GIORDANO BRUNO.*
THE nineteenth century finds it no easy task to understand, still less to accurately appreciate at his true value, the half- charlatan, half-philosopher who was so common in the sixteenth. Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, Giordano Bruno, the elder Scaliger, Yanini, and our countrymen Dee and Kelly, were all made up, though in varying proportions, of the two characters. The world has, however, long since rightly decided that Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, J. C. Scaliger, and Dr. Dee, were men of real science and learning ; but that in Vanini and Belly, the charlatan was much in excess of the philosopher. The position of Bruno has remained more doubtfuL Was he one of those "who talk of the truth, but have never sounded the depths where she dwelleth ;" or was he a true priest who has passed beyond the veil, who has entered into the holy of holies, and who has seen, sometimes it may be through a glass darkly, sometimes with marvellous clearness and accuracy, truths unknown to his contemporaries, which, though rejected in his own day, were to receive universal assent ender the teaching of other and later masters, who have obtained the glory which was denied to Bruno? It is difficult to persuade ourselves that a man could be other than a mountebank and an impostor who sometimes used an unintelligible jargon like that of Vanini, and who described himself in his letter to the 'University of Oxford as,— " A doctor in the more perfect theology, a philosopher known, approved, and honourably reoeived by the chief Universities of Europe, nowhere save among the barbarians and the vulgar a etranger, the awakener of sleeping souls, the trampler upon pre- sumptuous and recalcitrant ignorance, who in all his acts shows forth universal benevolence to all, whom upright and sincere men love,
whom noble souls receive with acclamation." .
Yet the man who used this bombastic language was none the less one of the profoundest and most original thinkers of his day, in many of his hypotheses a remarkable precursor of modern thought and modern science, one who anticipated some of the most important theories of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Hegel, and who possessed a conception of the universe which if not true, was in advance of his time. But Bruno was essentially a speculator, and not a reasoner ; his speculations, frequently perhaps no more than guesses, were always in- genious, always audacious, and not seldom capable of verifica- tion; yet in his writings they remain vague theories, mere hypotheses. He seems incapable of close reasoning, and espe- cially of that severe and unsparing criticism of his own theories which is characteristic of the true scientific mind. Though he prefers the deductive to the inductive method, he belongs really to neither school, for in him the imagination has more force than reason ; he is a poet rather than a philosopher. Yet no writer or thinker of his time accepted so fully the Copernican theory, or saw so clearly the momentous revolution in philo- sophy which the acceptance of that theory involved.
But whatever the position of Bruno as a philosopher, the man
• Ws of Chardon* Brace. Os Nolan. By J. Frith. Revised by Professor Maris Carriers. Lendea Trams sad Co. 1887. is certainly a most interesting personality. His life was full of exciting episodes. Devoted from his youth to literature, he had scarcely assumed the Dominican habit ere be found its restraints personally irksome, as well as incompatible with that freedom of thought which he carried to such unbounded lengths. For thirteen years he endured the monastic rule, dividing his time between his ecclesiastical duties and his philosophical studies, and writing during this period some of his lighter pieces. After being three times charged, if not with heresy, at least with heretical proclivities and forbidden studies, he at length left his convent, and thenceforth devoted himself to the career of a wandering philosopher; studying, teaching, speaking, and writing at Geneva, Toulouse, Paris, London, Oxford, Wittem- burg, Helmstadt, and Frankfort; everywhere making friends, not only of men of the highest rank, but of those who were the most cultivated and enlightened, and who were able to see his real merits through the cloud of boastful and bombastic language in which he delighted to envelope his ideas. At Geneva, he was the friend of Caracciolo ; at Toulouse, a readership and the degree of Doctor of Philosophy were conferred on him ; at Paris, he was appointed by Henry III. his reader-in-ordinary. Passing to London in the suite of his chief protector and friend, the learned and virtuous Castelnan de la Mauvissiere, he there enjoyed the intimacy of men like Sir Philip Sidney and Falke Greville ; and if the Oxford dons (" pigs," as he calls them) were unable to discover his merits, and judged him, as they might not unfairly do, from his absurd letter to the Vice- Chancellor, the Professors of Wittemburg on the other hand, received him with open arms. At Prague, the Emperor Rudolph was favourably disposed towards him ; Duke Julius of Brunswick-Wolfenbiittel was delighted to appoint him to a professorship at his new University of Helmstadt; at Frankfort, he was hospitably entertained by the Carmelites, and enjoyed the intimacy of the learned printers Wechel and Fischer. So far from being, as Mr. Frith tells us, "hunted from town to town by the ban of excommunication," everywhere, except at Geneva, he might have stayed and have had an honourable career ; only his restless disposition, his feverish anxiety for new scenes, new societies, and new opportunities of displaying his learning, drove him from city to city. Of his residence at each place he has left ns most interesting notices, and none more so than those of London and Oxford. His account of Oxford, indeed, is a little tinged with the mortification occasioned by the chilling and con- temptuous reception he met with ; while his description of the "stubborn and pedantic ignorance, mixed with rustic incivility," which he found there, is not unlike other unfavourable criticisms of Oxford from time to time during the two centuries which followed, from those visitors and students whose unorthodox and somewhat revolutionary opinions excited the suspicions and dis- like of the conservative University. But his animated pictures of his life in London, of the courteous, cultivated, and hospitable gentlemen he met with, and of the rade and almost savage manners of the lower classes, and their hatred of foreigners, form one of the most interesting and graphic pictures we have of England and Englishmen in the reign of Elizabeth. It is strange that we have no reference to Bruno in the contemporary literature of the time, especially as seven, if not eight of his books, were printed in London ; yet we cannot but think that a serious examination of what can be discovered as to his residence here, whether in his own writings or elsewhere, would lead to some interesting conclusions on the subject of his influence on the writings of his friends and associates, and on the extent to which their intercourse with him affected his own works. Certainly, the two years he spent in England were among the happiest years of his life.
Bruno left Frankfort in February, 1691, on the invitation of the Venetian Mocenigo, who has eternally disgraced the noble name which he bore by his treacherous denunciation of his guest to the Inquisition, just fifteen months later. With the sanction of the Venetian Government, Bruno was handed over to the Inquisition of Rome, charged with heresy and apostasy, and then for seven years he absolutely disappears from view. On February 8th, in the Jubilee year, 1600, by the direction of Clement VIII., " Fr. Jordanns " was declared an apostate and a heretic ; he was delivered to the secular arm to be punished, and with the brutal hypocrisy which characterised the capital sentences of the Holy Office, the Civil Governor of Rome was exhorted " so to mitigate the severity of the sentence that there might be no danger of death or of shedding of blood." Nine days later, Giordano Bruno was burned alive in the Campo di Fiore.
A detailed biography of Bruno, with an account of his writings and his opinions, especially one dealing, in the manner we have indicated, with his residence in England, is still a desideratum in our literature. Mr. Frith has studied with great care the books of Bartholmess, Berti, and Brannhofer ; he has made himself master of many of Bruno's works; and he is evidently a man who has read and thought much on philosophical sub- jects, and who is acquainted with the writings of many German thinkers of the last as of the present century, and in his work the English reader will obtain, for the first time, a detailed narrative of the philosopher's life, and an account of many of his works. But we Bad nothing in addition to what has been given us by the three writers just named_ That Mr. Frith is an admirer of the man, and a thorough- going partisan of the philosopher, is perhaps to be expected. But his tone of unmitigated eulogy is not that in which the biography of Bruno should be written, and in this respect Mr. Frith contrasts unfavourably with Bartholmess and Berti, to whom, and especially to the former, the student must still turn if he wishes to obtain a sober appreciation of Bruno's character and philosophy, for neither sobriety of judgment nor sobriety of language are characteristics of our author. The keynote of his work, the impression which he desires to produce of the philosophy of Bruno, will be found in the concluding page of his book :—
" The fame and hononrs which allure vulgar minds, to him were nothing. His life was a long protest. God is, God is truth ; and that truth shines forth in Nature, which is his handiwork. God is, and all
is in God, but in a manner befitting his protection The things of Nature by which we are surrounded, are shadows, unreal and not abiding ; but the spirit, the soul, the form, the act of the divine cognition, the substance which no human eye has ever seen, the Monad which can never be perceived by mortal sense, this alone is real, abiding, and true; this was before the worlds were ; this is Infinity. To perceive it is the only true knowledge ; to be joined with it is the only true happiness. The majesty and immutability of God dawn upon the eye of man, and, led by love, the great revealer, the eager human spirit is united with its Giver. If this assurance should penetrate the heart of one reader, the Nolan will not have died in vain, nor will the humble labours of his biographer be counted as
nothing."
Though it ought to be possible to make a most interesting and readable biography of Bruno, we cannot say that Mr. Frith has succeeded in so doing. He seldom continues his narrative for many sentences together, without long extracts from Bruno's works, or quasi-philosophical disquisitions in the style we have just quoted, so that whenever we are beginning to feel interested in any portion, we are irritated at being interrupted by dreary declamation. Nor when he is not philosophising is Mr. Frith always easy to read. He says in one place that Bruno "took no pains either to prune his style, or to lay the demon of quota- tion which came from his vast stores of learning." Mr. Frith has certainly neither pruned his style, nor laid the demon of quota- tion in his own case. Where he does not indulge in fine-writing, his pages are little more than things of shreds and patches, or rather mosaic pavements tesaelated with quotations. On the page in which he speaks of the "demon of quotation," he quotes Tira- boschi, Saiaset, Manzoni, Schiller, and Lord Bacon. Pp. 104.105 are made up of extracts from Clement, Goujet, Tiraboschi, Lewes, Piron, Ueberweg, Tschischwitz, Furness, and "the excellent Mrs. Pott " (whoever this lady may be). Often for many pages we get nothing of Mr. Frith's own, except the few words here and there which connect the quotations. Nor has he aimed at uniformity in his methods of reference ; sometimes, and most frequently, be adds to the unpleasantness of reading the book by inserting the references in the text. Sometimes he gives them in the notes, and occasionally he cites passages taken from what he calls " an old chronicle," without any other refer- ence. Thus, speaking of Toulouse, he has the following :— "The students, save an old chronicle, rose at four in the morn- ing, and after their prayers were said, they were on their way to the college by five o'clock, with their folios under their arms and lanterns in their hands." In the " old chronicle " we recognise the Memoires of Henri de Meemes, whose statement of what "we" did (in the first person) is thus paraphrased. But to quote these MOtnoires (or, indeed, any work of the seventeenth century) as an old chronicle is a singular misapplication of words. The book is full of trifling mistakes, some of them, no doubt, errors of the press. The biographer of Sidney is several times referred to as " Zonch ;" the Cabala del Cavallo Pegaseo is translated more than once as the Cabal of the Pagan= Horse; the Order of the Holy Ghost is said to have beeminatitnted by Henry IV.; and we are told that the question of Melanehthon's
belief or unbelief was discussed at Rome by the Pope, and by Cardinal Bembo, the future Pope !
The absence of an index deprives the book of all value as a work of reference ; but the alphabetical list of authorities (com- piled by Mr. W. Heinemann) is not without use, though it is merely a long (but incomplete) list of books and articles—the majority of them absolutely worthless and uninteresting—in which Bruno is spoken of, yet omitting many real authorities and valuable books and essays. For instance, it mentions neither the excellent dissertation of P. A. de Bruijn (Groningen, 1837), nor the article in the Quarterly Review for April, 1878; and though Dr. Willis's rubbishy life of Spinoza is inserted, the exhaustive and learned work of Professor Pollock is omitted. The occasional brief criticisms on the works given are in several cases ludicrously inaccurate ; a number of the (original) Spectator is said to be "written from the Puritan point of view ;" while Bidden, the well-known Lutheran divine, is described as writing "from the Roman Catholic point of view !" Mr. Symonds's chapter on Bruno in the last volume of his Renaissance in Italy is not men- tioned. We differ widely from several of the philosophical views there expressed ; but the chapter is not only moat interesting in itself, but it gives by far the most satisfactory account of Bruno. and his writings which as yet is to be found in our language, and we rejoice to see that Mr. Symonds gives us a half•promise of returning to the subject in a separate essay.
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