Bruno is a very complex personality, a representative of the transitional crisis period at the end of the 16th century, precisely the era that endowed Europe and the world with universal geniuses, great workers of the spirit and action, original thoughts and artistic achievements.
Today, he is best known for his defiant attitude before the Inquisition and his exemplary sacrifice for the idea – death at the stake in Rome on February 17, 1600. His dignified words to the judges after the verdict (“You fear more than I do…”), turning away from the crucifix offered to him to kiss when he was naked, with his mouth gagged so that he wouldn’t protest at the last moment, expecting to be turned into a living bonfire – all contributed to Bruno becoming a legend of free human thought, an irreplaceable figure in the pantheon of progressive humanity.
Of course, he is most significant as a philosopher whose thought is the ultimate product of Renaissance Platonism, Hermetism, and Pythagoreanism, and who contributed with his idiosyncratic, optimistic, and immanentistic pantheism I struggle with the late overcoming of my idealistic roots of my own humanistic tradition.
At the same time, Bruno is also a visionary of modern scientific thought, propelled, among other things, by Copernicus’ discovery and the overturning of ancient-Christian, medieval geocentrism, and a daring follower of Copernican heliocentrism, which in Bruno’s conception is refuted by the vision of an infinite universe in which countless worlds move and literally live. Thus, the position of man has changed from its roots.
He did not live long, only fifty-two years, of which he spent almost eight in the custody of the Holy Office. His works, written and published before 1582, when he had to flee Italy accused of heresy, have been lost. Nevertheless, between his thirty-fourth and forty-third years, when he was arrested in Venice on serious charges of denying certain fundamental religious dogmas (1591), in less than a decade he wrote and published thirty-eight books, while about ten more remained in manuscript. or is it lost forever.
His thought was fully elaborated around the year 1584, which was also the period of his most mature creativity. During this time, Bruno wrote six Italian dialogic discussions and several similar philosophical discussions in Latin verse. It was also a period of great hope in Bruno’s wandering life, as he participated as an official of the French ambassador in London in the ambitious plan for dynastic connection between France and England, as a prerequisite for reconciliation between moderate Catholics and Anglicans.
Bruno’s intuition about the unity of everything, about life pulsating even in dead things, about the intermingling and indivisibility of ultimate opposites, about the magical power of human words over nature, and about mankind’s belonging to that same nature and matter in which the soul wanders until it reaches unreachable heights or depths – is suggestive, inspiring, and, we may say, a poetic vision in itself.
From the strength of Bruno’s conviction, it is clear that his ideas would not be easily dismissed or forgotten.
His poetry is imbued with a picturesque and concrete form of philosophical discourse, often featuring unusual images, succinct proverbs, new analogies, and ancient myths renewed for the purpose of new insights. It is an extremely expressive and experimental style of prose narration, abrupt and unrestrained by grammatical rules, yet at the same time refined and measured, according to its fundamental function and speculative purpose.
It has long been accepted that his finest essays in the Italian language belong equally to both philosophy and literature.
The essay “On Heroic Enthusiasms” is Brun’s latest work in the Italian language and one of the most extensive. (…) The essay includes a significant innovation in the form of parts written in verses, in the form of sonnets and canzoni of unique structure, of which there are seventy-five. (…) The sonnets and canzoni are presented in a logical sequence derived from their content, as in any canzoniere, and the prose parts connect, prepare, or interpret their meaning in an allegorical sense. In the introduction of the discussion, Bruno relates his work to the biblical Song of Songs and its still relevant allegorical and moral interpretations. (…) The content, reduced to its essence, portrays the sufferings undergone by a person who feels the heroic enthusiasm of a soul that desires to return to the primal Source, the One, the Highest Good. It is an allegory of the struggle of the soul (psychomachy) and its journey or pilgrimage. However, let there be no doubt, let us say immediately that this is a secular asceticism and mystical soaring within the coordinates set by the philosopher himself. In this return to the One, Bruno attributes an active role to the human being, and the ultimate result of these heroic sufferings will be a reward for selected privileged individuals: they will experience annihilation in an indirect vision of the “divine”, which elevates them but still cannot satisfy the soul’s unquenchable thirst for the absolute. Of course, this journey into the infinite realms of the divine and descent into the inner depths of the human brings Bruno closer to his contemporaneous Christian mystics. of
(San Juan de la Cruz), not just in the external manifestations of his spiritual adventure. The commitment of intellect, will, and love of the Enthusiast does not rely on any supernatural inspiration that would give him certainty and hope in the success of his “journey.” Just as the Florentine Neoplatonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino, interpreting Plato’s Symposium, distinguishes between animal madness that returns a man to his animal nature and divine madness that elevates him above human nature, Bruno also distinguishes those who, like empty vessels, receive divinity into themselves, so people believe them because they are prophets or seers, from those who, with all their intellectual abilities and emotions, aspire towards the ineffable enchantment of the One. These are true heroic raptures, these are Bruno’s new Heroes, and their enthusiasm is all the more human and dramatic because the outcome of their exploits is more difficult and uncertain.
Bruno found significant inspiration for his thinking in the Latin work of Marsilio Ficino, actually in a part that contains translations and interpretations. Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, Plotinus’ Enneads, Dionysius’ works On the Names of God, the Hermetic Corpus, Iamblichus and Proclus. The term “furore” (passion, enthusiasm, madness) itself comes from Ficino, who translates Plato’s expression “mania” as furor. And the myth of Nature personified in Diana (the Moon), who receives light from Apollo (the Sun), which is ineffable and inexplicable One, has a Neo-Platonic origin. However, the philosophical and mythological heritage of antiquity and humanism is subjected to the cognitive and poetic criteria of Brun’s inspiration in his work. We will mention one of the central places and myths of the discussion On Heroic Enthusiasm in which some of the most important determinants of Brun’s thought system harmoniously merge:
Thus are described the paths of heroic love when it strives for its own object, which is the highest good, and of heroic reason when it seeks to attain its own object, which is the first truth or absolute truth. (…)
In the forest, unleash the hounds and guards
The young Actaeon, when fate directs him
To inadvertently follow the footsteps of forest beasts. The path led him to a suspicious and deserted place.
The most beautiful body and face in the water
that gods and mortals can see,
he saw in a golden and purple image,
and a great hunter found himself in the hunt.
The deer that goes
to the thickest place, with light steps,
were devoured by many strong dogs in an instant.
Therefore, no one finds it possible to see the Sun, the universal Apollo and the absolute light, the highest and most excellent kind; only his shadow, his Diana, the world, the universe, the nature that is in things, the light hidden in the opacity of matter, that is, the one that shines in the dark. (…) Rare are, I say, the Actaeons who have been allowed by fate to observe Diana naked, and to (…) cease being huntsmen and become prey. (…) In this universal and divine hunt, his capture is such that it is necessary for him to be caught, absorbed, united. That is why he is no longer ordinary, civilized, popular, but becomes wild like a deer, a inhabitant of lonely places; he lives divinely beneath the high vaults of the forest. And in the interior of mountain caves that are not adorned with artificial ornaments, where one admires the sources of large rivers, where existence remains untouched and pure from ordinary desires; there one can commune more freely with divinity. (…) Thus dogs, having thoughts about ordinary things, devour that Actaeon, and thus he, dead, for the people, for the masses, untangled from the knots of excited senses, freed from the bodily confinement of things, no longer looks at his Diana through chains and windows, but, toppling the walls to the ground, he transforms himself completely into an eye before the entire horizon. Now he sees all as one, foreign distinctions and numbers to him, which, like the diversity of senses, like the diversity of gaps, only allow for a confused vision and understanding. He sees Amphitrite, the source of all numbers, all species, all reasons, which is the Monad, the true essence of being above all beings; and although he does not see her in her essence; in absolute light, he still sees her in her offspring that is similar to her and that is her image; because from the Monad that is divinity, this other Monad arises that is prir. Oh, the universe, the world; where it is observed and reflected like the Sun in the Moon through which it illuminates us, while remaining in the hemisphere of intellectual substances. That is Diana, the one who is a being in itself, the being that is the ultimate truth, the truth that is understandable nature influenced by the Sun and the radiance of a higher nature, thus nature is divided into that which is born and that which gives birth, or the producer and the produced.
In the final part of the Heroic Enthusiasm, the nine blind men speak of the causes of intellectual blindness, because that is exactly what it is about, concluding with references to Pythagoras and Dionysius the Areopagite, who claimed that God is better worshipped and loved in silence, i.e. by favoring the so-called negative theology, as opposed to Aristotle and the scholastics who sought proof. In the last episode, which is of an autobiographical nature, as behind all nine blind men stands Bruno himself with his life and intellectual experience, the author returns to the initial personal motifs whose meaning is undoubtedly broader and deeper. Kirka, the symbol of matter, gives the blind a vessel with a miraculous liquid that can only be opened by a person with a pure soul (an allegory of intellectual love). When this happens, the blind will regain their sight and be able to observe the divine in the things of this world, in Nature and matter of which they are a part, but which is eternal and spiritual, and in which the immanent divinity is hidden. This is exactly what happens to Bruno’s blind characters, and it happens in Elizabethan England where the philosopher resided for a while, and where he momentarily believed he would be able to freely convey his philosophical credo.
Let’s say, in the end, that modern criticism has deemed this discussion a poem about Man, rather than about God. Man, indeed, in his fervor, strives for the divine and absolute, but the sublime and essentially indifferent divinity hides from him. The absence of grace does not discourage the heroic enthusiast, and he does not give up on his purpose, even though he knows that the truth and goodness he is seeking are beyond his reach. However, the conclusion is not pessimistic, as such enthusiasm elevates and enriches man. By contemplating Nature, one discovers the reflection or shadow of divinity. Some refer to the structure and style of Bruno’s treatise On Heroic Enthusiasm as “hieroglyphic,” alluding to the abundance of symbols, allegories, myths, and emblems that the poet and philosopher employ in that work. The reason for this should not be sought in the author’s fondness for the “Egyptian secrets” that were fashionable from humanism to the Baroque, but rather in the fact that the idea of nature as a colossal hieroglyph of divine thought belongs to Bruno’s way of thinking. It is also not coincidental that the author calls that treatise a “poem.” Neoplatonists considered the universe to be a “great Divine poem” – we know why, but we also know that every successful literary work (including Bruno’s treatise) is a universe pulsating with its own life and abiding by the norms of its human, poetical, and prophetic existence. Succeeding will no longer bring me face to face with the abyss of the night, I am the one who defeated the mighty Python,
Scaring away my Megera with the blood of the sea,
I address you, and direct my words to you;
I thank you, dear Sun,
my divine light,
I dedicate my heart and exalted hand to you:
You kept me far from that dreadful delusion,
You became my guide for the best endeavors,
And healed my painful heart and mind.
Who encourages me and instills courage for similar endeavors,
Who helps me not to fear the cruel fate or death?
Who knew how to shatter the chains and those doors,
From which only a few are free and come out?
Time, years, months, days, and hours,
The children and weapons of time and that court
Before which neither sword nor diamond are of value,
They have protected me from his madness,
So now I confidently spread my wings into the air,
And I’m not afraid of obstacles of crystal or glass;
I’m tearing through the heavens and rising into infinity.
And as I rise from my globe towards others,
And penetrate deeper into the universe through the etheric field:
I leave behind what others consider valuable, The distances see.
Giordano Bruno, On Infinity, the Universe, and Worlds.