The Augustinian library and Seripando’s collection were broken up in the nineteenth century. Most of the books were taken to the National Library of Naples, where those that belonged to Seripando still bear the special call numbers of his private library. The only record of Fra Teofilo’s own ideas comes from a single manuscript in the Vatican Library, a treatise titled On the Grace of the New Testament, written in 1570–71, when the author had just left a chair in metaphysics at the University of Rome to become a private tutor to Prince Ascanio Colonna. This manuscript contains enough evidence to suggest, however, that the friars of San Giovanni a Carbonara had developed a tradition of Platonic studies in Naples as distinctive as the Dominicans’ tradition of Scholasticism, and that this tradition exerted a powerful influence on Bruno at the very beginning of his time in Naples.
Like his student, Fra Teofilo was destined for a life of constant movement. Born, like Bruno, in a small town in the Kingdom of Naples, Teofilo da Vairano had been accepted as a student at the Augustinian college at Sant’Agostino in 1558—he was probably ten to fifteen years older than Bruno. By 1562 he had joined the faculty; by 1563 he had earned his baccalaureate degree; and in 1565 he was certified to serve as a professor of metaphysics “on any faculty” in Naples. By May 1566 he had been appointed rector of the Augustinian University of Florence, and moved away from Naples for good; at almost the same time, Filippo da Nola entered the convent of San Domenico Maggiore as a novice.
Given his admiration for Fra Teofilo and his evident affinity for Platonic philosophy, Bruno’s decision to join the Dominicans seems somewhat surprising, and the choice, made at a very young age for reasons we do not know, was not an entirely fortunate one. On the other hand, Bruno’s mind thrived as much on Scholastic organization as it did on Platonic passion, and in the end his writing showed a personality as divided as his philosophical loyalties. When he wrote in Latin, he wrote with a Dominican’s vocabulary and a Dominican’s precision. When he wrote in vernacular, he wrote, like Plato, as a dramatist and a philosophical lover.
At the same time, Fra Teofilo’s treatise On the Grace of the New Testament shows that his own preparation in theology rested on a firm Scholastic base; it displays his mastery of the tightly ordered rules of Scholastic syllogism, and delights in the minute theological arguments that Dominicans, as potential inquisitors, needed to know better than anyone else. He would have been more than adequate as a teacher of logic, an elementary course that prepared young students for the higher realms of metaphysics and theology.
But in a comment to a Parisian bookseller, Bruno called Teofilo da Vairano “his greatest master in philosophy,” a description that implies a teacher of an entirely different order. In one section of his treatise, Fra Teofilo describes his own philosophy as “what we have been taught by the Holy Scriptures, the teachings of Augustine, and the great Dionysius the Areopagite, so that the truth shall ever more shine forth,” and trains his skill “against some sayings of the Scholastics.” He belonged firmly, in other words, to the Platonic tradition that had been developed by the Augustinian Hermits of San Giovanni a Carbonara. In keeping with that tradition, many passages of Fra Teofilo’s text show magnificent flights of emotional rhetoric. If Filippo Bruno had never before seen a man driven by ardent love of transcendent ideas, Teofilo da Vairano was certainly such a person. In his work on divine grace, Fra Teofilo described a Church that included the entire human race, whose universal mission was propelled by love. His ecclesiastical name, Teofilo, “beloved of God,” could not have been more apt. (Ironically, he dedicated On the Grace of the New Testament to Antonio Cardinal Carafa, a nephew of the severe pope Paul IV.)
As it survives today, On the Grace of the New Testament is a collection of twelve shorter studies on such subjects as divine grace, infant baptism, original sin, and free will, all matters of urgent debate with the Protestants. Frequently the discussions are cast as dialogues between Fra Teofilo himself and various adversaries, who range over time and space from late-antique dissenters like Pelagius and Donatus, to thirteenth-century luminaries like Thomas Aquinas and the Augustinian Giles of Rome, to near contemporaries: the declared Protestants Luther, Melanchthon, Bucer, and Calvin, and the Catholic reformer Erasmus, who was, like them, consigned to the Inquisition’s Index of Forbidden Books. From 1559 on, any Catholic who wanted to read Erasmus or the Reformers could do so only by special dispensation, granted by a bishop or the Holy Office; otherwise the reader faced excommunication. Such a dispensation had evidently been granted to Fra Teofilo for some time, permitting him a wide range of readings.
Surprisingly, however, Teofilo da Vairano’s position in On the Grace of the New Testament diverged significantly from the hard traditional line then prevailing in Spain and Rome. His own view of religion was Catholic in the most trenchantly literal sense of the word; in one paragraph, he reviews the Greek adjective katholikos to show that the prefix kata- transforms it into a superlative version of holos, “whole,” “entire.” And indeed, to his age of vicious religious strife, Teofilo responded with an ardently universal profession of love for God and for creation. In writing about the passage in the Gospel of Saint Luke where Jesus says, “I came into this world to light a fire: what should I want but that it burn?” Fra Teofilo, unlike many of his contemporaries, saw neither the sacking of cities nor the burning of heretics in the name of religion, but rather a huge blaze of passionate human charity. He declared that the divine favor he called the grace of the New Testament had been available to every human being from Adam and shall be available to everyone, down to the least descendant of humanity on Judgment Day. He included an unusually large number of women in his catalogs of heroic figures from the past. He devoted one essay to proving that the Hebrew patriarchs were no less aware of full divine truth than Christian saints, fully admitted to “the grace of the New Testament,” and argued elsewhere that Christians were no less Jewish than the Jews themselves. In Fra Teofilo’s work, the river Jordan repeatedly symbolizes the crossing from ignorance into awareness, so that the real meaning of the Jews’ passage into the Promised Land is spiritual rather than physical. In his view, their rebirth is exactly comparable to the baptism of Jesus, and the baptism of every faithful Christian.
When Bruno wrote himself into philosophical dialogues, he would always take the name Teofilo. As with Fra Teofilo, rivers were to figure prominently in the imagination of the man who chose for himself the religious name Giordano, who likened his inspiration to a great river of eloquence, dreamed of his soul flowing into the great ocean, and ended his most ambitious dialogue with the baptism of nine blind initiates in the waters of the Thames—the river Jordan of the Nolan philosophy. He certainly came into the world to light a fire, and like Fra Teofilo, he saw that fire as an image of the blazing love that had created both the cosmos and human hearts. From his cell in the prisons of the Venetian Inquisition, he would contemplate the stars.
In 1571, shortly after completing On the Grace of the New Testament, Teofilo da Vairano handed his manuscript to the Vatican librarian, Antonio Cardinal Carafa (the book’s dedicatee), with a promise of more to come. The book passed almost immediately to the pope’s Private (“Secret”) Archive, where it sat among a series of volumes that seem to have served as reference texts when the popes Clement VIII and Paul V ordered hearings on the subjects of grace and free will, the topics most bitterly contested by Catholics and Protestants in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The fact that the manuscript was never published suggests that its theology was not easy to digest, especially for those two stern enforcers. (Nor was Fra Teofilo around to defend himself; he died in Palermo in April 1588.) It would take another four hundred years for a pope to issue an encyclical that began with the words “Deus caritas est”—“God is love.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Footprints in the Forest
NAPLES, 1563–1576
Into the woods young Actaeon unleashed
His mastiffs and his hounds, when
fateful force
Set him upon the bold incautious course
Of following the track of woodland beasts.
Behold, the sylvan waters now display
The loveliest form that god or man might see;
All alabaster, pearl, and gold is she;
He saw her; and the hunter turned to prey.
The stag who sought to bend
His lightened step toward denser forest depths
His dogs devoured; they caught him in their trap.
The thoughts that I extend
Toward lofty prey recoil and deal me death,
Rending me in their fell and savage snap.
—The Heroic Frenzies, 1.4
Although there is no way of knowing where Filippo da Nola took his lessons with Fra Teofilo da Vairano, his later writings show explicit echoes of the books gathered in Girolamo Seripando’s private library at San Giovanni a Carbonara. These included the indispensable works of Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine physician who first brought Plato to wide attention in fifteenth-century Italy and urged contemporary philosophical debate from a formal Scholastic question-and-answer toward the pleasures of literature. His monumental Platonic Theology reconciled Plato’s philosophy with Christianity, not with historical detachment but with a burning conviction that God had guided the development of both, “so that the truth shall ever more shine forth” (to use Fra Teofilo’s phrase), and was guiding their reconciliation in the here and now.
Ficino’s essay On Living the Heavenly Life contained a great deal of astrological advice, showing how to attract the influence of the various stars by arranging their favorite stones, colors, and gems; how to maintain youth by drinking the milk of young mothers; and how to stave off nearly every bodily ill by eating sugar, marzipan, or almond cookies. His Neoplatonism was no ascetic’s creed, and neither was the Nolan philosophy.
Bruno’s work also shows the imprint of less well-known Platonic authors: the Augustinian cardinal Giles of Viterbo and the Neapolitan poet Marcantonio Epicuro, who committed his own Platonic theology to a verse dialogue called Blindness (Cecaria). In one manuscript from the Seripando library, Epicuro’s Cecaria appears together with Giles’s poem “Love’s Beautiful Hunt”; Bruno would pay homage to both works in his own dialogue The Heroic Frenzies. From Epicuro, he borrowed the image of blindness. From Giles, he took the image of a forest.
It was an image whose power our deforested era can barely imagine. Both Giles of Viterbo and Giordano Bruno grew up on the edge of forests, Giles next to the thick Ciminian wood that struck such dread into the ancient Romans, and Giordano, of course, beneath the friendly sylvan slopes of Monte Cicala, “girded in chestnut, and oak, poplar, elm.” The forest is always more than a metaphor in their writing; they describe it as a vividly experienced reality; and Giles, at least, was an avid hunter who returned to the forest whenever he could, to pray and to pursue game. At the same time, the forest was an old Platonic image, and when Giles of Viterbo and Giordano Bruno use it, they use it as Plato did, to provide an image of the material world, a place of twisting paths, imminent danger, constant growth, and constant decay, bathed in shifting patterns of light, endlessly fertile and endlessly confusing. Finding a pattern to the forest is as elusive an undertaking as tracking prey.
The very word that Plato used to describe the stuff of nature, hyle, was the word that meant “wood”; Latin materia would also come to mean either “wood” or “matter.” But one translator of Plato’s Greek into Latin, a contemporary of Saint Augustine’s named Calcidius, employed his own term for hyle: silva, “woods” or “forest” rather than “wood.” And as it happened, Calcidius’s peculiar translation of one Platonic dialogue, Timaeus, was the single work of Plato’s to be read continuously throughout the Middle Ages into the fifteenth century. This translation by Calcidius, silva and all, must have provided Giles of Viterbo with his own introduction to Plato, and hence the idea of matter as a forest may have been one of those striking “I used to think” misconceptions developed in youth. Later Giles would read Plato in Marsilio Ficino’s infinitely more precise Latin translations, and finally he would read Plato in Greek. But he retained the image of the silva as a literal Forest of Matter, and used it to explain a number of Christian truths, as he said, “according to the mind of Plato.”
In the first place, the forest was as immediate an image as any for the world’s stubborn impenetrability. It could only be seen clearly from the outside, above the treetops, and Giles used this overview to evoke the way the material world must look from the vantage of Plato’s higher world of Ideas. On several occasions Plato himself compared the human search for knowledge to hunting game; by the same figure of speech we still “approach,” “track down,” and “investigate” what we do not know. Marsilio Ficino took the image of the spiritual hunt a step further, as the explicit pursuit of God, an archetypal creator of such brilliance that he was to the sun what the sun is to us: “That hunter is excessively fortunate who has applied himself to pursuing, with all his powers, step by step, the Sun of the sun. He shall have found what he sought, inflamed by its heat, even before he seeks it.”
Giles of Viterbo, in his turn, took Plato’s brief lines about hunting, together with Ficino’s hunt for divinity and the strange image of the Forest of Matter, to spin an extended tale about the human soul’s search for God. From 1506 onward, he set down many of these ideas in writing from a hermitage in his own Ciminian wood, as the young Girolamo Seripando studied Plato at his side. One copy of the resulting book, Seripando’s own copy in fact, was eventually lodged in the library at San Giovanni a Carbonara (it is now in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples). This manuscript and other copies were read eagerly in the sixteenth century, although the book was never published, because Giles never finished it; he left off writing it in 1512 to take up other projects.
Giles of Viterbo’s influential volume made an attempt to reconcile Christian theology with Platonic philosophy, but he did so in a curious way. He began with the standard theological textbook of the day, preserving its chapter headings but entirely rewriting the contents. The textbook itself had been written in the twelfth century by the Dominican Peter Lombard, who called his work Sentences; like the catechism, it made its points by a process of endless questions and answers, but it did so with encyclopedic, one might even say plodding, thoroughness: How are the persons of the Holy Trinity related to one another? What happens when a mouse eats the Host? (For that question, at least, the answer was lapidary: “Deus scit”—“God knows.”) This intricate apparatus of argument is what Giles of Viterbo rewrote, using word-pictures, myths, and metaphors drawn from Plato’s dialogues, the poetry of Homer and Virgil, and classical mythology. To his enterprise, he applied all the seductive powers of storytelling, imagery, and beautiful erotic language, and called the result The “Sentences” According to the Mind of Plato. He wrote as he and Mariano da Genazzano had trained themselves to preach: emotionally, rhetorically, in a consciously classical vein, their new style of Augustinian eloquence set starkly up against Peter Lombard’s Dominican precision.
In Giles of Viterbo’s hands, the Forest of Matter transformed Platonic philosophy into concrete images by taking words like silva and “tracking” literally: matter, silva, became the Forest, in which confused humanity hunted down knowledge of God. He cast the goddess Diana, the huntress, as a model for the searching human soul. In the Forest, his Diana sought out tracks or traces, literally footprints, vestigia, of God’s divine light. Giles wrote:
Diana is held to be a virgin, because she is herself free from silva and matter, and yet she devotes herself to holy hunting in the Forest … Diana practices her hunting, that is, she participates in Mind, and spends her time exclusively in hunting and understanding. To these she devotes her efforts, with all her enthusiasm and all her spirit, to exploring and pursuing the light of her homeland.
He urged his readers, in turn, to be like Diana:
[Plato] declares that the soul is ha
ppy in heaven, rejoicing not in realities, that is, in created things, but in pure essence, which belongs to God alone. For this reason he teaches that beauty is hunted out from the Forest of Matter, pure beauty, which exists without any mixture or composition … But come, let us track the hidden understanding from this Forest with the help that we can find in the human soul as nets and snares.
As with the image of tracking, “footprints” were a common philosophical term already in the ancient and early Christian worlds, to which Peter Lombard’s Sentences assigned a more specific theological meaning—the Dominican described vestigia as traces of divine presence in creation that took less literal form than the “image and likeness” of himself in which God had created Adam. But in transforming Peter Lombard’s “Sentences” According to the Mind of Plato, Giles of Viterbo worked the same magic on the original abstract formulation of vestigia that he had worked on forests and tracking—he took the words literally and conjured them into haunting images:
Sometimes, however, the footprints are so hidden that the power of human intelligence cannot reach them. For this reason we seek help from another source, and bring in experienced dogs so that with their help we may obtain our quarry. Now we are chasing something about God out into the open from its hiding places in Nature, something that we could never succeed in capturing with Nature alone as our guide, not unless we use the demonstrations of dialectic as our dogs and the study of philosophy as our nets. These dogs cannot track hidden quarry except by means of footprints, clear traces of the feet, or odors. Thus in this Forest of Matter divine footprints lie hidden, but when we take notice of them by means of reason, and consider them well, we hunt out the hiding places of the divine light. Plato assents to this in the third book of the Laws, when he teaches that one should track down musical harmonies in the manner of experienced dogs.
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