The Forbidden Universe (8 page)

The uncompromising Neapolitan took part in a famous debate with the scholars at Oxford, in front of the Polish prince Albert Laski and the eminent courtier and poet Sir Philip Sidney, in which he endorsed Copernicus’ ideas and linked them to magical concepts about the sun derived from Marsilio Ficino’s work.

It was in England that Bruno wrote some of his most important books. Of these, all apart from the first were penned in Italian rather than the customary Latin. But why go to London to publish books in Italian? Of the few Londoners who could read in the first place, how many could read Italian? Presumably Bruno’s books targeted Italians in London and Paris, a readership who would then take his ideas back to their homeland. Or perhaps Bruno had intended that the books be shipped over to Italy? Either way, they were circulating there within a few years, as we will see.

The first – and only Latin – work he published in his first year in London was
Explanation of the Thirty Seals
(
Explicatio triginta sigillorum
), a book about the magical memory system that culminates in an essay about the Hermetic vision. In this, Bruno lists Moses and Jesus as among those who had achieved enlightenment through this means. The
latter is portrayed not as the Son of God, or even as a divinely appointed prophet, but as a gifted and advanced magus, a practitioner of the same art so beloved by Bruno. This is an interesting concept – the founder of the religion that saw Bruno’s work as heretical practising the same heresies himself – but one that is not without some foundation, as we have discussed elsewhere.
¹⁰

In 1584 Bruno published two key works, both of which relate to Copernicus and heliocentricity. The first was
The Ash Wednesday Supper
(
Cena de le ceneri
), a dialogue between a group of scholars as they journey around London. In this book Bruno praises Copernicus, although he also claims that even Copernicus never came to understand the full importance of his discoveries. With his usual bravura, Bruno also declares himself to be Copernicus’ heir and states his intention to use his revelations to free the human spirit.

The second book was
Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast
(
Spaccio della bestia trionfante
) a ‘glorification of the magical religion of the Egyptians’,
¹¹
an unequivocal declaration of the need for its return in order to restore balance to the world. He links this to the Lament in
Asclepius
, which he reproduces in full.

The drama of the
Triumphant Beast
takes the form of a gathering of Greek and Egyptian deities to reform the heavens, changing the constellations in order to produce a similar shift on Earth. This is modelled on the Hermetic treatise
The Virgin of the World
(
Korè Kosmou
) in which Isis describes a similar council of the gods to her son Horus. She also features, alongside Sophia, in Bruno’s work. The ‘triumphant beast’ is, according to Bruno’s dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, the sum of all the vices that prevent human beings from activating their divine potential. However, some – including, fatally, the Inquisition – interpreted it as a veiled reference to the Pope. A political subtext runs
through the
Triumphant Beast
, as it ends with the council of the gods praising the great virtues, pureness of heart and magnanimity of Henri III, and his fitness to preside over a spiritually unified Europe.

Another significant work Bruno wrote and published in London in 1585, also dedicated to Sidney, was
On the Heroic Frenzies
(
De gli eroici furori
). Ostensibly a collection of love poems, it soon becomes clear that the ‘frenzy’ of passionate love is a way of attaining the Hermetic gnosis. This concept is taken from Agrippa (in turn a development from Ficino), who wrote of four types of
furor
that enable the soul to reconnect with the divine: poetic inspiration, religion, prophecy and love, the
furor
of Venus. Of the last, Agrippa writes that it ‘transmutes the spirit of a man into a god by the ardour of love, and renders him entirely like God, as the true image of God’
¹²
before proceeding to cite Hermes Trismegistus, from
Asceplius
, as an authority for this idea. This is obviously why the idea was so attractive to Bruno.

The concept of erotic love as a portal to Hermetic illumination links Bruno with other well-established traditions of sacred sexuality, including sex magic and tantrism. For someone who elevated what we would now call the sacred feminine, and who admired intelligent and able women, it is curious that nothing in the historical records specifically links him with any women. Or man for that matter: if Bruno had even been remotely rumoured to be gay this would have featured in the Inquisitions list of his calumnies. As it is, the Inquisition records only suggest that he was a womanizer, without any actual proof.

Bruno wrote in his dedication to Sir Philip Sidney that, although he hadn’t had as many lovers as Solomon, it wasn’t for the lack of effort on his part:

Only one source links Bruno, if only obliquely, with affairs of the heart. Several historians have suggested that the character of Berowne, the leader of the poets at the court of the King of Navarre in Shakespeare’s romantic comedy
Love’s Labour’s Lost
is based on Bruno. The identification is highlighted, as Yates has shown, by the fact that some of Berowne’s speeches, particularly his great paean in praise of Love in Act IV (‘For valour, is not Love a Hercules …’), contain specific parallels to
Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast
, the greatest of the works Bruno wrote in England, about ten years before Shakespeare penned the play.

Love’s Labours Lost
is not one of Shakespeare’s most popular works because of its abstruse and often tedious wordplay. The plot describes the oath taken by the King of Navarre and three of his scholars, led by Berowne, in order to concentrate on their pursuit of knowledge, which entails living an abstemious life for three years, including forswearing the company of women. But the arrival of the Princess of France and a bevy of young ladies-in-waiting throws several cats among the pigeons, with predictably hilarious(-ish) consequences. Other than the lesson that locking oneself away in the pursuit of knowledge is a bad idea – wisdom comes from participating in the real world – there seems little message in this typically mannered Elizabethan romantic comedy. Most of the jokes have never been found funny since doublet and hose went out of fashion.

But there is a bit of a mystery surrounding
Love’s Labours Lost
. The play has no proper ending – all of the characters simply disperse with a promise to meet up again in a year’s time. There are also a couple of contemporary references to an otherwise unknown sequel by Shakespeare called
Love’s
Labour’s Won
, but for some reason this has been omitted from the Shakespeare canon that passed into history. One clue, however, lies in the fact that at the time the play was written the King of Navarre and the King of France were one and the same, and he was being supported by Bruno and other Hermeticists – as we will see.

(However, at least one good thing came out of this little literary mystery. It inspired the 2007
Dr Who
story ‘The Shakespeare Code’, in which David Tennant’s Time Lord discovered that the now-lost
Love’s Labour’s Won
contained coded magical utterances that were set to open a portal to another dimension.)

In addition to his zeal for Hermetic reformation, Bruno was unquestionably one of the greatest intellects of his time, and was especially admired for his scientific and mathematical ideas and theories. Several studies have been devoted to this side of him, including Paul-Henri Michel’s
The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno
(1962), Dorothea Waley Singer’s
Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought
(1950) and Hungarian academic Ksenija Atanasijevic’s
The Metaphysical and Geometrical Doctrine of Bruno
(1923). Atanasijevic describes him as ‘certainly the greatest philosopher of the XVIth century’,
¹⁴
and writes:

Many of his pronouncements – all derived from the
essential
principles in the Hermetica – were staggeringly ahead of their time.

Clearly in a fever of composition, while still in London in 1584, Bruno published another remarkable work:
On the Infinite Universe and Worlds
(
De l’infinito universo e mondi
), in which he proposed two ideas that went way beyond even those of Copernicus. The first was that all creation was not contained within the space bounded by the sphere of the fixed stars, but was infinite. The second was that the stars are not small bodies of light fixed on that sphere but are actually suns like our own, only immensely far away, at different distances in the infinite universe. Bruno made a further extrapolation: if the stars are suns, then they too are circled by planets. He wrote:

The last sentence is strangely prescient of the curvature of space-time that is regarded as one of Einstein’s greatest insights.

Not only did Bruno think there were other planets, but also that some were inhabited.
On the Infinite Universe and Worlds
takes the form of a dialogue between two characters, Fracastoro and Burchio. At one point, the latter asks whether the other worlds are inhabited like ours, to which Fracastoro replies:

Ideas such as the one expressed by Fracastoro are so extraordinarily modern that it is difficult to appreciate just how big a conceptual leap they were at the time – and just how shocking they could seem.

Even Copernicus had maintained the conventional idea of a fixed sphere of stars. As such, shifting the centre from the Earth to the sun made relatively little difference to established views of mankind’s special place in creation. Even though the Earth was no longer the centre of everything, the sun is, making mankind
almost
the focus of creation. And according to Copernicus there was still only one relatively small, finite cosmos, in which existed a singular world in which God had created living things: a cosmos made just for us.

But if there are other suns, with their own inhabited planets, then the unique specialness of this world and of humanity is called into question. Since an infinite universe can have no centre, neither the world, nor even the sun, could claim to fill this role. In this theory of the world, humankind is shifted further from the centre of things – and from being the focus of God’s creation.

Modern science, which emphasizes the insignificance of both humanity and the Earth in cosmic terms, credits Copernicus with beginning the shift in perception from humanity being the centre of everything to our inhabiting a tiny part of an infinite universe. However, the credit should really belong to Bruno, since it was his notion of an infinite universe that provided the truly radical leap.

There was one major and insurmountable difference between the modern view and Bruno’s. He would never
have accepted the twenty-first century reasoning that, because the universe is infinite and we are not alone in it, human beings are therefore unimportant. He believed that the universe teems with life, including us, because it was
made
for life.

Another major difference between Copernicus’ and Bruno’s cosmologies was that Bruno’s unequivocally clashed head-on with Christian teaching, flatly
contradicting
the biblical story that God created the sun, moon and stars after making the Earth, with no mention of other earths. One of the heretical ideas for which Bruno was executed was that of an infinite, inhabited universe. So what was the source of his radical ideas?

In fact, Bruno derived the notion of an infinite universe from a passage in
Asclepius
, in which Hermes refers to a region ‘beyond heaven’, which implies that the heavens are not bound by the sphere of the fixed stars.
¹⁸
Although this suggests an infinite universe, it does not state that it is full of suns. The idea therefore seems to have been Bruno’s own extrapolation.