Justified True Belief

(●) The runaway friar who told Europe the universe has no edge, and who was burned in Rome for what he said about God rather than for what he said about the sky. + Most people who have heard of Giordano Bruno have heard one sentence about him: he said the stars were suns with worlds of their own, and the church burned him for it. The first half is true. He said it earlier and more loudly than anyone else alive, decades before a telescope existed to test it, and he was right about far more of it than he had any means of knowing. The second half is where the trouble starts, and the trial papers are the reason. He is on a Christian apologetics site for two reasons, and they pull in opposite directions. The first is that he asked a question the church of his day had not finished answering: if God is infinite, why would he stop at one small world? Christians would spend the next four centuries working out what to say to that, and the answers they reached are better than the silence he got. The second is that Bruno himself was not a Christian arguing for a bigger cosmos. He denied the Trinity, doubted that the Word became flesh, held that souls pass from body to body, and taught that God is not the maker of nature but its inner life. Those are the things the Roman Inquisition wrote down, and they are what a reader needs in hand before deciding what his death proves. One fact about him is worth keeping, because it explains the shape of his whole life: he ended at odds with all three of the great Western confessions. The Dominicans opened a heresy process against him at Naples in 1576 and he ran before it closed, the Calvinists excommunicated him at Geneva in 1579 and lifted the sentence only when he apologised, and the Lutherans excommunicated him at Helmstedt in 1589. He managed, in thirteen years, to be too much for everybody.

(●) 1548 AD: Born Filippo Bruno in a hill village above Nola, with Vesuvius on the skyline. + He was born in the early months of 1548 at Nola, a small town in the kingdom of Naples, which in those years was governed from Spain. His father Giovanni was a soldier; his mother was called Fraulissa Savolino. They christened him Filippo, most likely after Philip of Spain, the prince who would soon hold Naples himself, and the family home stood on the lower slopes of Mount Cicala, which he once described as a little village of four or five cottages, none of them too magnificent. Years later, in a Latin poem written in Frankfurt, he told a story from that hillside that had never left him. Looking across from Cicala as a boy, he had judged Vesuvius to be dark and bare and unwelcoming, a heap of rock with nothing growing on it. Then one day he walked over and stood on it, and found a garden: vines, fruit, colour everywhere. And from there, turning round, he saw that it was now his own beloved Cicala that looked grey and shapeless and dead. He drew a lesson from it that he never afterwards let go. The senses report accurately, but they report from where they are standing, and a man who mistakes that report for the whole truth will get the world badly wrong. He was also a boy of his time and place. He believed, and said so in print as an adult, that he had seen spirits on the local hills, and that a ball of fire he watched skim the rooftops at Nola was a living creature of the upper air. The magic that later helped to kill him was not something he picked up abroad. It was the air he was raised in.

(●) 1565 AD: He took the Dominican habit at Naples, and the name Giordano, in the house where Thomas Aquinas had taught. + At about fourteen he was sent from Nola down to Naples for schooling, and at seventeen he entered San Domenico Maggiore, the great Dominican convent of the city. For a clever boy whose parents were neither rich nor powerful, the orders were very nearly the only road to a life of study, and the Dominicans were the strongest house in the kingdom. Entering, he laid down the name Filippo and took the name he is remembered by. The choice put him inside the building where Thomas Aquinas had lectured three centuries before. He never lost his respect for the man. At his trial, thirty years and several excommunications later, he told the Venetian court that he kept the works of Saint Thomas always beside him, reading and re-reading them and holding them dear. He was ordained priest around 1572 and said his first mass at Campagna, and in 1575 he took his licence in theology. The trouble started early and it started small. While he was still a novice someone drew up a paper against him because he had given away his pictures of the saints, keeping only a crucifix, and because he had told a fellow novice to put down a devotional book called The Seven Delights of the Madonna and read the lives of the fathers instead. The prior tore the paper up the same day. It was meant to frighten him. It did not.

(●) 1576 AD: A heresy process closed in, and he threw off the habit and began sixteen years of wandering. + In 1576 his superiors opened a real process against him. He was never told the full charges. What he believed lay at the heart of it was a private conversation in which he had defended the Arian position, the fourth-century view that the Son is a creature rather than God in the full sense, and his account of that conversation was always the same: he had argued the case the way a student argues a case set for practice, not as a confession of his own faith. He left Naples for Rome while the matter was still pending and took shelter in the convent of the Minerva. It did not help. Word reached him there that a fresh process was being prepared with a hundred and thirty articles against him, and that his hidden copies of Chrysostom and Jerome with notes by Erasmus, whom Rome had by then condemned, had been found in Naples. He put off the habit and ran. What followed reads like a map of Europe drawn by a man who kept wearing out his welcome. Noli on the Genoese coast, teaching boys their grammar and their astronomy; Venice, where he printed his first book during a plague to raise a little money; Padua, Bergamo, Chambery. In 1579 he reached Geneva, the city of the exiled reformers, where a Neapolitan marquis bought him a sword, a hat and a cloak so that he could stop looking like a friar, and he kept himself alive correcting proofs. It lasted about three months. He printed a pamphlet listing twenty errors that Antoine de la Faye, the professor of philosophy, had made in a single lecture. On 6 August 1579 he was arrested for it, and a week later he was brought before the Consistory, the court of ministers and elders that handled discipline in Geneva. They asked him whom he had meant by calling the ministers of the city pedagogues. He answered with excuses rather than a retraction, and was excommunicated for it. The apology came in the end, as it would again. The sentence was lifted on 27 August, and he left. Toulouse gave him two years and a lectureship on Aristotle. Then the wars of religion reached the south of France, and he moved on again, to Paris.

(●) 1583 AD: London gave him a roof, a press and two good years, and he wrote the six Italian dialogues that carry his name. + Paris had gone well. A course of thirty lectures on the divine attributes made him briefly famous, King Henry III summoned him to court to find out whether his prodigious memory was a natural gift or a piece of magic, and Bruno persuaded him it was natural and dedicated a book on the art of memory to him for good measure. But he could not take the professorship he was offered, because a professor had to attend mass and he would not. In the spring of 1583 he crossed to London with letters to the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau, and lived in the embassy for two years as something between a secretary and a tutor. He tried Oxford early, going up in June 1583 in the train of a visiting Polish prince and returning later that summer to lecture on his own account, and it went badly. Oxford in those years fined its masters five shillings for every point on which they departed from Aristotle, and Bruno had arrived with a letter introducing himself as a doctor of a more elaborated theology, professor of a purer and harmless wisdom, a wakener of sleeping minds and a tamer of presumptuous and obstinate ignorance. The dons were not won over. He went back to London and wrote about them with a savagery that cost him friends. What he wrote in those two years is the reason anyone still reads him. Six Italian dialogues came off the press in quick succession: The Ash Wednesday Supper, On Cause, Principle and Unity, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, the Kabbalah of the Pegasean Horse, and The Heroic Frenzies, with the Expulsion and the Frenzies dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. They are argumentative, funny, rude, and completely unlike anything else being printed in Europe. They are also where he set out, in his own language rather than in schoolmen’s Latin, a universe with no wall around it.

(●) 1586 AD: Lutheran Germany took him in, and at Wittenberg he stood up and thanked Luther in public. + He went back to Paris in 1585, and he stayed just long enough to pick another fight, posting a hundred and twenty theses against the Aristotelians and leaving in the middle of the uproar that followed. Germany was next, and it began badly. Marburg refused him permission to teach at all. Then came Wittenberg, of all places, Luther’s own university, which let him lecture for two years and treated him decently while he was there, and he seems to have been genuinely grateful for it. When he left in 1588 he gave a farewell oration, and in it he praised Luther in terms nobody made him use. The world, he said, had been infected by a strong man armed with key and sword, fraud and force, cunning and violence, at once fox and lion; and here in Wittenberg one man had dragged that three-headed Cerberus with its threefold tiara up out of its pit, a Hercules who did greater things with less effort than Hercules himself. It is worth noticing, before the compliment is mistaken for a conversion, what he was actually praising. He admired Luther for breaking Rome, and that was as far as it went. He did not accept a word of Luther’s gospel. Four years earlier, in the Spaccio, the Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast he had printed in London, he had already mocked justification by faith, the Reformation teaching that a person is put right with God by trusting what Christ has done rather than by adding up his own good works, as the doctrine of men who expected credit from heaven for believing rather than for doing (T4). Prague, Helmstedt and Frankfurt followed in their turn. At Helmstedt in 1589 the Lutheran superintendent, the senior minister set over the churches of the district, excommunicated him, which completed the set: Dominicans, Calvinists and Lutherans had now each shown him the door. At Frankfurt in 1590 and 1591 he lodged with the Carmelites and worked on three long Latin poems, the last substantial things he would publish, in which the infinite universe of the London dialogues is argued out again in verse.

(●) 1592 AD: A Venetian nobleman invited him home to be taught the art of memory, then locked him up and denounced him. + In the summer of 1591 a letter reached him at Frankfurt from Giovanni Mocenigo, of one of the great families of Venice, asking him to come and teach him the art of memory. Bruno went. Venice was the least clerical city in Italy, he had a chair at Padua in view, and after fifteen years on the road the idea of going home and working in peace was worth a risk. He arrived in August 1591, spent some months in Padua, and by March 1592 was living in Mocenigo’s house. Mocenigo wanted something Bruno was not delivering. He had expected the secret arts, and what he was getting was memory drill and philosophy. When Bruno announced he was leaving for Frankfurt, Mocenigo shut him in an upper room, recited to his face the accusations he intended to lay, and waited to see whether the threat would shake the secrets loose. It did not. Bruno asked for his liberty, offered to stay and work for nothing, and asked only for the return of a book of conjurations that his host had taken from his papers. On 23 May 1592, the morning after locking him up, Mocenigo handed his denunciation to the Venetian Inquisition, and that night Bruno was arrested. Before the Venetian tribunal Bruno gave ground on a great deal, and he gave it readily. He was contrite about having left his order, he insisted that he had argued as a philosopher and had never meant to attack the faith, and he offered to submit. None of it persuaded anyone that he was harmless. Rome asked for him, Venice handed him over, and in the winter of 1593 he was taken south to the prison of the Holy Office, the Roman court that tried cases of heresy. And yet, for all the ground he gave at Venice, not one article of the philosophy itself came back with him. What he conceded there was his conduct and his intentions. The creed he had recited to the tribunal in June he never took back.

(●) 1600 AD: After seven years in Roman cells he refused to recant, and was burned at the Campo de’ Fiori on 17 February. + The full acts of the Roman trial are lost, and for six years the case ground on out of sight. What survives is a summary made for the judges, found again in the Vatican archive in 1940, and from it the shape of those years can be read: interrogations, a denunciation laid by a man who had shared his cell in Venice, and in March 1597 a formal warning to give up his doctrine of many worlds. The slowness is itself a fact worth weighing. On a list of twenty-one prisoners of the Inquisition drawn up in April 1599, only one other had been held longer than a year. They were in no hurry with him, and the likeliest reason is that they wanted him back rather than dead. When the case finally moved, it moved by a very old procedure. On 14 January 1599 eight propositions drawn from his books and his interrogations were read out to the Congregation of the Holy Office, the cardinals who decided such cases. They had been assembled by Robert Bellarmine, the ablest of Rome’s controversialists, the scholars whose whole trade was arguing the Catholic case against its opponents, and by the Commissary of the Holy Office, the official who handled the court’s business from day to day. The list itself is lost, so nobody can print it. What survives is the decision taken about it: the eight were to be put to Bruno to see whether he would abjure them, which meant standing up and swearing that he had held these things and now renounced them. On 4 February they were put to him, and he was told that they were heretical not by any recent ruling but by the judgment of the ancient fathers. Through the spring and summer he edged towards an abjuration and then drew back from it, granting most of the eight and refusing two, and on 10 September he was given forty days to repent, with proceedings to follow if he did not. The forty days ran out in October, and nothing happened for two months more. Then, on 21 December, he told the tribunal that he neither ought nor would recant, that he had nothing to recant, and that he did not know what he was supposed to be recanting. That closed it. On 20 January 1600 sentence was ordered, and on 8 February he was degraded, which is the formal stripping away of a man’s priesthood, then excommunicated and handed over to the Governor of Rome with the customary request that he be punished as mercifully as possible and without shedding of blood. That last phrase was the formula for the fire. Caspar Schoppe, a young convert who heard the sentence read, wrote an account of it nine days later, on the morning of the burning. He records one line of Bruno’s reply to the judges, and it is almost the last thing anyone heard him say (Q). The confraternity of Saint John the Beheaded, whose work was to walk with the condemned and press them to repent, kept its own register: two Dominicans, two Jesuits, two of the new church and one Hieronymite were brought in to reason with him, and he remained, in their words, always in his cursed obstinacy. On the morning of 17 February 1600 he was led to the Campo de’ Fiori, stripped, tied to a stake and burned. His tongue was bound so that he could not speak to the crowd. At the stake he turned his face away from the crucifix that was held up to him. His ashes went into the Tiber, and three years later his books went on the Index, the register of titles that Catholics were forbidden to print or to read.

What He Taught

(T1) The universe has no edge, and the stars are suns with worlds of their own. + Picture the sky as every educated person in 1580 pictured it. The earth sits still at the centre. Around it turn a series of transparent spheres carrying the moon, the sun and the five known planets, and outside them all is one last sphere with the fixed stars pinned to it like nail-heads. Beyond that sphere there is nothing, not even empty space, because space was understood to be a property of bodies and where there are no bodies there is no room. The whole thing was finite, tidy, and closed, and Copernicus had not changed that. Copernicus had moved the earth and left the outer wall standing. Bruno tore down the wall. There is no outermost sphere, he said; space runs on without limit, it is everywhere the same stuff, and the stars are not lights fixed to a ceiling but suns at various distances, each with planets of its own, each of those planets as much a world as this one. The moon is a world. The earth is a star. There is no centre anywhere, because in an infinite space every point can be called the middle with equal right. His reason for saying it was theological, not observational, and this is the part usually left out. He had no telescope; nobody did until Galileo turned one on the sky nine years after Bruno was dead. What he had was an argument about God’s generosity. An infinite power that produced only one small world would be an infinite power holding most of itself back, and a maker who could give being and would not is not a good maker. So the effect must match the cause: an unlimited God makes an unlimited world. The step is a bold one, and Christian theologians have generally refused it, because it assumes God owes the universe everything he is able to give and leaves him no freedom to give less. But the sky Bruno described, with numberless suns and their planets scattered through space without end, is far closer to what astronomers now report than anything his judges believed.

(Q) "I believe in an infinite universe, the effect of the infinite divine potency, because it has seemed to me unworthy of the divine goodness and power to create a finite world, when able to produce besides it another and others infinite." + Source: Bruno’s deposition before the Venetian Inquisition, 2 June 1592, in J. Lewis McIntyre’s translation (Giordano Bruno, 1903). He is standing in front of a tribunal that can burn him, and he has been asked what he actually holds. What comes out is not a defence but a creed. He goes on in the same breath to say that the earth is a star like the moon and the planets and the rest, that these bodies are worlds without number in an infinite space, and that there are therefore two infinities, one in the size of the universe and one in the count of its worlds.

(T2) God is not outside the world looking in; nature is God at work inside things. + Think about how a tree grows. Nothing pushes on it from the outside. The sap moves up through the root into the stem, the stem puts out branches, the branches put out twigs, and from inside the twig come the leaf and the flower and the fruit; and in autumn the whole traffic runs backwards, from leaf to twig to branch to root. Bruno kept coming back to that image, because it showed him the kind of cause he thought was really at work in the world. He called it the artefice interno, the craftsman inside, and he contrasted it with the craftsman outside, the sculptor standing over a block of marble with a chisel. His name for the craftsman inside was the soul of the world, and its highest faculty the universal intellect. This is the ancient idea of a world-soul, a single living principle present in everything, which he took from Plotinus and the Platonists and pressed much harder than they had. Matter is not dead stuff waiting to be shaped, he argued; matter is alive, divine, pregnant with every form it will ever take, and what the universal intellect does is draw those forms out from within rather than stamp them on from without. Hence his conclusion, and the sentence he is most often quoted for: nature is God in things. That sentence is the hinge of his whole system, and it is where he steps outside Christianity altogether. The position has a name, pantheism, from the Greek for all and God: the view that God and the universe are not two things but one. Scripture says the opposite at the first verse. God made the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1), which means the heavens and the earth are not God; Paul told the Athenians about a God who made the world and does not live in temples and is not served by human hands as though he needed anything (Acts 17:24-25). Bruno would have said he was honouring God by finding him everywhere. Christians answered, and answer, that a God who is simply the inside of the world can neither have made it nor save it.

(Q) "Animals and plants are living effects of nature, and nature is nothing but God in things." + Source: Spaccio de la bestia trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast), third dialogue, 1584, in J. Lewis McIntyre’s translation (Giordano Bruno, 1903). Bruno prints the Latin tag himself in the margin of the original: natura est deus in rebus. The speaker is Jupiter, in a comic council of the gods, explaining why the old Egyptians were not fools to honour the divine in the shape of living animals. Bruno’s serious point arrives under the joke: if God is genuinely present in everything, then a creature is a better image of him than a painted board.

(T3) Nothing that truly exists can perish, so death is only a rearrangement. + Take a house apart brick by brick and stack the bricks in the yard. The house is gone. The bricks are not. Bruno thought that everything we call dying is that and only that, and he thought it about souls as much as about bodies. Substance, the thing a thing actually is, never begins and never ends; what begins and ends is an arrangement, a particular gathering of parts held for a while in one shape. So death, he said, is nothing but division and congregation: a coming apart and a coming together again elsewhere. For human beings this meant the transmigration of souls, the doctrine that the same soul lives many lives in many bodies, one after another. It is an old belief and it was not invented by him; Pythagoras taught it, Plato taught it, and Bruno picked it up from them and argued that it followed necessarily from the eternity of substance. He was untroubled by the prospect. One of the things he liked best about his own philosophy was that it took away the fear of death, which he called worse than death itself, and at the stake he behaved like a man who meant it. Christians have always agreed with him about half of this and refused the other half at full strength. The half shared is that a person is not simply a body that stops: the soul outlives it. The half refused is the endless return. Scripture allows one life and then the reckoning: "it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment" (Hebrews 9:27). And the Christian hope is not a soul moving house forever but a body raised, which is a stranger and a more specific promise than anything Bruno was offering.

(Q) "I regard it as immortal, as also bodies in substance are immortal, death being nothing but division and congregation." + Source: Bruno’s deposition before the Venetian Inquisition, 2 June 1592, in J. Lewis McIntyre’s translation (Giordano Bruno, 1903). The "it" is what he calls the Spirit, the life of the universe, from which in his philosophy the life and soul of every living thing comes. Having said it, he reached for a text to clinch it, and the text he reached for was Ecclesiastes 1:9. He was a friar for eleven years and he knew where the verses were; the interrogators would have noticed that he had just used Solomon to underwrite the transmigration of souls.

(T4) A religion is to be judged by whether it makes people good, and by that test the churches of his day failed. + The Spaccio of 1584 is his strangest book and his angriest. The conceit is a joke: Jupiter has grown old, the constellations are full of his disreputable youthful adventures, and the gods sit down to clear the sky and put a virtue in the place of each vice. Under the joke is a serious proposal. Religion exists, Bruno thought, to hold a society together and make its members fit to live with, and any religion should be measured by that and by nothing else. Measured that way, he judged the Christianity around him a failure, and he was specific about where. His target was the doctrine that a person is right with God through faith rather than through what he does. Momus, the mocker of the council, complains of a sect who agree that doing good is good and doing evil is evil, and then teach that men win favour with the gods not by the good they do but by hoping and believing according to their catechism; Mercury adds that this makes the gods out to be concerned with nothing but their own glory and indifferent to the harm done to human society. Bruno was aiming at the Lutherans, and the book was four years old and unretracted when he stood up at Wittenberg to praise Luther. What he had against the older religions he admired, above all the Egyptian, was the reverse: he thought they had bound men to the world and to each other, and he thought the churches had loosened both bonds. There is a real criticism buried here, and the New Testament makes it first and harder: "So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead" (James 2:17). But Bruno was not asking for the two to be held together. He wanted the works and thought the faith was a swindle, which is why this is the teaching that runs straight into the parting of the ways.

(Q) "They said that to do good was good, to do evil, evil; but that men gained grace and favour with the gods, not through the good that they did, but through hoping and believing in accordance with their catechism." + Source: Spaccio de la bestia trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast), first dialogue, third part, 1584, in J. Lewis McIntyre’s translation (Giordano Bruno, 1903). Momus is arguing that one sect ought to be rooted out before the sky can be considered clean. The complaint that follows in the same passage is the sharper one: that they defame heaven by calling this arrangement heaven’s own institution, and that they do no work themselves while living on the work of others.

(T5) Chasing the infinite changes the one who chases it, and the hunter ends as the hunted. + In The Heroic Frenzies, written in London and dedicated to Sidney, Bruno takes the standard furniture of Renaissance love poetry, the unattainable lady, the sighing sonnets, the wounds and the darts, and announces that he is putting it to a different use. The lady is truth. What looks like a book of love poems is a book about what happens to a mind that sets out after something it cannot finish knowing. His picture for it is the old story of Actaeon, the hunter who went into the woods after game, came instead on the goddess Diana bathing, was turned into a stag, and was torn apart by his own hounds. Bruno reads every piece of it as a diagram of the mind. The woods are the tangle of things. The hounds are the hunter’s own thoughts, sent out ahead of him after goodness and beauty. Diana is nature, which is as much of the divine light as a creature can look at directly, the way you can look at the moon but not at the sun. And the transformation is the point. In every other kind of hunting the hunter keeps what he catches. In this one the object is too large to be carried home, so the catching happens the other way round: the man is taken up into what he was pursuing, and comes out of the wood no longer able to live as he lived before. A Christian reader will find this both familiar and off by a degree. Familiar, because Scripture also says that looking at God changes the one who looks, and that we become like what we behold. Off by a degree, because Bruno’s Diana is the world itself, and the change he describes is absorption rather than adoption. The end of his hunt is a man dissolved into nature. The end of the Christian one is a person, still a person, who has been given a name and a welcome.

(Q) "Rare, I say, are the Actaeons to whom fate has granted the power of contemplating the nude Diana... for the ultimate and final end of this sport, is to arrive at the acquisition of that fugitive and wild body, so that the thief becomes the thing stolen, the hunter becomes the thing hunted." + Source: De gli eroici furori (The Heroic Frenzies), part two, second dialogue, 1585, in L. Williams’ translation (The Heroic Enthusiasts, part the second, 1889). The sentences just before these are the ones that give the line its sting. Many wander in the wood, Bruno says, and very few find the fountain; most are content to hunt small game, and the greater number do not understand why, having spread their nets to the wind, they end up with their hands full of flies.

(Q) "Greater perhaps is your fear in pronouncing my sentence than mine in hearing it." + Source: reported by Caspar Schoppe, who was present when the sentence was read, in his letter of 17 February 1600 to Konrad Rittershausen; rendered here in J. Lewis McIntyre’s translation (Giordano Bruno, 1903). A former pupil of Bruno’s, the Count of Ventimiglia, is said to have reported the same remark in slightly different words. Schoppe was no friend. He wrote the letter to prove to a Lutheran correspondent that the man burned that morning had not been a Lutheran, and he listed the charges with relish before concluding that Bruno had gone off to tell those other worlds of his how Rome deals with blasphemers. The one sentence he could not spoil is the one he quoted from the prisoner.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) What Rome actually charged him with was the Trinity, the Incarnation and the soul. + The eight propositions read to the Congregation on 14 January 1599 have not survived, so nobody can quote them. What survives is everything around them, and it all points the same way. - His own confession. Before the Venetian tribunal in 1592 he admitted that since the age of eighteen he had doubted whether the word "persons" could properly be used of the distinctions in God, and that he had doubted, philosophically, the becoming flesh of the Word. He did not think of the Holy Spirit as a person at all, but as the soul or life of the universe. - The list Schoppe heard read out. It opens with the innumerable worlds and goes on from there. He had denied transubstantiation, the teaching that the bread and the wine of the Mass become the body and blood of Christ, and he had cast doubt on the virginity of Mary. He held the transmigration of souls and the eternity of the world, and made the Holy Spirit nothing more than the soul of the world. He had called Moses a magician with more skill in the art than the Egyptians had and said he made up his own laws, called Scripture a fable, and called Christ not God but a distinguished magician. Whether Schoppe reported every item fairly is open to argument. What is not open is the kind of item on the list. - Where Copernicus is. He is not there, and the calendar is against the legend. Heliocentrism, the claim that the earth travels round the sun rather than the sun round the earth, was not placed under formal suspicion by the church until 1616, sixteen years after Bruno was dead. In his own case the plurality of worlds was objected to as a theological error, bound up with the eternity of the world and the denial of a unique creation, rather than as an astronomical one. None of this makes the fire defensible. Burning a man for his opinions about the Trinity is not better than burning him for his opinions about the stars; it is simply a different charge, and a reader who wants to know what happened has to read the charge that was brought.

(†) Kepler read him, named him, and argued him down. + Six years after the fire, Johannes Kepler published De stella nova, his book on the new star that had blazed out in 1604, and in it he took up Bruno’s infinite universe by name. Kepler was a Lutheran, a convinced Copernican, and the man who would shortly work out the actual shape of the planetary orbits; he had every reason to be friendly to a bold cosmology, and he was not. He thought the observed sizes of the stars told against an unbounded scattering of suns, and he said frankly that he found the prospect of an infinity of worlds frightful. He kept arguing the point for the rest of his life. That is worth sitting with, because it breaks the story into its proper parts. The objection to Bruno’s universe was not simply clerical stubbornness. A working astronomer who had staked his career on the moving earth looked at Bruno’s sky and concluded, on the evidence available to him, that it was wrong. He was mistaken, as it turned out, and the mistake was reasonable. Science moved, as it does, by one Christian astronomer publicly disagreeing with another man’s conclusion and saying why. The larger question Bruno forced, whether an enormous universe embarrasses the God of Scripture, has had four centuries of Christian answers, and they have tended to run the other way. The Psalms had already looked at a night sky far smaller than ours and asked what man is that God should be mindful of him (Psalm 8:3-4), which is the same question with the numbers turned down. Isaiah makes the count of the stars a proof of God’s strength rather than a threat to it: he brings out their host by number, calling them all by name (Isaiah 40:26). Scale was never the argument.

(†) The nineteenth century put up a statue and made him a martyr for science. + For most of two hundred years he was nearly forgotten. His works went on the Index in 1603 and became rare, his name was filed with the books on the black arts, and when the Irish deist John Toland put a piece of him into English, Toland was working with a curiosity almost nobody else had read. A deist, in the language of that century, was a man who kept God and dropped revelation: the world was made and left to run by its own laws, and reason rather than Scripture was how you found out about its maker. Toland’s translation appeared in 1726, four years after his own death. Then Germany rediscovered him. The Spinoza controversy of the 1780s was a quarrel over whether a philosophy that makes God and nature one substance ends in atheism, and Friedrich Jacobi, who had set it off by reporting Lessing’s deathbed admission that he was a Spinozist, added a long summary of On Cause, Principle and Unity to the second edition of his letters on Spinoza in 1789 to show that the road was older than Spinoza. For a long while afterwards that summary was where German readers met him. Schelling wrote a dialogue called Bruno, Hegel gave him a place in the story of philosophy, and by the middle of the nineteenth century a wandering Italian who had defied Rome and died for it was exactly the figure a newly unified and anticlerical Italy wanted. In June 1889, over sharp opposition from the church party, a subscription committee of students, freemasons and anticlerical politicians unveiled Ettore Ferrari’s bronze statue of him on the Campo de’ Fiori, on the spot where he was burned, hooded and holding a book and facing the Vatican. The inscription dedicates it to Bruno from the age he foretold. The statue is honest about what it is: a monument raised by one side of a nineteenth-century quarrel. What it has left behind is a sentence that circulates far more widely than any sentence Bruno wrote, to the effect that he was killed for teaching that the earth goes round the sun. The trial record does not support that sentence. It supports a harder and less convenient one, which is that a church with the power to kill used it on a man for being wrong about God.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a God who is not the world, a Word who became flesh, one death, and mercy for the people he wrote off as fit for extinction. + He is not a Christian thinker who went slightly too far. He is a man who put something else in the place of the gospel, and the honest thing is to say where the lines fall. - God and the world. Bruno’s God is the inner life of nature, one substance unfolding itself; Scripture’s God made the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1) and is not any part of what he made. Paul names the exchange exactly: they worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator (Romans 1:25). A universe that is God cannot have been created by God, and it cannot be rescued by him either, because there is nobody outside it to do the rescuing. - The Incarnation. He admitted at Venice that he could not see how the infinite divine substance and a finite human nature could be joined, and doubted that the Word had become flesh. That is the one sentence Christianity cannot trade: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). Everything else in the faith hangs off it. - One life and then judgment. Transmigration offers an unlimited number of tries. Scripture offers one, and a verdict: it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment (Hebrews 9:27). What looks like generosity in Bruno’s scheme turns out to remove both the urgency of this life and the promise of a body raised at the end of it. - Grace. He thought credit given for believing rather than for doing was a fraud on human society (T4). The New Testament says the opposite and says it as good news, not as a loophole: "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast" (Ephesians 2:8-9). The whole point is that it is available to people who have nothing to bring. - The Jews. This one belongs on his own account and not on anyone else’s. In the Spaccio he gives Sofia, who is wisdom herself in that dialogue, a line calling them a race so pestilent, leprous and generally pernicious that it deserved to be stamped out before it was ever born, and in the Cabala he has Sebasto describe them as a people always base, servile, mercenary, solitary and unfit for the company of other nations. The words are his, printed in London in 1584 and 1585 over the epistles he signed, and no reading of their context softens them. Against them stands Paul, who was a Jew, writing that the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable (Romans 11:29), and the plain fact that the Christ Bruno dismissed as a magician was born among the people he wrote off. He remains worth reading. He saw the smallness of the sky his contemporaries were defending, he refused to pretend otherwise, and he went to the fire without taking a word of it back. But the courage was spent on a vision that dissolves the person into the cosmos, and the church that killed him and the philosophy he died for were both, in the end, further from the gospel than either supposed.