Talk:Giordano Bruno

Bruno Was Burned-At-The Stake Because Of Teaching Reincarnation

The Vatican was very guarded in c. 1600 about controlling the "Gates of Heaven" - the afterlife. They still are. Bruno taught reincarnation and this is probably the #1 reason why the Inquisition burned him at the stake. 2601:589:4800:9090:4043:CCE9:64FF:C66F (talk) 16:58, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

"Some historians contend that the main reason for Bruno's death was indeed his cosmological views"

This is total nonsense. Bruno was not a "scientist" (or what they'd call a "natural philosopher" in those days) -he was a mystic, somewhat analogous to modern-day New Agers like Deepak Chapra. He was not considered a scientist by his contemporaries and did not use the scientific method or even respect this process; he rejected scientific reasoning in favor of his mystical insights. As mentioned elsewhere, Nicholas of Cusa, a high-ranking cardinal, proposed the same many worlds view (this is where Bruno got this idea from) and somehow was never executed for his "cosmological views".

The argument quoted is total pseudo-historical nonsense and should be removed to improve the article's quality. "Some historians" don't think this at all -this line was sourced to one guy. Jonathan f1 (talk) 04:32, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

I added an additional source, though you may think that Alexandre Koyré is another "pseudo-historian" who writes "total nonsense". Other historians, like Miguel Ángel Granada (main translator of Giordano Bruno's works in Spanish and one of the most prestigious experts in Bruno's philosophy worldwide), are of the same opinion, among many others. By the way, which sources do yo provide to support your opinions? For instance, any reliable source that suggests that Bruno is "somewhat analogous to modern-day New Agers like Deepak Chapra"? Thank you in advance! PedroAcero76 (talk) 17:42, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

I've also added one more source. The statement says nothing about Bruno being a scientist or not, but that the main reason of his condemnation derived from his cosmology, simple as that. Cosmologies may be more or less scientific or not at all. Also, the new source shows that there is a recent trend among the scholars to consider his cosmology as indeed one of the main reasons. Quoting Hilary Gatti [1]: "One of the first and most notable developments consisted in a growing awareness that earlier commentators had indeed been right to consider Bruno's trial as being closely linked to that of Galileo (...) Jean Seidengart underlined the particular emphasis to be found throughout the trial on Bruno's doctrine of a plurality of worlds." and "Bruno, however, by admitting so candidly his distance from the Catholic theology, was indirectly questioning such a system of law, which imposed on his conscience views different from his own. (...) he was doing it in the name of a principle of religious pluralism which derived directly from his cosmology." Best regards! Bafuncius (talk) 19:37, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

I did not say that Martinez is a "pseudo-historian" -he's a good historian who makes a convincing case that Bruno's "many worlds" mysticism was part of the reason for his execution. But it was not the only reason, or the central reason, which is the claim I'm objecting to. Bruno's multiplicity of worlds was part of a goody bag of mystical nonsense: he thought these worlds were all divine; he thought the planets and stars were inhabited by souls and governed by spirits; he believed in reincarnation and was a pantheist; and, perhaps more importantly, he rejected transubstantiation. All of these elements combined, not merely his "cosmological views" (which were not separate from this other stuff).

And there's an issue where you have "cosmological views" linked to a Wiki page on the science of cosmology. Again, Bruno was not a scientist, did not arrive at these views via scientific reasoning and was not executed for anything to do with science. This is not a small point to make either: Bruno lived in an age when modern science was emerging. Galileo, Kepler, Harriot, Scheiner, Gilbert, Clavius, Vieta, Beeckman etc all did empirical science but Bruno did not and was actively opposed to scientific reasoning and methodology. All of his theories were based on non-empirical mystical speculation.

Maybe you could say that Bruno was some sort of "martyr for free speech" (if by "free speech" we mean the freedom to express crackpot ideas that have no basis in evidence, are not reasonable and may contradict religious dogma), but even here it's historically problematic to project a post-Enlightenment idea of "free speech" onto the 16th Century when people had no concept of this. Jonathan f1 (talk) 00:42, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

Bafuncius -true, Galileo was not on trial for science either; he was tried for contradicting Church dogma based on a theory that had no scientific backing at the time. Heliocentrism was not consensus science in Galileo's day, so the Church actually had "science" on its side. And Galileo was well aware that most of his contemporaries (actual scientists) disputed the Copernican model.

With Bruno it is even worse. Unlike Galileo, Bruno was not a scientist. He was a mystic who did not do empirical science or even believe in the process.

"Bruno has the Copernican model of the solar system wrong. He demonstrates total ignorance of the most elementary ideas of geometry, let alone geometric optics. He throws in scraps of pseudoscientific argument, mostly garbled, and proceeds to high-flying speculations that seem disconnected from the preceding or subsequent arguments."[2]

Frances Yates described Bruno as a Hermetical magician and wrote that, “the legend that Bruno was prosecuted as a philosophical thinker, was burned for his daring views on innumerable worlds or on the movement of the Earth, can no longer stand.”(p. 355[3])

In Plurality of Worlds: The Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant, Stephen Dick wrote “It is true that he [Bruno] was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600, but the church authorities were almost certainly more distressed at his denial of Christ’s divinity and alleged diabolism than his cosmological doctrines.”(p.10)

(Note that Dick has since adjusted his views, but only because Bruno's pantheistic cosmology cannot be coherently separated from his other mysticism -they were all part of the same grab bag of nonsense.)

Michael J. Crowe also reached the same conclusion that it is a myth “that Giordano Bruno was martyred for his pluralistic convictions’ about many worlds."(p. 8[4]).

If the Bruno affair was "closely linked to Galileo's trial", then why wasn't the ruling on Bruno cited during Galileo's later trial? The Roman Inquisition worked not just by precedent but also case law (see Thomas Mayer's The Roman Inquisition: A Papal Bureaucracy and Its Laws in the Age of Galileo, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013, p.152, 169) - meaning that, if it were true what you say, Bruno's trial would've resulted in a ruling that the Copernican model was at least formally heretical in 1599 and so could've been cited in a 1616 trial. But not only was it not cited during Galileo's trial, but Cardinal Bellarmine put the question to assessment -which means there was no precedent ruling at the time.

But you know nothing about any of this and are just randomly quoting scholars without any context. There's also a high likelihood you are totally misinterpreting what Hilary Gatti has written about Bruno, assuming you have even read all her work. In Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science (Cornell, 2002, p. 3), she wrote that Bruno had “a well-known and clearly expressed distaste for the new mathematics, which he saw as a schematic abstraction attempting to imprison the vital vicissitudes of matter into static formulae of universal validity.” So Hilary Gatti does not dispute the unremarkable fact that Bruno did not join the Scientific Revolution of his period and even rejected its methods.

You need to adjust the lead where it describes Bruno as a "cosmological theorist" and links to a page on cosmological science -he was a cosmological mysticist, a totally different thing. There were people doing empirical science in his day - Galileo, Kepler, Harriot, Cardano, Scheiner, Gilbert, Clavius, Vieta, Beeckman etc -but Bruno wasn't one of them. And all that sciency talk about "Copernican model" and "cosmic pluralism" is also irrelevant -he didn't even understand these models and merely borrowed bits and pieces from them in the same way he borrowed from astrology and pantheistic mysticism. And to describe his case as a "landmark in the history of free thought and the emerging sciences" is total nonsense -he was not an "emerging scientist" number one, and secondly "free thought/free speech" is a post-Enlightenment concept and didn't apply to the 16th Century. Jonathan f1 (talk) 20:36, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Jonathan f1, you're narrowing the sense of cosmology down to the current scientific one, but look at its Wikipedia page for other meanings: "(it) is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe. The term cosmology was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount's Glossographia,[2] and in 1731 taken up in Latin by German philosopher Christian Wolff, in Cosmologia Generalis.[3] Religious or mythological cosmology is a body of beliefs based on mythological, religious, and esoteric literature and traditions of creation myths and eschatology.". Also, there are the sections "Philosophy" and "Religious or mythological cosmology" for it. It is just a matter of that interpretation, there is no issue in saying that ancient and medieval philosophers and theologians had cosmologies, or even that each lay person can have one's own personal cosmology. Bafuncius (talk) 21:44, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Okay, you raise a fair point -that page does indeed include the metaphysical stuff and not just physical science. But why write this:

" He is known for his cosmological theories, which conceptually extended to include the then novel Copernican model."

Bruno did not even understand the Copernican model; he merely borrowed some bits and pieces of it (see above sources). He had no interest in the scientific debates of his age.

And then also:

"He proposed that the stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets (exoplanets), and he raised the possibility that these planets might foster life of their own, a cosmological position known as cosmic pluralism. He also insisted that the universe is infinite and could have no center."

All of this language makes it sound like he was doing empirical science, which he was not. His multiple worlds theory also included souls and spirits in these planets and a pantheistic universe. And all of these ideas were obtained via mystical speculation and not by any mathematics or empirical methods. Jonathan f1 (talk) 23:21, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Jonathan f1, those affirmations may sound scientific, but they are correct. First, Bruno was a reader of Copernicus, and even a good one at that according to Hilary Gatti ("he shows an overall understanding of Copernicus's text which is much more sophisticated than usually supposed and includes some of the most technically difficult aspects of the new astronomy such as the precession of the equinoxes and even anomalies such as axial precession" [5]), but yes, more as a philosopher, not a scientist doing experiments. Nevertheless, that first statement has no problems, "he is known for his cosmological theories, which conceptually extended to include the then novel Copernican model". As Gatti says, in the same page of the book link above, "he opened up the universe to a multiplicity of solar systems (...) Above all, his daring and uncompromosing development of universal infinity launched into the post-Copernican cosmological debate a discussion which, although in rather different terms, is still ongoing". In that book, it is evident that his "intuition" were discussed by future astronomers such as Kepler and Brahe, and even them were skeptic of infinite suns, worlds and universe due to their own personal beliefs. Nonetheless, Bruno was cited due to being one of the first who expounded thus in a more philosophically advanced manner during that century. As Gatti concludes here ([6]):

"In this poem Bruno retraces the difficult elaboration of his thought, renewing polemic against the Aristotelian physics and reaffirming his cosmological conception which implies the intuitive surpassing of the closed heliocentric system as expounded by Copernicus. Thus he confers on the universe an infinite dimension. We may indeed consider Bruno to be a 'Philosopher of the Renaissance' in that he occupies the middle position in a line which, if towards the past it reaches back to classical and pre-classical positions concerning natural philosophy and cosmological intuitions, as to the future it would be impossible to deny that he anticipates positions which are scientifically supported in our own days" Bafuncius (talk) 00:15, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

A tad late in replying -I apologize, for completely forgetting about this discussion.

Bruno "anticipated" modern-day science theories? Wow, I sincerely doubt the legitimacy of the sources you guys are using, or at least your interpretation of these sources. I know we're not allowed to conduct original research (at this point what difference does it make -you guys don't care about any secondary RS I cite), but have a look at a contemporary account of his condemnation by Gaspar Schoppe (and I'm sure you can find this cited in some scholarly sources):

That Bruno’s homeland was Nola, in the Kingdom of Naples, where he was professed as a Dominican. He already started doubting the Transubstantiation eighteen years ago (what goes beyond the Reason is, as your Chrysostom affirms, repugnant), and had even denied it. Then he began casting doubts on the virginity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (whom Chrysostom himself calls purer than all the Cherubim and Seraphim) and moved to Geneva, where he stayed for two years. But he didn’t completely approve of Calvinism and was therefore forced to leave and go to Lyon and then to Toulouse, before finally settling in Paris. There he performed as a supplementary professor, for he saw that regular professors were compelled to attend Holy Mass. After that, he went to London and published a small book about “the Triumphant Beast”4, that is to say the Pope, for your people accustom to call him “beast” on account of his honour. Then he repaired to Wittenberg and lectured publicly for two years there, if I’m not mistaken.

Once again forced to leave Wittenberg, he published a small book entitled De inmenso et infinito itemque de innumerabilibus (if I correctly remember the titles, because I had those books with me in Prague), and then another one entitled De umbris et Idaeis5, and in both of them he teaches the most horrible and absurd things; for example: that there’s a countless amount of Worlds; that a soul can indeed migrate from a body to another body and also to another World; that a single soul can form two bodies, that magic is a good thing and it is allowed to practice it; that the Holy Ghost is none other than the soul of the World and this is what Moses meant when he wrote that it hovered over the waters; that the World exists from everlasting; that Moses performed the miracles through magic, in which he had greater skill than the rest of the Egyptians; that Moses fabricated the Laws himself; that the Holy Scriptures are a fable; that the Devil will be saved; that only the Hebrew descend from Adam and Eve and that the rest of the Nations descend from two people that God made the day before; that Christ was not God, but a distinguished magician that mocked people and because of that he wasn’t crucified but rightly hanged; that the Prophets and Apostles were vile magicians and most of them were hanged.' Lastly, it would be an endless task to enumerate the entirety of his absurdities, the ones he asserted in his books but also by word of mouth. In summary, he defended everything that has been said by the pagan philosophers or by any ancient or recent heretic.'

Note that not once does Schoppe describe Bruno as a "natural philosopher" (ie scientist) who was condemned for anything to do with "natural philosophy" (ie science): his crimes were all religious heresies and his theories were mystical. You guys are seriously misleading readers with some of the language in this article. Jonathan f1 (talk) 19:27, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

"embraced Calvinism"

Looks like an editor may have engaged in deceptive editing to shoehorn this into the article (although the situation may have come about from other editors changing the sourcing). It was supported solely by a supposed quotation from Singer, paired with a footnote explaining that even she found the evidence unconvincing. However, the book it was cited to is searchable on IA, and the quotation itself was not in the book at all! A search of Google books finds only one 1800s source which suggests this and at least one that suggests that it was untrue. Additional web sources making this claim did not really appear to be reliable. While it is also in Encyclopedia Brittanica, that's a tertiary source and since it does appear to be either an outdated or minority view, this will need better sourcing and the inclusion of opposing views to get a better idea of what current scholarship really thinks about this. Meanwhile I've removed the strong unqualified claim from the lead and the unverifiable quotation from the body, which was the only support for this position in the article. Skyerise (talk) 11:35, 4 June 2024 (UTC)