Popes did in fact lift bans of excommunication, and normally the nuncio would simply have written to Rome to endorse Bruno’s request. But Girolamo Ragazzoni had no pull with Pope Sixtus V; he had been appointed nuncio by the previous pope, Gregory XIII, and, like many of Gregory’s appointments, had already been officially replaced. He was only waiting in Paris for that replacement to arrive.
Sixtus V is best known now for his obsession with ancient Egyptian obelisks, four of which he would eventually place in strategic piazzas around Rome as signposts to pilgrims and monuments to the victory of Christianity; each obelisk had been carefully baptized, exorcised, and topped with a cross. Sixtus was as implacable about religion as he was about city planning, and much less imaginative. He encouraged the Huguenots to convert en masse, but he was unlikely to lend a receptive ear to a lapsed Dominican who had traveled and lived among the infidels, and was now proclaiming a new philosophy of heaven and earth. It was enough that his predecessor, Gregory XIII, had changed the calendar.
Any return to the Church would have required severe acts of penitence. The Bible’s stories of redemption all happen to people who have lost everything: Job, whose tribulations are sent as a test by Satan, and who, after crying out his protest, hears God’s response and replies: “Then I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” The prodigal son of the parable has squandered everything he owns, and returns to his father’s house as a total surrender of his personal pride.
Saint Peter, after denying that he knew Jesus, “went out and wept bitterly” (Matthew 26:75). In the sixteenth century, repentance often followed on a crisis of faith, like the spiritual crisis that transformed Ignatius of Loyola from a terribly wounded mercenary soldier into the founder of a new religious order built on the idea of intellectual militancy.
But Giordano Bruno’s faith in God had never been so strong; everything he had discovered about the immensity of the universe only strengthened his awe at creation and his joy at coming closer to its source. His attention was fixed not on what he had done wrong in his life but on what he had learned in its course, and he was consumed with eagerness to communicate those discoveries. Furthermore, he observed repeatedly that in deepening his knowledge of the universe, he had also deepened his communion with religion’s most basic truths. He quoted Psalm 19 in support of his philosophy: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth his handiwork.” And if Bruno maintained that Solomon and Pythagoras had both understood that there was “nothing new under the sun,” he also believed that the universe and the individual experienced unending renewal. Like Mendoza and Ragazzoni (and as a former friar of San Domenico Maggiore, that most political of convents), he understood perfectly well that religion had its political side. He was anything but a dogmatic Catholic, but in many respects Catholic ideas and Catholic disciplines continued to regulate his life. So long as Sixtus V was pope, however, he could abandon any hope of being restored to participating in the sacraments. With his old Neapolitan survival instincts as active as ever, the Nolan philosopher knew that he could not stay in Paris. He wrote ahead to several German universities to ask whether there were any positions open.
In Paris, meanwhile, Bruno had returned to the Collège de Cambrai to live, but thought better of asking Henri for a reappointment as royal reader. The deteriorating political climate, his isolation in England, and his disastrous reception at Oxford had turned him into a more guarded soul than he had been two and a half years before. He did, however, renew two important friendships from his previous stay: those with Jacopo Corbinelli, the Florentine secretary of Queen Mother Catherine de Médicis, and Piero Del Bene, abbot of Belleville, almoner to Henri III. It is Corbinelli who reveals why Bruno, despite his prickly character, continued to make so many friends in high places, for the Florentine calls him “a delightful companion at the table, much given to the Epicurean life,” and we can certainly see that side of Bruno, with his sense of humor and his quicksilver wit, in his Italian works. The Nolan also began to spend time reading in the magnificent library of the abbey of Saint Victor, as well as talking to the librarian, Guillaume Cotin, whose diary of those years gives us another of our rare pictures of Bruno as others saw him. Cotin’s picture is less happy than Corbinelli’s. When he first met the French librarian, Bruno reported that “he had just been in England with the king’s ambassador, and lectured at Oxford,” putting the best face on his recent past. As he got to know Cotin better, however, the Nolan’s bitterness began to emerge. So did his devastating loneliness:
December 7: Jordanus came back again. He told me that the cathedral of Nola is dedicated to Saint Felix. He was born in 1548; he is thirty-seven years old. He has been a fugitive from Italy for eight years, both for a murder committed by one of his [Dominican] brothers, for which he is hated and fears for his life, and to avoid the slander of the inquisitors, who are ignorant, and if they understood his philosophy, would condemn it as heretical. He said that in an hour he knows how to demonstrate the artificial memory … and he can make a child understand it. He says that his principal master in philosophy was [Fra Teofilo da Vairano], an Augustinian, who is deceased. He is a doctor of theology, received in Rome … He prizes Saint Thomas … he condemns the subtleties of the Scholastics, the sacraments, and also the Eucharist, which he says Saint Peter and Saint Paul knew nothing about; all they knew was “This is my body.” He says that all the troubles about religion will be removed when these debates are removed, and he says that he expects the end to come soon. But most of all he detests the heretics of France and England, because they disdain good works and prefer the certainty of their own faith and their justification [by it]. He disdains Cajetan and Pico della Mirandola, and all the philosophy of the Jesuits, which is nothing but debates about the text and intelligence of Aristotle.
In what must have been Bruno’s tirade to his new friend, we can pick out his impatience with the arguments that divided Catholic from Protestant, Calvinist from Anglican: the number of the sacraments, how to take Communion, the relative importance of faith or good works to living the good Christian life. He observed these debates, moreover, as a person banned, by what he himself may have seen as technicalities, from taking Communion altogether. Like many of the Reformers, he reread the Gospels to discover how much of current Christian practice, on both sides of the Reformation, drew from traditions not stated in the Bible. He also recognized, at the same time, that religious tradition was often instrumental in creating orderly societies, as well as tearing them apart (in The Ash Wednesday Supper, anticipating Galileo, he argued that the Bible was better used for moral guidance than for mapping the heavens). The twentieth-century cosmologist Harold Urey, who fully accepted an infinitely large universe governed by quantum principles, would also say, “Fundamentally, I am a Catholic.” In 1586, Giordano Bruno was saying much the same thing, but the times were drastically different, and that “fundamentally” did not count as much as adherence to a particular side in the debates about sacraments, good works, and free will.
On February 2, 1586, Cotin’s diary reports a new arrival in the city: “Jordanus told me that Fabrizio Mordente is here in Paris, sixty years old, the god of geometers, and in that field he surpasses everyone who has gone before and everyone today, even though he knows no Latin; Jordanus will have his works printed in Latin.”
Mordente came originally from Salerno in the Kingdom of Naples, where he had served as a soldier alongside Giovanni Bruno, Giordano’s father, who was now living in retirement in Nola. In 1554, Mordente had invented an instrument called the reduction compass, a compass whose two arms were both of adjustable length. Over the years he continued to publish essays on his invention and offer them to well-placed sponsors, including the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian II and his son King Rudolf II of Bohemia. In 1584, Mordente published yet another account of his compass, this time with the editor Christophe Plantin in Antwerp, and then, in 1585, in Paris, where he was encouraged by Abbot Piero Del Bene. With the help of th
is device, Mordente claimed to have solved one of the great geometric problems of all time, squaring the circle, that is, creating a circle and a square with perimeters of equal length. Solving the problem was perfectly easy with a loop of string; all it took was rearranging the shape of the loop. Making the same transformation with the geometer’s tools of compass, straightedge, and pen was another matter entirely. Not one of the ancient Greek geometers or their medieval successors had ever found a solution, nor had any modern mathematician, at least until Mordente trumpeted his own success with the help of modern technology.
From Mordente’s point of view, squaring the circle was a pretext for showing off the excellence of his compass. For Bruno, on the other hand, squaring the circle was important for its theoretical implications, and it was these that made him praise Mordente as “the god of geometers.”
The Nolan philosopher was hardly unique in his time for thinking that mathematics had to change if it were to have any value for natural philosophy. Arithmetic, geometry, and algebra had found no satisfactory way to account for phenomena like motion, gravity, or the behavior of liquids, or to calculate the area of curved shapes. In the next century, that same dissatisfaction would inspire the simultaneous invention of calculus in two different places, Oxford and Hannover, by two different people, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who arrived at the discovery by two different paths. The questions that drove them, however, were essentially the same, and common to the whole community of natural philosophers, including, in the late sixteenth century, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Giordano Bruno.
Bruno hoped to find mathematical formulas for motion, but more than any of his contemporaries he sought formulas that would work on a huge scale, throughout the infinite expanse of the universe, and also, as he was beginning to realize, on a scale of infinite smallness. In other words, he was moving toward the calculus himself, and could already outline what would become some of its fundamental ideas in theory, if he could not yet express them in usable equations.
There were two stages in Bruno’s life when he wrote specifically on mathematical subjects. His encounter with Fabrizio Mordente and the reduction compass gave him his first impetus to do so. For Bruno, squaring the circle made an important step toward solving one of the outstanding problems posed by the Nolan philosophy: finding the mathematical means to analyze a shift from linear motion to circular motion, which would enable him to link the motion of individual objects on the earth, and by implication on other planets, with the motion of the heavenly bodies. When he offered to translate Mordente’s work into Latin, he was thinking at the same time of developing it further on his own. Mordente, absorbed in his own researches, never suspected that the Nolan’s interest in him might also involve self-interest. Besides, Bruno took an uncomplicated delight in making the contact with a fellow Neapolitan, and especially with a Neapolitan who had known the father he never expected to see again.
Well traveled as they were, both Mordente and Bruno believed fervently in the importance of translation, an interest on Bruno’s part that had been further stimulated by his friendship with John Florio, who would turn into a superb translator of Montaigne. In the first section of Cause, Principle, and Unity, Armesso regrets the fact that Bruno’s dialogues have not been translated: “I’d gladly have them translated into our [English] language, so that they could serve as a lesson.”
In collaboration with Mordente, Bruno transformed that philosophical impetus into two publications in Latin: Mordente and On Mordente’s Compass, both published in Paris in the spring of 1586, not long after Bruno’s conversation with the librarian Cotin.
For these two works, Bruno used the word “translation” (translatio) in another sense: to describe the changeover from circular to linear motion and vice versa (for translation from one language to another, he actually used the Latin word traductio). This kind of translation was the goal toward which he directed all his own involvement with the reduction compass, which for him was really an involvement with geometry. He used Mordente’s instrument to divide arcs and chords of a circle into fractions, and then divided the fractions into fractions until he reached the level of infinitesimal units; this was the place where “translation” occurred. To effect that translation, however, the reduction compass proved useless; he needed—and lacked—not an instrument but a set of ideas: the approximations by which calculus transformed infinitesimals into workable mathematical formulas. The last part of Bruno’s On Mordente’s Compass is an appendix called “A Dream,” in which, as himself, he writes:
Is it not then possible to measure in turn both the motion and the thing that moves? Should it not follow that the definite law of what rotates in a connected continuum around a definite center apply to every other definite point directed toward that center? Should not the translation of one part of a continuum be followed by the translation of the whole?
The answer would eventually prove to be yes, but in order for that “yes” to have more than a purely abstract significance, mathematicians would have to make yet another translation: from words into numbers. It was a translation that Bruno himself was unable to make, and among his contemporaries only Kepler came close.
As Mordente read (or had read to him) Bruno’s “translations” of his work, he realized that they were not translations at all: however effusive their praise of “the god of geometers” and his divine compass, their real subject was the Nolan philosophy, and their real hero came not from Salerno but from Nola. In On Mordente’s Compass, Mordente is made to demonstrate his instrument to a character named Botero (surely the philosopher Giovanni Botero, then on a mission abroad in Paris for the Duke of Savoy), while remarking how grateful he is that his own “puerile” literary style and confused ideas have been so wonderfully improved by his translator.
Mordente began to complain to anyone who would listen about Bruno’s “ingratitude.” Stung, and probably well aware by that time that the reduction compass did not actually square the circle, Bruno turned from translating Mordente to attacking him. Although Mordente’s name meant “biting,” the real biter was Bruno’s pen, which subjected “the god of geometers” to an expulsion worthy of the Triumphant Beast. Rather than simply gossiping, Bruno published a pamphlet called The Triumphant Idiot, a dialogue that begins with this blistering exchange between the characters Philotheus and Savolinus:
PHILOTHEUS: Why don’t you think it right (O Savolinus) for our Mordentius to call himself nearly divine, the instrument and image of nature at work, the parent of mechanical inventions, the restorer of fallen arts, the finder of what has been lost, the discoverer of new things, to whom a hundred gods owe a hundred sacrifices, to whom previous geometers must give way, and who alone shall be lofted to heaven by his successors?
SAVOLINUS: Because I regard him as an idiot, a mere mechanic, uncouth and infantile in his speech, inexperienced in all the other arts that serve the truth of the art he professes, and bereft of any outstanding power of reason.
Without explicitly saying so—he had learned that much about strategy from his libel suit in Geneva—Bruno went on to insinuate that the real ideas in Mordente and On Mordente’s Compass had been not Mordente’s but his own. As Savolinus remarks at the end of The Triumphant Idiot:
This man who mentions such mighty matters, yet who does not even know how to explain them competently: I can hardly believe that he was the inventor of this technique, but rather that he accepted help from some other, unknown man, whose name has been suppressed, a man who had wandered these regions for a long time; for many others think as I do, and take it as obvious enough.
Philotheus quickly suggests that it is better to err on the side of generosity, but the accusation has been voiced all the same.
After The Triumphant Idiot, Bruno followed with another pamphlet, On the Interpretation of Dreams, in which he continued the discussion he began in his “Dream” from On Mordente’s Compass. Explicitly now, rather than implicitly, he takes credit, and perhaps j
ustifiably so, for all the mathematical developments of Mordente’s geometries.
Fabrizio Mordente may not have known Latin, but he was as experienced a courtier as Bruno, and knew how to defend himself with a courtier’s cunning. Turning their argument from a mathematical into a political problem, he denounced the Nolan to the duc de Guise.
At the same time, unfortunately, Bruno had been courting notoriety on another front. Taking advantage of the Collège de Cambrai’s independence from the Sorbonne and its Scholastic heritage, he presented a lecture in 1586 in which he promised to refute 120 errors of Aristotle. Shortly before, he had convinced his student Jean Hennequin, a young French nobleman, to publish, under his own name, Bruno’s One Hundred and Twenty Articles on Nature and the World Against the Aristotelians and dedicate it to Henri III. At the end of his lecture, the Nolan stepped down from the podium and let Hennequin take his place to field the questions that were bound to arise from such a bold attack on the Philosopher. Indeed, a brash young French lawyer, Raoul Callier, arose to defend Aristotle, and did so forcefully enough to confound poor Hennequin, who naturally turned to Bruno for help—the offending lecture, after all, had been Bruno’s, not his. But Bruno simply complained that it was late in the afternoon and tried to leave as Hennequin and his other students pulled on his sleeves and begged him to respond. At last, he agreed to return on the following day to debate Callier.
The reports of that debate are sketchy and evenly divided in handing the victory to Callier or to Bruno. They all agree, however, on the discussion’s vitriolic tone. Corbinelli saw little hope for Bruno and his campaign against Aristotle: “I think he’ll be stoned by this university. But he’s heading soon for Germany.”
As Corbinelli predicted, Bruno left Paris shortly afterward. He stopped first along the Rhine, at Mainz. Founded as a Roman military camp, the city still preserved some of its Roman ruins, as well as a beautiful Gothic cathedral in rust-red stone. But he failed to find a job, and moved on to Wiesbaden, and then to Marburg. There, he signed the register of the university on July 25, 1586, as “Iordanus Neapolitanus, Doctor of Roman Theology.” This “Roman” qualification did not sit well with the university’s Protestant rector, Petrus Nigidius, who forbade Bruno to lecture in public. The Nolan exploded, and as Nigidius reported: “He went so far as to insult me in my home as if I had acted against the public interest, the custom of all the universities of Germany, and the good of knowledge.” The rector erased Bruno’s name from the university register, noting in the margin that the erasure had been done “with the unanimous consensus of the faculty in philosophy.” One of those faculty members, in turn, erased the rector’s note; apparently the faculty was not so unanimous after all, nor the rector so universally popular. By then, however, the doctor of Roman theology was on his way to Wittenberg, the very town where, in 1517, Martin Luther had posted his Ninety-five Theses and ushered in the Reformation.
Giordano Bruno Page 21
