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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Giordano Bruno, by Walter Pater
+#14 in our series by Walter Pater
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+Title: Giordano Bruno
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+Author: Walter Pater
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+Release Date: July, 2003 [Etext# 4228]
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Giordano Bruno, by Walter Pater
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+
+GIORDANO BRUNO, PARIS: 1586.+
+WALTER HORATIO PATER
+
+     "Jetzo, da ich ausgewachsen,
+     Viel gelesen, viel gereist,
+     Schwillt mein Herz, und ganz von Herzen,
+     Glaub' ich an den Heilgen Geist." -- Heine+
+
+[234] IT was on the afternoon of the Feast of Pentecost that news of
+the death of Charles the Ninth went abroad promptly.  To his
+successor the day became a sweet one, to be noted unmistakably by
+various pious and other observances; and it was on a Whit-Sunday
+afternoon that curious Parisians had the opportunity of listening to
+one who, as if with some intentional new version of the sacred event
+then commemorated, had a great deal to say concerning the Spirit;
+above all, of the freedom, the independence of its operation.  The
+speaker, though understood to be a brother of the Order of St.
+Dominic, had not been present at the mass--the usual university mass,
+De Spiritu Sancto, said to-day according to the natural course of the
+season in the chapel of the Sorbonne, by the Italian Bishop of Paris.
+It was the reign of the Italians just then, a doubly refined,
+somewhat morbid, somewhat ash-coloured, Italy in France, more Italian
+still.  Men of Italian birth, "to the great suspicion of simple
+people," swarmed in Paris, already "flightier, less constant, than
+the girouettes on its steeples," and it was love for Italian fashions
+that had brought king and courtiers here to-day, with great eclat, as
+they said, frizzed and starched, in the beautiful, minutely
+considered dress of the moment, pressing the university into a
+perhaps not unmerited background; for the promised speaker, about
+whom tongues had been busy, not only in the Latin quarter, had come
+from Italy.  In an age in which all things about which Parisians much
+cared must be Italian there might be a hearing for Italian
+philosophy.  Courtiers at least would understand Italian, and this
+speaker was rumoured to possess in perfection all the curious arts of
+his native language.  And of all the kingly qualities of Henry's
+youth, the single one that had held by him was that gift of
+eloquence, which he was able also to value in others--inherited
+perhaps; for in all the contemporary and subsequent historic gossip
+about his mother, the two things certain are, that the hands credited
+with so much mysterious ill-doing were fine ones, and that she was an
+admirable speaker.
+
+Bruno himself tells us, long after he had withdrawn himself from it,
+that the monastic life promotes the freedom of the intellect by its
+[235] silence and self-concentration.  The prospect of such freedom
+sufficiently explains why a young man who, however well found in
+worldly and personal advantages, was conscious above all of great
+intellectual possessions, and of fastidious spirit also, with a
+remarkable distaste for the vulgar, should have espoused poverty,
+chastity, obedience, in a Dominican cloister.  What liberty of mind
+may really come to in such places, what daring new departures it may
+suggest to the strictly monastic temper, is exemplified by the
+dubious and dangerous mysticism of men like John of Parma and Joachim
+of Flora, reputed author of the new "Everlasting Gospel," strange
+dreamers, in a world of sanctified rhetoric, of that later
+dispensation of the spirit, in which all law must have passed away;
+or again by a recognised tendency in the great rival Order of St.
+Francis, in the so-called "spiritual" Franciscans, to understand the
+dogmatic words of faith with a difference.
+
+The three convents in which Bruno lived successively, at Naples, at
+Citta di Campagna, and finally the Minerva at Rome, developed freely,
+we may suppose, all the mystic qualities of a genius in which, from
+the first, a heady southern imagination took the lead.  But it was
+from beyond conventional bounds he would look for the sustenance, the
+fuel, of an ardour born or bred within them.  Amid such artificial
+religious stillness the air itself becomes generous in undertones.
+The vain young monk (vain of course!) would feed his vanity by
+puzzling the good, sleepy heads of the average sons of Dominic with
+his neology, putting new wine into old bottles, teaching them their
+own business--the new, higher, truer sense of the most familiar
+terms, the chapters they read, the hymns they sang, above all, as it
+happened, every word that referred to the Spirit, the reign of the
+Spirit, its excellent freedom.  He would soon pass beyond the utmost
+limits of his brethren's sympathy, beyond the largest and freest
+interpretation those words would bear, to thoughts and words on an
+altogether different plane, of which the full scope was only to be
+felt in certain old pagan writers, though approached, perhaps, at
+first, as having a kind of natural, preparatory kinship with
+Scripture itself.  The Dominicans would seem to have had well-
+stocked, liberally-selected, libraries; and this curious youth, in
+that age of restored letters, read eagerly, easily, and very soon
+came to the kernel of a difficult old author--Plotinus or Plato; to
+the purpose of thinkers older still, surviving by glimpses only in
+the books of others--Empedocles, Pythagoras, who had enjoyed the
+original divine sense of things, above all, Parmenides, that most
+ancient assertor of God's identity with the world.  The affinities,
+the unity, of the visible and the invisible, of earth and heaven, of
+all things whatever, with each other, through the consciousness, the
+person, of God the Spirit, who was at every moment of infinite time,
+in every atom of matter, at every [236] point of infinite space, ay!
+was everything in turn: that doctrine--l'antica filosofia Italiana--
+was in all its vigour there, a hardy growth out of the very heart of
+nature, interpreting itself to congenial minds with all the fulness
+of primitive utterance.  A big thought! yet suggesting, perhaps, from
+the first, in still, small, immediately practical, voice, some
+possible modification of, a freer way of taking, certain moral
+precepts: say! a primitive morality, congruous with those larger
+primitive ideas, the larger survey, the earlier, more liberal air.
+
+Returning to this ancient "pantheism," after so long a reign of a
+seemingly opposite faith, Bruno unfalteringly asserts "the vision of
+all things in God" to be the aim of all metaphysical speculation, as
+of all inquiry into nature: the Spirit of God, in countless variety
+of forms, neither above, nor, in any way, without, but intimately
+within, all things--really present, with equal integrity, in the
+sunbeam ninety millions of miles long, and the wandering drop of
+water as it evaporates therein.  The divine consciousness would have
+the same relation to the production of things, as the human
+intelligence to the production of true thoughts concerning them.
+Nay! those thoughts are themselves God in man: a loan, there, too, of
+his assisting Spirit, who, in truth, creates all things in and by his
+own contemplation of them.  For Him, as for man in proportion as man
+thinks truly, thought and, being are identical, and things existent
+only in so far as they are known.  Delighting in itself, in the sense
+of its own energy, this sleepless, capacious, fiery intelligence,
+evokes all the orders of nature, all the revolutions of history,
+cycle upon cycle, in ever new types.  And God the Spirit, the soul of
+the world, being really identical with his own soul, Bruno, as the
+universe shapes itself to his reason, his imagination, ever more and
+more articulately, shares also the divine joy in that process of the
+formation of true ideas, which is really parallel to the process of
+creation, to the evolution of things.  In a certain mystic sense,
+which some in every age of the world have understood, he, too, is
+creator, himself actually a participator in the creative function.
+And by such a philosophy, he assures us, it was his experience that
+the soul is greatly expanded: con questa filosofia l'anima, mi
+s'aggrandisce: mi se magnifica l'intelletto!
+
+For, with characteristic largeness of mind, Bruno accepted this
+theory in the whole range of its consequences.  Its more immediate
+corollary was the famous axiom of "indifference," of "the coincidence
+of contraries."  To the eye of God, to the philosophic vision through
+which God sees in man, nothing is really alien from Him.  The
+differences of things, and above all, those distinctions which
+schoolmen and priests, old or new, Roman or Reformed, had invented
+for themselves, would be lost in the length and breadth of the
+philosophic survey; nothing, in itself, either great or small; and
+matter, [237] certainly, in all its various forms, not evil but
+divine.  Could one choose or reject this or that? If God the Spirit
+had made, nay! was, all things indifferently, then, matter and
+spirit, the spirit and the flesh, heaven and earth, freedom and
+necessity, the first and the last, good and evil, would be
+superficial rather than substantial differences.  Only, were joy and
+sorrow also to be added to the list of phenomena really coincident or
+indifferent, as some intellectual kinsmen of Bruno have claimed they
+should?
+
+The Dominican brother was at no distant day to break far enough away
+from the election, the seeming "vocation" of his youth, yet would
+remain always, and under all circumstances, unmistakably a monk in
+some predominant qualities of temper.  At first it only by way of
+thought that he asserted his liberty--delightful, late-found
+privilege!--traversing, in mental journeys, that spacious circuit, as
+it broke away before him at every moment into ever-new horizons.
+Kindling thought and imagination at once, the prospect draws from him
+cries of joy, a kind of religious joy, as in some new "canticle of
+the creatures," a new monkish hymnal or antiphonary.  "Nature"
+becomes for him a sacred term.  "Conform thyself to Nature"--with
+what sincerity, what enthusiasm, what religious fervour, he enounces
+the precept to others, to himself!  Recovering.  as he fancies, a
+certain primeval sense of Deity broadcast on things, in which
+Pythagoras and other inspired theorists of early Greece had abounded,
+in his hands philosophy becomes a poem, a sacred poem, as it had been
+with them.  That Bruno himself, in "the enthusiasm of the idea," drew
+from his axiom of the "indifference of contraries" the practical
+consequence which is in very deed latent there, that he was ready to
+sacrifice to the antinomianism, which is certainly a part of its
+rigid logic, the purities of his youth for instance, there is no
+proof.  The service, the sacrifice, he is ready to bring to the great
+light that has dawned for him, which occupies his entire conscience
+with the sense of his responsibilities to it, is that of days and
+nights spent in eager study, of a plenary, disinterested utterance of
+the thoughts that arise in him, at any hazard, at the price, say! of
+martyrdom.  The work of the divine Spirit, as he conceives it,
+exalts, inebriates him, till the scientific apprehension seems to
+take the place of prayer, sacrifice, communion.  It would be a
+mistake, he holds, to attribute to the human soul capacities merely
+passive or receptive.  She, too, possesses, not less than the soul of
+the world, initiatory power, responding with the free gift of a light
+and heat that seem her own.
+
+Yet a nature so opulently endowed can hardly have been lacking in
+purely physical ardours.  His pantheistic belief that the Spirit of
+God was in all things, was not inconsistent with, might encourage, a
+keen and restless eye for the dramatic details of life and character
+for humanity in all its visible attractiveness, since there, too, in
+[238] truth, divinity lurks.  From those first fair days of early
+Greek speculation, love had occupied a large place in the conception
+of philosophy; and in after days Bruno was fond of developing, like
+Plato, like the Christian platonist, combining something of the
+peculiar temper of each, the analogy between intellectual enthusiasm
+and the flights of physical love, with an animation which shows
+clearly enough the reality of his experience in the latter.  The
+Eroici Furori, his book of books, dedicated to Philip Sidney, who
+would be no stranger to such thoughts, presents a singular blending
+of verse and prose, after the manner of Dante's Vita Nuova.  The
+supervening philosophic comment re-considers those earlier physical
+impulses which had prompted the sonnet in voluble Italian, entirely
+to the advantage of their abstract, incorporeal equivalents.  Yet if
+it is after all but a prose comment, it betrays no lack of the
+natural stuff out of which such mystic transferences must be made.
+That there is no single name of preference, no Beatrice or Laura, by
+no means proves the young man's earlier desires merely "Platonic;"
+and if the colours of love inevitably lose a little of their force
+and propriety by such deflection, the intellectual purpose as
+certainly finds its opportunity thereby, in the matter of borrowed
+fire and wings.  A kind of old, scholastic pedantry creeping back
+over the ardent youth who had thrown it off so defiantly (as if Love
+himself went in for a degree at the University) Bruno developes,
+under the mask of amorous verse, all the various stages of
+abstraction, by which, as the last step of a long ladder, the mind
+attains actual "union."  For, as with the purely religious mystics,
+union, the mystic union of souls with each other and their Lord,
+nothing less than union between the contemplator and the
+contemplated--the reality, or the sense, or at least the name of it--
+was always at hand.  Whence that instinctive tendency, if not from
+the Creator of things himself, who has doubtless prompted it in the
+physical universe, as in man?  How familiar the thought that the
+whole creation longs for God, the soul as the hart for the water-
+brooks!  To unite oneself to the infinite by breadth and lucidity of
+intellect, to enter, by that admirable faculty, into eternal life--
+this was the true vocation of the spouse, of the rightly amorous
+soul--"a filosofia e necessario amore."  There would be degrees of
+progress therein, as of course also of relapse: joys and sorrows,
+therefore.  And, in interpreting these, the philosopher, whose
+intellectual ardours have superseded religion and love, is still a
+lover and a monk.  All the influences of the convent, the heady,
+sweet incense, the pleading sounds, the sophisticated light and air,
+the exaggerated humour of gothic carvers, the thick stratum of pagan
+sentiment beneath ("Santa Maria sopra Minerva!") are indelible in
+him.  Tears, sympathies, tender inspirations, attraction, repulsion,
+dryness, zeal, desire, recollection: he finds a place for them all:
+knows them all [239] well in their unaffected simplicity, while he
+seeks the secret and secondary, or, as he fancies, the primary, form
+and purport of each.
+
+A light on actual life, or mere barren scholastic subtlety, never
+before had the pantheistic doctrine been developed with such
+completeness, never before connected with so large a sense of nature,
+so large a promise of the knowledge of it as it really is.  The eyes
+that had not been wanting to visible humanity turned with equal
+liveliness on the natural world in that region of his birth, where
+all its force and colour is twofold.  Nature is not only a thought in
+the divine mind; it is also the perpetual energy of that mind, which,
+ever identical with itself, puts forth and absorbs in turn all the
+successive forms of life, of thought, of language even.  But what
+seemed like striking transformations of matter were in truth only a
+chapter, a clause, in the great volume of the transformations of the
+Spirit.  To that mystic recognition that all is divine had succeeded
+a realisation of the largeness of the field of concrete knowledge,
+the infinite extent of all there was actually to know.  Winged,
+fortified, by this central philosophic faith, the student proceeds to
+the reading of nature, led on from point to point by manifold lights,
+which will surely strike on him, by the way, from the intelligence in
+it, speaking directly, sympathetically, to the intelligence in him.
+The earth's wonderful animation, as divined by one who anticipates by
+a whole generation the "philosophy of experience:" in that, the bold,
+flighty, pantheistic speculation became tangible matter of fact.
+Here was the needful book for man to read, the full revelation,
+the detailed story of that one universal mind, struggling, emerging,
+through shadow, substance, manifest spirit, in various orders of
+being--the veritable history of God.  And nature, together with the
+true pedigree and evolution of man also, his gradual issue from it,
+was still all to learn.  The delightful tangle of things! it would be
+the delightful task of man's thoughts to disentangle that.  Already
+Bruno had measured the space which Bacon would fill, with room
+perhaps for Darwin also.  That Deity is everywhere, like all such
+abstract propositions, is a two-edged force, depending for its
+practical effect on the mind which admits it, on the peculiar
+perspective of that mind.  To Dutch Spinosa, in the next century,
+faint, consumptive, with a hold on external things naturally faint,
+the theorem that God was in all things whatever, annihilating, their
+differences suggested a somewhat chilly withdrawal from the contact
+of all alike.  In Bruno, eager and impassioned, an Italian of the
+Italians, it awoke a constant, inextinguishable appetite for every
+form of experience--a fear, as of the one sin possible, of limiting,
+for oneself or another, that great stream flowing for thirsty souls,
+that wide pasture set ready for the hungry heart.  Considered from
+the point of view of a minute observation of nature, the Infinite
+might figure as "the infinitely little;" no blade [240] of grass
+being like another, as there was no limit to the complexities of an
+atom of earth, cell, sphere, within sphere.  But the earth itself,
+hitherto seemingly the privileged centre of a very limited universe,
+was, after all, itself but an atom in an infinite world of starry
+space, then lately displayed to the ingenuous intelligence, which
+the telescope was one day to verify to bodily eyes.  For if Bruno
+must needs look forward to the future, to Bacon, for adequate
+knowledge of the earth--the infinitely little; he looked back,
+gratefully, to another daring mind, which had already put the earth
+into its modest place, and opened the full view of the heavens.
+If God is eternal, then, the universe is infinite and worlds
+innumerable.  Yes! one might well have supposed what reason now
+demonstrated, indicating those endless spaces which sidereal science
+would gradually occupy, an echo of the creative word of God himself,
+
+"Qui innumero numero innumerorum nomina dicit."
+
+That the stars are suns: that the earth is in motion: that the earth
+is of like stuff with the stars: now the familiar knowledge of
+children, dawning on Bruno as calm assurance of reason on appeal from
+the prejudice of the eye, brought to him an inexpressibly
+exhilarating sense of enlargement of the intellectual, nay! the
+physical atmosphere.  And his consciousness of unfailing unity and
+order did not desert him in that larger survey, making the utmost one
+could ever know of the earth seem but a very little chapter in that
+endless history of God the Spirit, rejoicing so greatly in the
+admirable spectacle that it never ceases to evolve from matter new
+conditions.  The immovable earth beneath one's feet! one almost felt
+the movement, the respiration of God in it.  And yet how greatly even
+the physical eye, the sensible imagination (so to term it) was
+flattered by the theorem.  What joy in that motion, the prospect, the
+music, the music of the spheres !--he could listen to it in a
+perfection such as had never been conceded to Plato, to Pythagoras
+even.
+
+     "Veni, Creator Spiritus,
+     Mentes tuorum visita,
+     Imple superna gratia,
+     Quae tu creasti pectora!"
+
+Yes! the grand old Christian hymns, perhaps the grandest of them,
+seemed to blend themselves in the chorus, to deepen immeasurably
+under this new intention.  It is not always, or often, that men's
+abstract ideas penetrate the temperament, touch the animal spirits,
+affect conduct.  It was what they did with Bruno.  The ghastly
+spectacle of the endless material universe, infinite dust, in truth,
+starry as it may look to our terrestrial eyes--that prospect from
+which Pascal's faithful soul recoiled so painfully--induced in Bruno
+only the delightful consciousness of an ever-widening kinship [241]
+and sympathy, since every one of those infinite worlds must have its
+sympathetic inhabitants.  Scruples of conscience, if he felt such,
+might well be pushed aside for the "excellency" of such knowledge as
+this.  To shut the eyes, whether of the body or the mind, would be a
+kind of dark ingratitude; the one sin, to believe directly or
+indirectly in any absolutely dead matter anywhere, because involving
+denial of the indwelling spirit.  A free spirit, certainly, as of
+old!  Through all his pantheistic flights, from horizon to horizon,
+it was still the thought of liberty that presented itself to the
+infinite relish of this "prodigal son" of Dominic.  God the Spirit
+had made all things indifferently, with a largeness, a beneficence,
+impiously belied by any theory of restrictions, distinctions,
+absolute limitations.  Touch, see, listen, eat freely of all the
+trees of the garden of Paradise with the voice of the Lord God
+literally everywhere: here was the final counsel of perfection.  The
+world was even larger than youthful appetite, youthful capacity.  Let
+theologian and every other theorist beware how he narrowed either.
+The plurality of worlds! how petty in comparison seemed the sins, to
+purge which was the chief motive for coming to places like this
+convent, whence Bruno, with vows broken, or obsolete for him,
+presently departed.  A sonnet, expressive of the joy with which he
+returned to so much more than the liberty of ordinary men, does not
+suggest that he was driven from it.  Though he must have seemed to
+those who surely had loved so lovable a creature there to be
+departing, like the prodigal of the Gospel, into the furthest of
+possible far countries, there is no proof of harsh treatment, or even
+of an effort to detain him.
+
+It happens, of course most naturally, that those who undergo the
+shock of spiritual or intellectual change sometimes fail to recognise
+their debt to the deserted cause: how much of the heroism, or other
+high quality, of their rejection has really been the growth of what
+they reject?  Bruno, the escaped monk, is still a monk: his
+philosophy, impious as it might seem to some, a new religion.  He
+came forth well fitted by conventual influences to play upon men as
+he was played upon.  A challenge, a war-cry, an alarum; everywhere he
+seemed to be the creature of some subtly materialized spiritual
+force, like that of the old Greek prophets, like the primitive
+"enthusiasm" he was inclined to set so high, or impulsive Pentecostal
+fire.  His hunger to know, fed at first dreamily enough within the
+convent walls as he wandered over space and time an indefatigable
+reader of books, would be fed physically now by ear and eye, by large
+matter-of-fact experience, as he journeys from university to
+university; yet still, less as a teacher than a courtier, a citizen
+of the world, a knight-errant of intellectual light.  The philosophic
+need to try all things had given reasonable justification to the
+stirring desire for travel common to youth, in which, if in nothing
+else, that whole age of the [242] later Renaissance was invincibly
+young.  The theoretic recognition of that mobile spirit of the world,
+ever renewing its youth, became, sympathetically, the motive of a
+life as mobile, as ardent, as itself; of a continual journey, the
+venture and stimulus of which would be the occasion of ever new
+discoveries, of renewed conviction.
+
+The unity, the spiritual unity, of the world :--that must involve the
+alliance, the congruity, of all things with each other, great
+reinforcement of sympathy, of the teacher's personality with the
+doctrine he had to deliver, the spirit of that doctrine with the
+fashion of his utterance.  In his own case, certainly, as Bruno
+confronted his audience at Paris, himself, his theme, his language,
+were the fuel of one clear spiritual flame, which soon had hold of
+his audience also; alien, strangely alien, as it might seem from the
+speaker.  It was intimate discourse, in magnetic touch with every one
+present, with his special point of impressibility; the sort of speech
+which, consolidated into literary form as a book, would be a dialogue
+according to the true Attic genius, full of those diversions, passing
+irritations, unlooked-for appeals, in which a solicitous missionary
+finds his largest range of opportunity, and takes even dull wits
+unaware.  In Bruno, that abstract theory of the perpetual motion of
+the world was a visible person talking with you.
+
+And as the runaway Dominican was still in temper a monk, so he
+presented himself in the comely Dominican habit.  The eyes which in
+their last sad protest against stupidity would mistake, or miss
+altogether, the image of the Crucified, were to-day, for the most
+part, kindly observant eyes, registering every detail of that
+singular company, all the physiognomic lights which come by the way
+on people, and, through them, on things, the "shadows of ideas" in
+men's faces (De Umbris Idearum was the title of his discourse),
+himself pleasantly animated by them, in turn.  There was "heroic
+gaiety" there; only, as usual with gaiety, the passage of a peevish
+cloud seemed all the chillier.  Lit up, in the agitation of speaking,
+by many a harsh or scornful beam, yet always sinking, in moments of
+repose, to an expression of high-bred melancholy, it was a face that
+looked, after all, made for suffering--already half pleading, half
+defiant--as of a creature you could hurt, but to the last never shake
+a hair's breadth from its estimate of yourself.
+
+Like nature, like nature in that country of his birth, the Nolan, as
+he delighted to proclaim himself, loved so well that, born wanderer
+as he was, he must perforce return thither sooner or later, at the
+risk of life, he gave plenis manibus, but without selection, and,
+with all his contempt for the "asinine" vulgar, was not fastidious.
+His rank, unweeded eloquence, abounding in a play of words, rabbinic
+allegories, verses defiant of prosody, in the kind of erudition he
+professed to despise, with a shameless image here or there, product
+not of formal method, but of Neapolitan improvisation, was akin to
+[243] the heady wine, the sweet, coarse odours, of that fiery,
+volcanic soil, fertile in the irregularities which manifest power.
+Helping himself indifferently to all religions for rhetoric
+illustration, his preference was still for that of the soil, the old
+pagan one, the primitive Italian gods, whose names and legends haunt
+his speech, as they do the carved and pictorial work of the age,
+according to the fashion of that ornamental paganism which the
+Renaissance indulged.  To excite, to surprise, to move men's minds,
+as the volcanic earth is moved, as if in travail, and, according to
+the Socratic fancy, bring them to the birth, was the true function of
+the teacher, however unusual it might seem in an ancient university.
+Fantastic, from first to last that was the descriptive epithet; and
+the very word, carrying us to Shakespeare, reminds one how
+characteristic of the age such habit was, and that it was pre-
+eminently due to Italy.  A bookman, yet with so vivid a hold on
+people and things, the traits and tricks of the audience seemed to
+revive in him, to strike from his memory all the graphic resources of
+his old readings.  He seemed to promise some greater matter than was
+then actually exposed; himself to enjoy the fulness of a great
+outlook, the vague suggestion of which did but sustain the curiosity
+of the listeners.  And still, in hearing him speak you seemed to see
+that subtle spiritual fire to which he testified kindling from word
+to word.  What Parisians then heard was, in truth, the first fervid
+expression of all those contending apprehensions, out of which his
+written works would afterwards be compacted, with much loss of heat
+in the process.  Satiric or hybrid growths, things due to hybris,+
+insolence, insult, all that those fabled satyrs embodied--the
+volcanic South is kindly prolific of this, and Bruno abounded in
+mockeries: it was by way of protest.  So much of a Platonist, for
+Plato's genial humour he had nevertheless substituted the harsh
+laughter of Aristophanes.  Paris, teeming, beneath a very courtly
+exterior, with mordent words, in unabashed criticism of all real or
+suspected evil, provoked his utmost powers of scorn for the
+"triumphant beast," the "constellation of the Ass," shining even
+there, amid the university folk, those intellectual bankrupts of the
+Latin Quarter, who had so long passed between them gravely a
+worthless "parchment and paper" currency.  In truth, Aristotle, as
+the supplanter of Plato, was still in possession, pretending to
+determine heaven and earth by precedent, hiding the proper nature of
+things from the eyes of men.  Habit--the last word of his practical
+philosophy--indolent habit! what would this mean in the intellectual
+life, but just that sort of dead judgments which are most opposed to
+the essential freedom and quickness of the Spirit, because the mind,
+the eye, were no longer really at work in them?
+
+To Bruno, a true son of the Renaissance, in the light of those large,
+antique, pagan ideas, the difference between Rome and the Reform
+would figure, of course, as but an insignificant variation upon [244]
+some deeper, more radical antagonism between two tendencies of men's
+minds.  But what about an antagonism deeper still? between Christ and
+the world, say!  Christ and the flesh?--that so very ancient
+antagonism between good and evil?  Was there any place for
+imperfection in a world wherein the minutest atom, the lightest
+thought, could not escape from God's presence?  Who should note the
+crime, the sin, the mistake, in the operation of that eternal spirit,
+which could have made no misshapen births?  In proportion as man
+raised himself to the ampler survey of the divine work around him,
+just in that proportion did the very notion of evil disappear.  There
+were no weeds, no "tares," in the endless field.  The truly
+illuminated mind, discerning spiritually, might do what it would.
+Even under the shadow of monastic walls, that had ever been the
+precept, which the larger theory of "inspiration" had bequeathed to
+practice.  "Of all the trees of the garden thou mayst freely eat!  If
+you take up any deadly thing, it shall not hurt you!  And I think
+that I, too, have the spirit of God."
+
+Bruno, the citizen of the world, Bruno at Paris, was careful to warn
+off the vulgar from applying the decisions of philosophy beyond its
+proper speculative limits.  But a kind of secresy, an ambiguous
+atmosphere, encompassed, from the first, alike the speaker and the
+doctrine; and in that world of fluctuating and ambiguous characters,
+the alerter mind certainly, pondering on this novel reign of the
+spirit--what it might actually be--would hardly fail to find in
+Bruno's theories a method of turning poison into food, to live and
+thrive thereon; an art, surely, no less opportune in the Paris of
+that hour, intellectually or morally, than had it related to physical
+poisons.  If Bruno himself was cautious not to suggest the ethic or
+practical equivalent to his theoretic positions, there was that in
+his very manner of speech, in his rank, unweeded eloquence, which
+seemed naturally to discourage any effort at selection, any sense of
+fine difference, of nuances or proportion, in things.  The loose
+sympathies of his genius were allied to nature, nursing, with equable
+maternity of soul, good, bad, and indifferent, rather than to art,
+distinguishing, rejecting, refining.  Commission and omission; sins
+of the former surely had the preference.  And how would Paolo and
+Francesca have read the lesson?  How would this Henry the Third, and
+Margaret of the "Memoirs," and other susceptible persona then
+present, read it, especially if the opposition between practical good
+and evil traversed another distinction, to the "opposed points," the
+"fenced opposites" of which many, certainly, then present, in that
+Paris of the last of the Valois, could never by any possibility
+become "indifferent," between the precious and the base,
+aesthetically--between what was right and wrong, as matter of art?
+
+NOTES
+
+234. +Pater's article appeared in The Fortnightly Review, 1889.
+Later it was much revised and included as Chapter VII of the
+unfinished novel, Gaston de Latour.
+
+234. +From Heine's Aus der Harzreise, "Bergidylle 2": "Tannenbaum,
+mit grunen Fingern," Stanza 10.
+
+243. +E-text editor's transliteration: hybris.  Liddell and Scott
+definition: "wanton violence, arising from the pride of strength,
+passion, etc."
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg Etext of Giordano Bruno, by Walter Pater
+
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