Who the heck is Giordano Bruno?

I confess I didn't know. I graduated with Honors with a degree in History. My area of emphasis was on the rise of the scientific worldview in Western Europe. But I had no idea who Giordano Bruno was. This fact, frankly, speaks more about people like Tim - several posts below - than it does about me. It's not my job to keep track of every crackpot who become celebrated as a "Martyr to Free Thought," but in the interest of education I did a bit of internet research on the subject. Here's a synopsis, with my notes in italics.

The Claim - Bruno: the forgotten apostle of the scientific method, martyred for his scientific beliefs.

According to the BBC News:

Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake on 17 February, 1600, for refusing to recant his philosophical beliefs before the Catholic Church's Inquisition.

Bruno, who travelled throughout Europe writing and teaching, is seen by some historians as a forerunner of modern scientific thinking.

But it was his defence of the ideas of Copernicus - saying the sun could not be the centre of that universe - that landed him in trouble with the Catholic church.

This is very interesting. Roger Bacon, who is often described as the true forgotten father of empiricism, I know. This guy I've never heard of. Why haven't I heard about this guy?

According to this post:

Then a Dominican monk named Giordano Bruno, removed his priestly vestments and became a philosopher to share his knowledge with Europe.

This genius savant claimed that Copernicus was correct - the earth revolved the sun, but went light years beyond the Polish astronomer. Our sun was just a close-by star, he claimed, and the millions of stars have planets about them just as ours does. He claimed this universe of stars was limitless. We are now finding planeted stars as a matter of course. Robert Ingersoll said, "He knew the Jewish records were below the level of the Greek and Roman myth; that there is no such thing as special providence; that prayer is useless; that liberty and necessity are the same; and that good and evil are but relative." Bruno did not believe in life after death - perhaps that's why he did so much while he lived.

For these claims, and for the crime of advancing the notion that priests had no right to use violence in attempting to convert disbelievers, Bruno was charged by his former church. The Catholic Church locked him up for 7 years in prisons of the Office of the Inquisition, in Venice, and Rome. His Starr-like prosecutor scoured Europe for his writings. He was offered freedom, if he would recant. He scoffed at the very idea, and told the bishops and priests who condemned him to death, "Perchance your fear in passing judgment on me is greater than mine in receiving it." Decades later, Galileo would accept the same offer.

The church destroyed so much knowledge that it took Western civilization almost 1700 years to arrive where the pagan Greeks were, in 300 BCE. Why do we know of Copernicus and Galileo who mistakenly left the sun the center of the universe, but not Bruno, who saw the infinite? Those who control the present control the past. That's why.

OK, I can see where Tim's sneer about the Church's role in preserving and distributing knowledge comes from. It's an absurd position. The "Church" didn't destroy knowledge. Most - in fact, all - serious scholars blame the "Dark Ages" on something called the "Barbarian Invasions," which destroyed the cultural cohesiveness of the Roman Empire and severed the new Germanic civilization's connection with the tradition of classical learning that had previously existed. No serious scholar disputes the role of monasteries in preserving the classical tradition, albeit I will agree that Aristotle's writings were obtained through Muslem sources. But, their effect on subsequent intellectual history is through St. Thomas Aquinas who "baptized" Aristotle as "the Philosopher."


According to The Giordano Bruno Collection, Bruno was feted by various historical personages, including Upton Sinclair, who wrote:

The Church which burned John Huss, which burned Giordano Bruno for teaching that the earth moves round the sun -- that same Church, in the name of the same three-headed god, sent out Francesco Ferrer to the firing-squad; if it does not do the same thing to the author of this book, it will be solely because of the police.

It is these societies which, in every city and town in America, are pushing and plotting to get Catholics upon library boards so that the public may not have a chance to read scientific books; to get Catholics into the public schools and on school-boards, so that children may not hear about Galilee, Bruno, and Ferrer; to have Catholics in control of police and on magistrates benches, so that priests who are caught in brothels may not be exposed or punished. ['The Profits of Religion,' by Upton Sinclair, 1926.]

In 1926, when the slogan "Rum, Rome and Rebellion had only recently derailed the Smith campaign, Sinclair was worried about a Catholic theocracies. Can you say "bigoted loonie tunes?" And, I hadn't realized that Upton Sinclair was such an anti-Catholic bigot. He truly expected a Papist hit squad to appear at his doors? Incidentally, although we forget today, this attitude was quite real. My Catholic mother - whose own mother was a convert from Methodism - remembers a Protestant uncle - presumably in the 1930's and so not far from Sinclair's paranoid prose - standing with his arm on the fireplace mantle announcing that the "Papists have guns in their church cellars." I've heard this story since I was ten years old, and it was never placed in any kind of context about tolerance or bigotry. The story never had any kind of message. It was just told as a matter of simple fact. I guess, now, that the gist of the story is that prior to 1960, if you were Catholic in America you had to accept a kind of alien status as normal.

On the other hand, Bruno was an unpleasant jerk, who injected himself in the big political issues of the age.

OK. The secularist subtext is that Bruno was a proto-Galileo who was martyred by the superstitious bigots of the Church. A gentle, noble soul with a philosopher's curiosity. Reading the Bruno hagiography, one would conclude that Bruno was the poster boy of secularism, which is why the secular atheists have used him as their patron saint. On the other hand, a modicum of skepticism would cause one to ask a few questions. Such as, how come Bruno was martyred and Galileo, who was the better known scientist - and therefore more dangerous to the Church wasn't?

Likewise, if you know anything about Galileo, you know that the Church's focus was really on Galileo's ambiguous relationship with various heretical movements, not per se with his support of Copernicanism. Conventional wisdom aside, the Church's position was not always and everywhere anti-Copernican. For that matter, Copernicus was a Catholic, and later probably became a priest, and nobody sent him to an auto da' fe. Biblical literalism has never been the Church's strong suit; in fact, Augustine counselled such an approach when faced with conflict between the observable world and the Bible. So, some questions need to be answered.

On further investigation we find that Bruno would easily be discounted as a crank if he tried to get a university assignment. According to this laudatory Joan D'Arc piece Bruno speculated about parallel universes, ufos and rejected the limits of the Copernican system. While all of those things may be correct, based on the entire absence of any empirical data, what Bruno was doing wasn't science, it was alchemy. There are probably a million "mute inglorious Miltons" in history who believed as Galileo prior to Galileo, the difference between them and Galileo was that Galileo did the hard work and had data to support his intuition. Mere intuition can be simply kooky. In fact, though, prior to Galileo's empirical data, rejection of the Ptolemaic system was a matter more of faith than fact. Thomas Kuhn has an entire chapter on this in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." Copernicus may have been right, but his decision was based more on mysticism than anything like science.[Don't get me wrong - it was a mysticism that worked. The Copernican system was far simpler, which was a good reason to adopt it.]

Not surprisingly, for anyone with any knowledge of the actual history of the Galileo episode, this SETI Editorial: The Folly of Giordano Bruno points out that there is no evidence that Bruno was executed based on his "scientific" beliefs and that those beliefs were what any secular atheist would scorn today as being "wacky" and "religious."

This encyclopedia entry points out the peripatetic nature of Bruno's life. It seems that wherever Bruno went, he provoked anger. The Catholic Encyclopedia points out that Bruno was excommunicated by the Lutherans and may have been excommunicated by the Calvinists. If Bruno had been treated by the Lutherans and Calvinists as they were wont to do with Catholics and Anabaptists, Bruno would be forgotten today.

In between these excommunications, though, Bruno took up residence in the England of Queen Elizabeth, where:

In 1583 he crossed over to England, and, for a time at least, enjoyed the favour of Queen Elizabeth and the friendship of Sir Philip Sidney. To the latter he dedicated the most bitter of his attacks on the Catholic Church, "Il spaccio della bestia trionfante", "The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast", published in 1584. He visited Oxford, and, on being refused the privilege of lecturing there, he published (1584) his "Cena delle ceneri", or "Ash-Wednesday Supper", in which he attacked the Oxford professors, saying that they knew more about beer than about Greek. In 1585 he returned to France, and during the year which he spent in Paris at this time made several attempts to become reconciled to the Catholic Church, all of which failed because of his refusal to accept the condition imposed, namely, that he should return to his order.

The Giordano Bruno Collection notes that "Robert Green Ingersoll, the Great Agnostic, a master of wit and intelligence, has said the following in regards to Giordano Bruno"

Let me show you the difference between the theological and the secular spirit. Nearly three hundred years ago, one of the noblest of the human race, Giordano Bruno, was burned at Rome by the Catholic Church -- that is to say, by the 'Triumphant Beast.'

So, it seems fair to infer that Bruno was writing anti-Catholic tracts in Elizabethan England during the midst of an era of religious wars from a country that was regularly executing Catholic priest for the high crime of ministering to a people who had had their traditional religion forcibly taken from them.

Apparently, after burning all his bridges in Protestant Europe, and after he had voluntarily put himself into the Protestant camp, Bruno found himself forced to return to the Catholic sphere of influence, Venice, where he was turned over to the Inquisition and subsequently executed.

In light of the full facts, Bruno was clearly not a martyr to science. His scientific accomplishments were non-existent. Moreover, it seems a great leap to cast Bruno as a martyr to philosophy and science. He was writing anti-Catholic tracts from a Protestant country. Quite recently, Americans became properly cheesed when the Dixie Chicks based the American President in England. While no one would suggest executing the Dixie Chicks, in the Seventeenth Century, there was no definite line between religion and national policy. Sovereigns would regularly change the religion of their people. Sovereigns were expected to maintain uniformity. Although conveniently forgotten by conventional wisdom, England under the Tudors reqularly executed Catholic priests for being Catholic priests and, therefore, agents of a foriegn power. At the end of the Seventeenth Century, in A Letter Concerning Toleration, John Locke would still counsel against extending tolerance to two groups - Atheists and Catholics.

The broader point in all this is that Tim was not engaging in history. He was engaging in bigotry. Bigotry is what causes the selective harvesting of data and the mendacious crafting of half-truths into scurrilous scandal. Bigotry thrives on the cheap shot, which can be rebutted only at length.

A last point, when you consider the the Cristeros and the Vendee, you can safely say that more Catholics have been killed by Secularists and Atheists since 1600, than vice versa, Bruno included. [See, all sides can play the game of the "hit and run" and the "cheap shot." Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention Hitler, Mao and Stalin - all of whom were, in their own special way, secularists.]

It looks like the secularists have been "hitting home runs" for human dignity, truth and the advancement of civilization since the Enlightenment.