Giordano Bruno was a 16th century philosopher, theologian, and monk who was an early supporter of Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the universe. He was also burned at the stake by the Catholic church in 1600 at the age of 42 after being found guilty of heresy by the Roman Inquisition. That combination of circumstances has sometimes led to him being portrayed as the first martyr for modern science at the hands of religion. The somewhat ominous-looking image of the bronze statue of the brooding Bruno that is sited at the location of his execution in Campo de’ Fiori in Rome has become iconic.
The opening episode of Cosmos hosted by Neil DeGrasse Tyson (that I did not see) apparently had an extended tribute to Bruno. Corey S. Powell summarizes what Tyson supposedly said about him.
Starting in the late 1500s, Bruno argued not only in favor of Copernicus’s sun-centered cosmology, he also proposed that space was infinite in extent; that stars were other suns, surrounded by other Earths; and that those other worlds were also populated.
His belief in an infinite universe, reflecting the infinite glory of God, got Bruno shunned and exiled from country after country. He grew impoverished and largely friendless, but refused to recant. Eventually Bruno was imprisoned by the Church, and burned at the stake in 1600–10 years before Galileo announced his first observations that confirmed Copernicus was right.
Powell says that this story is either misleading or wrong. Although Bruno is fascinating for many reasons, he was not the first to propose the idea of an infinite universe, he was not an astronomer, nor was he even much of a Copernican. What he was was a theological and philosophical innovator who postulated endless inhabited worlds and this is mainly what got him into trouble with the church.
The Roman Inquisition listed eight charges against Bruno. His belief in the plurality of worlds was just one. The others involved denying the divinity of Jesus, denying the virgin birth, denying transubstantiation, practicing magic, and believing that animals and objects (including the Earth) possessed souls. You could fairly call Bruno a martyr to the cause of religious freedom, but his cosmic worldview was neither a deduction nor a guess. It was a philosophical corollary of his heterodox belief that God and souls filled all of the universe.
So there were plenty of reasons for the church to be angry with Bruno that had little to do with Copernican astronomy but everything to do with the determination of the church to maintain its rigid orthodoxy on doctrinal issues. Powell goes on to say that other elements of the common story about the man are also false.
Despite his heresies, Bruno was neither impoverished nor alone. In reality, he had a series of powerful patrons. In 1579, he was appointed a professor of philosophy in Tolouse, France. In 1581, King Henry III of France offered him a lucrative lectureship at the Sorbonne. In 1583 he visited England, lived with the ambassador to France, and met regularly with the Court…and so on. The gaunt, lonely fellow you see on screen in Cosmos is not the real Bruno.
Nor was Bruno the simple, humble figure shown on TV. A major reason he moved around so much is that he was argumentative, sarcastic, and drawn to controversy. He engaged in bitter academic disputes, many of which had nothing to do with his cosmic framework. One example He fled France because of a violent dispute about the proper use of a compass (seriously).
…Bruno’s impassioned statements and outrageous personality alienated many of his natural supporters. Neither Johannes Kepler nor Galileo thought much of him. Kepler even wrote specifically to refute Bruno’s ideas.
So Bruno was a prickly character both intellectually and personally. But nevertheless, the story of Bruno is a compelling one and shows the intolerance of the church for people with heterodox views. As Powell says:
None of this means that Bruno in any way deserved his fate. But neither does he deserve to be reduced to a cartoon about intellectual freedom. He was a brilliant, complicated, difficult man.
Powell goes on to discuss the life of a much-lesser known astronomer and popularizer of science named Thomas Digges whom he says contributed much more to the eventual acceptance of Copernicanism and the idea of an infinite universe. In 1576 he published the first English translation of Copernicus’s De Revolutionisbus. Powell compares Bruno and Digges.
Bruno was a pugilist and an ideologue. In many of his ideas he was right–wildly, spectacularly right–but his method of spreading his ideas alienated his supporters. More importantly, his ideas sprang from faith nearly as much as did the ideas of the Church; Bruno was far from a scientist in the modern sense.
Digges, in contrast, was focused on advancing the work of Copernicus. He helped lay the intellectual groundwork for Kepler and Galileo, and established England as a beachhead of progressive scientific thought.
One of the things I have learned is that the history of science as told in science textbooks is not to be trusted. In fact, I have written two articles that tried to set the record straight in two areas, that Columbus was not the one who proved that the Earth was round and correct some of the many myths surrounding the Copernican revolution, especially the one that it was initially opposed because it represented a demotion for human beings because it implied that the Earth was no longer the center of the universe.
Of course, there is likely to be no definitive account of someone who lived over 400 years ago and Powell’s criticism of the way that the Cosmos show portrayed Bruno has been challenged by Steven Soter, one of the co-writers of the series, who says that Bruno’s scientific insights, especially the one that the Sun and other stars were similar things. were not insignificant, leading to a bit of back and forth with Powell standing by his argument that Bruno’s troubles with the church due to his heresies were caused primarily by theological differences, rather than those originating in science.
In a subsequent exchange, Soter and Powell get into more detail about the significance of Bruno’s scientific insights. In the end, Powell makes an important point about a common trap that we can fall into in looking back at scientific history.
First, we sometimes regard ourselves as inherently smarter than those in the past, simply because we start from a place of greater understanding. Such casual arrogance overlooks the incredible efforts required by people like Bruno, Digges, and thousands–no, millions–of others who have contributed to science and to the great march of human knowledge.
Second, there is a tempting inclination to view the past as a prelude toward an inevitable present. This attitude, which has been known to afflict academics as well, is known as Whig history. I still think Cosmos fell prey to this error, in trying to make Bruno’s universe look too much like our own. Seen in clear-eyed historical context, Bruno’s views still strongly resembled the spiritually ordered Church universe of the time–not to mention the philosophies of his ancient Greek influences, Lucretius and Anaxagoras.
This is a great exchange of essays, though to fully appreciate them one has to have a taste for historical detail. The histories we learn from physics textbooks are all too often oversimplified in the cause of quickly making some point and should be treated with caution. The real histories are much more interesting and complex. But to read those you have to seek out the writings of historians of science or physicist authors who have taken the trouble to become familiar with such works.
1) The church at the time seemed t oconfuse the two. The placement of the works of Copernicus and Galileo on the Index of Banned Books is a clear sign that they did not back away from scientific positions.
2) For crying out loud, they had an Index of Banned Books! That’s a poor start right there.
3) The distinction between science and religion is a difficult position to maintain without implicitly acknowledging a right by the Church hierarchy to control religious belief.
Bruno’s proposal that the visible stars in the sky were not holes in the firmament but were like the sun and that they had planets like the earth with life on them is absolutely an anathema to creationists. Several years ago, I had some discussions on Jason Rosenhouse’s blog with a YEC who called himself JonS who steadfastly denied that there was life anywhere else in the universe. Aside from the fact that Bruno, like Newton, was, apparently, an Arian, the notion that there might be intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos would have been absolutely the height of heresy back in the age when Bruno lived. Even if Bruno had not been an Arian, that proposal alone would quite probably have merited execution for heresy by the Raping Children Church in those days.
1. Bruno’s Cosmological theories had a lot to do with why he was executed. The above is from the Vatican City archives themselves. Read it yourself and make up your own mind.
2. The trial transcript has disappeared. The trial summary was lost for centuries and found misfiled a few decades ago. It should be the primary historical document.
3. The Vatican once had the entire Latin summary with an English translation on their website. It then disappeared and I was never able to find it again. For reasons that might not bear close examination.
Giordano Bruno may have had another, more active role in history. John Bossy in Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair suggests that he was “Henry Fagot”, an English spy at the French embassy in London, responsible for revealing the identity of catholic priests operating covertly in England, causing the execution of English conspirators against Elizabeth I and partly responsible for the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. If Bossy was right, the papacy had very good practical reasons for wanting Bruno dead, regardless of his opinions.
Powell says that this story is either misleading or wrong. Although Bruno is fascinating for many reasons, he was not the first to propose the idea of an infinite universe, he was not an astronomer, nor was he even much of a Copernican. What he was was a theological and philosophical innovator who postulated endless inhabited worlds and this is mainly what got him into trouble with the church.
Actually, that’s pretty much what Cosmos spelled out. They mentioned three of the eight charges against Bruno, two of which were religious. Tyson describes Bruno as not being a scientist, but just a lucky guesser. They point out that Bruno was inspired by Lucretius on the infinity of the universe. Etc.
@sc…
Wow, that’s pretty wild. I had never heard that before.
The proper approach is of course to put it in contemporary context. Well, in Europe around 1600 CE the favourite passtime was to kill believers of other denominations. That had begun about 100 years before and would last until about 1650.
My compatriots of 400 years ago for instance, while living in the most liberal country of its time, had no problems beheading someone who was instrumental in founding that same country. Of course a religious conflict had everything to do with it besides a political struggle (with stadtholder Maurits):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_van_Oldenbarnevelt
So it’s ad hoc logic to single out Bruno as a victim of science-religion controversy. Like you argued in the case of Copernicus things were a lot more complicated. They always were. Religious involvement was standard.
NdGT makes clear that this segment was not directly about Religion vs Science.
Instead it’s about how silencing, punishing and executing people for offering new or controversial ideas hinders human progress and creates suffering. It was about Authoritarian Ideological Dogma vs Free Inquiry.
It doesn’t matter whether the enforcers of Dogma are Religious, the State, the dominant Culture, a political party, a business interest, etc.; they all retard progress and cause suffering.
Mano, reading this quote from the first article you linked (about Copernicus):
Made me wonder, do you think perhaps that’s why unbelievers were -burnt- rather than say beheaded or some other similar form of death? It seems a grizzly justification for a particularly gruesome death at the hand of flames for non-believers. And the fact it comes from philosophers as far back as Aristotle seems, at least to me, to lend credence to the idea of that being a death that is more likely to lift the non-believers towards the heavens…or some such nonsense…
Oh, for an edit button…Sorry, I should have said the link about copernican myths, this one: http://www.truefreethinker.com/articles/copernican-myths.
That is possible but I haven’t actually looked at the theology that was driving the whole burning thing. Trying to understand the thinking behind such awful actions seems pretty difficult.