BRUNO, GIORDANO (b. Nola, Italy, 1548; d. Rome, Italy, 17 February 1600), philosophy.

  ignored. Leo Olschki was probably one of the first to notice that no coherent philosophical system could be drawn from Bruno's works through this approach; and Antonio Corsano emphasized the magical ingredients in Bruno's thought and the politico-religious aspects of his activities. It is, however, the work that has been done in recent years on the Renaissance Hermetic tradition that has at last made it possible to place Bruno within a context in which his philosophy, his magic, and his religion can all be seen as belonging to an outlook that, however strange, makes historical sense.

Now that Giordano Bruno has been, as it were, found out as a Hermetic magician of a most extreme type, is he therefore to be rejected as of no serious importance in the history of thought? This is not the right way to pose the question. Rather, it should be recognized that Renaissance magic, and that turning toward the world as a revelation of the divine that is the motive force in the “religion of the world” that inspired Bruno, was itself a preparation or a stage in the great movement that, running out of the Renaissance into the seventeenth century, gradually shed its irrational characteristics for the genuinely scientific approach to the world. Bruno's leap upward through the spheres into an infinite universe, although it is to be interpreted as the experience of a Gnostic magician, was at the same time an exercise of speculative imagination presaging the advent of new world views. Although Bruno infused the innumerable worlds of which he had learned from Lucretius with magical animism, this was in itself a remarkable vision of a vastly extended universe through which ran one law. We can accept Bruno's Renaissance vision as prophetic of coming world views, although formulated within a very strange frame of reference.

Again, Bruno's atomism, derived from his study of Lucretius through magical interpretation of Lucretius in such a writer as Palingenius, whose Zodiacus vitae was one of Bruno's inspirations, may have stimulated the attention of other thinkers. The Renaissance interpretation of Lucretius, which was begun by Ficino, is a stage in the history of atomism which has not yet been adequately examined. When that history comes to be written, Bruno's magically animated atoms may be found to hold some transitional place in it.

Another example of Bruno's thought as a presage of scientific discovery is his remarkable intuition about the circular movement of the blood, which he based on parallelism between man and the universe; he believed that “spirit” is the driving force that moves the blood, the same spirit that is diffused through the universe and that Plato defined as “number which moves in a circle.” Hence, the movement of the blood within the body, said Bruno, is circular, diffused from the heart in a circular movement.

One of the closest connections between Bruno and a seventeenth-century scientific philosopher is that which can be discerned in the influence of Bruno's Cena de le ceneri on William Gilbert's De magnete. The magnet is always mentioned in textbooks on magic as an example of the occult sympathies in action; and Bruno, when defending his animistic version of heliocentricity, brought in the magnet. Gilbert's language when defending heliocentricity in the De magnete is extremely close to that of Bruno; like Bruno, he cites Hermes and others who stated that there is a universal life in nature when he is arguing in favor of earth movement. The magnetic philosophy that Gilbert extended to the whole universe seems most closely allied to that of Bruno, and it is not surprising that Francis Bacon should have listed Gilbert with Bruno as proud and fantastic magi of whom he strongly disapproved.

Even the strangest and most formidably obscure of Bruno's works, those on his magic arts of memory, can be seen to presage, on the Hermetic plane, seventeenth-century strivings after method. Bruno aimed at arranging magically activated images of the stars in memory in such a way as to draw magical powers into the psyche. These systems were of an incredible complexity, involving combinations of memory images with the revolving wheels of Lull to form ways of grasping everything in the universe at once and in all possible combinations. Bruno's Hermetic computers, if one may be permitted to call them such, were almost certainly known to Leibniz, who was also familiar with the art of memory and with Lullism. When introducing his universal calculus, Leibniz uses language that is remarkably similar to that in which Bruno introduced his art of memory to the doctors of Oxford. The many curious connections between Bruno and Leibniz may, when fully explored, form one of the best means of watching the transitions from Renaissance occultism to seventeenth-century science.

Within that view of the history of thought in which the Renaissance magus is seen as the immediate precursor of the seventeenth-century scientist, Giordano Bruno holds a significant place, and his tragic death early in the first year of the new century must still arrest our attention as symbolic of a great turning point in human history.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. ORIGINAL WORKS.

Bruno's Latin works are in Opera latine, Francisco Fiorentino, Vittorio Imbriani, C. M.