Customer Reviews

Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic

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Here Ingrid Rowland continues to demonstrate her profound mastery of the society and space of sixteenth-century Rome. Unlike most other accounts, Rowland emphasizes Bruno's role as a writer and shows that his fiery death at the stake in the Campo de' Fiori provoked change in the policy of the Roman Inquisition's treatment of intellectuals. I admire most of all Rowland's ability to bring forth vivid details from Bruno's beginnings in Naples, from his travels through France, England and even to the Frankfurt book fair, and from his obstinate conclusions both religious and scientific. She does much to humanize both Bruno and his chief prosecutor, Cardinal Bellarmine, and in the end suggests how science and religion soon found that they belong together rather than in conflict. This bright and polished biography does much to put the imagination of Bruno and his moving historical context in this reader's mind.

There seem to be relatively few books written about Giordano Bruno in English, therefore this recent book is welcome, but somewhat disappointing. It seems to be mostly a travelogue, and not a great work of scholarship. It is more general in biography coverage than the more narrowly focused and scholarly writing of Frances Yates, and presumably other more recent books about Bruno that I have not yet read. Although the author Rowland quotes from Bruno's writings, the quotations are far too few and far too short for truly and deeply understanding Bruno's thoughts; and the quotations chosen are often examples of profanity; evidently chosen as evidence of Bruno's hatred of the theology of the Roman Catholic Church. Bruno seems to have had a split personality: imaginative and intellectual, but half crude and profane and arrogantly hateful of other people. Rowland was evidently saving her translations of Bruno's writings for her later books. Unfortunately, the best of Bruno scholarship seems to be only available in Italian. There are many writings of Bruno that are only available in Italian or Latin, and poorly or not at all discussed by general or popular writing in the English language. I would have preferred that Rowland had spent more time translating her Italian and Latin language reference source books into English, instead of writing this biography. Annoying "invisible" unnumbered endnotes. Good bibliography.

I have often visited the statue of Giordano Bruno in the Campo dei Fiori and wondered what he was all about. This book presents a clear and accurate and very readable description of him. Now I feel that I know him as a person and an intellectual. His thinking was openminded and farsighted. Ingrid Rowland has done an excellent job of translating his works and the relevant literature that he studied and used in his teaching. Bravo!

Giordano Bruno was a name I had come across in various histories of Christianity and/or the Renaissance that I've read through the years but I knew very little about him other than that he was considered a heretic and burned at the stake. When I saw this book, I thought it would be a good opportunity to find out a bit more about someone who was little more than a name to me. Reading this turned out to be quite an eye-opening experience.

On a purely informational level, there is a lot here. Rowland shared a number of anecdotes about Bruno's life which have stuck in my mind: his getting caught with a forbidden book in the latrine, the mockery of his high-flown rhetorical style by the English, his own fondness for mockery and cursing even in the prisons of the Inquisition.

But more telling than the individual anecdotes are the larger ideas that span Bruno's life story. I was particularly fascinated by his expertise in memorization techniques. In a time when books and writing ability were rare, the ability to memorize vast amounts of information was an important skill. Bruno, apparently, was highly prized as a teacher of his own memorization technique which allowed him to make a living during his years as a wanderer across Europe.

And, of course, there was the development of his philosophical ideas. He is probably best known for developing the idea of an infinite universe where the stars could be individual solar systems with their own planets. This alone had implication with his ultimate conflict with the Church. But he also asserted theological ideas that were clearly heretical in the eyes of Christianity, such as that Christ committed a mortal sin in the Garden of Gethsemane. Granted, the Inquisition was a horrible thing, but it becomes clear from reading this that Bruno did himself no favors when facing the Cardinals. It is perhaps during this last section that the dichotomy of Bruno's character most comes to the fore: philosophical egoism vs. true son of the Church. It is the tragedy of Bruno's experience that he could not find a way out of a situation that should have been manageable for him.

It is clear in this book that Bruno had a lot more impact on his better-known peers than he is given credit for. Kepler and Galileo both credit him as an influence. (In fact, shortly before his arrest, Bruno applied for the mathematics professorship at Pisa that went to Galileo.) Professor Rowland should be commended for bringing this important person back before us. If she goes a bit overboard with unenlightening epigraphs and quotations, that is a small price to pay for the wealth of knowledge gained.

Above you will see snippets taken from my published review of this book on H-Net. You will note the ellipsis separating the two cited sentences. In fairness to my own disappointment with the book, I offer here a few sentences the publisher replaced with the ellipsis:
"The minimal scholarly apparatus as well as the book's high level of generalization and some problematic points of analysis, however, will make the book of limited usefulness."
"One weakness of the work--how certain points of Bruno's thought have been situated into the intellectual history of the West--is unfortunate, regardless of the intended readership. In some instances the historical connections Rowland draws could be judged simply incautious or overly simplifying."
"A more distressing example--an imprecise generalization that turns into an outright error of analysis--can be found in Rowland's concluding evaluation of Bruno's rejection of Eucharistic transubstantiation. This point of Bruno's thought is of central significance because it is explicitly enumerated in the inquisitors' judgment against him."
"Rowland did not need to associate Bruno with the "Thirty-Nine Articles," but since she did, the reader deserves a more thorough and precise explanation."
"Rowland appears not to understand either the theories of real presence she refers to or the not atypical scholastic use of the word signum that in no wise precludes the kind of substantial change to the consecrated elements that Cranmer and Bruno varyingly rejected and that Aquinas and Bellarmine unequivocally affirmed. Both gaffes would have horrified all four churchmen."
"At the same time, the minimal scholarly apparatus, the high degree of historical generalization, and several factual errors of varying significance hamper the book's usefulness."
D. J. Collins

As my screen name surely reveals, I have a long term sense of affinity with Giordano Bruno, the philosopher murdered by Christians in 1600. Curiously, Ingrid Rowland's biography of Bruno begins at precisely the same place where my personal affiliation began, at the foot of the statue of him in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome, where I lived in the mid-1960s. Ingrid Rowland respects -- reveres! -- Bruno as deeply as I do; any reader of her book who expects her to demean or debunk Giordano on any level will be sorely confused and disappointed. For Rowland, Bruno was not merely a martyr to free thought and/or science but in fact a profound thinker, a philosopher who ideas stretched back to antiquity and probed forward in time to prevision those of Newton and Spinoza. Likewise, the Bruno of Rowland's account was not the Kabbalistic magus/mystic that other writers have purported to make him; well aware of Kabbalah, of the writings and notions of mystics like Giles of Viterbo and Ramon Llull, Giordano was nevertheless a thinker more attuned to perception of material reality. Bruno's professed "magic" was in fact his stock-in-trade system of memory cultivation. That he was rash, reckless, and restless, Rowland leaves no doubt. But that he was a genius of the most uncompromising intellectual integrity is also beyond doubt in her portrayal.

Rowland spends a good deal of her book examining Bruno's writings rather than his behavior. If one wants a biography of juicy gossip, one had better look elsewhere. The burden of Rowland's account is to explicate and contextualize Bruno's many publications. Rowland's claim, with which I thoroughly concur, is that Bruno was one of the greatest "literary" figures of his epoch, a writer whose books still have the power to amuse and engross readers. Fresh translations of Bruno's oeuvre have in fact been appearing recently; Rowland herself is preparing a translation of Bruno's "The Heroic Frenzies". Judging by her translations of some of Bruno's poetry in this bio, such a volume will be extremely interesting.

Whatever shame and opprobrium the priesthood of the Catholic Church has exposed itself to, with the recent scandals of child abuse, the guilt that adheres to all Christianity for the violent intolerance of its history must never be ignored. Giordano Bruno was hounded from land to land, betrayed to the Inquisition, imprisoned for nine years of incessant persecution, then burned alive with maximum cruelty, with his tongue either tied or nailed to prevent him from exclaiming. Protestants, however, have no claim to disassociate themselves from the Inquisition; not only did Bruno meet with persecution in Protestant lands, but also Jean Calvin himself had supervised the burning alive of Miguel Servetus in Geneva, before Bruno's slaying. Servetus was another brilliant human thinker, now regarded as the philosophical progenitor of Unitarianism. The familiar notion that "power corrupts" needs to be paraphrased: "faith corrupts, and absolute faith corrupts absolutely."

Ingrid Rowland strikes a good balance in her life of Giordano Bruno. She manages to create a compelling background to the man and also to give an overview of Bruno's vast range of interests: Poetry, Theology, Philosophy, Cosmology and Magic. Recommended.

All in all this is worth a read. It provides a great overview of this oft-neglected intellectual giant's life and times. If you are looking for a detailed explanation of Bruno's thought, you might be left a bit disappointed, but it is a great place to start.

On my third reading of the beautiful biography by Ingrid Rowland, I count ten direct comparisons that Bruno is "like Jesus" and nine more subtle comparisons that may be accidental. The subtle comparisons come in the earlier chapters, for example when Bruno the teenager is already in trouble with the church authorities, as readers may know Jesus was. The later chapters covering Bruno's betrayal, arrest, trial, sentence, and how the world was changed, compare more directly.

The opening passage to chapter one is from Bruno's "The Ash Wednesday Supper," in which one of Bruno's characters predicts his own death by "a hundred torches" in "Roman Catholic Territory." With Rowland's suspenseful writing, we do not learn until page 277 that Bruno himself was burned at the stake on "Ash Wednesday," February 17, 1600. Predicting his own death is, of course, one of the similarities to Jesus. Rowland simply reports these facts and lets the reader put them together.

The heart of the book is Bruno's compassion toward his accusers. Though he had already predicted his own death if he returned to Roman Catholic Territory, Bruno came back to Italy from his safe haven in Protestant Germany. On page 242 we have, "he, too, wished for the cup to pass..." Once arrested, Bruno said to his accusers: "I...am here in the hands of Your Illustrious Lordships to receive the remedy for my health...and am ready to carry out whatever your prudence shall have...judged expedient for my soul..." The Inquisition believed that it is Bruno who is on trial, but Bruno appears to be testing the Inquisition. The Catholic Inquisition claimed to be a service to humankind, to detect wrongdoing and purge it so that the soul would be saved. Bruno is taking them at their word. The only thing is, if they are mistaken in their claim to cleanse his soul, HE is the one who pays the price with his life. Could there be a more unconditionally compassionate act? In several more chapters we see that Bruno with honesty allows himself to be probed by the Inquisition as if they really could free his soul from its mistakes. When his mistakes could not be purged (most likely because he was not mistaken), they torture him and burn him at the stake.

Though Bruno paid the short-term price with his life, Rowland shows that the Inquisition was changed as a result of Bruno's heroism. The Inquisitor, Bellarmine, who was so cruel to Bruno, had changed his ways by the time it was Galileo's turn, and because of this Galileo lived and shared his work to the world. In her Epilogue, Rowland also hands us Athanasius Kircher, born (coincidentally?) the year after Bruno died, who became a priest saying and doing almost all of the same things Bruno said and did, but with the Church's approval for a healthy lifespan of 80 years! Rowland's book celebrates many of the positive results from Bruno's sacrifice. Bruno forgave his inquisitors, but as of 2008 the Catholic Church still has not pardoned Bruno, Rowland reports. Instead, Bruno's inquisitor Bellarmine was sainted.

I believe Rowland's book is written without slant, nonjudgmental to all parties including the Church. In fact it is difficult to find her own opinion (except that all her bible passages are in KJV). While Yates wanted Bruno to be seen as a reborn Egyptian or Greek God, and Gatti wants Bruno to be seen as the Father of Modern Science, Rowland seems content to show Bruno as a human like any of us--hanging out in the best libraries and bookstores, promiscuous, occasionally cursing the sky with his middle finger, irreverent to Moses and the Virgin, denying Jesus was divine--who happened to truly understand mercy. Perhaps her book's cover reveals some hint of Rowland's opinion... can you see the subtle hint of halo around his head?

The book was purchased as a reference for course material I maintain for a History of Science course. The materials included in this book added contemporary value to my discussions on Copernicus and Galileo and their issues with the Church. The reading was especially timely, since the Church is now addressing some of those issues again!