History of Philosophy
by
Alfred Weber§ 49. Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno(1) was born at Nola, near Naples, in 1548. While still a young man, he entered the Dominican order, but the influence exercised upon him by the writings of Nicolas Cusanus, Raymond Lullus, Telesio, and his profound love of nature, soon turned him against the monastic life and Catholicism. He visited Geneva, where he met with bitter disappointments, Paris, London, and Germany, journeying from Wittenberg to Prague, from Helmstaedt to Frankfort. But Protestantism proved no more satisfactory to him than the religion of his fathers. Upon his return to Italy he was arrested at Venice by order of the Inquisition, imprisoned for two years, and then burnt at the stake in Rome (1600). His adventurous life did not hinder him from writing numerous treatises, the most remarkable of which are the following: Della causa, principio ed uno(2) (Venice, 1584); Del infinito universo e dei mondi(3) (id., 1584); De triplici minimo et mensura (Frankfort, 1591); De monade, numero et fiqura (id., 1591); De immenso et innumerabilibus s. de universo et mundis(4) (id. 1591).
Bruno was the first metaphysician of the sixteenth century who unreservedly accepted the heliocentric system. Aristotle's spheres and divisions of the world he regarded as purely imaginary. Space, he held, has no such limits, no insurmountable barriers separating our world from an extra-mundane region reserved for pure spirits, angels, and the supreme Being. Heaven is the infinite universe. The fixed stars are so many suns, surrounded by planets, which, in turn, are accompanied by satellites. The earth is a mere planet, and does not occupy a central and privileged place in the heavens. The same may be said of our sun, for the universe is a system of solar systems.
If the universe is infinite, we must necessarily reason as follows: There cannot be two infinities; now the existence of the world cannot be denied; hence God and the universe are but one and the same being. In order to escape the charge of atheism, Bruno distinguishes between the universe and the world: God, the infinite Being, or the Universe, is the principle or the eternal cause of the world: natura naturata; the world is the totality of his effects or phenomena: natura naturata. It would, he thinks, be atheism to identify God with the world, for the world is merely the sum of individual beings, and a sum is not a being, but a mere phrase. But to identify God with the universe is not to deny him; on the contrary, it is to magnify him; it is to extend the idea of the supreme Being far beyond the limits assigned to him by those who conceive him as a being by the side of other beings, i.e., as a finite being. Hence Bruno loved to call himself Philotheos,(5) in order to distinguish clearly between his conception and atheism. This proved to be a useless precaution, and did not succeed in misleading his judges.
As a matter of fact, the God of Bruno is neither the creator nor even the first mover, but the soul of the world; he is not the transcendent and temporary cause, but, as Spinoza would say, the immanent cause, i. e., the inner and permanent cause of things; he is both the material and formal principle which produces, organizes, and governs them from within outwardly: in a word, their eternal substance. The beings which Bruno distinguishes by the words "universe" and "world," natura naturans and natura naturata, really constitute but one and the same thing, considered sometimes from the realistic standpoint (in the mediæval sense), sometimes from the nominalistic standpoint.(6) The universe, which contains and produces all things, has neither beginning nor end; the world (that is, the beings which it contains and produces) has a beginning and an end. The conception of nature and of necessary production takes the place of the notion of a creator and free creation. Freedom and necessity are synonymous; being, power, and will constitute in God but one and the same indivisible act.(7)
The creation of the world does not in any way modify the God-universe, the eternally-identical, immutable, incommensurable, and incomparable Being. By unfolding himself, the infinite Being produces a countless number of genera, species, and individuals, and an infinite variety of cosmical laws and relations (which constitute the life of the universe and the phenomenal world), without himself becoming a genus, species, individual, or substance, or subjecting himself to any law, or entering into any relations. He is an absolute and indivisible unity, having nothing in common with numerical unity; he is in all things, and all things are in him. In him every existing thing lives, moves, and has its being. He is present in the blade of grass, in the grain of sand, in the atom that floats in the sunbeam, as well as in the boundless All, - that is, he is omnipresent, because he is indivisible. The substantial and natural omnipresence of the infinite Being both explains and destroys the dogma of his supernatural presence in the consecrated host, which the ex-Dominican regards as the corner-stone of Christianity. Because of this real all-presence of the infinite One, everything in nature is alive; nothing can be destroyed; death itself is but a transformation of life. The merit of the Stoics consists in their having recognized the world as a living being; that of the Pythagoreans, in having recognized the mathematical necessity and immutability of the laws governing eternal creation.(8)
Bruno sometimes calls the Infinite, the Universe, or God, matter. Matter is not the µn öv of Greek idealism and the Schoolmen. It is inextended, i. e., immaterial in its essence, and does not receive its being from a positive principle outside of itself (the form); it is, on the contrary, the real source of all forms; it contains them all in germ, and produces them in succession. What was first a seed becomes a stalk, then an ear of corn, then bread, then chyle, then blood, then animal semen, then an embryo, then a man, then a corpse, and then returns to earth or stone or some other material, only to pass through the same stages again. Thus we have here something that is changed into all things, and yet remains substantially the same. Hence, matter alone seems to be stable and eternal, and deserves to be called a principle. Being absolute, it includes all forms and all dimensions, and evolves out of itself the infinite variety of forms in which it appears. When we say a thing dies, we mean that a new thing has been produced; the dissolution of a combination means the formation of a new one.
The human soul is the highest evolution of cosmical life. It springs from the substance of all things through the action of the same force that produces an ear from a grain of wheat. All beings whatsoever are both body and soul: all are living monads, reproducing, in a particular form, the Monad of monads, or the God-universe. Corporeality is the effect of an outward movement or the expansive force of the monad; in thought the movement of the monad returns upon itself. This double movement of expansion and concentration constitutes the life of the monad. The latter lasts as long as the backward and forward motion producing it, and dies as soon as this ceases; but it disappears only to arise again, in a new form, soon after. The evolution of the living being may be described as the expansion of vital centre; life, as the duration of the sphere; death, as the contraction of the sphere and its return to the vital centre whence it sprang.(9)
All these conceptions, especially the evolutionism of Bruno, we shall meet again in the systems of Leibniz, Bonnet, Diderot, and Hegel, which his philosophy contains in germ and in the undifferentiated state, as it were. As the synthesis of monism and atomism, idealism and materialism, speculation and observation, it is the common source of modern ontological doctrines.
1. The Italian writings edited by A. Wagner, 2 vols., Leipsic, 1829; [new edition by P. de Lagarde, 2 vols., Gottingen, 1888-89]; Latin writings ed. by A. F. Gfrorer, Stuttgart, 1834, incomplete; [also by Fiorentino and others, 4 vols., Naples, 1880, 1886; Florence, 1889; W. Lutoslawski, Jordani Bruni Nolani Opp. inedita manu propia scripta, Archiv f. Geschichte der Philos., II., 326-371, 394-417; F. Tocco, Le opere inedite di G. B., Naples, 1891. - TR.]. See Christian Bartholmess, Jordano Bruno, 2 vols., Paris, 1846-47; [R. Mariano, G. B., la vita et l'uomo, Rome, 1881]; H. Brunnhofer, G. B.'s Weltanschauung und Verhangniss, Leipsic, 1882; [J. Frith, Life of G. B., the Nolan, revised by M. Carriere, London, 1887; Sigwart, Kleine Schriften, I., pp. 49 ff. - TR.]. M. Felice Tocco has published: Le opere latine di G. B. esposte e confrontate con le italiane, Florence, 1889, and Le opere inedite di G. B. M. Tocco distinguishes three phases in the philosophical development of Bruno: a Neo-Platonic, an Eleatic and Heraclitean, and a Democritean phase. With the head of the materialistic school, Bruno advances the notion of an infinite number of worlds and the theory of atoms, which, from his animistic point of view, become monads. Bartholmess lays especial stress on the first of these phases; Brunnhofer, on the second; but neither interpretation exhausts Bruno's thought.
2. German transl. by A. Lasson in Kirchmann's Philosophische Bibliothek, 2d ed. 1889. - TR.
3. German transl. by L. Kuhlenbeck, Berlin, 1893. - TR.
4. Id., 1890. - TR.
5. Philotheus Jordanus Brunus Nolanus de compendiosa architectura et complemento artis Lullii, Paris, 1582.
6. Della causa, 72 ff.
7. De immenso et innumbilibus, I., 11.
8. Id., VIII., 10.
9. De triplici minimo, pp. 10-17.