The Theory of Heliocentrism

In 1548, three years after Nicolaus Copernicus died in northern Poland, a baby was born in the Italian village of Nola, not far from the ancient remnants of Pompeii. His father was an officer in the army of the city-state of Naples, his mother a woman of good breeding from the minor gentry. They christened their child Filippo Bruno. Precocious and imaginative from an early age, little Filippo grew up there in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, which constantly huffed and grumbled and glowered above him. It was a harbinger of the restless, disruptive life that lay ahead of the boy.

Like Copernicus, Filippo Bruno was the second son of his parents, and thus he was vouchsafed the same lot in life, that of becoming a living donation to the Church. And initially at least, he accepted his fate with similar equanimity. In 1565, at age seventeen, he entered the Dominican monastery in Naples. To mark the occasion, he changed his Christian name to Giordano, which is the name in Italian of the Jordan River of Biblical fame, the waterway where Jesus Christ himself was baptized. At this point in time, Bruno was as sincere and orthodox a young believer as ever took a novice monk’s vows of obedience, poverty, and chastity.

But that began to change once he had access to the monastery’s ample library. He read and read and read, read not just Christian theological texts but pagan and Jewish and Muslim works. He immersed himself in mysticism: in the occult teachings of the semi-mythical ancient Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus, in the Jewish Kabbalah, in the ideas of the ancient Gnostic and Arian Christians, so different from the sturdy and stable orthodoxy of the present-day Church, whose lodestars were Augustine’s doctrines of sin and redemption and the methodical, Aristotelian  scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas. Indeed, Bruno learned to loathe Aristotle in particular. There were more things in heaven and earth, he was certain, than were dreamt of in that man’s self-satisfied philosophy. After all, how could a God who cared only for balance and order have invented something so wild and wonderful as sex, another subject that was much on his mind as the reality of his cloistered life set in.

Bruno was full of questions that the monks around him would prefer he did not ask. If God was perfect and unchanging, why was the God of vengeance of the Old Testament so different from the God of love of the New? (Maybe the two were actually separate beings entirely, as some of the Gnostics had said.) How could Jesus simultaneously be God and the son of God? (Maybe the Arians had had it right when they said that Jesus was subordinate to God, that there had been a time when God existed and Jesus did not.) And why did the bread and wine that believers ingested during the ritual of the Eucharist continue to taste like ordinary bread and wine in the mouth if they were literally transformed there into the body and blood of Jesus? (Maybe the rite of the Eucharist was just a metaphor, as some in Protestant circles were prepared to say.) The Church’s standard response in the face of probing questions like these — that these were matters that simply “surpassed human understanding” — struck Bruno as, well, a bit of a cop-out.

Alas, it was not a great time to be testing the boundaries of Church orthodoxy. For beginning with the crowning of Pope Paul IV in 1555, the conservative wing of the Church had seized the reins of power. Through new dictates handed down by the Council of Trent, one of the most important ecumenical gatherings in all its long history, the Church under Paul finally made a concerted institutional effort to clean up its own act, by inculcating an earnest expectation that all members of its clergy would live up to the letter of their oaths to God, or be punished severely for their failure to do so. But less positively from the standpoint of a man like Giordano Bruno, it began to enforce an equally uniform code of thought as well as behavior, applicable to clergy and laity alike. “No man must debase himself by showing toleration toward heretics of any kind!” thundered Paul IV from his pulpit. Needless to say, his definition of “heretic” was broad. Paul introduced an “Index of Forbidden Books” in 1557; the mere possession of one of these volumes was a crime against God that could be harshly punished by a reinvigorated Europe-wide Inquisition. Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was not included on the first edition of the Index, probably because it was too obscure at this stage to have come to the attention of the papal authorities in Rome. Instead the list was dominated by the works of Martin Luther and his followers and of various heterodox proto-Protestants who had preceded them.

These policies, enacted as a bid to fight off the so-called Protestant Reformation, have gone down in history as the Counter-Reformation. They largely succeeded in their objective; the Catholic Church’s steady bleed of territory and worshipers to the Protestants ended for the most part, and Western Europe stabilized into two opposing, fairly evenly matched camps. But they did so at the cost of turning the Church into a deeply reactionary institution, as hostile toward any notion of independent thought within its own ranks as it was toward those Christians of the opposing camp who had chosen to reject the divine embrace of the pope. Too often during and after the reign of Paul IV, cruelty became the public face of the papacy. When in 1572 the French Protestant sect known as the Huguenots were massacred in tens of thousands by mobs of Catholics, Pope Gregory XIII celebrated the violence by leading the people of Rome in the singing of a song of praise to the French mobs. In the words of the twentieth-century historian of Christianity Henry Chadwick, performative provocations like these “printed on Protestant minds the indelible conviction that Catholicism was a bloody and treacherous religion.” And who could blame them really?

In a milieu such as this, Giordano Bruno was skating on thin ice with his ceaseless questioning of sacred truths, even if he was doing so only within the walls of his cloister, out of the hearing of Protestants and the Catholic laity alike. He was reprimanded and censured by his superiors twice. Ironically, the final straw came when he was caught reading not a pagan or a Protestant but the works of the Dutch Catholic priest Erasmus, who just 50 years earlier had been the leading light of the Church’s then-ascendant free-thinking wing, preaching a message of overriding humanism, fearless scientific inquiry, and tolerance for the ideas of others — even those ideas with which Erasmus was emphatically not in agreement, such as the most radical positions of Martin Luther. Facing the prospect of torture, imprisonment, or worse as a result of this, his third denunciation, in 1576 the 28-year-old Bruno fled in the dead of night the monastery where he had lived for the past eleven years. He would spend the next sixteen years as a wanderer, trying always to stay one step ahead of the Inquisition, whom he roused to a fury by publishing a series of fearlessly anti-orthodox tracts through brave printers in the towns through which he passed. By doing so, he became one of the most important figures within a sort of intellectual underground that had risen up inside Catholic Europe, whose adherents were determined to keep the spirit of Erasmus alive even if doing so meant risking imprisonment, torture, or execution at the hands of the pope’s Inquisitors.

Sometimes Bruno’s practical talents were enough to secure for him powerful patrons who were capable of protecting him from the Inquisition, at least for a period of time. In 1582, for example, he wound up in France under the wing of King Henry III, teaching that monarch’s functionaries how to build a “memory palace” in their heads and store all sorts of facts and figures there. But every time his position seemed secure, Bruno would publish something so incendiary that he would be compelled to flee in the night once again. In this case, it was a satire called The Torchbearer, a brutal send-up of life in the Church that reinforced exactly the debauched image of the institution that the Counter-Reformation was trying to leave behind.

You will see, in mixed confusion, snatches of cutpurses, miles of cheats, enterprises of rogues; also delicious disgusts, bitter sweets, foolish decisions, mistaken faith and crippled hopes, niggard charities, virile women, effeminate men, and everywhere the love of gold. Hence proceed quartan fevers, spiritual cancers, light thoughts ruling follies. In fine, you will see little beauty and nothing of good.

Run out of Paris by his own ill-judged — if doubtless in many places still all too accurate — depiction of the Church, Bruno next fetched up in London, the capital of Protestant England. Queen Elizabeth I took him into her court just as happily as her counterpart across the English Channel had done. By now, Bruno had encountered the heliocentrism of Nicolaus Copernicus. The farthest thing from that slow and sober thinker in terms of personality, he nevertheless embraced Copernicus’s ideas with his usual enthusiasm for every controversial cause that crossed his path. He endeavored to explain them in a series of lectures at Oxford University, only to be greeted with catcalls, polemics, and threats. Bruno, one can’t help but sense, wouldn’t have had it any other way. He responded in kind, until London as well became too hot for him and he was forced to move on — back to Paris for a similar series of lectures at the Sorbonne, then on to Marburg, to Wittenberg, to Prague, to Brunswick, to Frankfurt, to Zurich, passing freely back and forth across the Protestant-Catholic divide, pissing both sides off equally. In fact, Bruno would become one of the few men in history to manage to get himself explicitly cast out of the grace of God by both the Protestants and the Catholics:  by the former in 1590 in Helmstedt, by the latter in… but that is getting ahead of our story.

By 1590, Bruno’s philosophy, and with it his model of the cosmos, was effectively complete. Said model was based more on intuition than logic, mathematics, or astronomical observation; to call him an astronomer in the same sense as Aristarchus, Copernicus, or most of the other characters we have met or will meet in these pages would be to present a badly distorted picture of the man. Nevertheless, his ideas were truly extraordinary, putting to shame Aristarchus’s or Copernicus’s heliocentrism when it came to sheer audacity. For Giordano Bruno had actually moved beyond heliocentrism entirely, toward a universe that is even more uncannily recognizable to all of us modern souls. Neither the Earth nor the Sun lie at the center of it; the Earth orbits the Sun, yes, but the Sun is in turn but one of an infinity of stars floating through the infinity of space. This is a universe of worlds upon worlds, stars upon stars. “There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught,” said Bruno. “No absolute position in space — the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the universe, and the observer is always at the center of things.” Many of the worlds orbiting around different stars, he posited, must surely have intelligent beings much like us living upon them.

It was nothing short of a gob-smacking vision, an imaginative leap from here to infinity, arrived at at a time when just a peripatetic Earth struck the vast majority of people as a leap too far. It was also, of course, a vision that was thoroughly incompatible with the precepts of Christianity as they were accepted and understood at the time; the Bible spoke of only one world, only one race of Man, not an infinity of them. (Did all of those alien beings living on all of those other planets each get their own incarnation of Jesus to die for their sins and redeem them? Did they all obligingly nail him to their own crosses?)

Never one to shy away from the wilder implications of his ideas, Bruno leaned into it, presenting a new theology that was beautiful and awe-inspiring in its own way, but had little to do with orthodox Christianity. Bruno’s God smacked more of the Muslim Allah — literally, “The All” — than the anthropomorphized Christian Holy Father. “God is not an external intelligence,” Bruno wrote. Rather than the Prime Mover behind the universe imagined by Aristotle, God was the universe. Thus to dwell in the universe was to dwell in God, if one could but recognize it. The highest form of peace was to feel oneself a part of the One. “It is Unity that enchants,” Bruno said. “By its power I am free though thrall, happy in sorrow, rich in poverty, alive even in death.”

He said all of this at a time when the Catholic Church would kill you just for musing that maybe the bread and wine of the Eucharist didn’t really turn into the body and blood of Christ inside the mouth of a believer. He was just asking for trouble — and in the end he got it.

During his first decade and a half of wandering, Bruno was wise enough to stay clear of the Iberian and Italian Peninsulas, where the Inquisition’s presence was strongest. In early 1591, however, he received the first of a series of letters from Giovanni Mocenigo, a Venetian nobleman. Mocenigo praised Bruno effusively, and begged him to come visit him in his palazzo on Venice’s Grand Canal, to share his transporting wisdom with his host and the people of the city. Bruno was not immune to the siren call of flattery — far from it. Additionally, Venice’s reputation preceded it. Throughout its existence, it had been known more as a hotbed of commerce than one of faith, with famous native sons like Marco Polo, who had traveled overland all the way to China in the name of opening up new markets, and Antonio Pigafetta, who had sailed all the way around the world with the Spanish fleet of Ferdinand Magellan in the hope of finding a westerly trade route to Asia; in typical Venetian fashion, both men had then returned home to enrich themselves through bestselling books when the original commercial ambitions behind their adventures were disappointed. In short, if anyplace in Italy might be safe for Bruno, it seemed like it would be cosmopolitan Venice, where the latest prices in the marketplaces were generally given far more weight than the latest papal decrees. He eventually accepted Mocenigo’s invitation, arriving before the end of 1591.

At first, all seemed to be well. Bruno dined with and gave lectures to the Venetian elite, and spent time as well at the nearby University of Padua, where Copernicus had once passed four years puttering about with his books. Little did Bruno know that Mocenigo was an agent of the Inquisition, whose assignment was to give his guest enough rope to hang himself. If half of Venice and Padua had the opportunity to hear him denying some of the most fundamental teachings of the Bible, a conviction of heresy ought to be quick and easy to obtain once he was arrested.

On May 22, 1592, after having spent more than six months in and around Mocenigo’s palazzo, Bruno, perhaps belatedly starting to sense the danger he was in, told his host that he thought it was time for him to move on. “He insisted on my remaining, but I was equally set on going,” Bruno would later testify at his trial. “He began to complain that I had not taught him what I had promised. Then he used threats, saying he would find means, if I did not remain of my own free will, to compel me.” The argument ended inconclusively, with Bruno agreeing to spend one more night but no more in the palazzo. He should have stuck to his guns and left the same day. For during that night, the Inquisition came to drag the 44-year-old troublemaker out of bed. He would never know freedom again.

His trial commenced just four days later. By the rules of the Inquisition, Bruno was accorded none of the rights we expect to be granted to the accused today: no jury of his peers, no defense attorney to act as his guide and advocate, no privilege to call his own witnesses, no chance to review the evidence arrayed against him or to introduce his own, no opportunity to even hear the charges against him until the first day of the trial. The star witness for the prosecution was Giovanni Mocenigo. His testimony demonstrated that he had been taking thorough notes during his many hours of conversation with his house guest.

At various times when he has talked with me at home, [Bruno] said that Catholics were much to blame in holding that bread becomes flesh; that he was an enemy of the Mass; that no religion pleases him; that Christ was a wretch; that he might very well foretell his being hanged, since he did evil to seduce people. [Bruno said] that there was no distinction of persons of God, which would be an imperfection; that the world is eternal and that there are infinite worlds, and that God unceasingly makes infinities because he wills as much as he can. [Bruno claimed] that Christ worked miracles in appearance and was a magician; the same of the Apostles, and that he might be given the mind to do as much and more; that Christ showed he was unwilling to die, and put it off as long as he could; that there is no punishment of sins, and that souls, created by the operation of nature, pass from one animal to another, and that, even as brute beasts are born of corruption, so are men.

He set forth a design to form a new sect, under the name of the New Philosophy; said the Virgin could not have brought forth a child, and that our Catholic faith is full of blasphemy against the majesty of God; that the disputes and revenues of friars should be stopped, because they befoul the earth; that they are asses and their doctrines asinine; that we have no proof our faith is endorsed by God, and that to abstain from doing to others what we are unwilling they should do to us is enough for a good life; [that] he is in favor of all other sins, and that it is a marvel God endures so many heresies of Catholics; [that] he desires to apply himself to divination, and all the world would follow him; that Saint Thomas Aquinas and all the doctors knew nothing, and that he could enlighten the first theologians in the world so that they would be unable to reply.

This is a stunning litany of assertions being attributed to Bruno. Apart from a few that seem obviously fabricated or exaggerated by Mocenigo to please the court (“…he did evil to seduce people…”), they seem to have been born in a different time and place entirely than a freshly post-Medieval Europe. “He who desires to philosophize must first of all doubt all things,” Bruno was fond of saying. No statement could have been more in conflict with a Church whose bedrock was an unquestioning belief in the orthodox Christian God, ineffable and impervious to doubt, attainable not through one’s intellect or even imagination but only via the act of willful submission to a higher authority that the Church called Faith.

When Bruno himself took the stand at his trial, he did his cause few favors. He explained that in his opinion the heretical doctrine of Arianism, with its denial of the Holy Trinity in favor of a separate, subservient Jesus Christ, was “less dangerous than it is commonly taken to be.” He admitted that he had studied many an entry on the Index of Forbidden Books, such as those by “Calvin and other heretics, not to acquire their doctrine or for improvement, for I think them more ignorant than myself, but out of sheer curiosity.” (Indeed, Bruno had gone so far in challenging the most basic precepts of Christianity itself that the doctrinal disputes between Catholics and Protestants seemed positively picayune by contrast.) About his model of the cosmos, he said forthrightly that

I hold the universe to be infinite as a result of infinite divine power, for I think it unworthy of divine goodness and power to have produced merely one finite world when it was able to bring into being an infinity of worlds. Wherefore I have expounded that there is an endless number of individual worlds like our Earth. I regard it as a star, and the Moon, the planets, and the [other] stars are similar to it, the latter being of endless number. All these bodies make an infinity of worlds. They constitute an infinite whole, in infinite space, an infinite universe, that is to say, containing innumerable worlds. So that there is an infinite measure of the universe and an infinite multitude of worlds.

The accused damned himself with words like these; a verdict of guilty and an unpleasant death seemed foregone conclusions for Giordano Bruno. Yet they were a weirdly long time in coming. For Bruno was truly a prize catch, and the Inquisitors back in Rome had decided that they wanted him for themselves, to make a proper example out of. The current Pope Clement VIII, who had been crowned just three months before Bruno was arrested, was a diffident man by nature, prone to indecision. And yet his papacy would go down in history as one of the most dedicated of them all to rooting out heresy and enforcing absolute orthodoxy. This was thanks to the pope’s personal spiritual advisor Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, who was possessed of all of the decisiveness that his ostensible superior lacked. A hardliner through and through, who embraced and strained mightily to live up to his popular epithet “Hammer of the Heretics,” Bellarmine was always on the lookout for flagrant offenders to serve as public personifications of the wages of sin. And Giordano Bruno was nothing if not a flagrant offender.

After months of wrangling, the Venetian Inquisition finally agreed to ship the prize to their comrades in Rome at the beginning of 1593. Bruno had been treated reasonably humanely up to this point, but that changed markedly now. He was cast into the notorious dungeon of the Roman Inquisition, where he must subsist on “the bread of suffering and the water of tribulation.” Here he was subject at one time or another to the whole ingenious battery of Medieval torture techniques: the ordeal of water, the ordeal of fire, the strappado, the wheel, the rack, the strivaletto. I have no heart to delve into this gallery of horrors in detail here; suffice to say that they are all extremely distasteful just to read about, much less to witness, much, much less to experience.

Bruno remained in the dungeon for seven years, while his trial remained technically an ongoing affair in the records of the Church. It seems that Bellarmine was trying to break him during that time, so as to gain the benefit of a public spectacle of his recanting, and possibly of then being publicly forgiven by Pope Clement, that dispenser of Christian mercy. But Bruno refused to budge from his laundry list of blasphemies. “I will not do so,” he said as late as December 21, 1599. “I have nothing to renounce, neither do I know what I should renounce.”

At last, Cardinal Bellarmine decided he had had enough. On February 8, 1600, Bruno — by now a scarred, battered, emaciated, pathetic figure — was made to kneel before Bellarmine and a group of fellow Inquisitors. One of them formally and enthusiastically excommunicated him, thus condemning his soul to suffer the eternal fiery agonies of Hell. In order to match his earthly fate to the one that awaited him in the afterlife, he was to be burnt at the stake. Bruno raised his head and looked his accusers in the face. “Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it,” he said.

On February 19, the sentence was carried out. Clad in a white robe speckled with orange flames and crimson devils, he was ushered out into the open air for the first time in seven years. Surrounded by a jeering crowd, he was led to Rome’s Campo di Fiori. There his mouth was forced open so that an iron spike could be rammed horizontally through both of his cheeks; his lips were then pulled forward and another spike rammed vertically through them, as great geysers of blood sprayed the crowd. His face thus hidden behind this cruel cross of God, he was tied to a post surrounded by a pile of oil-soaked wood. A torch was touched to the wood, and the fire sprang into life around him. Just before he disappeared behind the smoke and flames, a kindly monk leaned in, holding a crucifix up to his distended lips — one last chance to beg God’s forgiveness before the end. Giordano Bruno turned his head defiantly away.

“Much have I struggled,” he had written shortly before his betrayal by Giovanni Mocenigo. “I thought I would be able to conquer, and both fate and nature repressed my zeal and strength. However, there was in me whatever I was able to do, which no future century will deny to be mine, and that which a victor could have for his own: not to have feared to die, not to have yielded, and to have preferred a courageous death to a noncombatant life.”

It cannot be denied that Bruno relished playing the role of the contrarian, that he was the sort of man who is always ready to say that black is white just because everyone around him is saying the opposite. And yet — and speaking only for myself now — his vision of a God who is literally All strikes me as far more compelling than the petty, pedantic old man in the sky advocated by the Inquisition. It would require the work of centuries to prove that Bruno’s vision of an infinite cosmos — or one big enough to seem that way to us, at any rate — was in fact the correct one. As we turn back now to the pioneering doers who would finally force even the most hidebound minds of the Church to accept that the Earth does not lie at the center of the everything, we should continue to spare a thought now and then for this other extraordinary dreamer. For before we can establish what is, we must first dare to imagine what may be. How amazing to think that the first martyr for the cause of a non-central, peripatetic Earth was the first for that of a non-central, peripatetic Sun as well. To call someone “ahead of his time” is an overused turn of phrase. But if anyone is deserving of it, it must surely be Giordano Bruno.

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(A full listing of print and online sources used will follow the final article in this series.)