The Swerve (34 page)

That universe was not for Bruno a place of melancholy disenchantment. On the contrary, he found it thrilling to realize that the world has no limits in either space or time, that the grandest things are made of the smallest, that atoms, the building blocks of all that exists, link the one and the infinite. “The world is fine
²²
as it is,” he wrote, sweeping away as if they were so many cobwebs innumerable sermons on anguish, guilt, and repentance. It was pointless to search for divinity in the bruised and battered body of the Son and pointless to dream of finding the Father in some far-off heaven. “We have the knowledge,” he wrote, “not to search for divinity removed from us if we have it near; it is within us more than we ourselves are.” And his philosophical cheerfulness extended to his everyday life. He was, a Florentine contemporary observed, “a delightful companion
²³
at the table, much given to the Epicurean life.”

Like Lucretius, Bruno warned against focusing all of one’s capacity for love and longing on a single object of obsessive desire. It was perfectly good, he thought, to satisfy the body’s sexual cravings, but absurd to confuse those cravings with the search for ultimate truths, the truths that only philosophy—the Nolan philosophy, of course—could provide. It is not that those truths were abstract and bodiless. On the contrary, Bruno might have been the first person in more than a millennium to grasp the full force, at once philosophical and erotic, of Lucretius’ hymn to Venus. The universe, in its ceaseless process of generation and destruction and regeneration, is inherently sexual.

Bruno found the militant Protestantism he encountered in
England
and elsewhere as bigoted and narrow-minded as the Counter-Reformation Catholicism from which he had fled. The whole phenomenon of sectarian hatred filled him with contempt. What he prized was the courage to stand up for the truth against the belligerent idiots who were always prepared to shout down what they could not understand. That courage he found preeminently in the astronomer Copernicus, who was, as he put it, “ordained by the gods
²⁴
to be the dawn which must precede the rising of the sun of the ancient and true philosophy, for so many centuries entombed in the dark caverns of blind, spiteful, arrogant, and envious ignorance.”

Copernicus’s assertion that the earth was not the fixed point at the center of the universe but a planet in orbit around the sun was still, when Bruno championed it, a scandalous idea, anathema both to the Church and to the academic establishment. And Bruno managed to push the scandal of Copernicanism still further: there was no center to the universe at all, he argued, neither earth nor sun. Instead, he wrote, quoting Lucretius, there were multiple worlds,
²⁵
where the seeds of things, in their infinite numbers, would certainly combine to form other races of men, other creatures. Each of the fixed stars observed in the sky is a sun, scattered through limitless space. Many of these are accompanied by satellites that revolve around them as the earth revolves around our sun. The universe is not all about us, about our behavior and our destiny; we are only a tiny piece of something inconceivably larger. And that should not make us shrink in fear. Rather, we should embrace the world in wonder and gratitude and awe.

These were extremely dangerous views, every one of them, and it did not improve matters when Bruno, pressed to reconcile his cosmology with Scripture, wrote that the Bible was a better guide to morality than to charting the heavens. Many people may have quietly agreed, but it was not prudent to say so in public, let alone in print.

Bruno was hardly the only brilliant scientific mind at work in Europe, rethinking the nature of things: in London he would almost certainly have met Thomas Harriot,
²⁶
who constructed the largest telescope in England, observed sun spots, sketched the lunar surface, observed the satellites of planets, proposed that planets moved not in perfect circles but in elliptical orbits, worked on mathematical cartography, discovered the sine law of refraction, and achieved major breakthroughs in algebra. Many of these discoveries anticipated ones for which Galileo, Descartes, and others became famous. But Harriot is not credited with any of them: they were found only recently in the mass of unpublished papers he left at his death. Among those papers was a careful list that Harriot, an atomist, kept of the attacks upon him as a purported atheist. He knew that the attacks would only intensify if he published any of his findings, and he preferred life to fame. Who can blame him?

Bruno, however, could not remain silent. “By the light of his senses
²⁷
and reason,” he wrote about himself, “he opened those cloisters of truth which it is possible for us to open with the key of most diligent inquiry, he laid bare covered and veiled nature, gave eyes to the moles and light to the blind … he loosed the tongues of the dumb who could not and dared not express their entangled opinions.” As a child, he recalled in
On the Immense and the Numberless
, a Latin poem modeled on Lucretius, he had believed that there was nothing beyond Vesuvius, since his eye could not see beyond the volcano. Now he knew that he was part of an infinite world, and he could not enclose himself once again in the narrow mental cell his culture insisted that he inhabit.

Perhaps if he had stayed in England—or in Frankfurt or Zurich, Prague or Wittenberg, where he had also wandered—he could, though it would have been difficult, have found a way to remain at liberty. But in 1591 he made a fateful decision to return to Italy, to what seemed to him the safety of famously independent
Padua
and Venice. The safety proved illusory: denounced by his patron to the Inquisition, Bruno was arrested in Venice and then extradited to Rome, where he was imprisoned in a cell of the Holy Office near St. Peter’s Basilica.

Bruno’s interrogation and trial lasted for eight years, much of his time spent endlessly replying to charges of heresy, reiterating his philosophical vision, rebutting wild accusations, and drawing on his prodigious memory to delineate his precise beliefs again and again. Finally threatened with torture, he denied the right of the inquisitors to dictate what was heresy and what was orthodox belief. That challenge was the last straw. The Holy Office acknowledged no limits to its supreme jurisdiction—no limits of territory and, apart from the pope and the cardinals, no limits of person. It claimed the right to judge and, if necessary, to persecute anyone, anywhere. It was the final arbiter of orthodoxy.

Before an audience of spectators, Bruno was forced to his knees and sentenced as “an impenitent, pernicious, and obstinate heretic.” He was no Stoic; he was clearly terrified by the grisly fate that awaited him. But one of the spectators, a German Catholic, jotted down strange words that the obstinate heretic had spoken at the moment of his conviction and excommunication: “He made no other reply than, in a menacing tone, ‘You may be more afraid to bring that sentence against me than I am to accept it.’”

On February 17, 1600, the defrocked Dominican, his head shaved, was mounted on a donkey and led out to the stake that had been erected in the Campo dei Fiori. He had steadfastly refused to repent during the innumerable hours in which he had been harangued by teams of friars, and he refused to repent or simply to fall silent now at the end. His words are unrecorded, but they must have unnerved the authorities, since they ordered that his tongue be bridled. They meant it
literally
: according to one account, a pin was driven into his cheek, through his tongue, and out the other side; another pin sealed his lips, forming a cross. When a crucifix was held up to his face, he turned his head away. The fire was lit and did its work. After he was burned alive, his remaining bones were broken into pieces and his ashes—the tiny particles that would, he believed, reenter the great, joyous, eternal circulation of matter—were scattered.

SILENCING BRUNO PROVED
far easier than returning
On the Nature of Things
to the darkness. The problem was that, once Lucretius’ poem reentered the world, the words of this visionary poet of human experience began to resonate powerfully in the works of Renaissance writers and artists, many of whom thought of themselves as pious Christians. This resonance—the trace of an encounter in painting or in epic romance—was less immediately disturbing to the authorities than it was in the writings of scientists or philosophers. The ecclesiastical thought police were only rarely called to investigate
¹
works of art for their heretical implications. But just as Lucretius’ gifts as a poet had helped to diffuse his radical ideas, so too those ideas were transmitted, in ways extremely difficult to control, by artists who were in contact directly or indirectly with Italian humanist circles: painters like Sandro Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, and Leonardo da Vinci; poets like Matteo Boiardo, Ludovico Ariosto, and Torquato Tasso. And before long the ideas surfaced as well far from Florence and Rome.

On the London stage in the mid-1590s, Mercutio teased Romeo with a fantastical description of Queen Mab:

She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes

In shape no bigger than an agate stone

On the forefinger of an alderman,

Drawn with a team of little atomi

Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep …

“… a team of little atomi”: Shakespeare expected then that his popular audience would immediately understand that Mercutio was comically conjuring up an unimaginably small object. That is interesting in itself, and still more interesting in the context of a tragedy that broods upon the compulsive power of desire in a world whose main characters conspicuously abjure any prospect of life after death:

Here, here will I remain

With worms that are thy chambermaids. O, here

Will I set up my everlasting rest …

Bruno’s years in England had not been in vain. The author of
Romeo and Juliet
shared his interest in Lucretian materialism with Spenser, Donne, Bacon, and others. Though Shakespeare had not attended either Oxford or Cambridge, his Latin was good enough to have enabled him to read Lucretius’ poem for himself. In any case, he seems to have personally known John Florio, Bruno’s friend, and he could also have discussed Lucretius with his fellow playwright Ben Jonson, whose own signed copy
²
of
On the Nature of Things
has survived and is today in the Houghton Library at Harvard.

Shakespeare would certainly have encountered Lucretius from one of his favorite books: Montaigne’s
Essays
. The
Essays
,
first
published in French in 1580 and translated into English by Florio in 1603, contains almost a hundred direct quotations from
On the Nature of Things
. It is not a matter of quotations alone: there is a profound affinity between Lucretius and Montaigne, an affinity that goes beyond any particular passage.

Montaigne shared Lucretius’ contempt for a morality enforced by nightmares of the afterlife; he clung to the importance of his own senses and the evidence of the material world; he intensely disliked ascetic self-punishment and violence against the flesh; he treasured inward freedom and content. In grappling with the fear of death, he was influenced by Stoicism as well as Lucretian materialism, but it is the latter that proves the dominant guide, leading him toward a celebration of bodily pleasure.

Lucretius’ impersonal philosophical epic offered no guidance at all in Montaigne’s great project of representing the particular twists and turns of his physical and mental being:

I am not excessively fond
³
of either salads or fruits, except melons. My father hated all kinds of sauces; I love them all…. There are changes that take place in us, irregular and unknown. Radishes, for example, I first found to agree with me, and then to disagree, now to agree again.

But this sublimely eccentric attempt to get his whole self into his text is built upon the vision of the material cosmos that Poggio awoke from dormancy in 1417.

“The world is but a perennial movement,” Montaigne writes in “Of Repentance,”

All things in it are in constant motion—the earth, the rocks of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt—both with the common motion and with their own. Stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion. (610)