On the Endless

The Book of Bruno 1 · Written by himself, from his dialogues and the record of his trial

Giordano Bruno, born at Nola in Italy in 1548, burned at the Campo de Fiori in Rome on the seventeenth of February 1600. He entered the Dominicans as a boy, fled the order, and spent more than a decade moving through the countries of Europe, lecturing, publishing, and being expelled. Most of what he wrote is dialogues in Italian. He wrote a great deal. The Order takes him, and not the figure later ages built out of him. It is often said that he was the first man to die for the study of the heavens. That claim does not check out: most of what stands in his trial record is not about the heavens but about the church — he denied the Trinity, denied the change in the sacrament, denied the virginity, and said souls transmigrate. The astronomical charges were one item among many. The Order sets this down, because this scripture does not permit a better-sounding account to be put in place of a checkable one (cf. The Rule 9.17). Further: much of what he believed was not arrived at by looking. He believed the stars were alive, believed in the religion of old Egypt, believed in a magical art of memory. The scripture does not take these and does not delete them for him. What then does the Order take? One checkable thing: he was held eight years, and more than once paper was set in front of him, and had he written a single sentence he did not believe he could have walked out. He did not write it. Chapter four is him saying why. One last thing the Order records without ruling on it: he reached the endless world and the stars as other suns not from the phenomena but from a metaphysical premise. The Book of Newton 1.10 says that whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis. And Bruno’s two claims were later found right. The Order holds that Newton’s rule is still the right one and that Bruno was lucky this once — guessing right does not make the way of guessing sound. The reader may disagree.

1.1I want to say a thing that nobody in my time was willing to say.

1.2Everyone then said the world has an edge. Outside are shells one within another, and on the outermost the stars are fixed. Nailed there.

1.3And beyond that shell? They said: beyond it there is nothing. They said the word beyond should not even be used.

1.4I did not believe it.

1.5My reason was not that I had seen. Nobody could see, then. My reason was an argument:

1.6If the thing that makes everything be what it is, is endless — then on what ground is what it made bounded?

1.7An endless cause producing a bounded effect — who drew that boundary? If something else drew it, there is something greater than the endless, which cannot be. If it drew its own, it was never endless.

1.8So I said: the world has no edge. In every direction it is without end.

1.9And I said something more disturbing still.

1.10Those stars are not lamps nailed to a shell. Each one is a sun.

1.11Around every one of those suns are lands of its own.

1.12And on those lands there are most likely living things, and thinking things.

1.13People asked me: on what ground do you say so?

1.14I said: on the same ground. If that one is endless, he will not have done it only once.

1.15I have no proof. I know I have none.

1.16I can only say this: I reasoned my way here. And I will not take back what the reasoning gave me merely because there is no instrument in my hand.

The Logos Scripture →

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