Another significant work Bruno wrote and published in London in 1585, also dedicated to Sidney, was On the Heroic Frenzies (De gli eroici furori). Ostensibly a collection of love poems, it soon becomes clear that the ‘frenzy’ of passionate love is a way of attaining the Hermetic gnosis. This concept is taken from Agrippa (in turn a development from Ficino), who wrote of four types of furor that enable the soul to reconnect with the divine: poetic inspiration, religion, prophecy and love, the furor of Venus. Of the last, Agrippa writes that it ‘transmutes the spirit of a man into a god by the ardour of love, and renders him entirely like God, as the true image of God’12 before proceeding to cite Hermes Trismegistus, from Asceplius, as an authority for this idea. This is obviously why the idea was so attractive to Bruno.
The concept of erotic love as a portal to Hermetic illumination links Bruno with other well-established traditions of sacred sexuality, including sex magic and tantrism. For someone who elevated what we would now call the sacred feminine, and who admired intelligent and able women, it is curious that nothing in the historical records specifically links him with any women. Or man for that matter: if Bruno had even been remotely rumoured to be gay this would have featured in the Inquisitions list of his calumnies. As it is, the Inquisition records only suggest that he was a womanizer, without any actual proof.
Bruno wrote in his dedication to Sir Philip Sidney that, although he hadn’t had as many lovers as Solomon, it wasn’t for the lack of effort on his part:
I have never had a desire to become a eunuch. On the contrary I should be ashamed if I agree to yield on that score were it only a hair to any man worth his salt in order to serve nature and God.13
Only one source links Bruno, if only obliquely, with affairs of the heart. Several historians have suggested that the character of Berowne, the leader of the poets at the court of the King of Navarre in Shakespeare’s romantic comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost is based on Bruno. The identification is highlighted, as Yates has shown, by the fact that some of Berowne’s speeches, particularly his great paean in praise of Love in Act IV (‘For valour, is not Love a Hercules …’), contain specific parallels to Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, the greatest of the works Bruno wrote in England, about ten years before Shakespeare penned the play.
Love’s Labours Lost is not one of Shakespeare’s most popular works because of its abstruse and often tedious wordplay. The plot describes the oath taken by the King of Navarre and three of his scholars, led by Berowne, in order to concentrate on their pursuit of knowledge, which entails living an abstemious life for three years, including forswearing the company of women. But the arrival of the Princess of France and a bevy of young ladies-in-waiting throws several cats among the pigeons, with predictably hilarious(-ish) consequences. Other than the lesson that locking oneself away in the pursuit of knowledge is a bad idea – wisdom comes from participating in the real world – there seems little message in this typically mannered Elizabethan romantic comedy. Most of the jokes have never been found funny since doublet and hose went out of fashion.
But there is a bit of a mystery surrounding Love’s Labours Lost. The play has no proper ending – all of the characters simply disperse with a promise to meet up again in a year’s time. There are also a couple of contemporary references to an otherwise unknown sequel by Shakespeare called Love’s
Labour’s Won, but for some reason this has been omitted from the Shakespeare canon that passed into history. One clue, however, lies in the fact that at the time the play was written the King of Navarre and the King of France were one and the same, and he was being supported by Bruno and other Hermeticists – as we will see.
(However, at least one good thing came out of this little literary mystery. It inspired the 2007 Dr Who story ‘The Shakespeare Code’, in which David Tennant’s Time Lord discovered that the now-lost Love’s Labour’s Won contained coded magical utterances that were set to open a portal to another dimension.)
THE INFINITE UNIVERSE
In addition to his zeal for Hermetic reformation, Bruno was unquestionably one of the greatest intellects of his time, and was especially admired for his scientific and mathematical ideas and theories. Several studies have been devoted to this side of him, including Paul-Henri Michel’s The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno (1962), Dorothea Waley Singer’s Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought (1950) and Hungarian academic Ksenija Atanasijevic’s The Metaphysical and Geometrical Doctrine of Bruno (1923). Atanasijevic describes him as ‘certainly the greatest philosopher of the XVIth century’,14 and writes:
If the Inquisition had not managed to put its jackal’s claws upon him when he was forty-four and if he had not been burnt alive at the age of fifty-two, Bruno would have left to humanity some more of his inspired and farsighted conceptions.15
Many of his pronouncements – all derived from the essential principles in the Hermetica – were staggeringly ahead of their time.
Clearly in a fever of composition, while still in London in 1584, Bruno published another remarkable work: On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (De l’infinito universo e mondi), in which he proposed two ideas that went way beyond even those of Copernicus. The first was that all creation was not contained within the space bounded by the sphere of the fixed stars, but was infinite. The second was that the stars are not small bodies of light fixed on that sphere but are actually suns like our own, only immensely far away, at different distances in the infinite universe. Bruno made a further extrapolation: if the stars are suns, then they too are circled by planets. He wrote:
For there is a single general space, a single vast immensity which we may freely call Void; in it are innumerable and infinite globes like this on which we live and grow. This space we declare to be infinite, since neither reason, convenience, possibility, sense-perception or nature assign to it a limit. In it are an infinity of worlds of the same kind as our own … Beyond the imaginary convex circumference of the universe is Time.16
The last sentence is strangely prescient of the curvature of space-time that is regarded as one of Einstein’s greatest insights.
Not only did Bruno think there were other planets, but also that some were inhabited. On the Infinite Universe and Worlds takes the form of a dialogue between two characters, Fracastoro and Burchio. At one point, the latter asks whether the other worlds are inhabited like ours, to which Fracastoro replies:
If not exactly as our own, and if not more nobly, at least no less inhabited and no less nobly. For it is impossible that a rational being fairly vigilant, can imagine that these innumerable worlds, manifest as like to our own or even more magnificent, should be destitute of similar or even superior inhabitants.17
Ideas such as the one expressed by Fracastoro are so extraordinarily modern that it is difficult to appreciate just how big a conceptual leap they were at the time – and just how shocking they could seem.
Even Copernicus had maintained the conventional idea of a fixed sphere of stars. As such, shifting the centre from the Earth to the sun made relatively little difference to established views of mankind’s special place in creation. Even though the Earth was no longer the centre of everything, the sun is, making mankind almost the focus of creation. And according to Copernicus there was still only one relatively small, finite cosmos, in which existed a singular world in which God had created living things: a cosmos made just for us.
But if there are other suns, with their own inhabited planets, then the unique specialness of this world and of humanity is called into question. Since an infinite universe can have no centre, neither the world, nor even the sun, could claim to fill this role. In this theory of the world, humankind is shifted further from the centre of things – and from being the focus of God’s creation.
Modern science, which emphasizes the insignificance of both humanity and the Earth in cosmic terms, credits Copernicus with beginning the shift in perception from humanity being the centre of everything to our inhabiting a tiny part of an infinite universe. However, the
credit should really belong to Bruno, since it was his notion of an infinite universe that provided the truly radical leap.
There was one major and insurmountable difference between the modern view and Bruno’s. He would never have accepted the twenty-first century reasoning that, because the universe is infinite and we are not alone in it, human beings are therefore unimportant. He believed that the universe teems with life, including us, because it was made for life.
Another major difference between Copernicus’ and Bruno’s cosmologies was that Bruno’s unequivocally clashed head-on with Christian teaching, flatly contradicting the biblical story that God created the sun, moon and stars after making the Earth, with no mention of other earths. One of the heretical ideas for which Bruno was executed was that of an infinite, inhabited universe. So what was the source of his radical ideas?
In fact, Bruno derived the notion of an infinite universe from a passage in Asclepius, in which Hermes refers to a region ‘beyond heaven’, which implies that the heavens are not bound by the sphere of the fixed stars.18 Although this suggests an infinite universe, it does not state that it is full of suns. The idea therefore seems to have been Bruno’s own extrapolation.
As we noted in the last chapter, at least one thinker had challenged the ‘celestial sphere’ concept and argued for infinite space. This individual was Englishman Thomas Digges, ‘the first Copernican in England’,19 whose ideas Shakespeare alluded to in the ‘nutshell’ line in Hamlet. Digges made the proposal in 1576 in his outline of Copernican theory – the first published in England – A Perfit Description of the Caelestiall Orbes. Given that Bruno wrote his work in England, it could be that he was influenced or inspired by Digges.
But Digges, too, was part of the Elizabethan esoteric scene, being a protégé of John Dee, himself a great supporter of heliocentricity. Although Dee left no reference to the theory in his own works, he encouraged its first champions in England, urging the astronomer John Field to use Copernicus’ system to draw up a table of the positions of the planets in 1557. Dee was also, notably, Digges’ mathematics tutor (Digges called Dee his ‘second mathematical father’).20 In fact, Digges’ version comes straight from Asclepius.21
These were not the only anticipations of modern scientific thinking and discoveries in Bruno’s work. In fact, some of his ahead-of-their-time pronouncements become positively eerie. In On the Infinity of the Universe and Worlds he writes:
Thus soul and intelligence persist while the body is ever changing and renewed part by part … for we suffer a perpetual transmutation, whereby we receive a perpetual flow of fresh atoms and those that we have received are ever leaving us.22
As we now know, every cell in our bodies is constantly being replaced throughout successive cycles of seven to ten years. But how did Bruno know? And that is by no means the limit of Bruno’s prescience. Peter Tompkins writes:
The doctrine of evolution, the progressive development of nature, an idea unknown to classical philosophy, was first pronounced by Bruno, not vaguely or partially; he extended its laws to the inorganic as well as the organic world, maintaining that unbroken line of evolution from matter to man which only modern science later began to recognize.23
Bruno heavily influenced the English natural philosopher and physician William Gilbert (1544–1603) who British science writer John Gribbin describes as ‘the first person to set out clearly in print the essence of the scientific method – the testing of hypotheses by rigorous experiments – and to put that method into action.’24
Gilbert’s major work, On the Magnet, Magnetic Bodies, and the Great Magnet of the Earth (De magnete, magneticisque corporibus, et de magno magnete tellure), published in 1600, was one of the landmarks of the scientific revolution, presenting his theory that the reason magnets, or loadstones, work is because the Earth itself is a magnet. Historian Hilary Gatti, author of a study of Bruno’s legacy to England following his visit, demonstrates that in his ideas about the Earth’s magnetism, Gilbert built on Bruno’s cosmology.25
A collection of Gilbert’s papers published half a century after his death, A New Philosophy of Our Sublunar World (De mundo nostro sublunari philosophia nova), makes his debt to Bruno very clear.26 The two men almost certainly met, as Gilbert was physician to Elizabeth I at the time that the Neopolitan was a frequent visitor to her court.
Another royal physician who made an indelible mark on the history of science was William Harvey, who as Charles I’s physician in 1628 famously demonstrated the circulation of the blood – ‘one of the greatest achievements of the Scientific Revolution’.27 However, as Harvey acknowledged, his inspiration came from the work of one of his colleagues, the Hermeticist Robert Fludd (who we will meet in a later chapter), who had proposed the idea based on Hermetic principles. Fludd’s own inspiration was almost certainly his esoteric hero Bruno, who had put forward the same thing for the same reasons nearly half a century earlier.28 Once again, he deduced this from the Hermetica, specifically its association of the spirit that moves through the body with the blood; Treatise X of the Corpus Hermeticum explicitly states ‘the spirit, passing through veins and arteries and blood, moves the living thing’.29 And so another major scientific discovery can be atributed to Hermes Trismegistus – and to Bruno.
His influence was, indeed, vast. As Ksenija Atanasijevic writes:
But Bruno’s contribution to the development of subsequent philosophy and modern astronomy is beyond proper evaluation not only in terms of his conception of the infinity of the universe; with his comprehensively conceived and elaborately argued doctrine of the triple minimum he is also one of the leading forerunners of later monadology, atomism and the teachings about the discontinuity of space, time, motion and geometrical bodies.30
Atanasijevic concludes that ‘it was Bruno who laid the firm foundations upon which was to rise, in the course of time, the … edifice of new atomic science’.31 But although Bruno’s ideas were in many respects far closer to the modern scientific mindset than the works of Copernicus and Galileo, they sprung from his immersion in the ancient philosophy of Hermeticism.
THE GIORDANISTI
Bruno returned to Paris with Castelnau in the autumn of 1585, being attacked by pirates as they crossed the Channel – much like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet. Things were fraught in Paris: a group of ultra-Catholic French nobles had formed the Catholic League, which aimed to oust Henri III and wipe out the French Protestants – the Huguenots – and form an alliance between France and Spain. Henri had been forced to make a number of concessions such as rescinding liberties he had granted to the Huguenots, in order to avoid civil war. Henri had no heir and France was simmering with tension as sides were being taken over who would succeed him.
Somewhat surprisingly, in Paris Bruno made overtures to the papal nuncio about returning to the Catholic Church and receiving absolution, although he was spurned. This seems incongruous, but Yates explains that Bruno had become convinced that the great Hermetic reformation would happen within the Catholic Church, so that was the place to be. As she wrote, ‘The new dispensation was to be an Egyptianized and tolerant Catholic and universal religion, reformed in its magic and reformed in its ethics.’32
However, it soon became apparent that this rather unrealistic hope was doomed, with political events in France taking a turn for the worse for Bruno’s programme of reform. He left Paris in the late summer of 1586, shortly before the Catholic League took control of the city. Adapting himself to the new situation, Bruno shifted his focus to the Protestant lands, and toured Germany for the next few years. Initially he obtained a post as lecturer at the University of Wittenberg in Saxony (which had produced Martin Luther, not to mention the fictitious Hamlet). Bruno owed his job to the influence of another important Oxford contact, Professor of Law Alberico Gentili, an Italian refugee whose family had fled abroad because of their Protestant beliefs. Gentili is remembered today as the founder of international law.
After a couple of years at Wittenber
g, Bruno moved on briefly to the Prague court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II. Despite his leading role in the great Catholic dynasty of the Habsburgs, Rudolph (1552–1612) was extraordinarily liberal-minded. Not only was he renowned for his patronage of the arts and learning but he was also an active and enthusiastic sponsor of the occult sciences, particularly alchemy. Rudolph employed Tycho Brahe as his Imperial Mathematician, who was himself succeeded by his assistant, Johannes Kepler. Shortly before Bruno arrived at his court, the great Dr Dee had been a distinguished guest of the Emperor.
Rudolph never shared his dynasty’s political or religious interests, and focused instead on his own enlightened pursuits. He moved the imperial court from Vienna to Prague in Bohemia, which under his patronage became a sparkling Renaissance city, where all learning and culture was encouraged. In Prague, Protestants and – extraordinarily for the time – Jews were free to practise their religion. Rudolph also worked for a unified Christian Europe, backing those who worked for tolerance and reconciliation between Catholic and Protestant. His own religious orientation is unclear. Although raised a Catholic, he was obviously lapsed, going so far as to refuse the last rites on his deathbed. But neither did he join any of the Protestant churches.
Rudolph acted like a magnet for occultists, artists and scholars, and Bruno was no exception. But to Bruno an added attraction must have been the existence of a court of exceptional tolerance and open-mindedness. Having received some financial assistance from the Emperor, Bruno moved swiftly on to the University of Brunswick, all the while in a ferment of thinking and plotting.
Throughout his wandering years, Bruno’s position on the Catholic Church and the nature of the Hermetic revolution shifted. Until his departure from Paris, he believed that an Egyptian reformation could begin within the Church, through collaboration between Hermes-friendly monarchs such as Henri III and allies in Rome itself. But not only was Henri losing the civil war against the Catholic League, he was soon to be assassinated by one of their agents, a Dominican monk. (Catherine de’ Medici also died – surprisingly of apparently natural causes – at the beginning of that year.) Spain was bringing its whole might to bear on crushing Bruno’s next best hope for harmony in Europe, Elizabeth’s England, building up the armada for the attack of 1588; few gave England much of a chance.
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