AEgypt (50 page)

The coach did not stop even at the gates of the Vatican Palace, it went right through, and only came to rest at last in a garden of golden stone and green poplars, fountains and galleries and silence.

—Come, said the friar. Wash and refresh yourself.
Sanctissimus
is at dinner.

From that day forward this garden (it was the Cortile del Belvedere that Julius II had built) would mean Garden to Giordano Bruno. This flight of stairs would mean Stairway. These
stanze
he entered now, dark-brilliant in the flaming day, were the courts and chambers of a mind, a thinking, remembering mind.

—These are the
stanze
painted by Raffaello. There is the Triumph of the Church. Saint Peter. Saint Stephen. Aquinas, of our order. Come along.

—Who are these?

—Philosophers. Look more closely. Can't you see Plato with his beard, Aristotle, Pythagoras? Come along.

He tugged at Giordano's sleeve, but the young monk in wonderment held back. The painted crowd on the stairs of that cool edifice, those gowned men holding tablets, stirred; they blinked, looked down on Giordano, smiled, and resumed their conversation and their stillness.

The friar delivered him to other Dominicans, secretaries of the Dominican cardinals around the Pope; they looked Giordano over, and put questions to him. And Giordano began to understand why he had been brought here.

Around Peter's throne now the jealousies and suspicions which tend to divide and inflame the busiest of Christ's servants were unusually raw, and Giordano was to be a counter, one small counter, in the game of influences and prestige waged between the
Domini canes
and the Black Company of Jesus. The Jesuits were famed for their adoption everywhere of the New Learning, and for putting its novelties and successes to the Church's uses in their colleges and academies. The Dominicans wanted to show off some knowledge that was theirs, and to remind Pius, who was after all a Dominican himself (though He seemed not always as conscious of it as He might be), that His black-and-white hounds guarded treasure as precious as any New Learning: the Art of Memory, which the order had so perfected.
Sanctissimus
would be amused to see how agile it had made a Dominican mind.
Sanctissimus
would be instructed as well.

Cardinal Rebiba himself returned Giordano to the Raffaello
stanze
when he had washed and eaten, and introduced him to the little dried pear Who was Pius V, Vicar of Christ on Earth. He lived in those rooms, beneath those pictures, amid these bustling monks. He sat on a pillowed chair; He was so short that His white satin slippers didn't reach the floor, and a monk hastened to slip a stool beneath them.

Giordano did his tricks. He recited the psalm
Fundamenta
in Hebrew after hearing it read aloud once; he named the tombs on the Appian Way in their order as he had passed them. The trick of
amiavi-amaveri-veravama
was tried, but
Sanctissimus
could not understand what was proceeding, and it had to be quickly given up.

—We studied this art when We were young, the Pope said to Rebiba, who nodded encouragingly. To Giordano the Pope said:

—Now We have no need of it. You see here are secretaries all around Us now, who remember for Us all that We need to have remembered. Perhaps you will be one of them, one day.

He nodded then, smiling sweetly, and said: Go on.

Under Rebiba's questioning, the memory artist (close-mouthed with stage-fright, and having forgotten Cecco) gave an account of his practice of the art, how he had built his palaces, and cast the images he used on them; he said nothing about the stars, or the
horoscopi
, but he told them how the hieroglyphs of AEgypt could be used, the signs made by Hermes.

—Is this that Hermes, the Pope asked, who gave laws and letters to the AEgyptians?

—It is, Giordano answered.

—And who in his writings spoke of a divine Word, Son of God, through which the world was made, though he lived many generations before Our Savior?

—I have not read his works, said Giordano.

—Come and look here, said
Sanctissimus
. Come along.

With a bustle of monks and Rebiba, the Pope went into the largest of the
stanze
, the
Stanza della Segnatura
, where He was accustomed to sign the decrees of the ecclesiastical court, and stood with Giordano beneath the paintings of the pillared basilica, Plato, sunlight, truth.

—Look up there, said the Pope. Beside the man with the diagram, who is Pythagoras. Who is he in the white?

—I don't know, said Giordano.

—No one knows, said the Pope. Here is Plato. Pythagoras. Epicurus (who is in hell) with his vine leaves in his hair. Could this one in white be Hermes?

Giordano looked up at the personage the Pope pointed to.

—I don't know, he said.

The Pope moved away, through the crowded room, crowded with the great dead, and Giordano followed.

—Ptolemy, He said, pointing. With a crown, who was a king in AEgypt. Was not that Hermes also a king in AEgypt? And look there. Homer. And Virgil. But who are these, these in armor?

Cardinal Rebiba marveled sourly at them, the little old man, the monk who with his bull neck and tense strut looked more like a brigand or a wrestler than a philosopher. They studied pictures that the cardinal himself had never thought to puzzle over. The afternoon was growing late, and had taken a useless turn; the Neapolitan, instead of astonishing with his art, was advertising his ignorance.

—We live in these rooms,
Sanctissimus
said. And so do these people. And We don't know who they are, or what brought them here. Well.

He proffered His ring, and Giordano fell to his knee and, as instructed, came close to but did not kiss the stone on His finger even as the Pope withdrew it.

—Now We must return to Our business. Is there anything you need? Ask Us.

—I would like, Giordano said, to read the writings of that Hermes.

—Is that lawful? the Pope said, and turned to Rebiba. Is it?

Rebiba, blushing, made an ambiguous gesture.

—If it is lawful, the Pope said, you may. Go downstairs. In Our library We have We-don't-know-how-many books. Hermes
et hoc genus omne
.

Turning to go, He raised His hand, and a secretary flew to His side.

—The
Index librorum prohibitorum
, He said as the secretary wrote. It needs looking into. We will appoint a
congregatio
of Our cardinals. They must take counsel about this. It has been much neglected.

He was gone, leaving Giordano and the others kneeling, and red-faced Rebiba bowing low.

—Go away, Rebiba then said to Giordano. The library is below. You have been worse than useless.

Behind Rebiba as he went out, as though caught up in the angry swish of his red satin skirts, went the rest of the priests, secretaries, guards, and servants who had filled the rooms. One only was left, standing by the far door, a young and smiling boy Giordano had not before noticed, fair-haired, his arms crossed before him. Without words, he crooked a finger, signaling Giordano to follow. Featly he went down the narrow stair, which after a long time debouched into a disused suite of rooms, all painted, empty and lit by the day.

—Look, the boy said, at that wall, beneath the zodiac. Who holds the book? Hermes.

Giordano looked. An armillary sphere representing the heavens hung over the head of a sweet-faced man, who spoke to others, AEgyptians perhaps, in a garden.

—Pinturrichio painted it, the boy said. Come. You will see Hermes again, in the farther room.

They went through connecting chambers, a room of Apostles instantly recognizable by the emblems they carried, Peter's keys, Matthew's book, Andrew's cross; and through a room of Arts—Astrology and Medicine and Geometry and Grammar—all pictured there much as they were pictured in their rooms in the memory palace Giordano had within.

—Who do you see there? the boy said, bringing Giordano into the last room. Who is on that wall?

—Mercurius, Giordano said.

—Who is Hermes too.

A young man with the same sweet face as the man beneath the armillary heavens: with a curved sword he was striking down a grotesque figure who grew eyes not only in his head but all over his body, in his cheeks, arms, thighs. Behind these two a placid cow looked on: Io. Transformed into a cow by Juno, she was put to be watched over by Argus the thousand-eyed, but Argus was slain by Mercury, and Io escaped into AEgypt.

—Look, said the boy. AEgypt.

Along the borders of the wall, all around the room, were pyramids, hieroglyphic bulls, Isis, Osiris.

—It was Alexander the Sixth who made these rooms, the young man said. His sign was the Bull; he studied magic; he knew Marsilius, and loved him. He loved wealth, too. He was a very bad man.

His clear laughing eyes directed Giordano's to another wall: a seated queen, not Our Lady; a bearded prophet on one side of her, and the same strong sweet-faced man on the other, pensive, smiling faintly.

—Queen Isis, said the boy. Who was Io once. And Mercurius, who went into AEgypt, and gave to the AEgyptians their laws and letters. The other man is Moses, who lived then too.

—Yes, said Giordano. He looked from the clear dreaming wise eyes of Mercurius in the picture to the clear laughing eyes of the fair-haired boy, and a weird shudder flew over him.

—Come, the youth said. Down.

They went into a tiny and shabby chapel, and down a twisting flight of stairs into a chamber whose smell Giordano knew at once. Books.

—It is called the
Floreria
. Sit.

There was a broad scarred table onto which the light fell from a high window; there was a bench before it. Giordano sat.

In after times he would not remember much of his sitting there, or even how many days he sat. He was brought food, now and then, to his table; a pallet was made for him, in a corridor, between piles of books waiting to be bound, and there sometimes he slept. And the smiling youth came and went, and put the books before him, and took them away, and brought more. It was he too who brought the dishes of food, and tugged at Giordano's hair when he had fallen asleep on the open pages.

Had there been others there? There must have been, other scholars, librarians, students harmlessly looting the Pope's treasure: some of the faces which, ever after, the speakers in the dialogues of Thrice-great Hermes would wear in Bruno's imagination must have been borrowed by him from the readers whom he saw there: but he wouldn't remember them. What he remembered was what he read.

They were great folio volumes, a hundred years old almost, Marsilio Ficino's translation into Latin of the Greek originals (which had come out of the AEgyptian somewhen): bound in gold and white, printed in a clear and smiling Roman type.
Pimander Hermetis Trasmegisti
. He began with Ficino's awed commentary:

In that time in which Moses was born there flourished Atlas the astrologer, brother of Prometheus the physicist and maternal uncle of the elder Mercury whose nephew was Mercurius Trismegistus.

He read how Pimander, the Mind of God, came to this Mercurius-Hermes, and told him of the origins of the universe: and it was an account strangely like Moses's in Genesis, but different too, for in it Man was not made of clay but existed before all things, was son and brother at once to the Divine Mind and sharer in Its creative power, sharer with the seven Archons—the planets—in celestial nature. A God himself, in fact, until, falling in love with the Creation he had helped to shape, Man fell: and mingled his substance with Nature's matter: and came to be earthy, bound up in love and sleep, and subject to
heimarmene
and the Spheres.

Back upward he must go then, through those Spheres, taking from each of the seven Archons the powers he lost in his fall, and leaving behind the layers of material garment he has worn, until in the ogdoadic sphere he returns to his true nature, and sings hymns of praise to his Father:

Holy is God the Father of all, who is before the first beginning;

Holy is God, whose purpose is accomplished by his several Powers;

Holy art Thou, of whom all nature is an image....

Accept pure offerings of speech from a soul and heart uplifted to thee, Thou of whom no words can tell, no tongue can speak, whom silence only can declare....

What sort of journey was this, how was it made, how were the powers to be acquired so that a man or his spirit could go so far? Giordano read Pimander's words to Hermes:

All beings are in God, but not as though placed somewhere; no more than they are placed in the incorporeal faculty of representation. You know this yourself: Direct your soul to be in India, to cross the seas, and it's done instantaneously. To travel up into heaven, the soul needs no wings, nothing can prevent its going thither. And if you wish to break through the vault of the universe, and see what's beyond it—if there is anything beyond it—you may do it.

Do you see what powers, what speed you have? That is how God must be imagined. All things are contained within God—the universe, himself and all—just as thoughts are contained within a mind. Unless you make yourself like God, though, you cannot understand God, for like is only intelligible to like.

Therefore make yourself huge, beyond measuring; with one leap free yourself from your body. Lift yourself out of Time and become Eternity: then you will begin to understand God. Believe that for you as for God all things are possible; conceive of yourself as immortal, capable of understanding everything, all arts, all sciences, the nature of every living being. Climb higher than the highest height; sink lower than the lowest depth. Draw into yourself the sensation of all created things, of fire and water, of wet and dry, cold and hot, imagining that you are everywhere on earth and in the sea, in the haunts of the animals, that you aren't yet born, in your mother's womb, adolescent, old, dead, past death. If you can embrace in thought all things at once, all times, places, substances, qualities, quantities, then you might understand God.