The Forbidden Universe: The Origins of Science and the Search for the Mind of God

by Lynn Picknett

  We suggest that the answer to these questions lies in events of a few months before, in an attempt to establish the Hermetic republic on Earth by force.

  Chapter Two

  1 Arianism was an alternative view of the nature of Christ that had been rejected and condemned during the formative years of the Catholic Church in the fourth century. In contrast to what became the Church’s official position – that God and Christ were of the same substance and that Christ had co-existed with God from the beginning of time – Arianism held that God had created Christ at a specific moment in time. This made him something more like the Gnostic Demiurge – or Hermes’ ‘second god’ – implying that Christ was distinct from God and that there was a time when he had not existed. The Arian view, contrary to a common misconception, was not that Jesus was a mortal chosen by God.

  2 Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 11.

  3 Copenhaver, p. 83.

  4 See Picknett and Prince, The Masks of Christ, pp. 371–81.

  5 Quoted in Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 340.

  6 Ibid., p. 215.

  7 Quoted in ibid., Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 204.

  8 Quoted in ibid., p. 206.

  9 Ibid., p. 288.

  10 See our The Masks of Christ, pp. 197–201 and 222–4.

  11 Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 211.

  12 Quoted in ibid., pp. 281–2.

  13 Quoted in Tompkins, p. 75.

  14 Atanasijevic, p. xxiii.

  15 Ibid., p. xx.

  16 Singer, Giordano Bruno, p. 363. Singer’s book includes a full translation of Bruno’s On the Infinite Universe and Worlds.

  17 Ibid., pp. 322–3.

  18 Copenhaver, p. 83.

  19 Gingerich, p. 23.

  20 Stephen Johnston, ‘Like Father, Like Son? John Dee, Thomas Digges and the Identity of the Mathematician’, in Clucas (ed.), p. 65.

  21 See Westman and McGuire, p. 24.

  22 Singer, Giordano Bruno, p. 285.

  23 Tompkins, p. 83.

  24 Gribbin, p. 3.

  25 Gatti, Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science, pp. 80–5.

  26 Gatti, ‘Giordano Bruno’s Copernican Diagrams’, pp. 43–6.

  27 Debus, ‘Robert Fludd and the Circulation of the Blood’.

  28 Ibid.

  29 Copenhaver, p. 33.

  30 Atanasijevic, p. xvii.

  31 Ibid., p. xviii.

  32 Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 304.

  33 Quoted in Tompkins, p. 23.

  34 Quoted in Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 312.

  35 Quoted in ibid., p. 312.

  36 See ibid., pp. 320–1.

  37 Ibid., p. 341.

  38 This is the description given to the extract from Boccalini’s work that was included with the first of the Rosicrucian manifestos.

  39 Findlen, ‘A Hungry Mind’.

  40 Ibid.

  CHAPTER THREE

  GALILEO AND THE CITY OF

  THE SUN

  Bruno’s exit from Padua for his fateful stay with Zuan Mocenigo left a space on centre stage for others to move in. This certainly marked a major opportunity for one aspiring scholar. Bruno had applied for the then-vacant chair of mathematics at Padua University, but owing to his untimely arrest the job went to another candidate – none other than Galileo Galilei.1 Of more immediate significance, however, was the arrival in Padua, just a few months after Bruno’s departure, of a rising star of the Hermetic world who was his spiritual heir.

  The similarities between the careers, philosophies and aims of Bruno and Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) are so striking that they must have been working to the same plan. Indeed, twenty-three-year-old Campanella’s arrival in the same circles so soon after Bruno’s arrest suggests that he was picking up where the Neapolitan had been forced to leave off. And despite dramatic reversals of fortune, Campanella ‘very nearly succeeded in bringing off the project of a magical reform within a Catholic framework, or, at least, in interesting a number of very important people in it’.2

  Like Bruno, Campanella was born in the Kingdom of Naples, though much further south in the town of Stilo in the Calabria region, in 1568, which made him twenty years Bruno’s junior. Also like Bruno, and probably for the same reason of being a bright lad from humble origins – his father Geronimo was a cobbler – Campanella began his career in the Dominican Order, which he entered at the age of fourteen. After his novitiate he became a friar (a brother who lived in the outside world) rather than a monk like Bruno.

  Campanella’s own freethinking earned him the suspicion of heresy. In particular, he advocated that knowledge should come from the direct study of natural phenomena (remember the Hermetic motto: ‘follow nature’), rather than from officially approved books. Not only was this – to modern eyes perfectly reasonable – approach deemed misguided but actually attributable to the Devil.

  One of the major influences on Campanella’s thinking was Marsilio Ficino, whose work was probably also responsible for attracting him to Hermeticism. Another esoteric influence was the venerable polymath Giovanni Battista della Porta (c.1535–1615), author of the classic 1558 treatise Natural Magic (Magiae naturalis), with whom Campanella struck up a friendship during a two-year stay in the city of Naples in the early 1590s. As with Bruno, Campanella was open to every sort of idea, but Hermeticism was the glue that held them all together and gave all human knowledge a recognizable shape.

  Della Porta’s influence inspired Campanella to write his first book, which advocated the practice of magic. Although it was only published in 1620, On the Sense of Things and of Natural Magic (Del senso delle cose e della magia naturale), argued that the world is a living thing and for the existence of the anima mundi. At around this time he also wrote On Christian Monarchy (De monarcha Christianorum), agitating for a reform of society and the Church. Clearly he was another Neapolitan destined to give the Vatican sleepless nights.

  In 1592 Campanella travelled to Padua on the well-worn path via Rome and Florence, meeting Gian Vincenzo Pinelli and Padua University’s new Professor of Mathematics, Galileo.3 Campanella and Galileo were to stay in touch for the rest of their lives. It was also in Padua that more questions were raised about Campanella’s dangerous beliefs. As a result, early in 1594 he was arrested by the Inquisition and transferred to Rome towards the end of the year – to the same prison as Bruno, although it is unlikely that they were allowed to communicate. Compared to Bruno’s continuous imprisonment ending in his execution, Campanella got off lightly. After agreeing to abjure his works he was released into a kind of house arrest in a Dominican monastery, although in 1597 his superiors ordered him back to Naples. Campanella had not been around long enough to make himself as much of a nuisance as Bruno, and he had not so far made much headway with plans for Hermetic reform.

  In fact, Campanella shared Bruno’s vision of the great magical transformation that was glimmering over the horizon, and which was written in the stars. He also regarded the heliocentric theory as the trigger of the new age of Hermetic enlightenment, and – for astrological and other reasons – he believed it was destined to happen in 1600.

  The approach of the new century encouraged Campanella to be much more politically proactive than Bruno even at the height of his career. Leaving Naples for the south, he threw himself into organizing the Calabrian revolt, which aimed to overthrow Spanish rule, beginning with Calabria – the arch of the Italy’s ‘foot’ and ‘toe’, which had long been ‘restive with political and religious dissidents’4 – and then the whole of the Kingdom of Naples.

  The Calabrian revolt is remarkable for the number of its Dominican supporters. Indeed, there was something very odd about the Order in Calabria, from at least the time it produced Bruno, but frustratingly after so many years it is impossible to pinpoint exactly the reason for this. This uprising was considerably more than just an expression of Calabrian nat
ionalism. It was to be a preparation for the coming age, and aimed to establish a republic based on magical principles that would – under its messiah Campanella – hold aloft the torch of the new age for the rest of the world to follow. Bruno, too, had railed against Spanish rule over the Kingdom of Naples in The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast.

  If the revolt was successful it would bring the Hermetic republic geographically close to the Papal States – the two shared a long border, cutting across the whole of Italy from Mediterranean to Adriatic coasts. A truly alarming prospect for the Pope and his henchmen.

  The uprising, however, was not to be. Informants betrayed it to the Spanish authorities, and after the organization was ruthlessly crushed in November 1599, Campanella and the other leaders were arrested. This almost certainly accounts for the Inquisition’s sudden desire to be rid of Bruno, the revolt’s spiritual inspiration, and he went to the stake barely three months later. Stephen Mason of Cambridge University argues that he was executed as an example to the Calabrian rebels, because of the connection to Campanella, and that he had been held for so long as a kind of hostage because of his standing among the insurgents.5 Publicly executing their spiritual leader at the beginning of their special year – 1600 – would also have been a calculated psychological move, rather akin to roasting the Pope on 25 December of a new millennium.

  This was, however, by no means the end of Campanella’s story. His continuing career sheds a rare light on Galileo’s trial thirty years later – over which Bruno, too, would cast a giant shadow.

  Campanella escaped the death penalty visited on the revolt’s other leaders through feigning madness. According to the law of the times, the insane could not be sentenced to death, not out of compassion but because they couldn’t comprehend the opportunity to repent of their sins before execution. If a judge did condemn them he, not the condemned, would take responsibility for their eternal damnation. However, there was considerably more to feigning insanity than a bit of Hamletesque raving about clouds looking like camels and some foaming at the mouth. The madness defence was hardly the easiest option. To prevent every miserable prisoner from using it to evade the death penalty, the Neopolitan authorities had come up with a twist. The accused had to maintain their mad behaviour – or keep up the pretence – under prolonged torture.

  Somehow the extraordinary Campanella managed to pass this test, and was duly sentenced to life imprisonment. For the next quarter of a century he was moved around a series of castle dungeons in the Kingdom of Naples. Although most prisoners in that place and time would have suffered horrors from the stark loneliness and the squalor of their own filth in the dark, fending off rats, Campanella’s life was surprisingly non-onerous. Viewing his imprisonment as an extended opportunity for study and contemplation – much like being in a monastery – he spent his time refining his ideas and writing. Not only was he supplied with books and writing materials and had at least some light in his cell, but he also received a steady flow of scholarly visitors, mainly from Germany, who took his writings back home to be published. Why his jailers were so obliging is a bit of a puzzle, especially as it must have dawned on them by now that he was as sane as they were – probably more so. Presumably bribes were involved from somebody, somewhere.

  The revolt having failed, Campanella’s goal now became the reformation of society through the Vatican and, perhaps oddly, the Spanish monarchy he had plotted to overthrow. Like Bruno, his ambitions were nothing if not excessive.

  Only once in his books did Campanella mention Bruno directly – significantly in a defence of Galileo published from prison in 1622 – and even then he was careful to declare that Bruno was a heretic. But Campanella was manifestly familiar with his philosophy and writings, judging by allusions in his work, his favourite being The Ash Wednesday Supper. Of course, given Bruno’s fate and the continued opprobrium attached to his name, there was no way Campanella could be more open, especially given that he was trying to win support for Catholic reform – and doing so from prison.

  Campanella’s major work is City of the Sun (Civitas Solis), written in the first years of the 1600s but not published until 1623, in Frankfurt.6 Basically concerned with a utopian society, the text takes the form of a dialogue between the Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller and the captain of a ship that had sailed to the New World. The captain relates how, after being shipwrecked, he was found by the inhabitants of the City of the Sun, describing its society in detail to the Grand Master. Clearly Campanella’s ideal republic, the kind he had hoped to establish in Calabria, the City of the Sun is designed and run according to magical and astrological principles. It is a Hermetic-Egyptian utopia, derived from the prediction at the end of Asclepius’ Lament. George Lechner of the University of Hartford, a specialist on magical and astrological symbolism in Renaissance art says of City of the Sun: ‘In it, Campanella developed the notion of a new city-state, led by a philosopher-priest-king, and guided by Hermetic magical principles.’7 And of course it is no coincidence that it was a city of the sun that was being debated, reminiscent of the ‘Civitas solis’ that Bruno discussed with the librarian of the Abbey of St Victor in Paris, saying that the ‘Duke of Florence’ planned to build it.8

  Even from prison Campanella played an influential role in events surrounding the next great champion of the sun-centred theory: Galileo Galilei. The Hermetic chain remained unbroken.

  THE THRICE-GREAT TRIO

  Giordano Bruno had made heliocentricity the centre of his Hermetic revolution, the sign that would trigger either the downfall or the reformation of the Church, neither of which was regarded with any great enthusiasm by the Vatican. For Bruno and the Giordanisti, heliocentricity was not just a theory: they believed its acceptance would usher in a new Hermetic utopia. And even with Bruno out of the way, it was feared that he had left behind a secret society – who and where nobody knew – which was proactively committed to bringing the Hermetic revolution about. Tommaso Campanella, Bruno’s spiritual heir, who shared his view of the importance of heliocentricity and was possibly even one of the Giordanisti, had conspired in a rebellion against the Kingdom of Naples and therefore against the Spanish crown, aiming to attack those who were deemed most loyal to the Catholic cause.

  Given this context, Copernicus’ original evocation of Hermes Trismegistus’ name in On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres was hardly likely to have been missed by those whose job it was to protect the Church. Perhaps placing the sun at the centre had been a devilish Hermetic plot all along? There was no way for those organizations whose task it was to defend the Church – the Inquisition and the Jesuits – to be sure, and every reason for them to be nervous. During the sixteenth century the Roman Church had only just survived its greatest trauma, a seemingly impossible undermining of its authority by the rise of the Protestant Churches. So who was to say what might happen next? The ideas of Bruno and other Hermeticists were being discussed across Europe, and even highly placed members of the Catholic Church had embraced them. Hermetic principles were being openly advocated. And then there were the Giordanisti – how many there were, and how widely they were spread, nobody knew. Maybe the Inquisition and Jesuits were over-reacting, but these were times that engendered paranoia. And so it was considered that – at the very least – establishing heliocentricity would attract more converts to Hermeticism. More readers would devour Bruno’s works, and possibly attempt to act on his agenda of radical reform.

  As long as Copernicus’ idea remained simply a theory, however, the Hermetic implications barely registered. But when an individual claimed he had come up with proof, then the Church began to become seriously worried. And ecclesiastical anxiety ran even deeper when it was discovered that the threat came from a direct associate of the mystical revolutionary Tommaso Campanella and other Giordanisti suspects, such as Pinelli and his circle in Padua – in other words, Galileo.

  The Hermetic interpretation of heliocentricity adds an important and otherwise missing element to the
story of Galileo’s persecution, finally making sense of some of its more puzzling aspects. Why, for example, were the Jesuits – Galileo’s main enemies – so zealous about making an example of him? And why exactly did they consider his work so dangerous?

  Galileo wrote to a friend in Paris as he was about to leave for Rome to face the Inquisition in 1633:

  I hear from a good source that the Jesuit Fathers have impressed the most important persons ‘in Rome’ with the idea that my book ‘the Dialogo’ is execrable and more dangerous to the Holy Church than the writings of Luther and Calvin.9

  Comparing Galileo’s work to Luther and Calvin seems rather excessive. How could proving Copernicanism possibly do anything like the same damage to the Church as those famous pioneering Protestants? And during a time when other heretics were challenging fundamental doctrines such as transubstantiation, heliocentricity does seem rather tame. There was something else behind the Church’s anxiety, something massive but unstated which lies somewhere in the significance of the heliocentric theory to the dangerous Hermeticists.

  Because the Galileo affair has been used for so long to score points in the contest between science and religion it has become hedged round with assorted myths propounded by one side or the other. Take for example the well-worn story of Galileo finishing his public recantation of his belief in the motion of the Earth around the sun by muttering the aside, ‘And yet it moves’. This was invented a century after the event, but has been repeated so often it is now considered by many to be the gospel truth. With so many assumptions and so many myths, it is almost impossible to uncover the simple truth. Almost, but not quite.

  Galileo has often been depicted as a modern rationalist-materialist scientist who had somehow been born out of time, and who was persecuted by superstitious – in other words cretinous – men whose intellects were stuck in the Middle Ages. Galileo is seen as a martyr for science and a victim of irrational religion. But of course the reality is that he was very much a man of his time, and we should no more assess his character and motivation by modern standards than we should Copernicus or Kepler.