Giordani Bruno

BrunoGiordano (1548-1600), an Italian wandering scholar, once a Dominican, starts from a Neo-Platonist position. The phenomena we see in the world are the effects of a world-soul which animates nature and makes it into a single organism. In Bruno’s thought God sometimes seems distant and unknowable; at other times God seems to be totally identified with the world of nature. In Bruno’s august but not wholly intelligible expression, God is the Nature which causes Nature which manifests itself in the Nature which is caused by Nature.

The world of nature, for Bruno, is infinite, with no edge, surface, or limit. In this boundless space there are many scholar systems; our sun is just one star among others, and no one star can be called the centre of the universe, since all position is relative. Our earth enjoys no unique privilege; for all we know intelligent life is present elsewhere in the universe. Solar systems rise, glow, and perish, pulsating moments in the life of the single organism whole soul is the world-soul. The universe is built up of atoms, physical and spiritual; each human being is a conscious, immortal atom, mirroring in itself the entire universe.

Bruno’s opinions, unsurprisingly, did not find favour with the Church. He was passed from one Inquisition to an other, and, having refused to recant, was burnt in Rome in 1600. His theories anticipate, in an exciting way, scientific discoveries of later ages and speculations which remain popular with scientists at the present day. But that is what they are, speculations; so far as we know he devoted no time to observation or experiment ~ page 199

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Dinesh ^club

4 years ago. Edited 4 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

In 2000, to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Bruno’s death, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno hundreds of rationalists, agnostics, atheists, and pantheists gathered before his statue in Rome’s Campo dei Fiori -- the site of his execution -- to lay flowers. They demonstrated that deep conviction and strong historical memory are as much, if not more, the province of those who believe in freedom of conscience as of those who salivate for orthodoxy.

One of Bruno’s contemporaries, although they did not know each other, was the conservative monarchist and devout Roman Catholic Michael de Montaigne, who penned these beautiful sentiments circa 1580: “I do not suffer from that common failing of judging another man by me. I can easily believe that others have qualities quite distinct from my own . . . I can conceive and believe that there are thousands of different ways of living.” Montaigne goes on, declaring himself, “contrary to most men,” ready to contemplate another human being “simply as he is, free from comparisons…. My one desire is that each of us should be judged apart from that conclusions about me [or anyone else] should not be drawn from routine ‘exempla’. ~ Page 221/222 (Excerpt "God and His Demons" ~ Michael Parenti

4 years ago. Edited 4 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

. . . Protestantism from Luther onward removed God from the world, the traditional monitheistic creed combined immanence and transcendence in such a way that the distance between the two was perhaps less than one would assume. Stahl mentions an admirable ingight of Giordano Bruno’s, who, although he was a heretic, probably kept something of the common creed on this point. For Bruno, the Soul of the world which emanates from transcendent God is both transcendent and immanent, it acts as external “cause” on the one hand and a “principle” internal to matter on the other; it animates while it forms and guides while it governs. ~ Page 84

18 months ago. Edited 18 months ago.

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