Giordano Bruno | Page 5

all, Parmenides, that most ancient assertor of
God's identity with the world. The affinities, the unity, of the visible
and the invisible, of earth and heaven, of all things whatever, with each
other, through the consciousness, the person, of God the Spirit, who
was at every moment of infinite time, in every atom of matter, at every
[236] point of infinite space, ay! was everything in turn: that
doctrine--l'antica filosofia Italiana-- was in all its vigour there, a hardy
growth out of the very heart of nature, interpreting itself to congenial
minds with all the fulness of primitive utterance. A big thought! yet
suggesting, perhaps, from the first, in still, small, immediately practical,
voice, some possible modification of, a freer way of taking, certain
moral precepts: say! a primitive morality, congruous with those larger
primitive ideas, the larger survey, the earlier, more liberal air.
Returning to this ancient "pantheism," after so long a reign of a
seemingly opposite faith, Bruno unfalteringly asserts "the vision of all
things in God" to be the aim of all metaphysical speculation, as of all
inquiry into nature: the Spirit of God, in countless variety of forms,
neither above, nor, in any way, without, but intimately within, all
things--really present, with equal integrity, in the sunbeam ninety
millions of miles long, and the wandering drop of water as it evaporates
therein. The divine consciousness would have the same relation to the
production of things, as the human intelligence to the production of true
thoughts concerning them. Nay! those thoughts are themselves God in
man: a loan, there, too, of his assisting Spirit, who, in truth, creates all
things in and by his own contemplation of them. For Him, as for man in
proportion as man thinks truly, thought and, being are identical, and

things existent only in so far as they are known. Delighting in itself, in
the sense of its own energy, this sleepless, capacious, fiery intelligence,
evokes all the orders of nature, all the revolutions of history, cycle upon
cycle, in ever new types. And God the Spirit, the soul of the world,
being really identical with his own soul, Bruno, as the universe shapes
itself to his reason, his imagination, ever more and more articulately,
shares also the divine joy in that process of the formation of true ideas,
which is really parallel to the process of creation, to the evolution of
things. In a certain mystic sense, which some in every age of the world
have understood, he, too, is creator, himself actually a participator in
the creative function. And by such a philosophy, he assures us, it was
his experience that the soul is greatly expanded: con questa filosofia
l'anima, mi s'aggrandisce: mi se magnifica l'intelletto!
For, with characteristic largeness of mind, Bruno accepted this theory
in the whole range of its consequences. Its more immediate corollary
was the famous axiom of "indifference," of "the coincidence of
contraries." To the eye of God, to the philosophic vision through which
God sees in man, nothing is really alien from Him. The differences of
things, and above all, those distinctions which schoolmen and priests,
old or new, Roman or Reformed, had invented for themselves, would
be lost in the length and breadth of the philosophic survey; nothing, in
itself, either great or small; and matter, [237] certainly, in all its various
forms, not evil but divine. Could one choose or reject this or that? If
God the Spirit had made, nay! was, all things indifferently, then, matter
and spirit, the spirit and the flesh, heaven and earth, freedom and
necessity, the first and the last, good and evil, would be superficial
rather than substantial differences. Only, were joy and sorrow also to be
added to the list of phenomena really coincident or indifferent, as some
intellectual kinsmen of Bruno have claimed they should?
The Dominican brother was at no distant day to break far enough away
from the election, the seeming "vocation" of his youth, yet would
remain always, and under all circumstances, unmistakably a monk in
some predominant qualities of temper. At first it only by way of
thought that he asserted his liberty--delightful, late-found
privilege!--traversing, in mental journeys, that spacious circuit, as it

broke away before him at every moment into ever-new horizons.
Kindling thought and imagination at once, the prospect draws from him
cries of joy, a kind of religious joy, as in some new "canticle of the
creatures," a new monkish hymnal or antiphonary. "Nature" becomes
for him a sacred term. "Conform thyself to Nature"--with what sincerity,
what enthusiasm, what religious fervour, he enounces the precept to
others, to himself! Recovering. as he fancies, a certain primeval sense
of Deity broadcast on things, in which Pythagoras and other inspired
theorists of early Greece had abounded, in his hands philosophy
becomes