Giordano Bruno (1548 - 1600) 

Credo versus Libido

Motto: Nothing under the sun is new “nihil sub sole novum”. (Solomon and Pythagoras)

Quotes by Giordano Bruno

“...And no one can say: Look, this is new, because it already existed centuries before us”.

“There is only one universal wisdom, which it is the task of the philosopher of his time to update again and again”.  

“...I have always been a philosopher by profession”.

“Those philosophers who have found unity have found their friend, wisdom. For wisdom, truth and unity are the same thing”.

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Giordano Bruno has always stood in the shadow of his younger, more successful and happier compatriot, Galileo Galilei.

Misconceptions that persist in the public domain and cannot be eradicated are to be put into perspective here. Galileo always remained a devout Catholic throughout his life and was friends with the upper echelons of the hierarchy (Cardinal Bellarmin, Grand Inquisitor in Rome, who had found Giordano Bruno guilty of the 8-fold heresy, was a friend of Galileo's) and in 1616 recommended that he describe his teachings as "theories" and not as truth, just as Copernicus himself would have done.

Galileo did not publicly acknowledge Copernicus’ teachings until 161O, by which time Bruno had already been dead for 1O years.

Galileo Galilei's Dialogue, which led to the famous trial in 1633, was published in 1632 with the full agreement of the Catholic Church.

However, Galileo added a “but”: “But that this same God, who has endowed us with senses, reason and judgment, should not permit us to use them, and should wish to teach us by some other means that knowledge which we ourselves can acquire by means of those faculties, I am not, it seems to me, obliged to believe”.

In Galileo's words, a division has thus been established that is generally attributed to his contemporary Descartes: The split between spirit and matter.

Galileo speaks of the Holy Spirit, which is necessary for our salvation, and the Holy Spirit is about TRUTH. But we can obtain KNOWLEDGE by means of a method “which I invented”, says Galileo proudly. It is the “nuova scienza”, the new science, which was later put into practice by Isaac Newton and his contemporaries, and above all Leibniz. Thus, the modern age was finally ushered in, and its effects in science and technology have shaped our entire world ever since; indeed, one could say that the “creed” of religion was replaced by the “creed” of science, as a new faith, indeed as a new ideology that must not be questioned.

So much for Galileo; our fiery spirit, Giordano Bruno, did not want to play tactics and bend certain church dogmas into a new way of thinking until they did not fit exactly, but could not be exposed as “heretical”. Bruno followed the ideas of Nicolaus Copernicus (symbolic figure of the modern revolution - 1473-1543). In his work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Orbits of the Celestial Bodies), he replaces the geocentric world view of Ptolemy (2nd century AD), which had been valid until then, with the earth as the stationary center of the universe, with the heliocentric world view with the sun as the central star around which the earth moves; an important step for the breakthrough from the closed medieval to an open dynamic world view. Bruno took up Copernicus’ heliocentric world view, but dropped the fixed star sphere that he assumed limited the universe and embraced the idea of the infinity of the universe. While the individual worlds are changing and transient, the universe as a whole is eternal and unmoving, since it has nothing outside itself, but is itself all being.

“We know for certain that this space, as the effect and product of an infinite cause and an infinite principle, must be infinite in an infinite way”.

Bruno thus follows the teachings of Nicholas of Cusa, called Cusan, who anticipated some of his ideas, albeit not in their radicality, and above all, since they were skillfully presented as “theories” and not as truth, remained under the umbrella of the Church, as did Erasmus of Rotterdam.

But how did Giordano Bruno come to be known more for his tragic end than for his philosophy and poetry?

Goethe described Bruno's works as “gold mines of great truths”, from which he had drawn “the most sublime of his thoughts”. Hegel said that he felt “something intoxicating in the grasp of Bruno's consciousness”. To name just 2 examples among the many poets, philosophers and enlighteners who have referred to him in the past.

One reason for Bruno's relative obscurity may be that all of his works were on the Catholic Church's index of “librorum prohibitorum” (forbidden books) until 1965. On the other hand, Bruno's thinking is so independent, original and multi-layered that it is almost impossible to categorize him in existing systems. Incidentally, he himself would have resisted this the most.

I recently met someone who asked me about this lecture. He said it would be interesting to hear what Bruno had to say to us today and to what extent he is relevant for our time.

I replied that I could summarize Bruno’s message for our time in 3 essential points:

1. Liberation from fear

2. Commitment to the spiritual potential of  and the free development of his creative powers.

3. Commitment to universal love

Bruno: “Every love... strives towards divine wisdom, towards truth, towards unity”.

However, before we examine Bruno's philosophy in the context of his biography, we should remember that we do not describe realities in relation to humanity's past, but always remain trapped in our own reality. However, if we remain aware of this, we can bring even the deepest past into our present time without hesitation.

Bruno's motto, which he quotes again and again and which summarizes his task as a philosopher in his time, is: “Nothing under the sun is new!” (nihil sub sole novum est)

Bruno attributes this saying to both Solomon, the wise man of the Old Testament, and Pythagoras, the wise man of the ancient world. He also makes an interesting trick by changing the complete text in time, namely from the future to the present. Even the future (as expectation) and the past (as memory) ARE only in the present. He thus refers to Augustine, who spoke of the great contradiction of time as the triad in the soul.

In Bruno's relationship to the history of philosophy, one repeatedly encounters the universal course of the world, which is compared to the solar year, where the beginning of one opposing position is the end of another and the end of this is the beginning of that. However, this eternal return is not the return of the same, as the same bad, but as the hope of the good. If one changes the perspective from the observer of time to the participant in this constant change, then the good, the hope, the return of the good, is the motor of the circulation. Thus, the speaker in the ital. Dialogues states, “...that although in our time we have reached the bottom of the sciences, the end of education and morals, we can expect the return of a better status for this very reason”.

According to Bruno, finite reality, our everyday world, is the scene of the clash of opposites, the presence of the infinite in the finite. Philosophy is the image of this changeability of the existent. At the beginning of De umbris idearum, it is postulated that heralds (mercurii) arise from time to time because wisdom is not always present and not in everyone.

According to the dialog De la causa (Of the cause), everything is permeated by the spirit, animated - according to Plotinus, (the leading thinker of Neoplatonism) and in the third dialog of the Spaccio (Mirror) it is said that the darkness would not be dark, if it were recognized, and the “discovered magic” consists in finding the hidden divinity in natural things, which is the condition for keeping the alternation of light and darkness ordered by fate going. It is the sage who considers the changeable things to be non-existent (shadow, illusion, maya). The question therefore remains as to whether and how the wise man can achieve this, how he can find and assert himself in the repeatedly invoked alternation of opposites within and between each other, in the discovery of the one and unified as opposed to the many and finite, and precisely in these multiplicities. The world in its multiplicity and finiteness thus serves as a school for becoming whole and self-knowledge.

In addition to Copernicus, Nicholas of Cusa and the humanists, Bruno’s thinking was strongly influenced by Neoplatonism. (see the founding of the Academy of Florence in 1459 by Cosimo de Medici, inspired by the Greek scholar Plethon, who brought the teachings of Plato and Plotinus to Italy) - Neoplatonist thinking: the physical world and matter are mirrors of the One/Infinite.

The ancient ideal of man as “uomo universal” (where the degree of education is also a measure of moral quality) was revived and gave this period its name: Renaissance humanism: the rebirth of man from the ancient spirit.

Here I would like to remind you of the brilliant and gifted Pico de la Mirandola, who in 1486, barely 23 years old, wrote 1OO theses, which he drew from Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic sources. He invited scholars from all over Europe to Rome for a public disputation, a so-called “intellectual tournament”. For this occasion, he wrote his famous and celebrated Speech on the Dignity of Man, which begins with the words: “Oh Adam…” In it, he sings of the great freedom of man to either allow himself to be degraded to an unconscious creature or to rise to the level of the gods. (The ancient Greeks called the potential in man to call himself a goddess “henosis”).

The human spirit strives, in accordance with the nature of the universe, for the realization of the infinite. Infinity is the center that it orbits but is never able to reach. The movement of the spirit is therefore carried by “heroic passion”, which leads to an increase in consciousness and, in stages, to a similarization with the divine.

In recent years there has been a revival of interest in the relevance of Giordano Bruno’s teachings, triggered by the work of an English private scholar named Yates on Renaissance research and the influences of ancient Egyptian, Kabbalistic and Indian wisdom teachings in this period.

However, a differentiated, comprehensive evaluation of not only the early Italian works but also the later Latin-language works is still lacking.

The Pisan Bruno researcher Rita Sturlese, among others, is currently creating the conditions for this with great energy.

Giordano Bruno is described as the most original, and often even the most important philosopher of the early modern period. The Nolan’s recurring themes are the metaphysics of unity, the doctrine of the interaction of matter, the world soul and universal reason;

His cosmocentric approach largely anticipated today's world view. A further focus of his teachings is his epistemology of the Eros of thought. He called the idea of the origin of thought in passion “heroic passion”, the passion of the philosopher. The passionate interest in what remains to be worked out in the transient frees us from the entanglements of everyday life and traditions and enables us to deal freely with reality. The motivation for thinking is to be found in a passion (the philosopher Max Scheler also calls it LOVE) for the permanent in the transient. 

Scheler took this idea further: Only to the lover does the beloved person show himself in a pure form freed from all entanglements and conditionalities. Hegel said: “I only really understand myself in you!”

Love in the mirror of the other leads to self-love, is to a certain extent the realization of the self in the other; and in the moment of this detachment from oneself, at the same time the kindling of a desire, a longing for the unity of oneself.

Bruno clarified these thoughts in the Greek Aktaion myth in his ital. Dialogues. The hunter named Aktaion is hunting with two dogs that represent the intellect and the will and discovers Artemis-Diana, the goddess of the hunt. He saw her and the great hunter became prey (a stag) and was torn to pieces by his own hunting dogs. What is the philosophical meaning of the image that the thoughts that strive for the lofty devour the thinker himself? It means that in order to reach the height of thinking, the search for the true, the beautiful, knowledge, one must leave the sensual, delusional and blind world. This is the beginning of true thinking. Now the philosopher lives the life of the gods.

Philosophizing is repeatedly portrayed as a “hunt for wisdom”, as in the case of Nicholas of Cusa (lat. Cusanus, 14O1 - 64). Cusanus’ thinking stands at the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times.  His philosophy contains many ideas that underlie the modern view of the world and man.

Back to the Eros of thinking and recognizing.

This is a well-known epistemological statement. Love transforms and changes the lover into the beloved.

In Socrates, Plato, Ficino, Augustine and many others, love is also a model or a metaphor for the pursuit of wisdom and truth, as a pursuit of philosophy.

The common consideration is always that the possession of truth, which is striven for, simultaneously destroys thinking and makes it true. For as long as one searches, what is sought is still far away; when it is reached, it transforms the seeker, because - unlike in physical encounters - the truth is so clear to the intellect that it is itself wise and the place of truth. So, while it might seem that the hunter-philosopher becomes the truth he seeks, it is also true that the truth “becomes the philosopher”, for such truth is not a possession but an activity of the intellect.

This is another reason why love is suitable as a comparative model for knowledge, because as an activity it is inherently unfulfilled, that the fulfillment of its striving always sets itself new goals and devalues the goals achieved by the fact that they were attainable. The mind concludes from the fact that it has recognized something that there must be something even greater than this... seized by its - only infinitesimally attainable - goal, it searches for the infinite. Bruno himself calls this movement a futile one. And yet, if we look at the concept of the infinite, its infinity also includes the fact that it is endlessly sought and pursued. Such a search is then, of course, no longer an earthly hunt, but a “metaphysical movement”. From the change of perspective from the hunter to the sought-after infinite, the philosopher can describe this metaphysical movement as a "circuit through the stages of perfection to that infinite center which is “neither formed nor form”.

In Bruno's ital. Dialogues on “The Heroic Passions”, the counter-question: "And how does one reach the center in the cycle?” is followed by the clear answer: “I cannot know that”: Why do you say it? is followed by the recommendation: “Because I can say it and let you think about it”.

So much for my selection of those thoughts that run through Bruno's work like a common thread:

“Those philosophers who have found their friend, wisdom, have found unity. For wisdom, truth and unity are the same thing.”

In order, as Hegel put it, "not to send the imagination and the heart away empty", I would now like to introduce you to the man Giordano Bruno.

To do this, I have chosen a childhood dream of Bruno’s about the “open sky.”  This dream anticipates Bruno’s vision and philosophy of the unbounded cosmos, of the infinity of worlds. For him, the revolution in cosmology means a revolution in the image of man.   

I found the description of this dream in the biography of Bruno by Eugen Drewermann Der Spiegel des Unendlichen(The Mirror of the Infinite).

“I am lying in bed, close to the wall of a tiny bedchamber that gives the impression of a rabbit hutch. I hold the comforter close to my lips, as if to stifle a silent scream, my eyes shut convulsively, as if, if I opened them, I would see something terrible, or rather, as if opening my eyes were the very reason why this terrible thing would unfailingly happen. I open them anyway and see the roof of the chamber slowly being lifted away. It is to be feared that in the next moment a giant hand will pull me out of bed to strangle me. But nothing of the sort happens. When I calm down again and stare into the darkness that surrounds me, countless stars flicker above me, dancing as if drunk, as if they were laughing at me…

In a sense, I never woke up from this dream of my childhood. I only know, in the face of all those who probably decided to execute me a few days ago, that the fears of my childhood no longer bind me. You see in me a free man. To whom the world seems like a nightmare when he is a child, why should he not be called to explain the nightmare of childhood to the world? When you say God, what do you really mean but the epitome of all your fears? You worship them; you fatten them with the blood of ever new victims. The truth? Do you know it? I do not know it. I only know that I have saved my fears for the world, and I can honestly say that I have never been so presumptuous as to confuse God with my fear. On the contrary, I have learned to overcome my fear of the world by trusting in something that I have never seen, but which has certainly never laughed at me. Do you call that God?”

We will now take a journey through time together and make use of the creative imagination that we all possess: the imagination, as the ability to create images. Bruno uses this creative ability in the development of his philosophy of the art of memory.

It is February 17th in the year 16OO.

We are in Rome. The city is in the throes of the extraordinary and teeming with millions of pilgrims. It is Holy Week. A particularly spectacular event has been solemnly announced: The burning of a famous, particularly unrepentant heretic. The man in question is a certain Giordano Bruno. A former Dominican monk and ordained priest from Nola near Naples, he traveled all over Europe and spread his dangerous teachings at universities and courts, causing uproar and scandal everywhere. He claimed that there are an infinite number of worlds, that the earth moves around the sun and that the whole creation is animated by a living spiritual force that forms and shapes from within. He even claimed that it was possible that there were other living worlds.

And then his attacks against Holy Mother Church. He doubted the Holy Trinity, the virginity of Mary and even the incarnation of Christ and the transformation at the Last Supper. He proclaimed that there is no hell and no heaven, only eternal life in changing states.

In the end, this stubborn, unteachable heretic is said to have spent 87 years in the prisons of the Inquisition. Despite torture, lengthy interrogations and the most intense abuse from his former order, it was not possible to persuade him to recant his heresies, which is why he now had to burn as a heretic.

At last he appears: Giordano Bruno, of medium height, his hair snow-white, 52 years old, clad in a sulphur-colored heretic's habit with appliqués of devils and hideous ornaments. His body seems very weak, but he is clearly making an effort to keep upright. His eyes still have that strange passionate fire that people say is the sign of a magician, which would also explain his unusual skills in the art of memory, with which he has made himself famous everywhere.

His mouth is closed with an iron clamp from which blood drips down. The heretic is to be prevented from uttering abominations against Holy Mother Church at the last minute.

The procession slowly moves forward with Bruno in the middle, accompanied by fanfares, spat on and jeered at by the crowd. The procession stops at the “Campo dei Fiori”, the field of flowers. A large pyre is piled up there with the stake in the middle. Bruno is led up to it. Once again, two spiritual guards jump up to him to hold a crucifix in front of his eyes. But Bruno pushes it aside and averts his eyes.

And then the fire is lit ...

“and Giordano Bruno is miserably roasted alive”,

wrote the young German eyewitness Schoppe, a converted Catholic who witnessed the entire trial and Bruno's burning as a witness in Rome.

Yes, the heretic had to burn!

“Because where are we going”, Schoppe writes to his old Lutheran teacher Ritterhausen in Germany, “if everyone thinks what they want. Or do you believe that everyone must be free to think and confess what suits them?”

Schoppe's remarks make it clear that Bruno's thinking and teachings violated a taboo. At the time, philosophical investigations had almost indistinguishably merged physical and natural history. The entire system of previous ideas had been called into question. The Church drew a line that no one was allowed to cross. Woe to anyone who dared to go beyond it. Bruno, who did so, paid for his daring with his life.

Another contemporary witness reports:

“Present at this gruesome spectacle were the highest ecclesiastical dignitaries in great numbers.

Probably fifty cardinals may have been present in Rome; the whole Catholic Church in its highest orders gathered around its head, witnessed the spectacle of Bruno’s burning and feasted, as Nero and his court once did on the Christians burning as torches, so now they, the leaders of the religion of love, feasted on the slow death throes of the dying philosopher”.

Giordano Bruno wrote in one of his books that he had never understood the Holy Trinity, but believed that one was never so close to the mystery as at the hour of his death. 

“You kill me because, in your opinion, I have denied Christ; there is so much truth in this that I have always placed knowledge higher than faith; but I also knew that one can only know what one lives, and I never denied that one can only be ALIVE as a LOVING HUMAN BEING. If only you had said that the man from Nazareth came to us from God, because he was a truly loving man - I assure you, I would never have mocked his figure. On the other hand, I had to crush your power-obsessed Christological myth with the power of my words. A past god speaks from you. No one will believe in your God anymore, except in the grip of your own fears and nightmares. But my God will take up residence in people's hearts and teach them the love that I was not yet capable of.

Love alone was and remains sacred to me.

But who are you, my supposedly so righteous judges and executioners!

Have you ever heard that song of love that sounds through the world as an inaudible song?”