Giordano Bruno’s original name was Filippo Bruno. He was born in Nola, in 1548, and died in Rome, in 1600. He was an Italian philosopher and writer, but not a scientist, for he never practiced any science. So why is he often named (incorrectly) as a martyr of science, who for his scientific ideas was condemned and executed by the Inquisition of the Catholic Church?
What follows is based on a summary of his
life taken from my dictionary titled 1000 Great
Scientists, published in Spanish in 1996. To disprove this
mistaken idea, I decided to include him in the list of scientists.
At age 15 he entered the Dominican order and later was a professor in Naples, but in 1576 he had to flee, accused of heterodoxy. He traveled through Italy, Switzerland, France, and England, achieving considerable success with his philosophy lessons in Paris and Oxford.
Although his thought was heterodox, he decided
not want to embrace Calvinism, which in Geneva interested him for some time,
considering it contrary to intellectual freedom. Returned to Italy in 1592, he
was denounced to the Inquisition in Venice. When the trial was transferred to
Rome, he was condemned as a heretic and died at the stake.
Bruno defended with enthusiasm the Copernican
system, not for scientific reasons, but philosophical. He wanted to use it as a
weapon against the scholastic philosophy, which was based on
Aristotle. He wanted to replace this philosophy by a hermetic form of Neoplatonism,
with which he hoped to achieve reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants.
Hermeticism is a
sect that arose in Egypt in the first centuries of the Christian era,
supposedly founded by a certain Hermes Trismegistus (hence its name), whose best-known
work is the Emerald Tablet. This
philosophy is related to the Gnostic currents of the age. Its influence
survived in the medieval and modern West through alchemists,
many of whom believed that they would find hidden clues to their experiments in
the Hermetic books. From this comes the current double meaning of this word: what
is hidden, as the information contained in those books, and what
is very well closed, as the containers of the alchemists.
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| Giordano Bruno |
In Giordano Bruno's system, which is vaguely pantheistic, the universe is infinite, and is the mirror where God contemplates himself. Bruno also adopted the Gnostic and Hermetic idea that there is something divine in every human being. He tried to show, with a scientifically incorrect argument, that the Sun is bigger than the Earth. In his work Dell'infinito universo e mondi (On the infinite universe and worlds, 1584) he argues, for philosophical reasons (but without proof), that the number of inhabited worlds is infinite.
As I have said above, Giordano Bruno did
not make any progress in the field of science. The main reasons why he was
condemned to die at the stake were not his belief in heliocentrism, nor his
claim that there is life outside the Earth, which are the two points of his
thought that most closely approximate, without being science. He was condemned mainly
because of his neo-Gnostic theology; for denying the Trinity, original sin, and
the divinity of Christ; and for questioning the presence of Christ in the
Eucharist.
Among his works, some of them written in
Italian, rather than Latin, we can mention La
cena de le ceneri (The Supper of the Ashes 1584),
where he uses the Copernican theory as a metaphor to discuss (in symbolic form)
the presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
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| Miguel Servet |
The case of Giordano Bruno is very similar to that of Miguel Servet, the best Spanish scientist of the 16th century, who is also sometimes considered a martyr of science, but is not mentioned as frequently as Bruno, for it was not executed by the Catholic Church, but by the Protestant Calvin, in Geneva. Servetus was a true scientist, for he discovered the pulmonary circulation of blood and the importance of respiration for the transformation of venous blood into arterial blood, anticipating William Harvey. He mentions these discoveries in his theological book Christianismi restitutio (The Restoration of Christianity, written in 1546 and published in 1553). But the reason why Calvin had him executed was, as in Bruno's case, theological rather than scientific, and for very similar reasons: because he denied the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, original sin, and the Trinity. As a medical professional he also made mistakes, as his astrological assertion that the stars influence human health.
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Manuel Alfonseca
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