Abstract
EARLY in 1600 Giordano Bruno went to the stake in the cause of free speech and thought. The ashes of martyrdom have ere now kept evergreen even reputations and names that were otherwise of little worth. But Bruno's life and work are alike memorable. Few, however, of those to whom the romantic wander-years and heroic death appeal, have leisure and training to grapple with the technical Latin and hard Italian of the versatile and stormy Nolan. The tercentenary, therefore, of Bruno's tragedy can have no memorial more fitting than Prof. Alois Riehl's “Giordano Bruno.” Would that it were in English Dating originally 1889, Prof. Riehl's brochure has undergone revision thorough and throughout. It puts Bruno in his right setting of time and place. It resumes, with brevity and lucidity quite noteworthy, the principles for which Brimo gave his life. Bruno originated neither Copernican physics nor pantheist metaphysics. His debt to one close forerunner at least is not small. Yet in taking the new astronomy as a scientific basis, and only therefrom passing to such metaphysical conceptions as infinity and unity, while reaching out ultimately to a monistic principle, it is Bruno and not his precursors, physicist and revived neoplatonist, that may claim to father modern naturalism. Prof. Riehl characterises the system as “theocentric,” since nature is, for Bruno, deus in rebus. Bruno is said to have met the process which resulted in his condemnation by equivocating between what he accepted secundum fidem and what he affirmed secundum rationem. At any rate, whatever human weakness he may have shown, he lost no opportunity of reaffirming his principles. He recanted nothing. He could have saved himself would he but have prostituted his pen to apologetics on behalf of the reigning orthodoxy. He chose not propter vitam vivendi perdere causas. And he died a knight-errant of the free spirit.
Giordano Bruno, zur erinnerung an den 17 Februar, 1600.
Von Alois Riehl. Zweite neu bearbeitete Auflage. Pp. iv + 56. (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1900.)
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B., H. Giordano Bruno, zur erinnerung an den 17 Februar, 1600. Nature 62, 77 (1900). https://doi.org/10.1038/062077b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/062077b0