Who doesn't know about Jordan Bruno? Well, of course, a young scientist who was burned at the stake by the Inquisition for spreading the teachings of Copernicus. What's wrong here? Except for the fact that he was executed in Rome in 1600 - that's all. Giordano Bruno a) was not young, b) was not a scientist, c) he was not executed for spreading the teachings of Copernicus. But what about it in reality?
Myth 1: young
Giordano Bruno was born in 1548, in 1600 he was 52 years old. Even today, no one would call such a man young, and in 16th century Europe, a 50-year-old man was rightfully considered elderly. By the standards of that time, Giordano Bruno lived a long life. And she was stormy.
He was born near Naples into a military family. The family was poor, the father received 60 ducats a year (an average official - 200-300). Filippo (that was the name of the boy) graduated from school in Naples and dreamed of continuing his education, but the family had no money to study at the university. And Filippo went to the monastery, because in the monastery school they taught for free. In 1565 he took monastic vows and became Giordano's brother, and in 1575 he set out on a journey.
For 25 years, Bruno has traveled all over Europe. Was in France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, England. Geneva, Toulouse, Sorbonne, Oxford, Cambridge, Marburg, Prague, Wittenberg - he taught at every major European university. He defended 2 doctoral dissertations, wrote and published works. He had a phenomenal memory - contemporaries said that Bruno knew by heart more than 1,000 texts, ranging from Holy Scripture to the works of Arab philosophers.
He was not only famous, he was a European celebrity, he met with royalty, lived at the court of the French king Henry III, met with the English queen Elizabeth I and the Pope.
Little does this wise scholar resemble a young man looking at us from the pages of a textbook!
Promotional video:
Myth 2: scientist
In the 13th century, Bruno would undoubtedly be considered a scientist. But at the end of the 16th century, all hypotheses and assumptions already had to be confirmed by mathematical calculations. In Bruno's works, there are no calculations, not a single figure.
He was a philosopher. In his writings (and he left more than 30 of them), Bruno denied the presence of celestial spheres, wrote about the infinity of the Universe, that the stars are distant suns around which the planets revolve. In England, he published his main work "On Infinity, the Universe and Worlds", in which he defended the idea of the existence of other inhabited worlds. (Well, it cannot be that God calmed down, creating only one world! Of course there is more!) Even the inquisitors, considering Bruno a heretic, at the same time recognized him as one of the "most outstanding and rarest geniuses that one can imagine."
His ideas were received by some with delight, others with indignation. Bruno invited the largest universities in Europe to be expelled later with a scandal. At the University of Geneva, he was recognized as an offender of the faith, put up at a pillar of shame and kept him in prison for two weeks. In response, Bruno did not hesitate to openly call his opponents half-witted, stupid, donkeys, both orally and in his writings. He was a talented writer (author of comedies, sonnets, poems) and wrote mocking poems about his opponents, which only produced his enemies.
It is simply amazing that with such a character and such a worldview, Giordano Bruno lived to be more than 50 years old.
Execution in the Square of Flowers
In 1591, Bruno came to Venice at the invitation of the aristocrat Giovanni Mocenigo. Having heard about the incredible ability of Giordano Bruno to memorize huge amounts of information, Señor Mocenigo was inflamed with the desire to master mnemonics (the art of memory). At that time, many scientists worked part-time by tutoring, Bruno was no exception. A relationship of trust was established between teacher and student, and on May 23, 1592, Mocenigo, as a true son of the Catholic Church, wrote a denunciation of the teacher to the Inquisition.
Bruno left for almost a year in the cellars of the Venetian Inquisition. In February 1593, the philosopher was transported to Rome. For 7 years, Bruno was demanded to renounce his views. On February 9, 1600, he was recognized by the Inquisitorial Court as "an unrepentant, stubborn and unyielding heretic." He was defrocked and excommunicated and handed over to the secular authorities with a recommendation to execute him “without shedding blood,” that is, burn alive. According to legend, after hearing the verdict, Bruno said: "Burning does not mean refuting."
On February 17, Giordano Bruno was burnt to death in Rome in a square with the poetic name "Piazza di Flowers".
Myth 3: execution for scientific views
Giordano Bruno was not executed for his views on the structure of the universe and not for promoting the teachings of Copernicus. The heliocentric system of the world, in which the sun was in the center, and not the earth, was not supported by the church at the end of the 16th century, but it was not denied, the supporters of the Copernican doctrine were not pursued and they were not dragged to the stake.
Only in 1616, when Bruno had already been burned for 16 years, Pope Paul V declared the Copernican model of the world to be contrary to Scripture and the work of the astronomer was included in the so-called. "Index of Prohibited Books".
The idea of the presence of many worlds in the universe was not a revelation for the church either. “The world that surrounds us and in which we live is not the only possible world and is not the best of the worlds. He is just one of an infinite number of possible worlds. He is perfect insofar as God is reflected in him in some way. This is not Giordano Bruno, this is Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), the recognized authority of the Catholic Church, the founder of theology, canonized in 1323.
And the works of Bruno himself were declared heretical only three years after the end of the trial, in 1603! Then why was he declared a heretic and sent to the stake?
The mystery of the judgment
In fact, why the philosopher Bruno was declared a heretic and sent to the fire is unknown. The verdict that has come down to us says that he was accused of 8 points, but which ones were not indicated. What kind of sins were listed for Bruno, that the Inquisition was even afraid to announce them before execution?
From the denunciation of Giovanni Mocenigo: “I am reporting according to my duty of conscience and by order of my confessor, which I heard many times from Giordano Bruno when I talked with him in his home that the world is eternal and there are endless worlds … that Christ performed imaginary miracles and was a magician, that Christ did not die of his own free will and, as best he could, tried to avoid death; that there is no retribution for sins; that souls, created by nature, pass from one living being to another. He talked about his intention to become the founder of a new sect called "New Philosophy." He said that the Virgin Mary could not give birth; monks disgrace the world; that they are all donkeys; that we have no proof that our faith has merit before God. " This is not just heresy, this is something in general outside of Christianity.
Smart, educated, without a doubt a believer in God (no, he was not an atheist), known in theological and secular circles, Giordano Bruno, based on his vision of the world, created a new philosophical doctrine that threatened to undermine the foundations of Christianity. For almost 8 years the holy fathers tried to persuade him to renounce his natural-philosophical and metaphysical convictions and failed. It is difficult to say how well-grounded their fears were, and brother Giordano would become the founder of a new religion, but they considered it dangerous to release the unbroken Bruno free.
Does all this belittle the scale of Giordano Bruno's personality? Not at all. He really was a great man of his time, who did a lot to promote advanced scientific ideas. In his treatises, he went much further than Copernicus and Thomas Aquinas, and pushed the boundaries of the world for humanity. And of course he will forever remain a model of fortitude.
Myth 4, the last one: justified by the church
One can often read in the press that the church admitted its mistake and rehabilitated Bruno and even recognized him as a saint. This is not true. Until now, Giordano Bruno in the eyes of the Catholic Church remains an apostate and a heretic.
Vladimir Arnold, an academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences and an honorary member of a dozen foreign academies, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, when meeting with Pope John Paul II, asked why Bruno had not yet been rehabilitated. Dad replied: "When you find aliens, then we'll talk."
Well, the fact that a monument to Giordano Bruno was erected in 1889 on the Square of Flowers, where a fire broke out on February 17, 1600, does not mean that the Roman church is happy about this monument.