Giordano Bruno
Cosmologist and Martyr (1548-1600)
by Robert Ellsberg

Giordano Bruno was creative, outspoken, radical, brilliant, contentious, and not afraid to think outside the box.  In any time in history, that can mean trouble, but in the late 1500s it often meant death at the stake, which was precisely what happened to Bruno.  Scholars may disagree as to the degree of his scientific expertise, or whether his fate was primarily written by the closed-minded Roman Inquisitors or by his own self-destructive actions.  But what keeps us all interested in him, then and since then, was his idea that we on this earth are just one small part of an infinite universe, which the equally infinite mystery of God easily encompasses.
- Margaret Wakeley

Giordano Bruno was one of the first human beings to intuit and thus consciously occupy the universe in its full immensity.  Thus, he seemed to his contemporaries like an alien from a different world.  And so they killed him.

Bruno was born in the town of Nola, near Naples, Italy.  He entered the Dominican order at the age of seventeen and proceeded through the usual course of studies and preparation for final vows.  With the Dominicans he received an eclectic education in the classics, philosophy, and theology, the subject in which he eventually earned a doctorate.  He acquired a reputation as a brilliant scholar, widely envied for his extraordinary powers of memory.  But he was also reputed to be something of an iconoclast, attracted to suspect philosophical and scientific speculations, and insufficiently deferential to authority.  After eleven years he found the mental constraints of the monastery too oppressive.  So he put off his religious habit and became an itinerant scholar.

In the next years Bruno traveled widely and published extensively on such themes as logic, the science of memory, mathematics, and philosophy.  He lectured in England, Paris, and other parts of the Continent.  His most controversial work was in the area of cosmology.  It was only a few years since Copernicus had published his work challenging the ancient view of the earth as the center of the universe.  Bruno believed that Copernicus had not developed the full cosmological implications of this insight.  He postulated the idea of an infinite universe with an infinity of worlds, many of them, perhaps, populated with creatures as intelligent as ourselves.  He suggested furthermore that in the future human beings might develop means of traveling through space and visiting these other worlds.  Such opinions generated a good deal of ridicule.  But there were church authorities who took Bruno’s views much more seriously.

In 1592 while visiting in Venice, Bruno was denounced as a heretic before the local Inquisition.  He found himself under arrest.  No doubt he hoped the matter would be quickly resolved; he had, after all, never engaged in theological controversy.  Instead, he entered into a Kafkaesque ordeal of endlessly repeated interrogations that lasted for eight years.  During this time he was eventually consigned to the Inquisition in Rome, and so spent much of this period confined to a dank dungeon.  A series of alleged heretical propositions was drawn from Bruno’s writings.  He persistently denied the meaning attached to these sentences, taken out of context from his work.  The charge that most seriously outraged the court was his idea of an infinite universe.

On February 8, 1600, Bruno was declared to be “an impenitent and pertinacious heretic and therefore to have incurred all the ecclesiastical censures and pains of the Holy Canon, the laws and the constitutions, both general and particular, imposed on such confessed impertinent tenacious and obstinate heretics.”  His books and papers were publicly burned in the square of St. Peter.  And he was then turned over to the “secular arm” for punishment.  Before his execution Bruno addressed his judges:  “Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.”  On February 17, he was publicly burned before a cheering mob.

In later centuries Bruno was acclaimed as a champion of intellectual freedom against the forces of intolerance.  In a deliberate snub to the Vatican, the republican government of Rome erected a statue in his honor in the square where he was burned.  Bruno did not regard himself as a “free thinker,” but as a devout Christian who believed there was no disrespect to the Creator in trying to fathom the infinite mysteries of creation.

Sincere thanks to Robert Ellsberg
for permission to use this chapter from his book Blessed Among All Women:  Women Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time.

Additional Resources
See:  Dorothea Waley Singer, Bruno: His Life and Thought  (New York:  Henry Schuman, 1950).