Source: Wikimedia Commons
Heresy. S.J. Parris. Doubleday, 2010. 448 pages.
I want to talk not so much about the historical novel by S.J. Parris as about Giordano Bruno and why he deserves our attention 424 years after his death (burned at the stake for heresy).
I’ll quote from the Wikipedia article:
“He is known for his cosmological theories, which conceptually extended to include the then-novel Copernican model. He practiced Hermeticism and gave a mystical stance to exploring the universe. He proposed that the stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets (exoplanets), and he raised the possibility that these planets might foster life of their own, a cosmological position known as cosmic pluralism. He also insisted that the universe is infinite and could have no center.
“Bruno was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on charges of denial of several core Catholic doctrines, including eternal damnation, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and transubstantiation. Bruno’s pantheism was not taken lightly by the church, nor was his teaching of metempsychosis regarding the reincarnation of the soul. The Inquisition found him guilty, and he was burned alive at the stake in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori in 1600.”
Giordano Bruno’s life shows us how some people (a tiny minority, usually) can be right about many things many years before it can be proven. And then there is the ugly corollary: Some people can be wrong about many things (a huge majority, usually) many years after those things have been proven false. It’s important to keep in mind that, though Bruno had a scientific mind, it was philosophy, rather than science, that he was doing with his theories. Bruno’s philosophy, though, was grounded in the best science of his time.
Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres had been published in 1543. Copernicus, who used telescopes and mathematics, was doing science. Even though it was philosophy that Bruno was concerned with, he was not just wildly speculating. The reasoning involved in forming scientific hypotheses is always disciplined by the rigors of philosophy. This is as true today as it was in Bruno’s time. Today’s cosmological theories come from a collaboration between scientists and philosophers of science.
The history of ignorance is as horrifying as the history of knowledge is inspiring. From the Wikipedia article on Bruno:
“The Vatican has published few official statements about Bruno’s trial and execution. In 1942, Cardinal Giovanni Mercati, who discovered a number of lost documents relating to Bruno’s trial, stated that the Church was perfectly justified in condemning him. On the 400th anniversary of Bruno’s death, in 2000, Cardinal Angelo Sodano declared Bruno’s death to be a “sad episode” but, despite his regret, he defended Bruno’s prosecutors, maintaining that the Inquisitors “had the desire to serve freedom and promote the common good and did everything possible to save his life.” In the same year, Pope John Paul II made a general apology for “the use of violence that some have committed in the service of truth.”
The service of truth?? Even today, popes still don’t get it. It was its monopoly on dogma that the church was serving.
But about the novel. S.J. Parris has written a series of seven novels about Giordano Bruno. They’re mystery novels. The first in the series, Heresy, is set in Oxford in 1583. (Elizabeth I had come to the throne in 1558.) I had just finished reading all seven of C.J. Sansom’s Shardlake novels, the last of which is set in 1549. The Shardlake novels left me very much in the mood for staying in that period. S.J. Parris is a pseudonym for Stephanie Jane Merritt.
I have not been able to find much material on how Stephanie Merritt did the research for her Bruno novels. I doubt that she was as thorough as Sansom was with his Shardlake novels. But there is this quote from Merritt on her web site:
“At university I specialised in medieval and Renaissance literature and got to know the writers of the Tudor period, which was how I discovered Bruno’s story. For a while I was tempted to go into academia in that area, so I think I always had a desire to write about that era in some form. But I’m glad I found a way back to it through fiction — it’s a lot more fun having the freedom to imagine myself into that world.”
Bruno was right about a great many things. Even his panpsychism is taken entirely seriously by cosmologists today, though some contemporary philosophers argue that it was pandeism that Bruno advocated rather than panpsychism.
Thanks David, for that bit of history.
I wonder if education in Europe (Italy, etc.) teaches this bit of history. Similarly, here in the U.S. we hid reality of what early life was like to indigenous people, doctors, astronomers, philosophers.
Those fellas of the inquisition were some nasty MAGA’s of their time, similar to the Nazi, I would suppose.
My mother was of the Catholic Church, believed in all they said – forced her children to attend, while my Father just dropped us off in-front of the church. Later in life we used to tease her – how she made us say the rosary daily listening to some priest on the radio (circa 1940-1955) while kneeling on #2 pencils to pay for our sins (what child of 10, 12 14, etc. has sinned?)
Hi Henry: I can only imagine what it must have been like to have been a Catholic child during the age of True Belief. For me, it was Protestant. Everyone where I grew up was either a Southern Baptist or a Methodist (though the occasional Quaker occurred, or, in the cities, Presbyterians and Moravians). I honestly don’t know if people actually believed that stuff. Some of them thought they did. Fear of hell was the biggest biggie, I think. The saddest thing was, the music was terrible in the Baptist church. The best thing was that there was still the occasional church supper back then.