Читать книгу Giordano Bruno - J. Lewis McIntyre - Страница 18

Table of Contents

Prague: 1588.The court of the Emperor Rudolph II. was at Prague, in Bohemia; from there his fame as a Maecenas of the learned, and especially of those who claimed power to read the heavens or to work magic, had spread to many countries. Perhaps Sidney, who had visited him from Elizabeth on the death of Maximilian, may have spoken of him to Bruno: while two of Bruno’s friends, the Spanish Ambassador St. Clement and the mathematician Mordentius, were at Prague in 1588. Thither, accordingly, he now turned in the hope of settled quarters, introducing himself, as was his frequent habit, with a Lullian work, which he caused to be printed soon after his arrival, and dedicated to the Spanish Ambassador.[95] June 10, 1588.The introductory letter is dated from Prague, June 10, 1588, and is in praise of Lully, whose importance to philosophy Bruno values much more highly than his successors have done: it promised at the same time a future work, the Lampas Cabalistica, in which the inner secrets of Lullism were to be more fully revealed. This, so far as we know, never appeared, and Bruno tried to obtain the Emperor’s patronage by a mathematical work dedicated to him, of somewhat revolutionary type—“One hundred and sixty articles against the mathematicians and philosophers of the day.” The Emperor, however, had few funds to spare for any but the professed astrologists and alchemists in whom lay his real interest—not at all scientific, although Tycho Brahé and Kepler profited themselves and the world by it. With three hundred dollars, which the Emperor gave in recognition of his powers, Bruno left about the close of the year, and onJanuary 13, 1589.January 13, 1589, matriculated in the Julian university of Brunswick at Helmstadt.Helmstadt. This, the youngest university in Germany at the time, of only twelve years’ standing, had been founded for the Protestant cause by the reigning Duke Julius, a breezy and popular prince, who loved theologians little, Catholics not at all, and founded a model university on liberal principles. It was not, however, an unqualified success. Bruno received some recognition from the university, or from the Duke, and when the latter died in May 1589 he obtained permission to give a funeral oration some days after the official programme had been carried through (on the 1st of July)—the Oratio Consolatoria.[96]

Bruno professes as his reason for wishing to speak that he must express his gratitude to one who had made the university he founded free to all lovers of the Muses, even to strangers such as Bruno himself was:—an exile from his Italian fatherland for honourable reasons and zeal for the truth, here he had received the freedom of the university: in Italy he was exposed to the greedy maw of the Roman wolf—here he was in safety: there he had been chained to a superstitious and absurd cult—here he was exhorted to more reformed rites. What is remarkable in this speech is the bitterness of Bruno’s personal attack upon Rome, and “the violent tyranny of the Tiberine beast.” The constellations are allegorically treated as symbols of the virtues of Julius, or of the vices which he attacked and repressed: among them “the head of the Gorgon, on which for hair there grow venomous snakes, representing that monster of perverse Papal tyranny, which has tongues more numerous than the hairs of the head, aiding and serving it, each and all blasphemous against God, nature, and man, infecting the world with the rankest poison of ignorance and vice.” It was indeed strange that Bruno should have thought of entering Italy after publishing words like these.

Excommunication of Bruno in Helmstadt.However, he was not to find the Protestants much more tolerant than the Catholics. In the university archives there is extant a letter from him to the prorector of the academy, appealing against a public excommunication of himself by the first pastor and superintendent of the church at Helmstadt, Boethius. According to this letter, Boethius had made himself both judge and executioner, without giving the Italian a hearing at all: and the letter appealed to the senate and rector against the public execution of an unjust sentence, privately passed; it demanded a hearing, so that if any legal derogation were to be made from his rank and good name, he might at least feel it to be justly made, and demanded that Boethius be summoned to show he had not fulminated his bolt out of private malice, but in pursuance of the duty of a good pastor on behalf of his sheep. Oct. 6, 1589.The date of the letter is October 6, 1589. No further records of the affair have been found, so that the appeal was probably rejected. The meaning of the excommunication is not quite clear: Bruno does not seem to have been a full member of either the reformed or the Lutheran church, although attending services; and in all probability the sentence was a formal one, which, however, carried serious social inconveniences with it. The prorector, Hofmann, was not one to sympathise either with Bruno or with his philosophy; he was unhappy unless attacking some other person’s opinions: philosophy in general fell under his condemnation, although he professed knowledge of it. A few years after he drove Bruno from Helmstadt he himself was dethroned from his place of authority, “ordered to stick to his last,” and had to leave Helmstadt in the end (1601). No doubt it is against him that the invectives in De Immenso,[97] are directed:—“This scholarch, excelling director of the school of Minerva: this Rhadamanthus of boys, without a shadow of an idea even of ordinary philosophy, lauds to the skies the Peripatetic, and dares to criticise the thoughts of diviner men (whose ashes are to be preferred to the souls of such as these).” Later Boethius also had to be suppressed by the consistory.[98] 1590.The young Duke, with whom no doubt Bruno stood in favour, since he presented him with eighty scudi after the funeral oration, was of the opposite party to Hofmann, but even with this support the Italian could not struggle against his enemies, and towards the middle of 1590 he left for Frankfort, “in order to get two books printed.”