Giordano Bruno | Page 8

such as had never been conceded to Plato, to Pythagoras
even.
"Veni, Creator Spiritus, Mentes tuorum visita, Imple superna gratia,
Quae tu creasti pectora!"
Yes! the grand old Christian hymns, perhaps the grandest of them,
seemed to blend themselves in the chorus, to deepen immeasurably
under this new intention. It is not always, or often, that men's abstract
ideas penetrate the temperament, touch the animal spirits, affect
conduct. It was what they did with Bruno. The ghastly spectacle of the
endless material universe, infinite dust, in truth, starry as it may look to
our terrestrial eyes--that prospect from which Pascal's faithful soul
recoiled so painfully--induced in Bruno only the delightful
consciousness of an ever-widening kinship [241] and sympathy, since
every one of those infinite worlds must have its sympathetic inhabitants.
Scruples of conscience, if he felt such, might well be pushed aside for
the "excellency" of such knowledge as this. To shut the eyes, whether
of the body or the mind, would be a kind of dark ingratitude; the one
sin, to believe directly or indirectly in any absolutely dead matter
anywhere, because involving denial of the indwelling spirit. A free
spirit, certainly, as of old! Through all his pantheistic flights, from
horizon to horizon, it was still the thought of liberty that presented
itself to the infinite relish of this "prodigal son" of Dominic. God the
Spirit had made all things indifferently, with a largeness, a beneficence,
impiously belied by any theory of restrictions, distinctions, absolute
limitations. Touch, see, listen, eat freely of all the trees of the garden of
Paradise with the voice of the Lord God literally everywhere: here was
the final counsel of perfection. The world was even larger than youthful
appetite, youthful capacity. Let theologian and every other theorist
beware how he narrowed either. The plurality of worlds! how petty in
comparison seemed the sins, to purge which was the chief motive for
coming to places like this convent, whence Bruno, with vows broken,
or obsolete for him, presently departed. A sonnet, expressive of the joy
with which he returned to so much more than the liberty of ordinary

men, does not suggest that he was driven from it. Though he must have
seemed to those who surely had loved so lovable a creature there to be
departing, like the prodigal of the Gospel, into the furthest of possible
far countries, there is no proof of harsh treatment, or even of an effort
to detain him.
It happens, of course most naturally, that those who undergo the shock
of spiritual or intellectual change sometimes fail to recognise their debt
to the deserted cause: how much of the heroism, or other high quality,
of their rejection has really been the growth of what they reject? Bruno,
the escaped monk, is still a monk: his philosophy, impious as it might
seem to some, a new religion. He came forth well fitted by conventual
influences to play upon men as he was played upon. A challenge, a
war-cry, an alarum; everywhere he seemed to be the creature of some
subtly materialized spiritual force, like that of the old Greek prophets,
like the primitive "enthusiasm" he was inclined to set so high, or
impulsive Pentecostal fire. His hunger to know, fed at first dreamily
enough within the convent walls as he wandered over space and time
an indefatigable reader of books, would be fed physically now by ear
and eye, by large matter-of-fact experience, as he journeys from
university to university; yet still, less as a teacher than a courtier, a
citizen of the world, a knight-errant of intellectual light. The
philosophic need to try all things had given reasonable justification to
the stirring desire for travel common to youth, in which, if in nothing
else, that whole age of the [242] later Renaissance was invincibly
young. The theoretic recognition of that mobile spirit of the world, ever
renewing its youth, became, sympathetically, the motive of a life as
mobile, as ardent, as itself; of a continual journey, the venture and
stimulus of which would be the occasion of ever new discoveries, of
renewed conviction.
The unity, the spiritual unity, of the world :--that must involve the
alliance, the congruity, of all things with each other, great
reinforcement of sympathy, of the teacher's personality with the
doctrine he had to deliver, the spirit of that doctrine with the fashion of
his utterance. In his own case, certainly, as Bruno confronted his
audience at Paris, himself, his theme, his language, were the fuel of one

clear spiritual flame, which soon had hold of his audience also; alien,
strangely alien, as it might seem from the speaker. It was intimate
discourse, in magnetic touch with every one present, with his special
point of impressibility; the sort of speech which, consolidated into
literary form