Bruno the Heretic

On this day in 1600, the priest, theologian, sometime Dominican friar, philosopher, and early proponent of heliocentrism, Giordano Bruno, was burned at the stake in Rome for the crime of heresy by the city’s civil authorities. His ashes were dumped into the Tiber river.

My primary interest in Bruno is that I once lived in a house that he once lived in, in Helmstedt the town of my birth.

Bruno’s writings are fascinating, and he himself is nothing short of brilliant. Of course like many of those in that era who skirted social and political convention, he pushed his published theories a step too far.

“Bruno was not condemned for his defence of the Copernican system of astronomy, nor for his doctrine of the plurality of inhabited worlds, but for his theological errors, among which were the following: that Christ was not God but merely an unusually skillful magician, that the Holy Ghost is the soul of the world, that the Devil will be saved, etc.”

Catholic Encyclopedia (1908)

Had he not been an ordained priest, he probably would have escaped his fate. In fact, the charges against him are instructive, including as they do “believing in metempsychosis and in the transmigration of the human soul into brutes, and dealing in magics and divination.”

He was the sort of person who quickly made enemies wherever he went. He fled his Dominican friary in a cloud of scandal. He was arrested in Geneva by the Calvinists. He was chased out of Britain by the Anglicans. The Lutherans excommunicated him in Germany.

The fact that the Inquisition got him in Italy is a clear indication only of who he preferred to have kill him.

These days, of course, Giordano’s is simply a great purveyor of Chicago-style pizza. I once had them deliver to my dorm room during finals… in Tucson.

In a funny way, my life at its fringes is tangled up in Bruno’s life, if a little backwards. If I were a Dominican, the circle would be complete.