The Forbidden Universe (11 page)

The nineteenth-century adulation of Bruno was based on a serious misconception, which endured because of the gap in the official records. Many had come to believe that Bruno had been put to death solely for advocating the heliocentric theory or the infinity of worlds, making him a kind of forerunner of Galileo. This belief encouraged what one commentator calls ‘a misguided interpretation of Bruno as a martyr for science’.
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Bruno was actually a martyr for Hermeticism. Although there was a connection with the Copernican theory, but Bruno was condemned not for preaching heliocentricity, but because of its special significance to him, particularly his vision that proving it would herald the coming Hermetic age.

Even today, the Catholic Church’s attitude to Bruno remains startlingly unchanged. When, in the Holy Year of 2000, a suggestion was made that Pope John Paul II might finally forgive him – as they had Galileo – the official response was that Bruno ‘had deviated too far from Christian doctrine to be granted Christian pardon’.
⁴¹

But the question remains: why had it taken eight years for Bruno to be condemned? Why had his teachings suddenly become too hot for the Inquisition?

We suggest that the answer to these questions lies in events of a few months before, in an attempt to establish the Hermetic republic on Earth by force.

Bruno’s exit from Padua for his fateful stay with Zuan Mocenigo left a space on centre stage for others to move in. This certainly marked a major opportunity for one aspiring scholar. Bruno had applied for the then-vacant chair of mathematics at Padua University, but owing to his untimely arrest the job went to another candidate – none other than Galileo Galilei.
¹
Of more immediate significance, however, was the arrival in Padua, just a few months after Bruno’s departure, of a rising star of the Hermetic world who was his spiritual heir.

The similarities between the careers, philosophies and aims of Bruno and Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) are so striking that they must have been working to the same plan. Indeed, twenty-three-year-old Campanella’s arrival in the same circles so soon after Bruno’s arrest suggests that he was picking up where the Neapolitan had been forced to leave off. And despite dramatic reversals of fortune, Campanella ‘very nearly succeeded in bringing off the project of a magical reform within a Catholic framework, or, at least, in interesting a number of very important people in it’.
²

Like Bruno, Campanella was born in the Kingdom of Naples, though much further south in the town of Stilo in the Calabria region, in 1568, which made him twenty years
Bruno’s junior. Also like Bruno, and probably for the same reason of being a bright lad from humble origins – his father Geronimo was a cobbler – Campanella began his career in the Dominican Order, which he entered at the age of fourteen. After his novitiate he became a friar (a brother who lived in the outside world) rather than a monk like Bruno.

Campanella’s own freethinking earned him the suspicion of heresy. In particular, he advocated that knowledge should come from the direct study of natural phenomena (remember the Hermetic motto: ‘follow nature’), rather than from officially approved books. Not only was this – to modern eyes perfectly reasonable – approach deemed misguided but actually attributable to the Devil.

One of the major influences on Campanella’s thinking was Marsilio Ficino, whose work was probably also
responsible
for attracting him to Hermeticism. Another esoteric influence was the venerable polymath Giovanni Battista della Porta (c.1535–1615), author of the classic 1558 treatise
Natural Magic
(
Magiae naturalis
), with whom Campanella struck up a friendship during a two-year stay in the city of Naples in the early 1590s. As with Bruno, Campanella was open to every sort of idea, but Hermeticism was the glue that held them all together and gave all human knowledge a recognizable shape.

Della Porta’s influence inspired Campanella to write his first book, which advocated the practice of magic. Although it was only published in 1620,
On the Sense of Things and of Natural Magic
(
Del senso delle cose e della magia naturale
), argued that the world is a living thing and for the existence of the
anima mundi
. At around this time he also wrote
On Christian Monarchy
(
De monarcha Christianorum
), agitating for a reform of society and the Church. Clearly he was another Neapolitan destined to give the Vatican sleepless nights.

In 1592 Campanella travelled to Padua on the well-worn path via Rome and Florence, meeting Gian Vincenzo Pinelli and Padua University’s new Professor of Mathematics, Galileo.
³
Campanella and Galileo were to stay in touch for the rest of their lives. It was also in Padua that more questions were raised about Campanella’s dangerous beliefs. As a result, early in 1594 he was arrested by the Inquisition and transferred to Rome towards the end of the year – to the same prison as Bruno, although it is unlikely that they were allowed to communicate. Compared to Bruno’s continuous imprisonment ending in his execution, Campanella got off lightly. After agreeing to abjure his works he was released into a kind of house arrest in a Dominican monastery, although in 1597 his superiors ordered him back to Naples. Campanella had not been around long enough to make himself as much of a nuisance as Bruno, and he had not so far made much headway with plans for Hermetic reform.

In fact, Campanella shared Bruno’s vision of the great magical transformation that was glimmering over the horizon, and which was written in the stars. He also regarded the heliocentric theory as the trigger of the new age of Hermetic enlightenment, and – for astrological and other reasons – he believed it was destined to happen in 1600.

The approach of the new century encouraged
Campanella
to be much more politically proactive than Bruno even at the height of his career. Leaving Naples for the south, he threw himself into organizing the Calabrian revolt, which aimed to overthrow Spanish rule, beginning with Calabria – the arch of the Italy’s ‘foot’ and ‘toe’, which had long been ‘restive with political and religious dissidents’
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– and then the whole of the Kingdom of Naples.

The Calabrian revolt is remarkable for the number of its Dominican supporters. Indeed, there was something very
odd about the Order in Calabria, from at least the time it produced Bruno, but frustratingly after so many years it is impossible to pinpoint exactly the reason for this. This uprising was considerably more than just an expression of Calabrian nationalism. It was to be a preparation for the coming age, and aimed to establish a republic based on magical principles that would – under its messiah Campanella – hold aloft the torch of the new age for the rest of the world to follow. Bruno, too, had railed against Spanish rule over the Kingdom of Naples in
The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast
.

If the revolt was successful it would bring the Hermetic republic geographically close to the Papal States – the two shared a long border, cutting across the whole of Italy from Mediterranean to Adriatic coasts. A truly alarming prospect for the Pope and his henchmen.

The uprising, however, was not to be. Informants betrayed it to the Spanish authorities, and after the organization was ruthlessly crushed in November 1599, Campanella and the other leaders were arrested. This almost certainly accounts for the Inquisition’s sudden desire to be rid of Bruno, the revolt’s spiritual inspiration, and he went to the stake barely three months later. Stephen Mason of Cambridge University argues that he was executed as an example to the Calabrian rebels, because of the connection to Campanella, and that he had been held for so long as a kind of hostage because of his standing among the insurgents.
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Publicly executing their spiritual leader at the beginning of their special year – 1600 – would also have been a calculated psychological move, rather akin to roasting the Pope on 25 December of a new millennium.

This was, however, by no means the end of Campanella’s story. His continuing career sheds a rare light on Galileo’s trial thirty years later – over which Bruno, too, would cast a giant shadow.

Campanella escaped the death penalty visited on the revolt’s other leaders through feigning madness.
According
to the law of the times, the insane could not be sentenced to death, not out of compassion but because they couldn’t comprehend the opportunity to repent of their sins before execution. If a judge did condemn them he, not the condemned, would take responsibility for their eternal damnation. However, there was considerably more to feigning insanity than a bit of Hamletesque raving about clouds looking like camels and some foaming at the mouth. The madness defence was hardly the easiest option. To prevent every miserable prisoner from using it to evade the death penalty, the Neopolitan authorities had come up with a twist. The accused had to maintain their mad behaviour – or keep up the pretence – under prolonged torture.