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BRUNO, GIORDANO (b. Nola, Italy, 1548; d. Rome,
Italy, 17 February 1600), philosophy.
Bruno's baptismal name was Filippo; he took the
name Giordano, by which he is always known, on
entering the Dominican order. His father, Giovanni,
was a soldier, and probably a man of fairly good
position; his mother, Fraulissa Savolino, has been
conjectured to have been of German descent, although
there is no real evidence. Hardly anything is
known of Bruno's early years in Nola, a small town
near Naples.
At the age of fifteen, Bruno entered the Dominican
order and became an inmate of the great Dominican
convent in Naples. Here he acquired a grounding in
Scholastic philosophy and the reverence for Thomas
Aquinas (who had lived and taught in the Naples convent)
that he professed throughout his life. Here,
too, he became proficient in the art of memory, for
which the Dominicans were noted, and was taken to
Rome to display his mnemonic skill to Pope Pius V.
Another influence which he may have come under
in these early years was that of the famous natural
magician and scientist Giambattista della Porta, who
in 1560 had established in Naples his academy for
investigating the secrets of nature. Bruno was formed
during these years in Naples: his mind and character
never lost the imprint of his training as a friar; and
it was as a passionate ex-friar that he wandered over
Europe, combining philosophical speculation with a
religious mission evolved through deep immersion in
Renaissance magic and its Hermetic sources.
Bruno's religion was the moving force behind both
his wandering career and his philosophical and cosmic
speculations. He believed that he was reviving
the magical religion of the ancient Egyptians, a
religion older than Judaism or Christianity, which
these inferior religions had suppressed but of which
he prophesied the imminent return. It included a
belief in the magical animation of all nature, which
the magus could learn how to tap and to use, and
a belief in metempsychosis. The historical origins of
Bruno's “Egyptianism” and the printed sources
whence he derived it are now clear, owing to the work
done by scholars in fairly recent years on the Hermetic
core of Renaissance Neoplatonism.
As propagated by Marsilio Ficino, Renaissance
Neoplatonism included a firm belief that both Plato
and his followers had been inspired by a tradition
of prisca theologia, or pristine and pure theology,
which had come down to them from the teachings
of Hermes Trismegistus, a mythical Egyptian sage,
and other figures supposedly of extreme antiquity.
This belief rested on the misdating of certain late
antique texts, of which the most important were the
Asclepius and the Corpus Hermeticum, which were
supposed to have been written by Hermes Trismegistus
himself.
Ficino believed that these texts contained authentic
revelations about ancient Egyptian religion and that
in them their supposed author prophesied the coming
of Christianity—and, hence, could take on sanctity
as a Gentile prophet. The scraps of Platonic notions
incorporated by the late antique Gnostic writers of
the Hermetic texts were, for Ficino, evidence that
these ancient “Egyptian” teachings were the pristine
source at which Plato and the Neoplatonists had
drunk. These beliefs could be supported from works
of some Church Fathers, notably Lactantius. Nor
were they peculiar to Ficino; on the contrary, the
whole Renaissance Neoplatonic movement contained
this Hermetic core, and the religious magic, or
theurgy, taught by Hermes Trismegistus, particularly
in the Asclepius, seemed corroborated by the intensive
Renaissance study of the later Neoplatonists, such as
Porphyry and Iamblichus. As a pious Christian,
Ficino was encouraged by the sanctity of Hermes
Trismegistus as a Gentile prophet to embark on the
astral magic described in the Asclepius, which lies
behind his own work on astral magic, the De vita
coelitus comparanda, although he did this hesitantly