Giordano Bruno | Page 6

a poem, a sacred poem, as it had been with them. That Bruno
himself, in "the enthusiasm of the idea," drew from his axiom of the
"indifference of contraries" the practical consequence which is in very
deed latent there, that he was ready to sacrifice to the antinomianism,
which is certainly a part of its rigid logic, the purities of his youth for
instance, there is no proof. The service, the sacrifice, he is ready to
bring to the great light that has dawned for him, which occupies his
entire conscience with the sense of his responsibilities to it, is that of
days and nights spent in eager study, of a plenary, disinterested
utterance of the thoughts that arise in him, at any hazard, at the price,
say! of martyrdom. The work of the divine Spirit, as he conceives it,
exalts, inebriates him, till the scientific apprehension seems to take the
place of prayer, sacrifice, communion. It would be a mistake, he holds,
to attribute to the human soul capacities merely passive or receptive.
She, too, possesses, not less than the soul of the world, initiatory power,
responding with the free gift of a light and heat that seem her own.
Yet a nature so opulently endowed can hardly have been lacking in
purely physical ardours. His pantheistic belief that the Spirit of God
was in all things, was not inconsistent with, might encourage, a keen
and restless eye for the dramatic details of life and character for
humanity in all its visible attractiveness, since there, too, in [238] truth,
divinity lurks. From those first fair days of early Greek speculation,
love had occupied a large place in the conception of philosophy; and in
after days Bruno was fond of developing, like Plato, like the Christian
platonist, combining something of the peculiar temper of each, the
analogy between intellectual enthusiasm and the flights of physical
love, with an animation which shows clearly enough the reality of his

experience in the latter. The Eroici Furori, his book of books, dedicated
to Philip Sidney, who would be no stranger to such thoughts, presents a
singular blending of verse and prose, after the manner of Dante's Vita
Nuova. The supervening philosophic comment re-considers those
earlier physical impulses which had prompted the sonnet in voluble
Italian, entirely to the advantage of their abstract, incorporeal
equivalents. Yet if it is after all but a prose comment, it betrays no lack
of the natural stuff out of which such mystic transferences must be
made. That there is no single name of preference, no Beatrice or Laura,
by no means proves the young man's earlier desires merely "Platonic;"
and if the colours of love inevitably lose a little of their force and
propriety by such deflection, the intellectual purpose as certainly finds
its opportunity thereby, in the matter of borrowed fire and wings. A
kind of old, scholastic pedantry creeping back over the ardent youth
who had thrown it off so defiantly (as if Love himself went in for a
degree at the University) Bruno developes, under the mask of amorous
verse, all the various stages of abstraction, by which, as the last step of
a long ladder, the mind attains actual "union." For, as with the purely
religious mystics, union, the mystic union of souls with each other and
their Lord, nothing less than union between the contemplator and the
contemplated--the reality, or the sense, or at least the name of it-- was
always at hand. Whence that instinctive tendency, if not from the
Creator of things himself, who has doubtless prompted it in the
physical universe, as in man? How familiar the thought that the whole
creation longs for God, the soul as the hart for the water- brooks! To
unite oneself to the infinite by breadth and lucidity of intellect, to enter,
by that admirable faculty, into eternal life-- this was the true vocation
of the spouse, of the rightly amorous soul--"a filosofia e necessario
amore." There would be degrees of progress therein, as of course also
of relapse: joys and sorrows, therefore. And, in interpreting these, the
philosopher, whose intellectual ardours have superseded religion and
love, is still a lover and a monk. All the influences of the convent, the
heady, sweet incense, the pleading sounds, the sophisticated light and
air, the exaggerated humour of gothic carvers, the thick stratum of
pagan sentiment beneath ("Santa Maria sopra Minerva!") are indelible
in him. Tears, sympathies, tender inspirations, attraction, repulsion,
dryness, zeal, desire, recollection: he finds a place for them all: knows

them all [239] well in their unaffected simplicity, while he seeks the
secret and secondary, or, as he fancies, the primary, form and purport
of each.
A light on actual life, or mere barren scholastic subtlety, never before
had the pantheistic doctrine been developed with