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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



France, who asked him whether the art of mem- 

 ory professed by him was an art practised by the 

 aid of Nature or of magic ; Queen Elizabeth of 

 England; Sir Philip Sidney; the Catholic Uni- 

 versity of Prague ; the Protestant University of 

 Wittemberg ; the booksellers of Frankfort-on- 

 the-Main, a city which he found friendly and hos- 

 pitable, and where he would have done well to 

 have staid had he been capable of staying quietly 

 anywhere ; and, finally, a young patrician of 

 Venice, Giovanni Mocenigo, who seems to have 

 combined strong intellectual ambition with weak 

 intellectual capacity, and with moral ability still 

 weaker. Having read one of Bruno's mysterious 

 treatises on his occult science, this idle young 

 nobleman could not be content without luring to 

 his palace in Venice the possessor of all those 

 boasted secrets of the Lullian art of memory, 

 which formed the charlatan part of poor Bruno's 

 philosophical stock in trade. Teacher and pupil 

 soon got tired of each other — the former failed 

 to teach, and the latter to learn, a unirersal sci- 

 ence which had little else than a merely chimeri- 

 cal existence. Bruno, besides, while he made a 

 great mystery of his occult science, made no mys- 

 tery at all of his open and scoffing heterodoxy. 

 Mocenigo's conscience became alarmed by his 

 confessor, when he exhorted his penitent — who 

 was ready enough to obey the injunction — to de- 

 nounce the teacher, of whom he was tired, to the 

 Inquisition. 



" Even independently of his heresy of inhab- 

 ited worlds innumerable," observes M. Berti, 

 " sentence of death would have been passed upon 

 Giordano Bruno. He came before the Holy Office 

 charged with far graver crimes than Paleario, who 

 was strangled and burned for denying the doc- 

 trine of purgatory, disapproving burial in church- 

 es, satirizing his fellow-monks, and attributing 

 justification to faith alone. Giordano Bruno was 

 condemned as an apostate, having deserted the or- 

 der in which he had been consecrated priest — as 

 relapsed, having been the subject of repeated pro- 

 cedures, without having been thereby reclaimed 

 to a religious life. The relapsed, even when they 

 had shown signs of repentance, were nevertheless 

 delivered over to the secular arm, and were almost 

 always sentenced to perpetual imprisonment: 

 even such of them as had performed acts of peni- 

 tence were sometimes condemned capitally. Bru- 

 no, besides, was chargeable with the heaviest of 

 all crimes— that of impenitence — almost always 

 punished with fire. The obstinate heretic, whom 

 no office of Christian charity has availed to lead 

 to conversion, shall not only (say the text-books 

 on the subject) be given over to the secular arm, 

 but burned alive. It was .added, « Quando isti 



pertinaces vivo igne cremantur, eorum lingua al- 

 liganda est, ne, si libere loqui possiut, astantes im- 

 piis blasphemiis offendant.' " » 



Everything conspired with Bruno's audacity 

 of temper and recklessness of that conduct in 

 life, which could alone have enabled him to steer 

 safely through the seas of religious discord, to 

 prepare for him the fate which he had voluntarily 

 returned to his country to meet. He was an en- 

 thusiastic Platonist, at a period when Aristote- 

 lianism was the sole saving faith, in the eyes 

 alike of dogmatic orthodoxy and alarmed sacer- 

 dotalism. " A Platonist in an Aristotelian atmos- 

 phere," as Mr. Leslie Stephen says of William 

 Law, "can no more flourish than an Alpine plant 

 transplanted to the lowlands." 2 The rampant 

 Aristotelians of Bruno's days would have no Pla- 

 tonic plants in their lowlands ; or, if any such 

 came there, were presently minded to make fire- 

 wood of them. " It will be remembered," says 

 M. Bartolmess, " under what circumstances Bru- 

 no's death took place. It was in the midst of an 

 epoch of reaction against Plato and Copernicus 

 — an epoch when Cardinal Bellarmine supplicated 

 Clement VIII. not to tolerate the teaching of Pla- 

 tonic philosophy in the Church. . . . That phi- 

 losophy," said the learned cardinal, "has too 

 much analogy with Christianity, not to excite 

 fear lest some minds may be alienated from our 

 religion, and attach themselves to Platonism." 



The sixteenth century in Italy may be divided 

 pretty equally into two halves, the first of which 

 preserved the Platonic traditions of the Floren- 

 tine academy, and the second stiffened into ex- 

 clusive Aristotelianism and intolerant orthodoxy. 

 In the latter there was an ecclesiastical retrogres- 

 sion into mediaeval scholasticism, under the double 

 influence of the new zeal for internal reform in 

 the Church of Rome, and of the external press- 

 ure of Spanish preponderance over the Italian 

 governments, which, as in Spain itself, worked 

 mainly through the established ecclesiastical ma- 

 chinery. At the opening of the century, the cul- 

 tivated mind of Italy, in the highest places of 

 church and state, had become all philosophic, 

 and more than half heathen. Cardinals wrote 

 plays, and patronized pictorial and poetic art on 

 any rather than sacred subjects. Nay, Clement 

 VII. and his court sat out the performance of 



1 " Avsenale o Pratlca del Sant' Offlzio."— " When- 

 ever those obstinate heretics are burned with quick 

 fire, their tongues must be tied, lest, being permitted 

 to speak freely, they offend the lookers-on with impi- 

 ous blasphemies." 



2 "English Thought in the Eighteenth Century," 

 vol. i., p. 158. 



