Italy xiv--The Unrighteous Martyr

By all accounts, the man had to have been that most difficult of combinations: someone who simply could not abide authority, nor those who wielded it. It's one thing, after all, to question ideas; it's another to poke a sharp stick in the eye of those who determine it is.

If Giordana Bruno had the wherewithal to assess himself on the basis of the age in which he lived, he might have said something to the effect of "I am a child of my day, a child of the Renaissance," because in the best Renaissance tradition, he questioned everything. To those who knew him, who listened to his ideas, or read his work, Bruno was a free-thinker. Back then, the church chose not to suffer those who, as they say, thought out of the box.

And so they hung him, upside-down and naked, his tongue fastened down tight, and then burned him at the stake, all of it very public, of course, as much out of principle as politics, because the church didn't need ideas. As one historian put it, Bruno's thought "challenges the developments of the Reformation, calls into question the truth-value of the whole of Christianity, and claims that Christ perpetrated a deceit on mankind. . ." That's for starters.

That fine statue up top, in a central market square of Rome, memorializes his life at the very spot where he met his ignominious death. There may be others, but in the Eternal City, where once upon a time (and maybe yet today) the church reigned in every possible avenue, the monument to Bruno memorializes those who insist boldly on, as the Bible itself says, kicking against the pricks. 

For Rome, the statue is almost "contemporary," raised and dedicated in 1889. Shoot, look closely and I bet you can still see the sweat stains from the workmen who put it there. In Rome, 1889 is yesterday.

For the record, the city put the monument up and thereby honored him. The Vatican, 289 years after his death strenuously opposed it. Call it town/gown.

His trial lasted seven years. It's a wonder it took that long because Bruno was not one to check his free-thinking at the door, nor fall in line for anyone or anything--church or state. To speak bluntly, for the powerful all over Europe (the man spent considerable time in France and even in Calvin's Geneva), Bruno became, wherever he went, an awful pain in the ass.

Central to his teaching was his embrace--with some peculiar refinements--of the cosmos of Copernicus, who argued that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the universe. Bruno may well have been the first to offer the idea that the stars were also separate suns, each having their own universe. 

To the church, that idea was far worse than scary. Bruno pushed it: it was altogether possible, if not probable, that there were other "earths," other beings, other animals. 

You can almost hear the crowd: "Lock him up. Lock him up."

The church is never so loveless as when it asserts dogma to destroy people. 

Last night we saw, once again, Arthur Miller's The Crucible, a tragedy of sorts that's set in 17th century New England, when righteous Calvinist thugs charged women with witchcraft when they refused to admit they'd compacted with the Devil. It's not sweet to watch or witness. 

Miller wrote the play as a response to the firebrand Joseph McCarthy, the senator from Wisconsin who flamed into prominence by claiming the U. S. State Department, if not the country itself, was being run by a red host of closet commies. 

But The Crucible is not just about 17th century New England, or cold-war America. The Crucible is about Giordana Bruno too, because it's about tolerance--and the striking lack of it.

Still today, 418 years after his death, people still leave tributes at the monument set where he died. In city that's full of martyrs, it's greatly comforting to witness that Bruno's story simply will not disappear.