Giordano Bruno

The teaching

Taught from his Italian dialogues of 1584 and 1585, with On the Shadows of Ideas and On Magic.

The infinite universe

Bruno reasons from the cause to the effect. An infinite power that made only a finite world would be idle in the rest of its power, and a goodness that held itself back would not be perfect goodness; so the effect must be worthy of its cause, and the universe is infinite. It has no edge and no centre, or rather any place in it may be called the centre, and its edge is nowhere. It is one, endless and unmoving as a whole, and within it move countless worlds: the fixed stars are suns, each with its own earths about it, and our sun is one star among them.

We are already in heaven

So the Earth is not the low dregs of the world beneath a perfect heaven. There is one space, one boundless air, in which every star and every earth moves, and we stand in the heavens already, on a star among stars. No crystalline shells carry the stars round: each world is a great living creature that moves by its own soul, as the Earth turns on itself and goes round the sun by its own life.

In The Ash Wednesday Supper he defends Copernicus as more than a maker of tables, as one who saw the truth of things, and he answers the objection from Scripture: the Bible speaks to the people in the language they know, to teach them how to live, not to teach them natural philosophy. His Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, where Jupiter clears the constellations of the gods' vices and sets virtues in their places, is taught on Ficino and the Renaissance.

The inner artist

The same life fills everything from within. The soul of the world, and the universal mind that is its first power, is the inner artist of all things: it forms matter from inside, as a seed shapes the plant it grows into, and not from outside, as a carpenter shapes wood. Matter is not a dead, empty receiver; it holds every form within it and brings them forth, and in the infinite, form and matter, power and act, are one.

Since all things are full of soul, nothing is wholly dead, and what we call death is only the passing of one form into another. In the infinite even opposites meet: the greatest and the least, the one and the many, coincide.

The shadows of ideas

The human mind does not see the ideas themselves, the pure forms in the divine mind, but their shadows, and a shadow is not darkness but the trace of light, the way by which the mind climbs toward it. On the Shadows of Ideas joins this teaching to the old art of memory, of places and images set in order. Bruno sets his images on turning wheels lettered after the manner of Ramon Llull, images drawn from the stars, from the things of nature and from the inventors of the arts, so that by turning the wheels the mind can combine them without end. The aim is to order the images within the mind after the order of the universe itself, until memory becomes a mirror of the whole.

The heroic frenzy

The love of the divine is the heroic frenzy, and in his sonnets with their commentary he tells it through the story of Actaeon. The hunter goes out into the woods of nature after the goddess and sees Diana bathing: the divine not in itself, which no one can look upon, but as it shines in nature. At that sight he is turned into a stag and torn apart by his own hounds, which are his thoughts.

The seeker becomes what he sought. The mind that hunts the infinite is changed into it, dies to its old self and lives the life of the divine. This frenzy is not the madness of the brute, which falls below reason, but a fire that lifts the mind above it.

Bonds

Magic, as On Magic teaches it, is the knowledge and use of bonds. Everything is tied to everything else, because one spirit runs through all things and joins them; the magus learns how one thing draws, holds or repels another, and works through voice, song, image, figure and sign upon that spirit, and above all upon the minds of others. Of all the bonds love is the greatest, and the others come back to it. The one who would bind others must take care not to be bound himself, for whoever loves without measure is held by what he loves.

Against pedants and cheats

His comedy The Candlemaker shows the other face of the same teaching. A pedant puffed up with Latin, a miser who hopes to make gold and a lover who wants a love charm are all fooled by rogues, one of them dressed as a magician, because each wants something the world will not give him honestly. The credulous make the cheat. Its title page carries his motto, sad in gladness, glad in sadness: the double face of one who laughs at the follies he sees and grieves over them.