BRUNO, GIORDANO (b. Nola, Italy, 1548; d. Rome, Italy, 17 February 1600), philosophy.

    and timidly, in fear of the Church's embargo on magic.

The extreme boldness and fearlessness that characterized Giordano Bruno are nowhere more apparent than in his choice of a religion. Discarding the belief in Hermes as a Gentile prophet, which sanctified the Hermetic writings for pious Christian Neoplatonists, Bruno accepted the pseudo-Egyptian religion described in the Hermetic texts as the true religion; he interpreted the lament in the Asclepius over the decay of Egypt and her magical worship as a lament for the true Egyptian religion, which had been suppressed by Christianity, although various signs and portents were announcing its return.

Among these signs was the heliocentricity announced by Copernicus—and it must be confessed that Copernicus himself did something to encourage such an interpretation of his discovery when, at a crucial point in his work, just after the diagram showing the new sun-centered system, he referred to Hermes Trismegistus on the sun as a visible god (a quotation from the Asclepius). In his defense of Copernicanism against the Aristotelians of Oxford, Bruno presented Copernicus as “only a mathematician” who had not understood the true inwardness of his discovery as he, Bruno, understood it—as portending a return to magical insight into living nature. In support of the movement of the earth, Bruno quoted a passage from one of the treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum, which states that the earth moves because it is alive.

The magical animism that permeates Bruno's philosophy of nature, his vision of the living earth moving round the sun, of an infinite universe of innumerable worlds moving like great animals in space, is inseparably connected with his pseudo-Egyptian religion. It is universal animism which makes possible the activities of the magus and justifies the techniques by which he attempts to operate on nature. Bruno aspired to become such a magus, using the techniques described in the De occulta philosophia of Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, a work that was itself the product of the Hermetic core within Renaissance Neoplatonism.

It is one of the most extraordinary features of Bruno's outlook that he seems to have believed that his religion could somehow be incorporated within a Catholic framework in the coming new dispensation. He never lost his respect for Thomas Aquinas, and his preaching of his new religion retained traces of Dominican preacher's training. Although Christ was for him a benevolent magus, as were Thomas Aquinas, Paracelsus, Ramón Lull, and Giordano Bruno himself, he proclaimed in the Spaccio della bestia trionfante that Christ was to remain in heaven as an example of a good life.

While still in the convent in Naples, he fell under suspicion of heresy and proceedings were instituted against him. The suspicion against him seems to have been of Arian tendencies; possibly his full “Egyptian” program was not yet developed. To avoid the process against him he left Naples in 1576. He went first to Rome, where he fell into new difficulties, from which he escaped by abandoning the Dominican habit and fleeing from Italy. Now began his long odyssey through France, England, Germany. He went first to Geneva, where he soon got into trouble and acquired a strong dislike of Calvinism.

From about 1579 to 1581 he was in Toulouse, where he lectured in the university on, among other things, the Sphere of Sacrobosco. From Toulouse he went to Paris; here his public lectures attracted the attention of King Henry III. His first published work, the De umbris idearum (Paris, 1582), is dedicated to Henry. It is an example of his transformation of the art of memory into a deeply magical art, and its title is taken from that of a magical book mentioned in the necromantic commentary on the Sphere of Sacrobosco by Cecco d'Ascoli, an author whom Bruno greatly admired. Bruno thus came before the world in his first Parisian period as a magician teaching some extremely abstruse art of memory that apparently gained the interest and approval of the king of France, who gave him letters of recommendation to the French ambassador in England. This is the first indication of some mysterious political, or politico-religious, undercurrent in Bruno's activities and movements.

Bruno crossed the Channel to England early in 1583; the royal letters of recommendation had the desired effect, for the French ambassador, Michel de Mauvissière, received him into the French embassy, where during the two years of his stay in England he lived as a “gentleman” attached to the embassy. He states that he often accompanied the ambassador to court and saw Queen Elizabeth, whom he addresses as “divine” in his works, an epithet that he had to try to explain away to the Inquisitors. The ambassadorial protection enabled Bruno to publish his extremely provocative works, in which he criticized Reformation Oxford as inferior in philosophical learning to the Oxford of the Middle Ages and attacked the whole social order of Elizabethan England for having destroyed, without adequately replacing, the institutions of Catholic times. His books were published clandestinely, with false imprints, by John Charlewood. As was to be expected, they aroused tumults against the bold ex-friar that were sometimes so violent that he dared not go outside the embassy.

Bruno opened his campaign in England with one of his obscure works on the magic art of memory,