ii MIRACLES AND DECEIT 257 



proposed to send Orion upon the earth. " He can do 

 miracles can walk upon the waves of the sea without 

 sinking or wetting his feet ; let us send him among 

 men to make them believe everything we would have 

 them believe that black is white, that the human 

 intellect is blind where it thinks itself to see best ; that 

 what to reason appears excellent, good, best, is vile, 

 wicked, evil in the extreme ; that nature is a strumpet, the 

 law of nature a ribaldry ; that nature and divinity cannot 

 work together for one and the same good end ; that the 

 justice of the one is not subordinate to that of the other, 

 but that they are as contrary as darkness and light/ 1 * 



The attitude of mind which formed the ideal of Asinity. 

 the Church for its members Bruno typified frequently 

 enough, as we have seen, by the Ass, after Cusanus' 

 Docta Ignorantia and Agrippa's praise of Asinity in his */* 

 work on The Vanity of all' Sciences. But they were in 

 earnest : Bruno bitterly ironical. In his Cabala Asinity 

 is given the two places left vacant in the heavens by 

 the council of the gods in the Spaccio : the place of 

 Ursa Major is taken by Asinity in the abstract, that of 

 Eridanus by Asinity in the concrete. The whole work 

 is in praise of " the pure goodness, royal sincerity, 

 magnificent majesty of ignorance, learned foolishness, 

 divine Asinity." Asinity is in the sphere of practice 

 as submission to authority in that of speculation, or 

 pedantry in that of teaching. Against all of these 

 Bruno casts the shafts of his irony, now broad and 

 heavy, now fine, light and piercing. 3 



1 Lag. p. 543. 35 ff., cf. 544. 20, 546. 16, and esp. 554. 13 ff. (Chiron the Centaur), 

 for other references to the Church and its beliefs. Bruno could not have written the 

 last passage while retaining any shred of genuine belief in the divinity of Christ. 

 v. also 534. 32. 



2 Cabala, p. 565. 



3 Cf. the poem in the Cabala, p. 564. 25, 0' Sant' dsinita, and Cena, Lag. 147. 21 

 (the Ark of Noah), etc. 



S 



