Ah, the poor doomed philosopher Giordano Bruno. Whereas Galileo had been allowed to live after recanting his astronomical views that ran counter to Roman Catholic teachings, Bruno — himself a Dominican friar — was executed by the Church in 1600. His death and his willingness to buck the Catholic Church’s stranglehold on acceptable views about the universe made him a darling for 19th- and 20th- century promoters of science. Here is one of the woodcuts that made him famous and got him into trouble.
Printed in 1584, shortly after Bruno was booted out of his lecturing position at Oxford, this woodcut juxtaposes two competing ideas about the universe. At the top was the preferred position held by the Church (and later Protestant leaders as well): the earth in the center, with crystaline spheres surrounding, the planets and moon and sun fixed onto them.
Contrasting down below was the Copernican view, the heliocentric model of the universe, with the earth in orbit around the sun (and the moon revolving around us).
Most people think Bruno’s support of the Copernican model was what landed him in trouble, but it wasn’t. Giordano thought that Copernicus hadn’t gone far enough, that he was a mere “dawn, sent by the gods,” and that he was “the sun” which would reveal the true philosophy.
And Bruno’s ideas were truly out of this world, some accepted by scientists today, and others much less so: multiple suns, with multiple worlds in orbit around them? — check. An infinite universe? — yes indeedy. Pantheism and truth that could be argued by sacred geometry? — yup, even though this was not science but the territory of hermeneutic philosophy. Bruno liked to quote a line by Virgil which seemed to embody an ancient belief in a universal spirit: “totamque infusa per artist,/ mens agitat molem, et toto se corpore miscet” — “pervading its members, mind stirs the whole mass and mingles with the whole body”.
So, Bruno was no scientist, even if he accidentally got some facts correct. Nonetheless, his life was an important chapter in the history of free thought. So go ahead, talk about Bruno.
Sources: Woodcut in La Cena de le ceneri, Venice=London, 1584, 98 “Centre, circle, circumference: Giordano Bruno’s Astronomical Woodcuts,” _Journal for the History of Astronomy_, 41: 311-327, Jan 2010
