Giordano Bruno's Infinite Space

Of the various charges of heresy which the Inquisition brought against Giordano Bruno, which included his claims that the consecrated host did not physically change into the body of Christ, and that the sun did not orbit around the earth, the heretical belief which his accusers seemed to find particularly shocking was his claim that space is infinite. It has been tempting in our own time to perceive Bruno as a vanguard hero courageously taking a stand against the repressive mindset of his age. But how true is this?

Excommunicated from his Dominican brotherhood, Bruno travelled through much of 16th-century Europe. Poet, writer, philosopher, lecturer, he was also an artist who produced what appear to our contemporary eyes to be timeless mystic mandalas for meditation - figures which Bruno considered to portray the spirit, the creative intellect, divine love, and other qualities (below). So it seems true enough to think of Bruno as being radically progressive for his time – because he was!

Today we can look at the wonders revealed to us by the Hubble orbiting telescope and see the realities which Bruno’s profound vision could only imagine. Instead of the nest of crystaline spheres orbiting the central earth which was then the prevailing view, Bruno gazed up at the stars and imagined worlds such as our own without number, each on its own journey through space, orbiting around its own parent star as our own earth journeys around the sun. More than this: according to Bruno many of these worlds harboured life, and new worlds were even now being born in the vast infinities of space. This is our own vision of things -  and this also was Bruno’s vision, unique for his time. No European mind before Bruno’s had thought of space as being infinite, or had thought of life existing anywhere other than on the earth – or of life being an ongoing process of creation. To 16th-century Europe, the act of creation – all creation – was something which had taken place ‘in the beginning’.

We now see our universe as being so strewn with other planets that even a conservative odds-against estimate gives us a figure of life in some form existing on some possible ten billion other worlds. Hubble even shows us so-called ‘star nurseries’ (above) – regions of space in which new stars can be seen forming, just as Bruno imagined them to be. Our contemporary science has endorsed all which Bruno claimed about our universe: that our earth is anything but the centre of all worlds, that space is teeming with other suns and planets, many of which must be home to life in some form – and that it is indeed incalculably vast. These are truths now commonly accepted and agreed upon, and our telescopes provide us with the hard evidence. But has all this been enough to redeem Bruno? 

Apparently not. 

As recently as 2000, Pope John Paul II was presented with an edict nullifying the charges against the philosopher Giordano Bruno. He refused to sign it, apparently considering Bruno’s heresy to be too extreme for the church to forgive. The charges brought by the church against Bruno stand to this day.

In February of the year 1600, after eight years of imprisonment by the Inquisition, Giordano Bruno was found guilty of heresy (the *bronze plaque above) and formally divested of his religious vows: a complex ritual of several hours of sustained humiliation, which included shaving his head to remove any traces of his friar’s tonsure – which would in any case by then have long vanished. He was then handed over to a civic bailiff, and following a further eight days of incarceration was set upon a donkey and taken to the place of execution in central Rome. Accounts mention his 'imprisoned tongue'. Clearly Bruno was gagged in some way, either by a leather strap or by a *metal spike being driven through his jaw. He was then stripped and bound to the stake. The pyre was then set to the torch. A crucifix was presented in front of him, but defiant at the last he averted his head. Shaved, naked, unable to cry out, Giordano Bruno burned. Following the burning his ashes were swept up and dumped in the Tiber.

Almost four centuries after his execution, the new Italian secular government, wishing to assert its independence from the papacy, commissioned the sculptor Ettore Ferrari to produce a statue of Giordano Bruno. It was planned to face the statue towards the morning sun, close to the site of Bruno’s execution. But as this in turn meant that the friar would have his back to the Vatican, the papacy objected that such a placement would be disrespectful. The acquiescent government duly turned the statue around, which is why the face of the hooded friar is now always in shadow. But with its brooding gaze now directed towards Saint Peter’s, it ironically also means that, centuries after his death, the statue continues to confront Bruno’s accusers.

Upon hearing his sentence, the Dominican philosopher is reported to have told his inquisitors that the sentence would be more fearful for them to pronounce against him than it would be for him to accept it. Five centuries on, his enduring words ring true.

Hawkwood

Sources:

‘Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic’, by Ingrid D. Rowland

‘Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition’, by Frances Yates

'The Pope and the Heretic: The True Story of Giordano Bruno, the Man Who Dared to Defy the Roman Inquisition', by Michael White.

*This plaque is on the base of the Bruno statue.

*Rowland's scholarly account leaves the uncertain choice open to question. White's book opts for the spike with bloody and sensational description - too sensational for me to be convinced of the author's veracity.