Bruno Nolano
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Bruno challenged all dogmatism, including that of the Copernican cosmology, the main tenets of which, however, he upheld. He believed that our perception of the world is relative to the position in space and time from which we view it and that there are as many possible modes of viewing the world as there are possible positions. Therefore we cannot postulate absolute truth or any limit to the progress of knowledge. He pictured the world as composed of individual elements of being, governed by fixed laws of relationship. These elements, called monads, were ultimate and irreducible and were based on a pantheistic infinite principle, or cause, or Deity, manifest in us and in all the world. Bruno’s influence on later philosophy, especially that of Spinoza and Leibniz, was profound. From The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Copyright © 2003 Columbia University Press.
In Rome he was imprisoned in the Castel Sant' Angelo for six years before he was tried. He tried in vain to obtain an audience with Pope Clement VIII, hoping to make peace with the Church through a partial recantation. His trial, when it finally occurred was overseen by the inquisitor, Cardinal Saint Robert Bellarmine, who demanded a full recantation, which Bruno refused. Consequently, he was declared a heretic and handed over to secular authorities on January 8, 1600 and burned at the stake on February 17 1600 in Campo de' Fiori, a popular Roman square. As a demonstration of mercy, the clerical authorities placed a bag of gunpowder around his neck before they set the fire, to spare Bruno, bringing his suffering to an end quickly. The authorities also nailed his tongue to his jaw to stop him from speaking. Since 1889, there has been a monument to Bruno on the site of his execution.
The world of science has long claimed Bruno as a martyr. Still, while his Copernicanism was undoubtedly a factor in his excommunication and execution, his theological beliefs were also sufficiently unorthodox to earn him condemnation, and probably played a larger role in the matter than his cosmology. Bruno denied the doctrine of the Trinity and embraced a sort of pantheistic animism. The Catholic church put him on trial for docetism (the doctrine that Jesus Christ did not actually have a physical body and that his physical presence was an illusion).
At his trial, he said: Perhaps you, my judges, pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it. All his works were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1603. Four hundred years after his execution, official expression of "profound sorrow" and acknowledgement of error at Bruno's condemnation to death was made, during the papacy of John Paul II. From Wikipedia.
Reading
De la causa, principio, et uno (1584, tr. The Infinite in Giordano Bruno, 1950)
De l’infinito, universo et mondi (1584)
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Commentaries
See P. H. Michel, The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno (tr. 1973); S. Drake, Copernicus—Philosophy and Science: Bruno—Kepler—Galileo (1973); F. A. Yates, Lull and Bruno (1982).