, to prevent his uttering blasphemies. As the flames leaped up, a crucifix was held before him, but he turned his head away. He uttered no scream, nor sigh, nor murmur, as Hus and Servetus had done; even that last mortal agony of the flesh could not overcome his spirit. And when nothing remained of his body but ashes, these were gathered up and tossed to the winds.
Berti, to whose indefatigable and enlightened researches, extending over forty years, we owe our knowledge of Bruno’s career,[33] says justly that Bruno bequeathed to his countrymen the example of an Italian dying for an ideal,—a rare example in the sixteenth century, but emulated by thousands of Italians in the nineteenth. To us and to all men his death brings not only that lesson, but it also teaches that no tribunal, whether religious or political, has a right to coerce the conscience and inmost thoughts of any human being. Let a man’s deeds, so far as they affect the community, be amenable to its laws, but his opinions should be free and inviolable. We can grant that the Torquemadas and Calvins and Loyolas were sincere, and that, from their point of view, they were justified in persecuting men who differed from them in religion; for the heretic, they believed, was Satan’s emissary, and deserved no more mercy than a fever-infected rag; but history admonishes us that their point of view was not only cruel, but wrong. No man, no church, is infallible: therefore it may turn out that the opinions which the orthodoxy of yesterday deemed pernicious have infused new blood into the orthodoxy of to-day. Bruno declared that the universe is infinite and its worlds are innumerable; the Roman Inquisition, in its ignorance, knew better. Galileo declared that the earth moves round the sun; the Inquisition, in its ignorance, said, No. It burned Bruno, it harried Galileo; yet, after three centuries, which do we believe? And if the Roman Church was fallible in matters susceptible of easy proof, shall we believe that it, or any other church, is infallible in matters immeasurably deeper and beyond the scope of finite demonstration? Cardinal Bellarmine, an upright man, and perhaps the ablest Jesuit of any age, was the foremost Inquisitor in bringing Bruno to the stake, and in menacing Galileo with the rack; but should a schoolboy of ten now uphold Bellarmine’s theory of the solar system, he would be sent into the corner with a fool’s-cap on his head.
[33] See Berti’s work, Giordano Bruno da Nola; Sua Vita e Sua Dottrina, 1889. This excellent biography deserves to be translated into English.
Strange is it that mankind, who have the most urgent need for truth, should have been in all ages so hostile to receiving it. Starving men do not kill their rescuers who bring them bread; whereas history is little more than the chronicle of the persecution and slaughter of those who have brought food for the soul. Doubtless the first savage who suggested that reindeer-meat would taste better cooked than raw was slain by his companions as a dangerous innovator. Ever since that time, the messengers of truth have been stoned, and burned, and ganched, and crucified; yet their message has been delivered, and has at last prevailed. This is, indeed, the best encouragement we derive from history, and the fairest presage of the perfectibility of mankind.
The study of the works of Giordano Bruno, which has been revived and extended during this century, is one evidence of a more general toleration, and of a healthy desire to know the opinions of all kinds of thinkers. One reason why Bruno has attracted modern investigators is because so many of his doctrines are in tune with recent metaphysical and scientific theories; and it seems probable that, for a while at least, the interest awakened in him will increase rather than diminish, until, after the republication and examination of all his writings, a just estimate of his speculations shall have been made. Much will undoubtedly have to be thrown out as obsolete or fanciful; much as flippant and inconsistent; much as vitiated by the cumbrous methods of scholasticism, and the tedious fashion of expounding philosophy by means of allegory and satire. But, after all the chaff has been sifted and all the excrescences have been lopped off, something precious will remain.
The very diversity of opinions about the upshot and value of his teaching insures for him the attention of scholars for some time to come. Those thinkers who can be quickly classified and easily understood are as quickly forgotten; only those who elude classification, and constantly surprise us by turning a new facet towards us, and provoke debate, are sure of a longer consideration. And see how conflicting are the verdicts passed upon Bruno. Sir Philip Sidney and that fine group of men who just preceded the Shakespearean company were his friends, and listened eagerly to his speculations. Hegel says: “His inconstancy has no other motive than his great-hearted enthusiasm. The vulgar, the little, the finite, satisfied him not; he soared to the sublime idea of the Universal Substance.” The French philosophes of the eighteenth century debated whether he were an atheist; the critics of the nineteenth century declare him to be a pantheist. Hallam thought that, at the most, he was but a “meteor of philosophy.” Berti ranks him above all the Italian philosophers of his epoch, and above all who have since lived in Italy except Rosmini, and perhaps Gioberti. Some have called him a charlatan; some, a prophet. Finally, Leo XIII, in an allocution which was read from every Romish pulpit in Christendom, asserted that “his writings prove him an adept in pantheism and in shameful materialism, imbued with coarse errors, and often inconsistent with himself;” and that “his talents were to feign, to lie, to be devoted wholly to himself, not to bear contradiction, to be of a base mind and wicked heart.” As we read these sentences of Leo XIII, and his further denunciation of those who, like Bruno, ally themselves to the Devil by using their reason, we reflect that, were popes as powerful now as they were three centuries ago, they would have found reason enough to burn Mill and Darwin, and many another modern benefactor.
Bruno’s character, like his philosophy, offers so many points for dispute that it cannot soon cease to interest men. He is so human—neither demigod nor demon, but a creature of perplexities and contradictions—that he is far more fascinating than those men of a single faculty, those monotones whom we soon estimate and tire of. His vitality, his daring, his surprises, stimulate us. In an age when the growing bulk of rationalism casts a pessimistic shadow over so many hopes, it is encouraging to know that the rationalist Bruno saw no reason for despair; and when some persons are seriously asking whether life be worth living, it is inspiring to point to a man to whom the boon of life was so precious and its delights seemed so inexhaustible. At any period, when many minds, after exploring all the avenues of science, report that they perceive only dead matter everywhere, it must help some of them to learn that Bruno beheld throughout the whole creation and in every creature the presence of an infinite Unity, of a Soul of the World, whose attributes are power, wisdom, and love. He was indeed “a God-intoxicated man.” Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Aquinas spun their cobwebs round the border of the narrow circle in which, they asserted, all truth, mundane and celestial, was comprehended; Bruno’s restless spirit broke through the cobwebs, and discovered limitless spaces, innumerable worlds, beyond. To his enraptured eyes, all things were parts of the One, the Ineffable. “The Inquisition and the stake,” says Mr. Symonds, “put an end abruptly to his dream. But the dream was so golden, so divine, that it was worth the pangs of martyrdom. Can we say the same for Hegel’s system, or for Schopenhauer’s, or for the encyclopædic ingenuity of Herbert Spencer?” By his death Bruno did not prove that his convictions are true, but he proved beyond peradventure that he was a true man; and by such from the beginning has human nature been raised towards that ideal nature which we believe divine.