THE TRANSPORTS OF INTREPID SOULS *-*
by
William BoultingThe full significance and subtle associations of the title Gli Eroici Furori cannot be adequately rendered.(1)
Plato discovered in the passion of Greek friendship an imperfect image of divine, ideal beauty and goodness, and taught that it may be converted into a spur to our highest desire. Through the Alexandrian thinkers, who mingled Platonic doctrines with Oriental mysticism, this thought reached the Middle Ages. United with the Provençal sentiment of chivalrous devotion to a chosen lady, it influenced Dante, and transfigured love occupied the great poet in his two most important works.(2) Taking a more fleshly form in [173] Petrarch, the sentiment found a lower level, and by the sixteenth century it had furnished a vast crowd of poetasters and dilettanti with fashionable affectations. Yet, in the fifteenth century, Benivieni, Pico and others, and, at the beginning of the sixteenth, Castiglioni, soared almost as high as Plato on wing hardly less confident.(3) But the usual Petrarchistic sonneteer, forced, artificial and absurd, was as hateful to Bruno as the pedant, and not less foolishly dull. He makes Tansillo, the Petrarchist, his chief interlocutor, point out a new and sure way. The intellectual lover may, by strenuous effort, reach a comprehensive vision of Nature,(4) which is the very image, nay the presence of God, though he may not reach that sense of direct union, which is pure feeling, granted to Plotinus(5) and other mystics.
The work is one long hymn to intellectual beauty, in prose and verse. One feels the influence of the Timæus and the vision of the Platonic soul "moving about the same in unchanging thought of the same." Bruno tells us that he followed lines laid down in the Symposium and Phædrus.(6)
In the introductory letter to Sidney, when writing concerning the constant transformation of all things, he digresses to distinguish between "those who declare according to reason and their own light" and "those who declare by faith and a higher light." He follows with a frank word as to his own attitude towards current Christian doctrine. "As to my faith," he says, "I hold it a most proper thing to declare and affirm with theologians and those who are concerned with the laws and institutions of the people in their interpretation: just as I am not slack to affirm and [174] accept the sense of those, among the good and wise, who speak according to reason."(7) That is to say, the religion of a people, being part of its political constitution and laws, must be followed; but the competent may subject it to judicious criticism. This is a most important passage, because, when tried by the Inquisition, we find Bruno willing to accept the Church as a practical institution and affirm its dogmas as adumbrations of truth, but resolutely maintaining the freedom of philosophy to interpret them and to pursue an independent course.
He did not write for the crowd however;(8) nor about social ethics as in the Spaccio; he will redeem the promise he made therein;(9) that work was but an introduction to this. The intellectually disposed will discover no abiding home in the transitory world of sense or in ordinary piety; only by the exercise of intellect, which is a divine passion, shall these find anchorage for the soul. Such as would purify the will sprout "wings to the soul";(10) they already possess the divine spirit they seek after, and so are at once the lover and the loved; and their love shall enable these undaunted heroes to pass through suffering (which is no other than a golden spur), become spectators of Infinite Power and Act, and be at one, not indeed with the innermost being of God, but with God in the highest manifestations of his mind.(11) The innermost being of God is not reached, even by the mystic.
Bruno is the first thinker who based the soul's duty to itself on its own nature: not on external authority, but on inner light.(12) He leaves theology to itself and is not here [175] concerned with social duty; still less with vulgar aims, but only with the unwearied ardours of noble desire, and with that hero who shall rise above the tumult of sense and the conflict of contraries. No work of Bruno's is fuller of strange imaginings, or better expresses his inmost soul.(13)
It is in two parts, each of five dialogues. In the first part, Tansillo, the poet, reads his own cryptic stanzas or those of the Nolan or of some other poet; and, sometimes, a symbolic picture is set before Cicada and is described; then, after the manner of Dante's Vita Nuova, poem or poem and picture are explained. The same plan is continued in the first two dialogues of the second part between Cesarino and Maricondo; the third dialogue between Liberio and Laodonio contains eight sonnets (two propositions and two replies of the heart to the eyes, and the same number of propositions and replies of the eyes to the heart). In the fourth dialogue Severino and Minutolo discuss, and nine blind men are spoken of, each of whom has disburdened his soul in a sonnet. Finally, in the fifth dialogue, two ladies, Laodomia and Giulia, are introduced. Laodomia describes how the nine blind men, "having overpassed all the seas, crossed all the rivers, surmounted all the hills and traversed all the plains, during a space of ten years, at the end of that time found themselves under the temperate sky of Britain and in the presence of the beauteous and gracious nymphs of Father Thames." The nymphs have passed a sealed vase to one of their number; it opens of itself and sprinkles its contents over the blind wanderers, who, to the amazement of everybody, themselves included, recover their sight.
The allegory is discontinuous, the symbols are farfetched; there are dubious side-lights of mystic meaning, [176] and all is intermingled with observations alien to the purpose in hand and even with personal reminiscences. But obscurity charmed the "intellectuals" of the era; they found no entertainment more agreeable or more mentally stimulating than moral conundrums - the more quaint and singular the better. Bruno certainly succeeds in reviving any flagging of attention by change of interlocutors, brisk and natural dialogue, surprise and unexpected digression.
He would have the service of the soul directed to "the fountain of the Ideas, the ocean of all truth and goodness." "The Infinite, being infinite, must be infinitely pursued."(14) The pursuit of Natural Knowledge is a most exquisite means of endowing the human soul with an heroic temper. For there are stages in the contemplation of the Divine Love and Wisdom. But, cast back into the body and bound by the body, the soul is not always in progress.(15) It must then arouse itself and make a new intrepid attempt; first through desire; next, by attention; then by study, and lastly by being filled with loving enthusiasm.(16) And though we can never attain the divine infinitude of Power, Love and Knowledge, we can share in its blessedness.
Bruno makes his start then with an impulse of intellectual passion, and treats of the upward ascent which the intellect must traverse to reach a right comprehension of God manifest in Nature. He makes Tansillo utter an Apologia pro vita sua. "That which hath no splendour beyond bodily charm is worthy only of that form of love which hath the perpetuation of the race for its object. Methinks it is piggish to enquire or bother about it. For mine own part, I was never more infatuate about such matters than I am [177] now about any picture or statue to which I may be indifferent."(17) "The contrary is the reason why its opposite is hankered after and enjoyed."(18) "But the wise hold all mutable things as if they were not, and affirm them to be vanity."(19) Sense would live according to sensible things, after its own manner; but there are other laws:(20) he who would aim at the imperishable object must rise, by heroic effort, above matter and flesh and the transitory things of earth.(21) The fulness of knowledge must be united with a burning passion for that which is both love and truth. The desire to comprehend is the soul's home-sickness which causes it to soar aloft for true wisdom and joy; it does not avoid, nay, it voluntarily seeks the path of suffering, the "Gethsemane of the soul," which shall lead it to true beauty - the ultimate harmony and conformity of all things.(22)
There are two kinds of ecstasy which may be reached by the divinely transported: there is the abstraction of passive mystics, who, usually, are ignorant folk, "into whom the divine sense enters as it were into an empty room"; and there are those who are filled with intellectual ardour, which spurs them to constructive activity, "so that, by rational process, the spirit becomes godlike in contact with its divine object." "The first kind possess more dignity, power and efficacy in themselves; the second kind are worthier, more powerful and efficacious and are divine. The first are worthy as is the ass who bears the sacraments; the second are as a sacred thing."(23) The experience of the mystic has empirical value, but philosophy deals with the rational.(24)
To Bruno, philosophy and science were "musical as is [178] Apollo's lute." He pursued them with, the passion of a lover. He holds that when once intellectual love is aroused nothing else will really satisfy.(25) We are indeed bound to the body, and restricted by our vegetative life; but our proper activity is, in ceaseless strife, to contemplate the divine object, whereby we shall bear even the most terrible of life's evils with unshaken mind.(26) Sensible beauty alters and fades; but there is an intelligible beauty which cannot perish: Love inspires us with love to pursue it. The desire of the soul is an infinite one, and this is of itself an assurance of its own unending fulfilment. The soul which has touched its shining goal holds eternity in a moment. Man "becomes a god through intellectual contact with that transcendent object, and has no thought but of divine things and shows himself insensible and unmoved by that which ordinary men feel most of all; but, through love of the divine, he disdains all other enjoyments and takes no thought of life."(27) These are no mere words. Bruno proved that they were sincere throughout life and in death. "It is neither natural nor expedient that the infinite should be grasped, nor can it render itself as finite, for then it would cease to be infinite - but it is expedient and natural that the infinite, being such, should be infinitely pursued; in which mode of seeking, not by physical desire, but by thought, the imperfect is not to be deemed the perfect, but, circling upwards through the grades of imperfection, strains after that infinite centre which is neither formed nor forms."(28)
Of Bruno, as of Spinoza, it may be said that he was "God-intoxicated." He felt that the Divine Excellence had its abode in the very heart of Nature and within his own body and spirit. Indwelling in every dewdrop as in the [179] innumerable host of heaven, in the humblest flower and in the mind of man, he found the living spirit of God, setting forth the Divine glory, making the Divine perfection and inspiring with the Divine love. The Eroici is full of the pantings of his soul for intellectual enfranchisement and contact with Truth, the divine object. He breaks out into many a canzone to express the heroic rapture of the upsoaring soul. Not all the verses are his own; perhaps the finest is a sonnet by Tansillo. There is much of the poetic conceits, so fashionable at the time, and, at his worst, Bruno has the fatal facility of the improvisatore; at his best he may be compared with Michel Angelo. A single example, not of his worst or best verse, may be translated to give, however poorly, some idea of his poetic manner in this work:
"Circles the sun and seeks whence he hath come;
And wandering lights make ever for their source;
The child of earth returns to earthly home;
From sea to sea again, the waters course;
Divine desire, wherever it may roam,
Soars ever upward, of its native force.
'Tis thus the soul, born of my lady fair,
Turns back to find that goddess past compare."(29)Bruno repeats that his teaching is for the few; for even the learned of the Universities are soul-less pedants knowing nothing of the strenuous life and caring less,(30) and, as for the wholly uninstructed, "the multitude can, with great difficulty, be kept from vice and urged to virtue by belief in eternal punishments."(31) This passage suggests that the permanence of the individual "soul" through the vicissitudes of the forms it assumes and the retributive justice which follows it, so pronouncedly brought before [180] Sidney in the dedicatory letter of the Expulsion, must by no means be taken au pied de la lettre.(32)
The heroic soul, says Bruno, shall seek truth and find it. The time had not then come for Pilate's question to be put again. Bruno was happily unvexed by the problem of truth. No germ is to be discovered in any of his writings of any one of the three popular solutions which philosophy has since provided - that Truth is a copy of Reality, or constitutes Reality itself, or is a mere sign for practical life. He takes Truth quite simply and uncritically. But there is a view implicit in the Eroici and in all but the earliest of his philosophical writings, and this is that our truth is a progressive, ideal approximation towards that whole Truth which is one with the inmost nature of Being.
Höffding justly remarks that, in this work, complexity of feeling is taken as a criterion for its development.(33) As to the eternal striving of the Infinite, Bruno anticipates Kant and Fichte. The interest he took in physics peeps out even in this ethical rhapsody: he points to the expansive force of steam.(34)
There are excellent remarks on poetry. "Poetry is not born in rules," says Tansillo; "rules are derived from poetry; and there are as many sorts of true rules as there are of true poets." Cicada: "But how are true poets to be recognized?" Tansillo: "By their song."(35)
*-* Excerpted from Giordano Bruno: His Life, Thought, and Martyrdom by William Boulting (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd.) (1916).
This e-text was created by Carl Mickelsen. Permission is granted for electronic copying, distribution in print form for educational purposes and personal use. No permission is granted for commercial use of this material.
Carl Mickelsen - carlmick@moscow.com
1. Patrizzi, Bruno's contemporary, wrote "Della diversità de' furori poetici."2. Divina Commedia; Vita Nuova.
3. Cfr., Benivieni, G; Commento ... dello amore el della bellezza divina, Fir., 1500. - Ficino, M; Sopra Io amore o ver convito di Platone, Fir., 1543. - Castiglione, B; Il libro del Cortigiano (tr. Sir Hoby, 1561).
4. Eroici, P. II, Dial. II.
5. Porph; V, Plot. 23
6. Spaventa; op. cit., I, p.141.
7. Eroici, Argomento del Nolano.
8. Eroici, P. I, Dial. II; P. II, Dial. II.
9. Spaccio, Epist. Esplic.
10. Eroici, P. II, Dial. II.
11. Ibid., P. I, Dial. II, III; P. II, Dial. IV.
12. Spaventa, B; op. cit., p. 143.
13. Happily, the body of the work is translated: "The Heroic Enthusiasts" by L. Williams. London, Redway, 1887-89.
14. Eroici, P. I, Dial. IV, Tansillo loq., after canz. 20; cfr. Spaccio, III, ii.
15. Ibid., P. I, Dial. IV, Tansillo loq., after canz. 23.
16. Ibid., P. I, Dial. V, vii.
17. Eroici, P. I, Dial. II, at end.
18. Ibid., after canz. 9; cfr. Spaccio, I, i.
19. Loc. cit.
20. Eroici, P. I, Dial. IV, after sonnet 22.
21. Ibid., P. II, Dial. II.
22. Ibid., P. II, Dial. III, foll. xiii.
23. Ibid., P. I, Dial. III, at beginning.
24. Cfr. Sensini, T; op. cit., p. 19.
25. Eroici, P. II, Dial. I, ix.
26. Ibid., P. I, Dial. IV, V.
27. Ibid., P. I, Dial. III, beginning.
28. Ibid., P. I, Dial. IV, after canz. 20.
29. Eroici, P. II, I, viii, Ottava del Nolano.
30. Ibid., P. II, II.
31. Argomento.
32. See pages 163 sq. of this work.
33. Höffding, H; Hist. of Mod. Phil., tr. Meyer, 1900, vol. 1, p. 147.
34. Eroici, P. I, Dial. V.
35. Ibid., Dial. I.
