Giordano Bruno: Infinite Worlds, Infinite Sentence

He had been difficult from the beginning. Born in Nola, near Naples, in 1548, Giordano Bruno entered the Dominican order and almost immediately began making himself unwelcome. He had read too much — not just the approved curriculum, but the full range of ancient philosophy, Hermetic writings, Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, and the new Copernican astronomy. He had a particular genius for synthesis and a complete inability to pretend he found something convincing when he did not.

He left the Dominicans and began to wander — Geneva, Paris, London, Frankfurt, Venice. Wherever he went he lectured, published, and argued. He developed a system of memory training based partly on Hermetic principles. He argued that the universe was infinite and filled with infinite worlds, each potentially inhabited — an idea derived from his Hermetic conviction that the divine was not separate from creation but identical with it: if God was infinite, the universe that expressed God must also be infinite. He argued that the sun was a star among stars, not the center of a finite crystalline sphere. He argued that the Catholic Church had corrupted the ancient wisdom that Hermes Trismegistus had transmitted and Ficino had recovered.

In Venice in 1592, he was betrayed to the Inquisition by a former patron. He was transferred to Rome and held for eight years while the trial proceeded. The precise charges have been partially lost, but the surviving records indicate they included the infinity of worlds, the transmigration of souls, the divinity of nature, and his claim that the universe itself was divine — pantheism, in effect.

He was offered a way out. If he would recant seven specific propositions, he would live. He refused. He told his judges, according to the account transmitted by Kaspar Schoppe who was present, that perhaps they who pronounced the sentence were in greater fear than he who received it.

On February 17, 1600, at the Campo de' Fiori — the Field of Flowers — they bound him to a stake with a gag in his mouth, so he could not address the crowd as he had at every previous opportunity. He was burned alive. A statue of him now stands in the Campo de' Fiori, facing the direction of the Vatican.

Bruno is the most dramatic figure in the history of Hermetic transmission because he is where the tradition became fatal. He had read Ficino's Hermes and taken its implications seriously — more seriously than Ficino himself had, more seriously than any of his contemporaries. He discovered that in the right political climate, a philosophy of the infinite and the divine that is everywhere could be a capital crime. The tradition that began with a man being addressed by a boundless being ended, for a time, with a boundless idea burning in the Campo de' Fiori.