Why was Giordano Bruno burned at the stake?

Giordano Bruno (Nola, 1548 - Rome, 1600) was an Italian Dominican friar and philosopher, known for an art of memory and for holding that the universe is infinite and has innumerable worlds. The Roman Inquisition condemned Bruno as an "impenitent, pertinacious and obstinate heretic", and Bruno was burned alive in the Campo de' Fiori, in Rome, on 17 February 1600.¹ Why? For heresies that were mostly theological (the Trinity, Christ, the Virgin, the Mass), mixed with philosophy (infinite worlds, the soul of the world); but the surviving copy of the sentence cuts the list short with an "etcetera".¹ The previous article was about the Roman art of memory; Bruno was its most famous Renaissance master, and fell into the hands of the Inquisition precisely through teaching it. I read the records in Italian and Latin, in Vincenzo Spampanato's edition (1921).

Who was Giordano Bruno?

Bruno was born in Nola, near Naples, with the name Filippo, and at 17 entered the Dominicans of Naples, taking the name Giordano.³ Bruno left the order and spent years moving from city to city. A witness who attended the sentencing, the German scholar Gaspar Schoppe, sums up the journey: Geneva, Lyon, Toulouse, Paris, London, Wittenberg, Prague, Helmstedt, Frankfurt and, at the end, Venice.²

In Paris, Bruno became famous for memory. As Bruno told the Venetian inquisitor in 1592, King Henry III sent for Bruno to ask "whether the memory I had and taught was natural or by magic art". Bruno gave a demonstration, and the king "recognised that it was not by magic art, but by science". Then came a book on memory, De umbris idearum ("On the Shadows of Ideas", 1582), dedicated to the king, who gave Bruno an extraordinary lectureship.¹

How it began: a memory lesson

In 1591, in Frankfurt, Bruno received two letters from a Venetian nobleman, Giovanni Mocenigo, with an invitation to Venice to be taught "the art of memory and invention".¹ Bruno went, and spent the last months living in Mocenigo's house. When Bruno wanted to leave, Mocenigo complained that the lessons promised had not all been given. On the night of Friday 22 May, according to Bruno's statement, Mocenigo came into the bedroom with a servant and five or six men ("gondoliers", Bruno thought), who got Bruno out of bed and locked Bruno in an attic: freedom would come if the lessons went on, in "the terms of the memory of words" and in geometry.¹

The next day, 23 May 1592, Mocenigo denounced Bruno to the Venetian Inquisition "out of the obligation of my conscience and by order of my confessor". The denunciation is a list of sentences Mocenigo claimed to have heard: that it is a great blasphemy to say the bread is transformed into flesh, that Christ performed apparent miracles and was a magician, that there is no distinction of persons in God, that the world is eternal and "there are infinite worlds", that souls pass from one animal into another, that the Virgin could not have given birth, that friars are all donkeys…¹

What Bruno said in Venice

Before the inquisitor, Bruno set out the philosophy in Bruno's own words. On 2 June 1592 came the central idea: "I hold an infinite universe, that is, the effect of infinite divine power, because I thought it unworthy of divine goodness and power that, being able to produce beyond this world another and infinite others, it should produce a finite world." The Earth is a star, like the Moon and the stars, and all of them are worlds "without number".¹

Bruno added something close to the name of this project. On the Holy Spirit: it could not be understood the way it must be believed, but "in the Pythagorean way", as "the soul of the universe", citing the Book of Wisdom ("the spirit of the Lord hath filled the world") and Virgil.¹ It is the ancient idea of the world soul, spoken by a friar before the Inquisition. The next day the questions turned to The Ash Wednesday Supper, a book by Bruno that "deals with the motion of the Earth", and Bruno played it down: the intention, Bruno said, had only been to make fun of some physicians.¹

On 30 July the scene changes. Bruno kneels: "I humbly ask pardon of the Lord God and of Your Most Illustrious Lordships for all the errors I have committed." Bruno asks for a heavier punishment rather than a public humiliation that would dishonour the habit, and promises to reform. The record notes that Bruno had to be told "several times" to get up.¹

Why was Giordano Bruno burned?

Early in 1593, Venice handed Bruno over to Rome, where the trial lasted seven years.³ Spampanato publishes some Roman decrees from those years. On 14 January 1599, Bruno was read "eight heretical propositions collected from the books and the trial" by the commissary and the Jesuit Robert Bellarmine; Bruno had to decide whether to abjure them. On 4 February, the pope ordered a term of forty days.¹ On 20 January 1600, the master general of the Dominicans reported that Bruno would not abjure, "asserting that no heretical propositions had ever been uttered, but that they had been badly excerpted by the ministers of the Holy Office". Pope Clement VIII decided that sentence should be passed and Bruno handed over to the secular arm.¹

The sentence, dated Tuesday 8 February, ought to say why. But the surviving copy only copies the first charge of the Venetian denunciation (that it was a great blasphemy to say the bread is transformed into flesh) and goes on: "etc. et infra".¹ The rest of the list is not there. So the honest answer to the question has two parts:

• What the documents I read say: heresies about the Mass, Christ, the Trinity and the Virgin; infinite worlds and the eternity of the world; the transmigration of souls; magic. That is what Mocenigo's denunciation and Schoppe's letter say.¹² The eight propositions are not in these records.
• What historians reconstruct: a summary of the trial found in 1940, which I have not read, allowed the historian Luigi Firpo to propose a similar list of eight charges: seven theological or philosophical, and one of magic and divination, according to Wikipedia.³ The historian Frances Yates rejected the legend that Bruno was burned for cosmology, but also held that the philosophical points were "inseparable" from the heresies.³

What no document I read says is that Bruno died for defending Copernicus. The motion of the Earth came up in the Venetian questioning, but it is not among the charges in the denunciation or in Schoppe's letter.

Giordano Bruno's last words

The famous sentence is not quite the last. Schoppe tells it in a letter of 17 February 1600. Schoppe places the reading of the sentence on the 9th, as does a Roman newsletter, which says it was the Wednesday; the official copy says the 8th. On both knees, Bruno heard the sentence handing Bruno over to the governor of Rome, "begging that the punishment be as merciful as possible and without the shedding of blood", and answered threateningly: Maiori forsan cum timore sententiam in me fertis quam ego accipiam, "perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it".² The sentence itself asks that the penalty be "without danger of death or mutilation of limb".¹ That was the usual way of handing someone over to the stake: fire sheds no blood.

Schoppe was no neutral witness. The letter was written to a Lutheran friend to defend the Inquisition, and it ends with a sneer: Bruno has gone, it says, to report in those invented worlds how Rome treats blasphemers.² But Schoppe was in the room, and that list of charges is the closest thing we have to the full sentence. One charge on it is seldom quoted: that the Holy Spirit is nothing but the "soul of the world".²

What happened on Thursday 17 February is told by several more papers. The record of the confraternity of San Giovanni Decollato, which accompanied the condemned, says that at "the sixth hour of the night" (hours were counted from nightfall) the brothers went to the Tor di Nona prison, that seven clergymen tried to persuade Bruno, and that in the Campo de' Fiori, "stripped naked and tied to a stake, [Bruno] was burned alive".¹ A Roman newsletter of 19 February adds that Bruno was burned "with the tongue in giova", bound, "for the very ugly words" spoken, and another that Bruno said it was a martyr's death, willingly met, "and that the soul would rise with that smoke to paradise".¹ Schoppe says that when a crucifix was held up, Bruno turned it away with a grim look.² And an account book of 14 March notes two scudi paid to the bishop of Sidon "for having degraded friar Giordano Bruno".¹

After the fire

Bruno's works were placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1603. In 1889, after the end of the pope's temporal power in Rome, a statue of Bruno was raised in the Campo de' Fiori. In 2000, on the fourth centenary, Cardinal Angelo Sodano called the death a "sad episode" but maintained that the inquisitors had done everything possible to save Bruno's life. All of this according to Wikipedia.³

From the attic to Campo de' Fiori

This piece goes through the documents in order: each step brings the original sentence, in Italian or Latin, its translation and the page where it is.

What I could not read

In Spampanato's edition I read the Venetian records cited (the denunciation of 23 May 1592 and Bruno's statements of 26 and 30 May, 2 and 3 June and 30 July), the Roman decrees of 1599 and 1600, the sentence, the confraternity's record, the Roman newsletters and Schoppe's letter; I have not checked them against the manuscripts.¹² I did not read the trial summary discovered in 1940 and published by Cardinal Giovanni Mercati in 1942, nor Luigi Firpo, nor Frances Yates's Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), nor Bruno's works, including De umbris idearum. The dates of Bruno's life, the transfer to Rome and what came afterwards come from Wikipedia.³ The translations are mine. I have not found the phrase "tongue in giova" explained; I translate it as "bound" because the English Wikipedia renders it as "imprisoned".

What we do with this

Anima Mundis carries in its name the idea Bruno defended before the judges: the soul of the world. We do not adopt it as doctrine, and what we do does not need it. But the case leaves a lesson about words: Bruno spent seven years saying the sentences had been badly excerpted, and the copy of the sentence ends in an "etcetera". In the Observatory we count frequencies and hours, never anyone's sentences.