Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) was an Italian philosopher, former Dominican friar and cosmological thinker. He defended an infinite universe containing innumerable worlds and challenged many of the philosophical and theological assumptions of his time. After years of travel across Europe, he was tried by the Roman Inquisition and executed in Rome in 1600.
SELECTED TEXTS
From The Ash Wednesday Supper
“The Tiphyses [the new Argonauts, that is, the Conquistadores, ed.] have found the means to disturb the peace of others, violate the native genius of regions, confound what provident nature had distinguished, through commerce to double defects and add vices to the vices of both peoples, violently propagate new follies and plant unheard-of madness where none existed, until at last the wisest is deemed to be the strongest; to devise new methods, instruments, and arts for tyrannizing and murdering one another.
In return for such deeds, a time will come when those peoples, having learned these things at their own bitter expense, through the inevitable vicissitudes of events, will know how and be able to repay us with fruits equal to, or worse than, those produced by such pernicious inventions. […]”
Source: Giordano Bruno, La cena de le ceneri, in Opere italiane, UTET, Turin, 2013, Vol. I, p. 452. English translation from the original Italian prepared for The Planet’s Cancer.
From Cause, Principle and Unity
“This most absolute act, which is the same as the most absolute power [God, ed.], cannot be comprehended by the intellect except by way of negation. It cannot, I say, be understood either insofar as it can be everything or insofar as it is everything.
For when the intellect seeks to understand, it must form an intelligible representation, making itself similar, proportionate and equal to what it seeks to comprehend. But this is impossible, because the intellect is never so great that it could not be greater still, whereas that which is infinite in every direction and in every respect cannot be greater than it is.
There is therefore no eye that can draw near to, or gain access to, so infinitely exalted a light and so profoundly deep an abyss.”
Source: Giordano Bruno, De la causa, principio et uno, in Opere italiane, UTET, Turin, 2013, Vol. I, pp. 696–697. English translation from the original Italian prepared for The Planet’s Cancer.
