Article - Giordano Bruno, his place in the history of philosophy and ideas, author - Yannis Fikas (Greece)

Yannis Fikas

Yannis Fikas is Founder and President of the Academy of Farsala. He is Professor of Philosophy at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens He is an author of eight books with philosophical and anthropological content.

Jfikas@otenet.gr

Giordano Bruno, his place in the history of

philosophy and ideas

Summary: The aim of this paper is to present the Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno. According to Giordano Bruno, a human being is threefold composed of a body (soma), soul (psyche) and spirit (nous). Bruno’s philosophical theory on the harmonization of the soul

with the mind (nous) and the body focuses mainly on the shaping of the psychological world through the development of imagination and memory. Bruno’s works deal with the “Art of Memory”, which elevates and gradually extends the consciousness of the disciple of wisdom from the earthly world to the extending boundaries of the starry sky. Bruno supports that humans who process the images of ideas through their imagination can approach the same archetypical ideas found within the divine mind and then embody them without distortions to the material world. These images constitute the best guides to the soul, because

they elevate consciousness and facilitate its entry and access to the archetypical ideas found in the universal intellect. As these images dim the light, they prepare the eyes of the soul which are still wrapped in fog to gradually face the very same ideas.

 Keywords: Philosophy, Renaissance, harmony of the opposites, unity, logic, imagination, memory, psychological world, Heroic Frenzies, individual freedom. 

The Renaissance

The characteristics of the historical period called The Renaissance appear in Italy in the 14 th century AD and last until the16th century AD. Within this period a total renewal of philosophy, science, art and civilization takes place. Renaissance ideas are not theocentric like the ones in the Middle Ages, but focus mainly on humans, city and nature. A new society characterized by mobility and conquest succeeds the static society of the Middle Ages with the strict secular and religious authority. The Renaissance human is able to arrange his life, shape his future and change his environment through the development of his personal virtues. The representatives of that new Renaissance spirit wanted to overcome the contradictions and conflicts of their times in order to create a better world. That need for change urged them to seek for ideals in the classical world. Literature, arts, science, politics and philosophy were cultivated. The ancient intellect returned through philosophy; while myths and symbols reappeared through art and mainly painting.

 Representatives of the Renaissance

The main Renaissance representatives on philosophy were:

Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) and Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639). With regard to art, they were Botticcelli (1445-1510), Leonardo Da

Vinci (1452-1519), Raphael (1483-1520), Michelangelο (1475-1564), Tiziano (1490-1576), Tintoretto (1518-1594) and Paolo Veronese (1528-1588). The artist and the philosopher, genuine representatives of the Renaissance spirit, harmonize the antitheses between logic and imagination, philosophy and religion, individual freedom and secular order.

The Universe

Giordano Bruno believed that God is the one to move humans, gods move the celestial bodies and the stars, the stars move the spirits of nature, which in their turn form the compounds of the natural elements; these elements activate the senses, the senses influence the soul and the soul influences the whole living creature. This is the downward course of the scale. However, the living creature escapes through the senses to the compounds, through the compounds to the various elements and through them to the spirits that inhabit them, through the spirits to the stars, through the stars to gods and through gods to the admiration of the unique, simplest, supreme and absolute Being. In this way, the descent from God to the living creature through

the world takes place and the living creature’s ascent to God through the world. Moreover, Giordano Bruno believed that the earth is a living entity who “senses” in a different way from that of a human. They had observed that the rotary movement of the Earth around the sun in vigorates its energy and vitality as well as the beings living in it. During the vernal equinox, the autumnal and summer energies refresh themselves and so does the natural vitality of the planet. During the autumnal equinox, the energies that help in the development of the psychological and the mental world are refreshed, while the natural vitality on the planet decreases.1

1 Ι.ΦΊΚΑ, Μονοπάτια Τέχνης και Σοφίας Αθήνα, Νίκας, 2010, σ. 10.

The Harmonization of Opposites

                 Giordano Bruno believed that harmony appears wherever there are opposites. In his work The expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, he mentions typical examples which verify this theory. “Thereby work pleases us only after rest and rest pleases us only after work. People who live in the countryside desire to go to the city and those who live in cities desire to go to the countryside for rest and holidays. Walking satisfies the person who rested and the one who has walked a lot finds rest relieving. Thus, the transition from the one extreme to the other, this motion through intermediary situations is what pleases us more. The person who wants to overcome a great obstacle which is in front of him should take several steps backwards”. Bruno used opposite pairs in his work The Ash Wednesday Supper as well, to convey the duality of human nature: “grand and small, cheerful and angry, bitter and happy, tragic and comical, heroic and dejected, teacher and student, believer and unbeliever, facile and ponderous, cringing and liberal, apish and dignified, a sophist with Aristotle, a philosopher with Pythagoras, smiling with Democritus, crying with Heraclitus”.2 

The Heart and the Mind

              In his work The Ash Wednesday Supper, Giordano Bruno

encourages the cultivation of philosophy which harmonizes the heart with the mind, the power with wisdom. In a poetic manner he presents the King of France, Henry III, as a model human who has walked the road to heart. Bruno actually mentions that Henry III is the king “who from the most generous heart of Europe makes the farthest corners of the world resound with the voice of his fame. He, when trembling with anger as a lion in a deep cave, casts fright and deadly fear on the (2 Bruno, G., The Ash Wednesday Supper, S. L. Jaki, The Hague, Mouton, 1975, pp. 43-44.)

other powerful predators of these forests; and when he retires and takes rest, he sends out such a blaze from a liberal and kindly soul, which kindles the neighboring tropics, warms the icy Great Bear, and dissipates the rigor of the arctic desert which revolves under the eternal custody of the fiery Bootes. VALE”.3

          In the same work, Bruno praises the human who cultivated the divine mind, the voice of silence, who whispers to the inner ears of the human and who encourages him to rise upwards to the spiritual world. Bruno states, “Now here is he who has pierced the air, penetrated the sky, toured the realm of stars, traversed the boundaries of the world, dissipated the fictitious walls of the first, eighth, ninth, tenth spheres, and whatever else might have been attached to these by the devices of vain mathematicians and by the blind vision of popular philosophers. Thus aided by the fullness of sense and reason, lie opened with the key of most industrious inquiry those enclosures of truth that can be opened to us at all, by presenting naked the shrouded and veiled nature; he gave eyes to moles, illumined the blind who cannot fix their eyes and admire their own images in so many mirrors which surround them from every side. He untied the tongue of the mute who do not know [how to] and did not dare to express their intricate sentiments. He restored strength to the lame who were unable to make that progress in spirit which the ignoble and dissolvable compound [body] cannot make. He provided them with no less a presence [vantage point] than if they were the very inhabitants of the sun, of the moon, and of other nomadic [wandering] stars [planets]. He showed how similar or dissimilar, greater or worse [smaller] are those bodies [stars, planets] which we see afar, compared with that [earth] which is right here and to which we are united. And he opened their eyes to see this deity, this mother of ours, which on her back feeds them and nourishes them after she has produced them from her bosom into which she always gathers them again -- who is not to be considered a body without a body without soul and life”.4

(3 Bruno, G., The Ash Wednesday Supper, S. L. Jaki, The Hague, Mouton, 1975, p. 22.)

Beauty Love and Eudaimonia

                      Giordano Bruno, like Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, believed that beauty is the manifestation of a radiant beam, which shines through the senses on the soul and the mind of humans and activates imagination. Beauty prepares the soul to fulfill an ascending

course towards wisdom in the same way that aesthetics leads to ethics. The natural beauty is the step that leads humans to love, which characterizes the psychological world, and ultimately, to eudaimonia, which characterizes the spiritual world. For Renaissance philosophers, beauty is the way through which artists and mainly painters and poets try to express the truth and captivate a beam of light which will turn the profane work into sacred work. 

Imagination and Memory

Imagination

     For Giordano Bruno, humanity is a link of an evolutionary chain which starts with the mineral world, the plant and animal world and the human world and continues with heroes and gods. Bruno believed that

the human soul needs molding and cultivation so that it can harmonize with the mind and the body. Bruno' s philosophical theory on the harmonization of the soul with the mind and the body focuses mainly on the shaping of the

psychological world through the development of imagination, memory, attention and concentration. His works De Umbris Idearum, Cantus Circaeus, Explicatio Ttriginta Sigillorum, Sigillus Sigillorum, Lampas Triginta Statuarum, De Imaginum, Signorum, et Idearum Compositione

(4 Bruno, G., The Ash Wednesday Supper, S. L. Jaki, The Hague, Mouton, 1975, p. 61.)

deal with the art of memory and encourage humans to mold their psychological world in order to approach the spiritual one. Bruno supported that humans who process the images of ideas

through their imagination can approach the same archetypical ideas found within the divine mind and then embody them without distortions to the material world. These images constitute the best guides to the soul, because they elevate consciousness and facilitate its entry and

access to the archetypical ideas found in the universal intellect. As these images dim the light, they prepare the eyes of the soul which are still wrapped in fog to gradually face the very same ideas. According to Bruno, the archetypical image of the god Hermes can be depicted

with the image of a statue of the god, like the Hermes of Praxiteles, imprinted on memory and moreover, interrelated with the quality characteristics of the god Hermes, such as the magic perception, eloquence, skillfulness etc. The archetypical image of Aphrodite can be depicted with the image of a statue of the goddess, like the Aphrodite of Milos, imprinted on memory and interrelated with the quality characteristics of the goddess Aphrodite, which are beauty, love, abundance.5

Memory

             Bruno believed that knowledge is the mere recollection of ideas and identified three types of memory: the natural memory which deals with the world of the body, the psychological one dealing with the world of the soul and the superior memory with the world of the mind. Bruno believed that when imprinted on the psychological memory the images of the sensory objects activate memory; and hence, a bridge is built between the spiritual and the material world. The Heroic Frenzies. Images and Symbols. 

(5 Ι.ΦΊΚΑ, Οι Μύθοι του αρχαίου κόσμου, Αθήνα, Μιχάλης Σιδέρης, 2019, σσ. 153-154.)

In his work Gli Eroici Furori Bruno refers to the myth of Actaeon, the young hunter who dared to face the goddess Diana swimming naked in the clean waters of a spring. The goddess punished him by turning him into a stag, which was devoured by his own blood hounds. While in all kinds of hunt the hunt recaptures his prey, in the hunt of spiritual purity symbolized by the naked Diana, the hunter himself is captured. The stag symbolizes the sacred and pure ideals, while Actaeon’s dogs symbolize the mental judgment and will which help him to pass from the natural world, the world of multiplicity, to the spiritual world, the world of truth and unity.6 In the same work, Bruno mentions a triad of perfections, which are truth, wisdom and intellect. In humans, these three notions are expressed as will, love and intellect. The symbolic images that Bruno uses to depict these three perfections are the images of the captain, phoenix and blacksmith respectively. The captain is the human will, which, as Bruno mentions, stands on the stern of the soul with the small wheel of logic and intellect governing the wishes of the inferior human powers. With the clarion sound the captain calls all the warriors, all the active powers of humans to fight the inferior passive ones, the ones of natural limitations. According to Bruno, the phoenix symbolizes the active intellect, the spiritual one, with which the hero senses the divine things and unites himself with the universe.7 The blacksmith expresses the human altruistic intellect, which intervenes with the anvil, the hammer and the fire and purifies the inferior intellect, which Bruno likens to the Hephaestus furnace where ideas are forged.8

The “Art of Memory” the conversion of man into God.

( 6 G. BRUNO, Gli Eroici Furori, Biblioteca Rara, Milano, Puplicata da G. Daelli, p. 33· Ι.ΦΊΚΑ, Τζιορντάνο Μπρούνο, η θέση του στην ιστορία της φιλοσοφίας και των ιδεών, Αθήνα, Νίκας, 2012, σσ.

114-121. Ι.ΦΊΚΑ, Οι Μύθοι του αρχαίου κόσμου, Αθήνα, Μιχάλης Σιδέρης, 2019, σ. 155.

7 G. BRUNO, Gli Eroici Furori, Biblioteca Rara, Milano, Puplicata da G. Daelli, p. 106.

8 G. BRUNO, Gli Eroici Furori, Biblioteca Rara, Milano,Puplicata da G. Daelli, p. 117.)

             The correspondence of virtues with constellations in the work The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast constitutes a mnemonic system

by Bruno, which elevates and gradually extends the consciousness of the disciple of wisdom from the earthly world to the extending boundaries of the starry sky. In the same work there is a second mnemonic system in which Bruno correlates the various parts of the human body, of the microcosm, which is a miniature of the macrocosm, with virtues. “I say, indeed, that their heads should contain a bridled imagination, cautious thinking, and a retentive memory. Their foreheads should show a quick apprehension, their eyes, prudence, their noses, sagacity, and their ears, attention. There should be truth on their tongues, sincerity in their breasts, and well directed affections in their hearts. In their shoulders they should show patience, in their backs, forgiveness of wrongs received, in their stomachs, discretion, in their belies, temperance, in their breasts, continence, in their legs, constancy, and in the soles of their feet rectitude. In their left hands, they should hold the Pentateuch of Decrees; in their right hands, discursive Reason, informative Knowledge, regulating Justice, governing Authority, and executive Power”9. In a third pursuance of the mnemonic system in his work Lampas Triginta Statuarum10, Bruno presents the images of gods and their quality characteristics found both in Bruno’s work and the orphic hymns. According to Bruno, the frequent contact of the soul with the gods arouses within the philosopher and the artist the desire to acquire the quality characteristics of gods.11 

         In his work entitled Sigillus Sigillorum1 2

, Bruno provides

(9 G., Bruno, Τhe Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, trans. Α. Imerti, University of

Nebraska Press, 1992, p.92. 10 J. Bruni, Lampas triginta statuarum, Opera latine concripta, F. Tocco et H. Vitelli, Faksmile-

Neudruck der Ausgabe von Fiorentino, Tocco und Anderen, Neapel und Florenz, 1879-91, pp. 9-37.

11 Ι.ΦΊΚΑ, Οι Μύθοι του αρχαίου κόσμου, Αθήνα, Μιχάλης Σιδέρης, 2019, σσ. 158-161.)

supplementary instructions on the constant and laborious effort

required in parallel with memory practice so that the human shapes his

psychological world and approaches his spiritual one. Therefore, the

first important factor, of the fifteen that Bruno highlights, is the

influence of the environment. In fact, he initially suggests a

“renunciation” of the environment with the intention of spiritual

perfection. Other factors are: the challenges that cause pain but perfect

the human being; the recognition of the soul world; the preoccupation

with spiritual activities and the parallel reduction in sleep time; the

supremacy of the intellect over the body; the ascertainment that the

intellect leads an independent life from the body; Plato’s belief that the

forms of objects exist within the soul world, the intellect, before they

manifest themselves in the world; the realization that there is a

relation between the external and internal world; the influence of the

emotional world on the soul and therefore, the need for strong self- control; the influence of the soul on the environment; the dissociation

from the animal habits; the avoidance of emotions, such as sadness, melancholy and fantasy, which cause great turmoil in the soul; the

conviction that logic is not enough to seek the truth; the bad mood that

sets the conditions for deficiency in philosophical attitude; and the

philosophy that elevates humans.13

Conclusion Towards a new Renaissance

The rediscovery of the Renaissance philosophy will help man, to be aware of his potentials, to identify his own core values, to acquire a vital and integrated sense of self, to become better and wiser citizen that will contribute to the common good, to acquire a holistic vision of

(12 J. BRUNI, Sigillus Sigillorum, Opera latine concripta, F. Tocco et H. Vitelli, Faksmile - Neudruck

der Ausgabe von Fiorentino, Tocco und Anderen, Neapel und Florenz 1879-91, pp. 181-187.

13 Ι.ΦΊΚΑ, Τζιορντάνο Μπρούνο, η θέση του στην ιστορία της φιλοσοφίας και των ιδεών, Αθήνα, Νίκας,

2012, σσ. 114-121.)

the universe, to rediscover nature, create new relationships with it and

develop a consciousness of responsibility and accountability towards nature.

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