Giordano Bruno - biography, philosophy. Life philosophy of Giordano Bruno
During the Inquisition, many who disagreed with the tenets of the church were burned at the stake. This role did not escape some scientists. From this article you will learn which scientists were burned by the Inquisition.
Why was Giordano Bruno burned?
Let us immediately note that he was not a scientist, but a monk, occultist, poet and a fierce fan of Copernicus. The latter caused him to quarrel with Giovanni Mocenigo, his patron from Venice. And he told the inquisitors about Bruno. They arrested him based on Giovanni's denunciations and forced him to sign an explanatory note regarding statements about the Virgin Mary and Christ. For 6 whole years Bruno was “transferred” from one prison to another. However, Pope Clement VIII took away his monastic rank and excommunicated him, bringing him to a secular court. He did not delve deeply into the affairs and subtleties of Bruno’s accusations, sentencing the “malicious heretic,” as they believed, to be burned.
Why was Copernicus burned?
was the first to become a victim of the Inquisition. The reason for this was the work “On Rotation celestial spheres", in which he described a heliocentric model with the Sun at the center, rather than how the Earth was previously considered. The Inquisition banned his work for 4 years. But this did not prevent the composition from gaining popularity even in China. However, the version that the Church burned Copernicus at the stake is far from true. He died of a stroke at an old age.
Miguel Servet was also burned at the stake
Miguel Servet is indeed a natural scientist and doctor. And they really burned it in Geneva. However, he is not well suited to the role of a victim of the “struggle between science and religion.” Servetus himself was fanatically religious; it was his religion, and not his scientific views, that brought him to the stake. He was condemned because of his book “The Restoration of Christianity” in which he denied the Trinity of God and generally expressed views that were extremely heretical from the point of view of Calvin (and everyone else).
Giordano Bruno became the most famous victim of religious obscurantism. It is still not known what exactly served as the main reason for the execution - progressive natural scientific views or heretical statements.
Giordano Bruno was born in 1548 in the province of Nola near Naples. At birth Bruno received the name Filippo. Based on the name of his native town, he was nicknamed Bruno Nolanz.
At the age of 11, the boy was sent to Naples to study literature, dialectics and logic. At the age of 15, Filippo continued his studies at the monastery of St. Dominic. In 1565 Bruno became a monk. Then they gave him church name Giordano.
Scientific and teaching activities
At 24, Bruno became a Catholic priest. Even then, the young man was accused of reading literature from the Index of Forbidden Books (published in 1559). Suspicion was also aroused by the fact that Giordano took icons out of the cell and left only the crucifix.
To avoid investigation, the young scientist went to Rome in 1576, then to the north of Italy, and then to Switzerland.
Here in Geneva he goes to university. However, they again began to suspect him of heresy. Giordano had to move to France, to the town of Toulouse. He was awarded an academic title, and for 2 years he lectured on philosophy.
In 1581 Bruno received a place at the Sorbonne University in France. He ingratiates himself with King Henry III of France.
In 1583 Bruno moved to England. First he settled in London, then in Oxford. But disputes with local professors forced him to move to the capital again.
Here he tries to convince those close to the Elizabethan court of the veracity of Copernicus's ideas. However, it does not find support. Only English physicist, court physician to James I and Elizabeth I, William Gilbert, shares his point of view.
After 2 years, Bruno returns to France. And in 1586 he moved to Germany. Here he unsuccessfully looks for work. Only in Marburg, a German university city, does he manage to get a position. But soon the scientist is suspended from teaching.
Giordano moves to the city of Wittenberg. From 1586 to 1588 he lectured. Afterwards he leaves for Prague, where he studies the concept of “magic”.
A year later, Bruno moved to Helmstedt, and then to Frankfurt. He receives a significant fee for publishing his works. However, in 1591 he was forced to hastily leave the city.
Imprisonment and execution
At the same time, Giordano invited the young aristocrat Giovanni Mocenigo to Venice to learn the so-called. “the art of memory” - mnemonics.
But already on May 23, 1592, Mocenigo sent the first denunciation against Bruno to the inquisitor. It said that Giordano spreads heretical views, denies the tenets of the Christian faith, puts forward wild hypotheses about the structure of the world and speaks harshly about monks.
On May 25 and 26, 2 more denunciations from Giovanni followed. An Italian philosopher is arrested. On September 17, the Roman Inquisition demands Venice to hand over Bruno to them for trial. On February 27, 1593, the scientist was transported to Rome.
Bruno spent 6 years in prisons in Rome. During this period, he refused to admit that his views and beliefs were wrong.
February 9th next year The inquisitorial tribunal charged Bruno with heresy on 8 counts. He was excommunicated from the church and deprived of his priesthood. The Nopalean was charged only with denying the dogmas of the church, but there is no mention that the reason for the execution was scientific views.
Giordano was sentenced to punishment “without shedding of blood.” This is what was meant by burning at the stake. The execution took place on February 17 in the Piazza des Flowers in Rome.
Worldview and works
Giordano Bruno's worldview amazingly combined magical and progressive scientific views. He was a fan of the ideas of Nicholas of Cusa and Copernicus, whose works argued that the Earth revolves around the Sun. The scientist sharply criticized the heliocentric system of the world structure that was dominant in the 16th century.
Bruno believed that the Sun is just a star, and the Universe is limitless. He argued that there were other, then unknown, celestial bodies in our Galaxy. The philosopher also argued that there is an infinite number of worlds and planets on which life is possible.
At the same time, Giordano conducted research on the topic of magic. He highlighted 9 various forms of magic. Bruno also believed that the soul is a metaphysical unit that can move from one body to another.
During his life, Giordano Bruno wrote several literary and natural science works. The most significant of them: “On Natural Magic” (1588), “On the Infinity of the Universe and Worlds” (1584), “The Art of Memory” (1582), “On the Monad, Number and Figure” (1591), “The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast” (1584), “On the immeasurable, innumerable and indescribable” (1591).
Until 1948, Bruno's works were included in the Index of Prohibited Books. 300 years after his death, on June 9, 1889, at the place of execution - the Square of Flowers - a monument to the Italian philosopher and scientist, several centuries ahead of his time, was unveiled.
Name: Giordano Bruno
Date of Birth: 1548
Age: 52 years old
Place of Birth: Nola, Naples, Italy
A place of death: Rome, Italy
Activity: monk, philosopher, poet
Family status: wasn't married
Giordano Bruno - biography
At school we were taught that Giordano Bruno was burned by the Inquisition because he shared the teaching of Copernicus about the rotation of the Earth around the Sun. But in the materials of his trial this “crime” was not mentioned even once. So why was the Italian philosophical monk executed, whose sentence has not yet been overturned by the Vatican?
His favorite hero was always Icarus. A daring young man flew into the heavens on homemade wings and paid for it with his life. Mentally rushing to the stars, on earth Giordano Bruno behaved the same way: boldly and recklessly, like the son of Daedalus. And he died just as horribly: Icarus was killed by the heat of the Sun, and Giordano by the flame of a fire lit by people.
As a child, his name was Filippo, and he was born in 1548 into the family of the nobleman Giovanni Bruno and Fraulissa Savolina. The family lived in the suburbs ancient city Nola, not far from the slopes of Vesuvius, above which high clouds of smoke sometimes rose. Then the townspeople rushed to the church for fear of God's wrath, but Father Filippo was not afraid of anything.
He was an officer in the service of the Spanish governor of Naples and spent most of the year on military campaigns. But when he returned home, there was no end to the joy. Father and son walked for a long time in the surrounding hills, and Giovanni told his son about his adventures and the wonders of distant countries. If the walk lasted until late, he taught Filippo to find constellations in the sky, without even thinking, which thereby determined the future fate of his son.
Young Bruno was taught to read and write, but he wanted to study further, which at that time was not at all considered obligatory for a nobleman. To Giovanni’s credit, he did not interfere with his son and even allocated part of the poor family funds for the boy’s education in Naples. In the summer of 1562, Filippo set off on his journey.
Having settled with his uncle, he became a student of the monk Teofilo da Vairano, who was to prepare the young man to enter the university. He was lucky with his mentor - Father Teofilo did not force his pupil to memorize textbooks, but taught him to think, instilling an interest in logic, philosophy, dialectics and literature.
I liked his lessons young man many more lectures at the university, which he attended on the sly. The university was located in the ancient monastery of San Dominico Maggiore, and mainly Dominican monks taught there. With a pompous air they uttered Latin quotations, caring little about it. whether their listeners understand them. But Filippo had already studied Latin - the language of science - and therefore understood that the teachers were only retelling the opinions of the church fathers, without introducing anything new into them.
Other students were not very interested in their studies, giving in to temptations with all their fervor big city. Despite strict prohibitions, they left the monastery cells every evening and went on a trip to the surrounding taverns and “fun houses”. Many carried weapons with them and used them without hesitation. Filippo was not a fighter, but he loved a feast in a friendly company and the company of beautiful ladies. Judging by the descriptions of his contemporaries and the only surviving portrait, he was a real handsome man with delicate features, thick chestnut curls and a dandy mustache. He composed poems with which he easily charmed girls.
But science attracted Bruno more than women and entertainment. However, in June 1565, instead of entering the university, 17-year-old Filippo unexpectedly became a novice at the monastery of San Dominico. From now on he was called Giordano, after the biblical River Jordan, and he wore the rough woolen robe of a monk. One can only speculate about the reasons for this decision. Much later, in the 19th century, the legend of Bruno's unhappy love was born. His beloved was either the daughter of a Spanish nobleman or a beautiful Jewish woman, who for his sake renounced the faith of her ancestors, but was killed by vengeful relatives almost during the wedding ceremony.
It is not at all necessary to believe all these romantic stories - it is enough to remember that for the scientist at that time the monastery was still one of the main refuges. If in the north of Italy the Renaissance laid down the traditions of secular science, independent of the church, then in the backward south there was no need to even think about it. Here, under the watchful eye of the Pope and the Spanish governor, science still remained the handmaiden of theology.
And yet the monastery walls could no longer contain the spread of new ideas. At night, by the light of a cinder, Giordano secretly read the works of philosophers and scientists bought in bookstores. He was most influenced by two authors. The first was the German bishop Nicholas of Cusa, who reached the rank of cardinal. However, despite his high rank, he was the author of many ideas that were far from orthodoxy - he. for example, he suggested that the Lord created not only the Earth, but also many inhabited worlds. The second was the Polish canon Nicolaus Copernicus, who observed the luminaries in homemade telescope. These observations led to a conclusion that he decided to announce only in 1543, at the end of his life.
Their essence is that the Earth is not the center of the Universe, it revolves around the Sun along with the planets and stars. Copernicus did not dare to reconsider the previous opinion, according to which the stars were something like lamps attached by the Almighty to the vault of heaven. Nevertheless, his work could have caused a real storm if not for the careful publisher Retik. who threw out the most daring passages from the book “On the Reversal of the Celestial Spheres.” Seeing how his brainchild was cut off, Copernicus died of frustration. A true meaning his discoveries were recognized by the scientific world only a century later, after the discoveries of Galileo and Kepler.
Under the influence of these books, Bruno became stronger in the opinion that reason and the Christian faith are incompatible. Biblical legends are just fairy tales with which churchmen fool the people. The young rebel contrasted their picture of the world with his own. His God “is in everything and everywhere” and actually merges with nature. While recognizing its existence, Bruno rejected the divinity of Christ, miracles and sacraments, and most importantly, the necessity of the church and its monopoly on the truth. Words were followed by deeds.
First, Giordano removed the images of saints from his cell. Then he advised a friend who was reading “The History of the Joys of the Virgin Mary” to throw away the book and read something more useful. Surprisingly, serious consequences his actions did not matter - in due time, Brother Giordano became a deacon, then received a parish in one of the cities of Campania. And in 1572 he returned to San Dominico again, but as a student at the theological school.
The comrades did not understand Bruno. and he found an interlocutor outside the monastery - the mysterious Donna Morgana, to whom his first writings were dedicated. Some consider her a rich widow, no stranger to science, others - an exquisite courtesan, out of boredom listening to an ardent young man. But it is more likely that Morgana, with her name taken from chivalric romances, was an invention of Giordano himself, who was suffering from lack of communication. After all, the monastery authorities kept a vigilant eye on the novices and would hardly allow one of them to spend time in women’s society. Therefore, Bruno's meetings with Morgana took place only in the imagination. In reality, all that remained was to pace the tired cell and write malicious poems:
Holy donkey, holy dullness,
Oh, holy stupidity, blissful ignorance,
You alone give edification to our souls.
After all, neither intelligence nor training are of any use.
Bruno called donkeys everyone who believed once and for all established opinions, without giving themselves the trouble to think. It became increasingly painful for him to live among them, pretending to be a pious son of the church. Donna Morgana - or his own caution - urged him to wait, but Bruno still sometimes could not stand it. When the famous theologian Montalcini came to the monastery to give a lecture, Bruno at a debate accused him of ignorance of the views of the Protestants whom he attacked.
The defeated theologian hastened to take revenge and sent a denunciation to the Dominican chapter about Giordano's sympathy for the heretics. He was threatened with an Inquisition trial with a harsh sentence, and in February 1576 Bruno left the monastery forever. For his unauthorized withdrawal from the order, Bruno was excommunicated from the church. A new stage in Giordano's life began. Naples, my native Nola, Donna Morgana, along with other friends of yesteryear, are all left in the past. From now on, he recognized only love for the Truth.
For four months Bruno wandered around Italy, earning a living by teaching grammar and philosophy. Once in Lyon, he stopped for the night in the monastery of his order. “I was received very coldly,” Bruno later wrote. - I talked about this with an Italian monk who was there, and he told me: “Keep in mind that in this country you will not find a warm welcome anywhere and, no matter how much you walk around the country, the further you go, the less You will receive a warm welcome."
This warning, as well as the plague that struck Italy, forced Bruno to flee to Geneva, where supporters of the “Protestant Pope” Calvin had long ruled. Life there was full and safe, but Protestants turned out to be just as intolerant of freedom of opinion as Catholics. For two months Bruno was busy correcting the printed copies in the printing house. He often attended sermons and readings delivered and read in this city by both Italians and French. And soon he was informed that he could not stay in Geneva for a long time unless he decided to accept the religion of this city. Bruno, who had previously abandoned one religion, did not want to accept another. He had to hit the road again.
In 1580, Bruno arrived in Toulouse, where he received a position as professor of philosophy at the university. Here he stayed for several years - a long time for Bruno. He still had no friends or women - Giordano led the life of an ascetic scientist. In Toulouse, he developed his own science - mnemonics - about the development of memory through logical exercises. This science was a great success. Bruno himself had an excellent memory and quoted entire pages from the books he read. His students did not achieve such success, but soon the Italian was summoned by King Henry III.
Bruno taught him mnemonics and taught himself by reading books in the rich library of the Sorbonne. His theory of the universe gradually changed: now he was sure that living beings live on the Moon and other planets, and someday people will definitely meet them. True, these were all theories - unlike Copernicus and Galileo, Bruno never engaged in methodical observation of the luminaries.
Meanwhile, Giordano's passion for astronomy and number theory led him down a dangerous path. Many considered and continue to consider him a mystic and even a magician, who left Christianity for the sake of “secret sciences” that give unheard of power. He actually studied works on alchemy and the works of Kabbalists, hoping to find a new truth there. But in the end he was disappointed - his comedy “The Candlestick” is full of ridicule of alchemists. spending their lives searching for the “philosopher’s stone.” However, he mocked everyone - Catholics and Protestants. scientists and nobility.
In Paris, his defiant behavior was not tolerated for long, and in the spring of 1583 Bruno had to leave for England. Scholarship was valued there - Bruno was introduced to Queen Elizabeth herself and received a chair at Oxford. England seemed to revive him: he was fascinated by Albion and especially by its women. "ABOUT. nymphs of England. lovely creatures! - exclaimed Giordano in lyrical poems, which he again began to compose. But the relationship with the local scientific world did not work out - having publicly embarrassed several theologians, Bruno was forced to leave Oxford and take refuge in London under the protection of the queen.
His main works were written in London: “The Feast on the Ashes” and “The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast,” which allegorically set out a new “religion of reason” that was supposed to replace Christianity. The church accused Bruno of atheism. to which he responded with another book - “On Heroic Enthusiasm.” He proclaimed: “Better a worthy and glorious death than an undignified and vile triumph.” At the end of 1585, he had to leave England along with his friend, the French ambassador Movissiere. The moment to arrive in France was clearly unlucky: religious wars were raging in the country, and the accusation of heresy that followed Bruno everywhere could cost him his life. When he tried to openly express his views at the Sorbonne, the orthodox almost tore him to pieces.
Giordano fled to Germany. where he found shelter first at the court of the Saxon elector, and then in Prague, with the alchemist emperor Rudolf II. Perhaps, under his influence, Bruno took up issues unusual for himself - he published a treatise on medicine, then “The Art of Divination,” where he taught how to summon spirits and learn the future from them. But friendship with the emperor did not work out. and Bruno continued his wanderings. In the summer of 1591, in Frankfurt, he was overtaken by a letter from the young Venetian patrician Giovanni Mocenigo. Not skimping on compliments to Bruno’s “divine mind,” he asked to teach him the sciences, promising a generous payment. Giordano, tired of the nomadic life, agreed and arrived in Venice in the fall.
Finally he was back in his homeland! He could listen to Italian speech and wander along the embankments. go into booksellers' shops, discussing last news. Unfortunately, Mocenigo was unable to grasp the basics of mnemonics. It soon became clear that he wanted to learn something completely different from Bruno - the art of making gold. Giordano explained as best he could that he did not own it, but the student did not believe it.
Having exhausted his very small reserve of patience, Bruno shouted at the patrician, calling him a donkey. The offended Giovanni did not remain in debt and denounced his guest to the local inquisitors. In May 1592, Bruno was imprisoned at the monastery of San Dominico di Castello. Tedious interrogations began, during which Giordano denied all accusations. The witnesses, mostly his close acquaintances, unanimously called him a devoted Catholic. In addition, many knew about his quarrel with the informer Mocenigo.
It seemed that he would soon be released. But Bruno himself decided his fate. In the general cell, he shocked his God-fearing fellow prisoners. He told them that the biblical miracles were made up, that the saints and prophets were simply fooling the people. and all monks must be exterminated like harmful insects. He led one of his cellmates, carpenter Francesco Vaia, to the window and pointed at the stars: these are countless worlds, in the face of which earthly passions look simply ridiculous. The carpenter did not understand anything, but diligently reported on his neighbor. Other prisoners did the same. Meanwhile, Rome demanded the extradition of the dangerous heretic Bruno. Usually Venice was in no hurry to carry out the orders of the Pope, and in this case the procurator of the Republic Contarini also said: yes, Giordano is a heretic, but he is “one of the most outstanding and rare geniuses that can be imagined.”
And yet, in the end, Giordano was given out. In February 1593 he was taken to the ancient Castle of Sant'Angelo. Long days and months of imprisonment dragged on. The Inquisition played with its prisoners like a cat with a mouse - interrogations followed every day, then they were forgotten about, leaving the prisoners in maddening loneliness. The bed was a rotten mattress, the food was pea or barley soup with a piece of tough meat on holidays. During the investigation, the prisoner was monotonously asked the same question until he confessed in exhaustion. Then we moved on to the next one. If necessary, torture was used - they were pulled up on the rack, their arms and legs were clamped in a vice, and huge amounts of water were poured into their mouths through a funnel. There was only one goal - to force the heretic to confess and condemn him to exile or many years of imprisonment in a monastery. The most dangerous were to be handed over to the secular authorities, which meant bonfire.
Even by the standards of the Inquisition, the investigation into Bruno's case dragged on for an incredibly long time - eight whole years. After all, the accused was a scientist of European renown who was familiar with strongmen of the world this. When studying the materials of the trial, one gets the impression that they did not really want to execute him. Ippolito Aldobrandini ascended the papal throne, taking the name Clement VIII. He was distinguished by tolerance, welcomed philosophers and himself expressed rather bold thoughts. But the testimony of his cellmates and the treatises obtained by the Inquisition, which exposed him as an enemy of the church, spoke against Bruno. He was tried as a heretic who spread his views, and for this the punishment could only be death. In the enumeration of his sins, evidence is only mentioned in passing: “He maintained the absurd opinion that the Earth revolves around the Sun along with other planets.”
Bruno himself hurt himself again - that's it long months He crossed out the evasions and renunciations with one letter to the Pope, in which he declared loyalty to his previous ideas. Most likely, he was simply fed up with everything - fifty years of his life were behind him. and was it worth making a deal with one’s conscience to live the rest of one’s life in prison or exile? He once wrote: “For people of a heroic spirit, everything turns into good, and they know how to use captivity as the fruit of freedom, and turn defeat into a high victory.”
On February 8, 1600, his sentence was announced. The number “eight” was fatal for Bruno - eight years in prison, eight charges, eight cardinals who tried him... Hearing the verdict, Bruno said to the judges: “You and great fear pass this sentence on me rather than listen to it!” On the morning of February 17, they dressed him in the shameful rags of a heretic, cuffed his hands and covered his mouth with a special vice so that he would not embarrass the people with seditious speeches. On Campo di Fiori - the Square of Flowers - they erected a pillar to which the executed man was tied with an iron chain. A huge crowd watched as the flames flared up and Giordano's figure disappeared into thick smoke. There were almost no shouts or jokes, people were silent. When it was all over, the executioners collected the ashes and threw them into the Tiber.
Almost three hundred years later, a monument was erected at the site of the execution with the inscription “Giordano Bruno from the century he foresaw.” Pope Leo XIII responded to this with a rebuke: “Bruno did not discover any significant achievements in the field of science... he was intolerant of other people’s opinions, malicious and loved flattery to the detriment of the truth.” In 1972, another Pope, Paul VI, officially expressed regret over the burning of Bruno. But the verdict was never overturned - the church could not forgive the scientist for the blasphemy against him. The martyr Giordano was burned not for scientific discoveries, but for rebellion against the church, loyalty to himself and love of independence.
Plan
Introduction
Biography of D. Bruno
Philosophy and creativity of Giordano Bruno
List of used literature
Introduction
Italian Giordano Bruno; present name: Filippo, nickname - Bruno Nolanets; 1548, Nola near Naples - February 17, 1600, Rome) - Italian philosopher and poet, representative of pantheism.
As a Catholic monk, Giordano Bruno developed Neoplatonism in the spirit of Renaissance naturalism and tried to give a philosophical interpretation of the teachings of Copernicus in this vein.
Bruno expressed a number of guesses that were ahead of his era and substantiated only by subsequent astronomical discoveries: that the stars are distant suns, about the existence of planets unknown in his time within our solar system, that in the Universe there are countless bodies similar to ours To the sun.
by the Catholic Church for free-thinking as a heretic, condemned by secular authorities and burned. Three centuries later, in 1889, a monument was erected in honor of Giordano Bruno at the site of his execution. However, even four hundred years later, the head of the Roman Catholic Church refused to consider his rehabilitation.
1. Biography
Filippo Bruno was born into the family of soldier Giovanni Bruno in the town of Nola near Naples in 1548. At the age of 11 he was brought to Naples to study literature, logic and dialectics. At the age of 15, in 1563, he entered the local monastery of St. Dominic. Here in 1565 he became a monk and received the name Giordano. Soon, for his doubts regarding the transubstantiation and immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary, he incurred suspicions. The authorities had to launch an investigation into his activities. Without waiting for the results, Bruno fled to Rome, but, considering this place not safe enough, he moved to the north of Italy. Here he began to make a living by teaching, without staying long in one place. From then on, he wandered around Europe.
In France, Bruno was noticed by King Henry III of France, who was present at one of his lectures, and was impressed by Bruno’s knowledge and memory. He invited Bruno to court and provided him with several years (until 1583) of peace and security, and later gave him letters of recommendation for a trip to England.
At first, the 35-year-old philosopher lived in London, then in Oxford, but after a quarrel with local professors he again moved to London, where he published a number of works, among which one of the main ones is “On the Infinity of the Universe and Worlds” (1584). In England, Giordano Bruno tried to convince high-ranking officials of the Elizabethan kingdom of the truth of Copernicus' ideas, according to which the Sun, and not the Earth, was at the center of the planetary system. This was before Galileo generalized the Copernican doctrine. In England, he never succeeded in spreading the simple Copernican system: neither Shakespeare nor Bacon succumbed to his efforts, but firmly followed the Aristotelian system, considering the Sun to be one of the planets, revolving like the others around the Earth. Only William Gilbert, a physician and physicist, accepted the Copernican system as true and experimentally came to the conclusion that the Earth is a huge magnet. He determined that the Earth is controlled by the forces of magnetism as it moves. But it should be noted that the words and evidence of Giordano Bruno on a subconscious level found support in Shakespeare, who often began to use his idea in his works.
Despite the patronage of the highest authorities in England, just two years later, in 1585, he was forced to actually flee to France, then to Germany, where he was also soon prohibited from giving lectures. Giordano Bruno spent seven years in the Holy Inquisition in Venice and Rome. Bruno had an amazing talent for making enemies for himself. He refused any tradition that his mind did not accept, and directly declared to those arguing with him that they were fools and imbeciles. He considered himself a citizen of the world, a son of the Sun and Earth, an academician without an academy.
In 1591, Bruno accepted an invitation from the young Venetian aristocrat Giovanni Mocenigo to teach the art of memory and moved to Venice. However, Bruno and Mocenigo's relationship soon deteriorated. On May 23, 1592, Mocenigo sent his first denunciation against Bruno to the Venetian inquisitor, in which he wrote:
On May 25, 26, 1592, Mocenigo sent new denunciations against Bruno, after which the philosopher was arrested and imprisoned.
The Venetian inquisitors were unable to convince Bruno of his attitude towards God and in 1593 they handed him over to their Roman colleagues. After seven years imprisonment and futile attempts to persuade him to renounce his teachings. On February 8, 1600, the inquisitorial tribunal, by its verdict, recognized Bruno as an “impenitent, stubborn and inflexible heretic,” deprived him of the priesthood, excommunicated him and handed him over to the court of the governor of Rome. In response, Bruno told the judges that they had to pronounce his sentence with more fear than he had to listen to it. By decision of a secular court, on February 17, 1600, Bruno was burned in Rome on Piazza Cvetovital. Campo dei Fiori). The executioners brought Bruno to the place of execution with a gag in his mouth, tied him to a post in the center of the fire with an iron chain and tied him with a wet rope, which, under the influence of the fire, contracted and cut into the body. Bruno's last words were: "I die a martyr voluntarily."
All works of Giordano Bruno were listed in 1603 in the Catholic Index of Prohibited Books and were there until its last edition in 1948.
On June 9, 1889, a monument was inaugurated in Rome on the very Campo dei Fiori square where the Inquisition executed him about 300 years ago. The film “Giordano Bruno” (Giordano Bruno, 1973) was made about Giordano Bruno in Italy.
2. Philosophy and creativityD. Bruno
In his philosophical views he gravitated towards mysticism. In his works, Bruno referred to the name of Hermes Trismegistus. Bruno was greatly influenced by the teachings of Copernicus and the ideas of Plato, rediscovered as a result of translations carried out by Marsilio Ficino. Other influences include Thomas Aquinas, Averroes, Duns Scotus, and Nicholas of Cusa. In Bruno's philosophy, the ideas of Neoplatonism (especially the ideas of a single beginning and the world soul as the driving principle of the Universe, which led Bruno to hylozoism) intersected with the strong influence of the views of ancient materialists and Pythagoreans. From Nicholas of Cusa, Bruno learned the idea of “negative theology,” based on the impossibility of a positive definition of God. This gave him the opportunity to contrast scholastic Aristotelism with his pantheistic natural philosophy. Bruno believed that the goal of philosophy is not the knowledge of a supernatural God, but of nature, which is “God in things.”
existence is a monad, in whose activity the physical and spiritual, object and subject merge. The supreme substance is the “monad of monads,” or God; as a whole it manifests itself in everything individual - “everything in everything.” These ideas of Bruno had a certain influence on the development of modern philosophy: the idea of a single substance in its relation to individual things was developed by Spinoza, the idea of the monad - by Leibniz, the idea of the unity of existence and the “coincidence of opposites” - in the dialectics of Schelling and Hegel.
Cosmology
heliocentric theory of Copernicus, Bruno expressed hypotheses about the infinity of nature and the infinite number of worlds in the Universe, asserted the physical homogeneity of the world (the doctrine of the 5 elements of which all bodies are composed - earth, water, fire, air and ether).
cosmology Bruno, following Nicholas of Cusa, expressed a number of guesses: about the infinity of the Universe, that the stars are distant suns, about the existence of planets unknown in his time within our solar system, that in the Universe there are countless bodies similar to ours To the sun. Bruno rejected medieval ideas about the opposition between Earth and heaven. He suggested the possibility of life on other planets, the habitability of other worlds.
Literary creativity
the poet Bruno belonged to the opponents of literary humanism. In their works of art- the anticlerical satirical poem “Noah’s Ark”, philosophical sonnets, the comedy “The Candlestick” (1582, Russian translation 1940) - Bruno breaks with the canons of “learned comedy” and creates a free dramatic form that allows him to realistically depict the life and customs of the Neapolitan street. Bruno ridicules pedantry and superstition, and with caustic sarcasm attacks the stupid and hypocritical immorality that the Catholic reaction brought with it.
Cultural influence
Giordano for a long time lived and worked in London, and also worked for two years as a typesetter in Oxford, and could communicate with people close to W. Shakespeare, or with the playwright himself. This was reflected in two of the latter’s works: “The Tempest” (the speeches of Prospero) and “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (the prototype of the philosopher Biron).
List of used literature
Antonovsky Yu. M. Giordano Bruno. His life and philosophical activity. St. Petersburg, 1892.
Barbour I. Religion and science: history and modernity. M.: BBI, 2000.
Bruno Giordano (1548-1600), Italian philosopher.
Born in a village near the city of Nola near Naples. He studied at a monastery school in Naples, where in 1565 he became a monk and joined the Dominican order. In 1572 he became a priest. He educated himself a lot and soon became imbued with atheistic views.
In 1576, Bruno was accused of heresy, broke with monasticism and fled first to Rome and then outside Italy. Moving from city to city, he was engaged in lecturing and writing numerous works.
From 1579 he lived in France, lectured on astronomy at the Universities of Toulouse and Paris.
In 1583 he moved to England, in 1585 he moved to Germany, where he traveled to different cities, promoting his worldview. In 1592, following a denunciation by the Venetian patrician G. Mocenigo, who invited him to Venice, Bruno was put on trial by the Inquisition.
The philosopher was arrested, and an investigation began against him - first in Venice, and from 1593 in Rome. He faced numerous charges of blasphemy, immoral behavior and heretical views. Bruno refused to recognize the main theories of his as false. He was sentenced to death and burned at the stake in Campo di Fiore in Rome on February 17, 1600.
Bruno's metaphysics is a link between the views of the philosopher, theologian and church-political figure N. Cusanus and B. Spinoza; it also had a direct influence on German classical idealism.
In his cosmology, Bruno follows Lucretius and N. Copernicus, but draws much more radical conclusions from the latter’s system than its author himself. More than any other Italian philosopher of his time, Bruno deserves to be called the forerunner, if not the founder, of modern materialist science and philosophy.
thanks, typo, corrected