Giordano Bruno by Walter Pater
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When Hell Froze Over

Walter Pater’s little booklet on the 16th century Dominican friar is a literary gem; not just for Pater’s distinctively graceful style, but also because of its profoundly perceptive content.

I have worked among Dominicans now for over a decade. And I am still surprised almost daily by the nature of the Order and its sociological effects. One of these effects is the intellectual freedom which is not just allowed but promoted, even at the risk of treading on the conventions of orthodoxy.

Giordano Bruno was a Dominican and arguably the first modern Pentacostalist. He believed in the Spirit, not merely as an abstract participant in divine society but as the active engine of the universe.

The Spirit for Giordano was everywhere and in everything. A century before Spinoza, Giordano reached the same conclusions that would get Spinoza ejected from his Amsterdam synagogue. Giordano survived as a member of the Catholic Church longer than Spinoza did in the synagogue, but his end was a bit more abrupt. He was burned at the stake in 1600.

Pater, I think rightly, ignores Giordano’s physical fate as a distraction from his intellectual achievement. This achievement goes beyond mere ideas. Giordano’s contribution to the world wasn’t in fact any specific idea, it was his establishment of the unrestrained goodness of ideas in general. Nothing was off limits, nothing was fixed and eternal except the demand on thinking beings to think: "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."

As Pater summarises his subject: “To the eye of God, to the philosophic vision through which God sees in man, nothing is really alien from Him.” Nothing alien, not even that central eccleiastical convention of Hell. Giordano announced that there was no Hell. And if there was no Hell, there could be no real authority to compel belief or even to adjudicate the morality of behaviour.

Pater is right. The only sin recognised by Giordano is the sin of obstinance against reality: “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.”

This is a theological conclusion; but it is also a scientific charter. “The reign of the Spirit, its excellent freedom” marks the separation of thought from not just ecclesial authority but from any fixed authority whatsoever: “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.”

By destroying Hell, all restrictions on thought were removed, even those of so-called scientific method. As Pater says, “Bruno had measured the space which Bacon would fill, with room perhaps for Darwin also.” Science does not have, is not, a single ‘method’, not the novum organum of Bacon, nor the field research of Darwin. Science invents methods as freely as it invents ideas. What really matters is that there is no Hell, only obscurity when you fail.

Seems obvious now, mainly because a man died expressing it. Ironically, it is other modern Pentecostals who take issue with Bruno’s achievement. For example, the well-known American evangelist, Carlton Pearson, was declared a heretic by his fellow Pentecostal bishops in 2004 for promoting the doctrine of ‘universal reconciliation’, in simple terms, the elimination of Hell.

No ecclesiastical hierarchy wants to lose its leverage over its congregations. Fortunately their power to inflict the ultimate earthly punishment has been somewhat curtailed, else Pearson certainly would have risked Bruno’s fate.

View all my reviews