“If there were no change in bodies, no variety in matter, and no vicissitude in beings, there would be nothing agreeable, nothing good, nothing pleasant. Pleasure and satisfaction consist in nothing else but a certain passage, progress, or motion from one state to another. We can have no delight in anything present till we have been first weary of what is past. The change from one extreme to another, with all the intervals, moving from one contrary to another by all the intermediate spaces, is sure to bring satisfaction.”— Giordano Bruno (1584), The Disengagement of the Triumphant Beast [7]
“Less than 400-years ago, Bruno suffered a martyr's death by fire. Excommunicated by an obscurantist ecclesiasticism he went to the stake for his beliefs. He was convinced that the wisdom and magic-born religion of ancient Egypt excelled the fanatical theology that burnt dissident thinkers as heretics. For him the Biblical record was on a par with the Greek myths. Refusing to retract his teachings, he met his doom dauntlessly, for he had less cause than his judges to fear the verdict of history and could snap his fingers at them in warning. Giordano Bruno, the unfrocked monk, perished on 16 Feb 1600, for his intransigent denial that Christianity was unique.”
“At the end of the 16th century, at least five models of the universe were extant: the traditional Aristotelian-Ptolemaic model, with a spherical, immobile earth at the center, orbited by the sun, moon and planets embedded in crystalline spheres, surrounded by a sphere of fixed stars, and powered from an external motive source, a prime mover or primum mobile; the Copernican system, which placed the sun in the center, orbited by the earth and other planets; the Tychonian system, a hybrid in which the sun and moon orbited the earth and the other planets orbited the Sun; Digges' system, which resembled the Copernican, but with the stars distributed in an indeterminately large space, yet still centered on the solar system; and Bruno's model, of an infinitely large universe, in which every visible star was sun or planet like our own, each of which was populated with its own plants, animals and people. Bruno's model combines three accurate insights.”
Bruno burning at the state on 16 Mar 1600. |
“To Bruno, from the generation he foresaw, here, where the pyre burned.”
“The seeds together in this world of ours, must be confessed in other realms there are still other worlds, still other breeds of men, and other generations of the wild.”— Seneca the Younger (50 ACM), Medea (318); cited by Giordano Bruno (1584) in On the Infinite, the Universe, and the Worlds (pg. 205)
“In contrast to the Cartesian caution, in Germany — where orthodox Cartesianism never gained a foothold — several prominent thinkers embraced the belief that the fixed stars were surrounded by planets and spread throughout an infinite universe. The Ecstatic Celestial Journey (Iter exstaticum coeleste), 1656, by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher explicitly characterized the fixed stars as suns with encircling planets, although it denied inhabitants even to the planets of our solar system and to the moon. And Otto Guericke, famous for the ‘Magdeburg experiments’ proving the existence of a vacuum, devoted a section of his Experimenta Nova (1672) to an examination and endorsement of Kircher's view of other planetary systems. Von Guericke also noted the possibility of an inhabited moon and planets, and emphasized (following Galileo) that any inhabitants would not be men, but rather diverse creatures beyond all our imaginings. But von Guericke denied Descartes's equation of extension and matter, and instead traced his ideas to Galileo, Kepler, Antonius de Rheita (Ѻ), Mersenne, Bruno, and Nicholas of Cusa.”— Steven Dick (1984), Plurality of Worlds (pg. 116)
Dedication statue was erected (1889) at the site of Bruno's demise, in the central Roman market Campo de’ Fiori. |
“Because I have tried to describe the field of nature, consider the disposition of the soul, partake of the life of the mind, and travel like a master artificer, i.e. do what Daedalus did, through the maze of the intellect, those who have regarded me have threatened me, those who have seen me have assailed me, those who have encountered me have tried to bite me, and those who have understood me have tried to destroy me; not just one, nor a few, but many, or virtually all.”— Giordano Bruno (1584), On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (pgs. 6-7) [6]
“They spoke Latin well, were proper min, of good reputation, fairly competent in learning, but mediocre in education, courtesy and breeding, for ‘tis yes my master; yes my father, or my mistress; yes forsooth; elect indeed, with their long robes, clad in velvet. One wore two shining gold chains about his neck while the other, by god, whose precious had bore twelve rings, had rather the appearance of a rich jeweler. Did they know aught of Greek? Aye and also of beer. One was the herald of obscurity and the other the bailiff of the goddess of presumption.”— Giordano Bruno (1584), commentary on his interview with the Oxford theologians [4]
“There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space; but 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.”— Giordano Bruno (1584), On Cause, Primary Origin, and the One; this, supposedly, is a close paraphrase of Epicurus (“Letter to Herodotus”)
“We have experience that sense-perception deceives us concerning the surface of this globe on which we live, much more should we hold suspect the impression it gives us of a limit to the starry sphere.”— Giordano Bruno (1584), On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (character: Philotheo)
“Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.”— Giordano Bruno (c.1590)
“A spirit exists in all things, and no body is so small but contains a part of the divine substance within itself, by which it is animated.”— Giordano Bruno (c.1590), Publication; cited by Henry Bray (1910) in The Living Universe (pg. 180)
“Perhaps you, my judges, pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.”— Giordano Bruno (c.1599), commentary on being sentenced to death by fire [5]