Giordano Bruno

had two grounds: his belief that religious or sectarian strife was the chief cause of the evils of war and civil discord that were rife throughout Europe, and the fact that one and all

pt as "philosophically" true the distinction of Persons, or the special divinity of Christ. Only once, perhaps, does he write seriously of Christ as the Son of God, and that in one of the posthumous works, the Lampas Triginta Statuarum.[531] "Charity is the most perfect and consummate harmony, by which the soul in us becomes so harmonious in itself that it is attuned both to God and to all men equally, not only to friends but even to enemies; to this perfection we are drawn, impelled, invited by the Son of the almighty God, to raise us up to the likeness of the Father, 'who maketh His sun to rise upon good and evil, and sends His rain upon the just and the unjust,' uplifting us from the savage condition of life common to brutes and to th

seven of them, but is not to scorch her head-and so on. These unpleasant details, however, are only a prelude to a philosophical conception of the divine action. God, it is said, does not provide for this and that individual as occasion arises.[534] He "does all things without deliberation, anxiety, or perplexity: provides for innumerable species and an infinite number of individuals, not in any order of succession, but at once and all together: He is not like a finite agent, doing things one by one, with many acts, an infinite number of acts for an infinite number of things, but does everything, past, present, and future, with one simple and unique act."[535] So the knowledge of God is simple, containing implicitly in itself all things that are or happen in the extended universe (the explicate unity). It is only to our confused

magic. Along with these he rejected also what may be called the morbid side of medi?val Christianity-its constant dwelling upon the physical, sensational aspects of Christ's life, sufferings, and death,[539] its appeal to the hysterical in man. Against a religion of incoherent personal emotion and brute ignorance, he would set one of humane love and of reason

be as dependent on men as men are on themselves for utility and profit.[541] The gods are beyond all passion: they have active anger and pleasure only, not passive. Therefore they do not threaten punishment or promise reward for good or evil that results in them, but for that committed on peoples and in the human societies which they foster by their divine laws and statutes, since human laws do not suffice. The gods do not seek the reverence, fear, love, worship, or respect of men, for any other end or utility than that of men themselves. Glory cannot be added to the gods from without; they have made their laws not to receive glory but to communicate glory to men. The sole sphere of justice is the moral actions of men with regard to other men; inward sins are sins only so far as they have outward effect, and inward justice is not justice without outward practice.[542] The Bible,-not science but morality its aim.In the Cena Bruno had already made practical use of this principle in maintaining that the Scriptures teach not science, but an ideal of conduct, and therefore that any argument from them as to the actual constitution of the world is devoid of compelling force, while, on the other side, no scientific theory or hypothesis can be r

he ordinary man by the threat of future punishment and promise of future reward; but it is an ideal whi

rmer must be governed by laws which they have blindly to obey, hence the supernatural sanction required; the latter pursue the true good without this stimulus, by virtue of reason. But for the sake of the many, the few must conform in outward practice with the religion of their state.[544] Brunnhofer goes so far as to see in this the idea of Lessing, that religion is a means whereby men are gradually educated upwards to a true knowledge of God,-leading them from the state of darkness and savagery to that of moral behaviour, at which point only the full light of science and philosophy takes the place of religion.[545] There was a religion, however, for the few as well as for th

inconsistent with revealed truth. But no theologian denied more strenuously than Bruno, in spite of occasional lapses, the possibility of two kinds of truth. There were indeed two kinds of evidence: "one from the light of our own senses and rational inference, such as we require in speculative sciences, in the arts, and in practical life, where true and false, good and evil, are apprehended by human reason and natural light;" the other, from light of a foreign, namely, a divine source. For as God neither deceives nor is deceived, and is not envious, but good in the highest degree-is indeed truth and goodness itself; so, when he speaks to us of occult things, of mysteries, it must be evident that everything he proposes for our belief is true, and that everything he proposes for our doing is good. But God is also the Author of nature, of our senses, of our eyes, and of that truth and evidence which is in them and according to them; truth does not contradict truth, goodness is not opposed to goodness. The word of God that is spread through the parts of nature, His hand and instrument,-for Nature is either God himself, or the divine force manifest in things,-is not opposed to the word of God, from whatever other part or principle it springs.[555] There could be no clearer assertion of the right of philosophy and science to pursue their own way in the discovery of truth. Nothing revealed from above can conflict with truth acquired by the discursive, slow-moving human reason, nor on the other hand can any real truth arrived at by science ever contradict the pure, genuinely-revealed, word of God. The sphere of faith is separated from that of reason; faith follows the authority of revelation, is an infallible certainty equal to, if not greater than, that of sense-knowledge and the intuition of first principles. Revealed truths are outside the sphere of sense and reason, not, however, as opposed or contrary to the truths belonging to that sphere, but as above them. While philosophical faith enables us to act according to reason and human nature, guiding us by principles innate in ourselves, to the perfection of our natural condition, theological faith leads us by supernatural principles to a supernatural end, to become formed in the likeness and in the knowledge of God.[556] Neither must we call to the bar of reason what is above reason, summon before our tribunal "cases" of eternity,[557] nor on the other hand must faith be allowed to prejudice the discovery of truth by natural methods: if so, it becomes a danger and a snare.[558] Bruno was therefore a Rationalist only in a limited sense: while he claimed for the philosopher entire freedom of interpretation of religious dogmas or legends, the interpretation was to be governed not by the facts of ordinary knowledge, but by the mystical intuition of divine truth, given, in inspired moments, to the heroic soul. There were two types of rationalism in mediaeval philosophy-that of Averroes, which sought to supplant the positive religions by a religion of philosophy, and that of Scotus Erigena, which aimed at upholding popular faiths while allowing the philosopher freedom of thought in interpreting the doctrines these faiths involved. Bruno's rationalism is clearly of the second type, although personally he disliked all prevailing

n time, however, take the body of a man, when this outlet is given to it, just as that of a man, should he refuse his opportunity, may sink back, and indeed must sink back, to the animal state, in the never-ceasing cycle of change. But what precisely is this soul that passes from one body to another, perhaps from one star to another? In one passage we read that as in corporeal matter the body of the ass does not differ from that of the man, so in spiritual matter the soul of the ass remains the same as that of the man; the soul of either is not different from that which is in all things, i.e. the soul of the universe.[567] We should then have to assume that it is matter, not the form or soul, that differentiates individuals. According to the differences of the organised bodies are the souls that are in them; or, it is one and the same soul which constitutes the vital and cognitive principle in different animal bodies, and in different "worlds" or stars. The individual human and animal souls would be merely modes of the one earth-soul, just as the different star-souls would be merely modes of the one soul of the universe, the first and highest emanation of divinity. The immortality of the individual soul would mean accordingly its reabsorption, at the close of its bodily life, into the eternal; but it would be impossible then to ascribe any continuity or identity to the souls of two beings which succeed each other in nature. This impersonal immortality is that which is most prominent in the Italian dialogues; it gives place, so far as prominence is concerned, to quite another stan

rfect in heaven (i.e. sub specie aeternitatis).[573] All things being subordinated to the will of the best, everything is good, and tends towards good; the contrary is only apparent when we refuse to look beyond the pre

, according to which every finite thing has an infinite worth from the very fact of its existence as a member, or part of the universe. It is in this

se there await the bodily members of a man and of all other kinds of being, in regular series, or in confused order; the death of the present members has no bearing upon the future life and its innumerable forms. The soul would not suffer if this were known to it; the wise soul does not fear death, sometimes desires it, and goes to meet it. Before every substance lies eternity for duration, immensity for place, omniformity for realisation."[577] The soul is not limited to the earth alone, but has the infinite worlds before it, for its dwelling-place. It is owing to this individual (indivisible, therefore unchanging) substance-the soul-that we are what we are; about it as a centre there occur in each life continuous "massing and unmassing" of corporeal atoms, through which the changes of form are brought about. "By birth and growth the spirit-architect expands into this mass of which we consist, spreading outwards from the heart. Thither again it withdraws, winding up the threads of its web, retiring by the same path along which it advanced, passing out by the same gate through which it entered. Birth is expansion of the centre, life consistency of the sphere, death contraction to the centre." It is the soul that gathers about it, groups and

their substance: it works in them, but not as a part of them. It does not gradually leave the being to which it has presen

its explicit nature-on its outward side. The striving after new life is due to the felt conflict, or want of harmony, between what it has in it to become-its inner self-and what it has actually become, the limited form in which it appears. On the one hand evil is necessary for good, for were the imperfections not felt, there would be no striving after perfection; all defect and sin consist merely in privation, in the non-realisation of possible qualities. "It would not be well were evil non-existent, for it makes for the necessity of good, since if evil were removed the desire of good would also cease."[583] In its whole life, however, the soul will realise all good, and therefore is only per accidens imperfect. On the other hand, however mean in itself

d not in circles or regular paths, but ever in spiral course, so that at each moment their places were other than at any prior or later moment. No two circles, no two lines in nature, were ever exactly equal; hence there was never a perfect circle nor a perfectly straight line. The principle is not at all an epist

reveals the mind from which it springs-the stars "declare the glory of the majesty of God and the works of His hands. Thence we are uplifted to the infinite cause of the infinite effect."[586] Nature is God in things,[587] His infinite mirror, the explicate, unfolded, extended, immeasurable world,

a nearer spring of knowledge is in ourselves. God in us."We are led to regard divinity not as without us, separate or distant from us, but as within ourselves (since it is everywhere wholly), for it is more intimate to us than we can be to ourselves, since it is the substantiating and most essential centre of all essences and of all being."[590] It is from these two aspects of his philosophy, the identifying of nature with God, and the identifying of the true being of each of us with God, that Bruno has been described as a Pantheist. So far, however, as this term implies the identity of the individual things with eac

ver penetrate to the deep-lying individual in ourselves, but see only the accidents, the externals; as we never see our own eye, but only its reflection from a mirror, so our intellect cannot see itself in itself, nor anything else in itself, but always some external form, semblance, image, figure, sign.[591] The truth of things-God-everywhere eludes our sense and our reason, our discursive intell

elf, and consequently are more truly known in it, in simplicity and togetherness, where all things are one in an ineffable sense, without distinction, distribution, or number."[592] God is the source of the determinations, the forms of all things. "The first measure is Mind itself: for all measure receives its denomination from mind"[593] (mensura, mens). "One is mind, everywhere wholly, giving measure to all things; one intellect, giving order to all t

lier works, although remaining in the language and even in much of the thoughts of the later, has been overcome in fact.[597] God is indeed transcendent, beyond the world, but He is so only as comprehending the world in Himself, its source, its truth-yet more than the source of things or of their order. In all other things we may distinguish between existence and essence (i.e. the fact of their being, their historical presence in the world, and their nature, through which they are what they are); in God alone these are one or indistinguishable.[598] God and things differ by a greater difference than substance and accident-i.e. things are not accidents, or "modes" of God. They differ from one another by their special differentiae, but resemble in other respects. God differs, not as marked off, limited by them, but as containing them all in essence, presence, power and eternity.[599] He is not apart from things, but in them; in them not as comprehended or contained by them, but as comprehending and containing them, and as the essential basis of all things, the centre of the universal life and substance.[600] He is all

n eternity; not as artificers, or material principles, moved by changing dispositions to new willing, new faculty, new effects, but from the instant of eternity, above time and above change, He creates all that which becomes in time, in change, in motion, in vicissitude. Before and above time and motion there is not always time and motion, but there we find divinity, immutable and invariable. He has from eternity willed that to be which now is." "There liberty makes necessity, necessity attests liberty."[605] "Past is not past to it (the First Intelligence), nor future future, but the whole of eternity is present to it as one whole, all together, in its completeness."[606] Seldom, even in recent idealist philosophy, has the World of Ideas maintained its hold so powerfully over a mind whose whole trend was towards a naturalistic interpretation of things. The religious instinct dominates to the last Bru