Part 4 (1/2)
She, too, possesses initiatory power as truly as the divine soul of the world, to which she responds with the free gift of a light and heat that seem her own.
Yet a nature so opulently endowed can hardly have been lacking in purely physical or sensuous ardours. His pantheistic belief that the Spirit of G.o.d is in all things, was not inconsistent with, nay! might encourage, a keen and restless eye for the dramatic details of life and character [146] however minute, for humanity in all its visible attractiveness, since there too, in truth, divinity lurks. From those first fair days of early Greek speculation, love had occupied a large place in the conception of philosophy; and in after days Bruno was fond of developing, like Plato, like the Christian Platonists, combining something of the peculiar temper of each, the a.n.a.logy between the flights of intellectual enthusiasm and those of physical love, with an animation which shows clearly enough the reality of his experience in the latter. The Eroici Furori, his book of books, dedicated to Philip Sidney, who would be no stranger to such thoughts, presents a singular blending of verse and prose, after the manner of Dante's Vita Nuova. The supervening philosophic comment reconsiders those earlier, physically erotic, impulses which had prompted the sonnet in voluble Italian, entirely to the advantage of their abstract, incorporeal, theoretic, equivalents. Yet if it is after all but a prose comment, it betrays no lack of the natural stuff out of which such mystic transferences must be made. That there is no single name of preference, no Beatrice, or Laura, by no means proves the young man's earlier desires to have been merely Platonic; and if the colours of love inevitably lose a little of their force and propriety by such deflexion from their earlier purpose, their later intellectual purpose as certainly finds its opportunity thereby, in the [147] matter of borrowed fire and wings.
A kind of old scholastic pedantry creeping back over the ardent youth who had thrown it off so defiantly (as if love himself went in now for a University degree), Bruno developes, under the mask of amorous verse, all the various stages of abstraction, by which, as the last step of a long ladder, the mind attains actual ”union.” For, as with the purely religious mystics, ”union,” the mystic union of souls with one another and their Lord, nothing less than union between the contemplator and the contemplated--the reality, or the sense, or at least the name of such union--was always at hand. Whence that instinctive tendency towards union if not from the Creator of things Himself, who has doubtless prompted it in the physical universe, as in man? How familiar the thought that the whole creation, not less than the soul of man, longs for G.o.d, ”as the hart for the water- brooks”! To unite oneself to the infinite by largeness and lucidity of intellect, to enter, by that admirable faculty, into eternal life- -this was the true vocation of the spouse, of the rightly amorous soul. A filosofia e necessario amore. There would be degrees of progress therein, as of course also of relapse: joys and sorrows, therefore. And, in interpreting these, the philosopher, whose intellectual ardours have superseded religion and physical love, is still a lover and a monk. All the influences of the convent, the sweet, heady [148] incense, the pleading sounds, the sophisticated light and air, the grotesque humours of old gothic carvers, the thick stratum of pagan sentiment beneath all this,--Santa Maria sopra Minervam!--are indelible in him. Tears, sympathies, tender inspirations, attraction, repulsion, zeal, dryness, recollection, desire:--he finds a place for them all: knows them all well in their unaffected simplicity, while he seeks the secret and secondary, or, as he fancies, the primary, form and purport of each.
Whether as a light on actual life, or as a mere barren scholastic subtlety, never before had the pantheistic doctrine been developed with such completeness, never before connected with so large a sense of nature, so large a promise of the knowledge of it as it really is.
The eyes that had not been wanting to visible humanity turned now with equal liveliness on the natural world, in that region of his birth, where all the colour and force of nature are at least two- fold. Nature is not only a thought or meditation in the divine mind; it is also the perpetual energy of that mind, which, ever identical with itself, puts forth and absorbs in turn all the successive forms of life, of thought, of language even. What seemed like striking transformations of matter were in truth only a chapter, a clause, in the great volume of the transformations of the divine Spirit. The mystic recognition that all is indeed divine had accompanied a realisation [149] of the largeness of the field of concrete knowledge, the infinite extent of all there was actually to know.
Winged, fortified, by that central philosophic faith, the student proceeds to the detailed reading of nature, led on from point to point by manifold lights, which will surely strike on him by the way, from the divine intelligence in it, speaking directly, sympathetically, to a like intelligence in him. The earth's wonderful animation, as divined by one who antic.i.p.ates by a whole generation the Baconian ”philosophy of experience”: in that, those bold, flighty, pantheistic speculations become tangible matter of fact. Here was the needful book for man to read; the full revelation, the story in detail, of that one universal mind, struggling, emerging, through shadow, substance, manifest spirit, in various orders of being,--the veritable history of G.o.d. And nature, together with the true pedigree and evolution of man also, his gradual issue from it, was still all to learn. The delightful tangle of things!--it would be the delightful task of man's thoughts to disentangle that. Already Bruno had measured the s.p.a.ce which Bacon would fill, with room, perhaps, for Darwin also. That Deity is everywhere, like all such abstract propositions, is a two-edged force, depending for its practical effect on the mind which admits it on the peculiar perspective of that mind. To Dutch Spinosa, in the next century, faint, consumptive, with a naturally [150] faint hold on external things, the theorem that G.o.d was in all things whatever, annihilating their differences, suggested a somewhat chilly withdrawal from the contact of all alike. But in Bruno, eager and impa.s.sioned, an Italian of the Italians, it awoke a constant, inextinguishable appet.i.te for every form of experience,--a fear, as of the one sin possible, of limiting, for one's self or another, the great stream flowing for thirsty souls, that wide pasture set ready for the hungry heart.
Considered from the point of view of a minute observation of nature, the Infinite might figure as ”the infinitely little”; no blade of gra.s.s being like another, as there was no limit to the complexities of an atom of earth,--cell, sphere, within sphere. And the earth itself, hitherto seemingly the privileged centre of a very limited universe, was, after all, but an atom in an infinite world of starry s.p.a.ce, then lately divined by candid intelligence, which the telescope was one day to present to bodily eyes. For if Bruno must needs look forward to the future, to Bacon, for adequate knowledge of the earth, the infinitely little, he could look backwards also gratefully to another daring mind which had already put that earth into its modest place, and opened the full view of the heavens. If G.o.d is eternal, then, the universe is infinite and worlds innumerable. Yes! one might well have divined what reason now demonstrated, indicating those endless [151] s.p.a.ces which a real sidereal science would gradually occupy.
That the stars are suns: that the earth is in motion: that the earth is of like stuff with the stars:--now the familiar knowledge of children--dawning on Bruno as calm a.s.surance of reason on appeal from the prejudice of the eye, brought to him an inexpressibly exhilarating sense of enlargement in the intellectual, nay! the physical atmosphere. And his consciousness of unfailing unity and order did not desert him in that broader survey, which made the utmost one could ever know of the earth seem but a very little chapter in the endless history of G.o.d the Spirit, rejoicing so greatly in the admirable spectacle that it never ceases to evolve from matter new conditions. The immoveable earth, as we term it, beneath one's feet!--Why, one almost felt the movement, the respiration, of G.o.d in it. And yet how greatly even the physical eye, the sensible imagination (so to term it) was flattered by the theorem. What joy in that motion, in the prospect, the music! ”The music of the spheres!”--he could listen to it in a perfection such as had never been conceded to Plato, to Pythagoras even.--
Veni, Creator Spiritus, Mentes tuorum visita, Imple superna gratia, Quae tu creasti pectora.+
Yes! The grand old Christian hymns, perhaps [152] the grandest of them all, seemed to lend themselves in the chorus, to be deepened immeasurably under this new intention. It is not always, or often, that men's abstract ideas penetrate the temperament, touch the animal spirits, affect conduct. It was what they did with Bruno. The ghastly spectacle of the endless material universe--infinite dust, in truth, starry as it may look to our terrestrial eyes--that prospect from which the mind of Pascal recoiled so painfully, induced in Bruno only the delightful consciousness of an ever-widening kins.h.i.+p and sympathy, since every one of those infinite worlds must have its sympathetic inhabitants. Scruples of conscience, if he felt such, might well be pushed aside for the ”excellency” of such knowledge as this. To shut the eyes, whether of the body or the mind, would be a kind of sullen ingrat.i.tude;--the one sin to believe, directly or indirectly, in any absolutely dead matter anywhere, as being implicitly a denial of the indwelling spirit.--A free spirit, certainly, as of old! Through all his pantheistic flights, from horizon to horizon, it was still the thought of liberty that presented itself, to the infinite relish of this ”prodigal son” of Dominic. G.o.d the Spirit had made all things indifferently, with a largeness, a beneficence, impiously belied by any theory of restrictions, distinctions, of absolute limitation. Touch! see!
listen! eat freely of all the trees of the garden of Paradise, with the voice of the [153] Lord G.o.d literally everywhere!--here was the final counsel of perfection. The world was even larger than youthful appet.i.te, youthful capacity. Let theologian and every other theorist beware how he narrowed either. ”The plurality of worlds!”--How petty in comparison seemed those sins, the purging of which was men's chief motive in coming to places like this convent, whence Bruno, with vows broken, or for him obsolete, presently departed. A sonnet, expressive of the joy with which he returned to so much more than the liberty of ordinary men, does not suggest that he was driven from it.
Though he must have seemed to those who surely had loved so loveable a creature there to be departing, like the ”prodigal” of the Gospel, into the farthest of possible far countries, there is no proof of harsh treatment on their part, or even of an effort to detain him.
It happens most naturally of course that those who undergo the shock of spiritual or intellectual change sometimes fail to recognise their debt to the deserted cause:--How much of the heroism, or other high quality, of their rejection has really been the product of what they reject? Bruno, the escaped monk, is still a monk; and his philosophy, impious as it might seem to some, a religion; very new indeed, yet a religion. He came forth well-fitted by conventual influences to play upon men as he had been played upon. A challenge, a war-cry, an [154] alarum, everywhere he seemed to be but the instrument of some subtly materialised spiritual force, like that of the old Greek prophets, that ”enthusiasm” he was inclined to set so high, or like impulsive Pentecostal fire. His hunger to know, fed dreamily enough at first within the convent walls, as he wandered over s.p.a.ce and time, an indefatigable reader of books, would be fed physically now by ear and eye, by large matter-of-fact experience, as he journeys from university to university; less as a teacher than a courtier, a citizen of the world, a knight-errant of intellectual light. The philosophic need to try all things had given reasonable justification to the stirring desire for travel common to youth, in which, if in nothing else, that whole age of the later Renaissance was invincibly young. The theoretic recognition of that mobile spirit of the world, ever renewing its youth, became the motive of a life as mobile, as ardent, as itself, of a continual journey, the venture and stimulus of which would be the occasion of ever-new discoveries, of renewed conviction.
The unity, the spiritual unity, of the world:--that must involve the alliance, the congruity, of all things with one another, of the teacher's personality with the doctrine he had to deliver, of the spirit of that doctrine with the fas.h.i.+on of his utterance, great reinforcements of sympathy. In his own case, certainly, when Bruno confronted his audience at Paris, himself, his theme, [155] his language, were alike the fuel of one clear spiritual flame, which soon had hold of his audience also; alien, strangely alien, as that audience might seem from the speaker. It was intimate discourse, in magnetic touch with every one present, with his special point of impressibility; the sort of speech which, consolidated into literary form as a book, would be a dialogue according to the true Attic genius, full of those diversions, pa.s.sing irritations, unlooked-for appeals, in which a solicitous missionary finds his largest range of opportunity, and takes even dull wits unaware. In Bruno, that abstract theory of the perpetual motion of the world was become a visible person talking with you.
And as the runaway Dominican was still in temper a monk, so he presented himself to his audience in the comely Dominican habit. The reproachful eyes were to-day for the most part kindly observant, registering every detail of that singular company, all the physiognomic effects which come, by the way, on people, and, through them, on things,--the ”shadows of ideas” in men's faces--his own pleasantly expressive with them, in turn. De Umbris Idearum: it was the very t.i.tle of his discourse. There was ”heroic gaiety” there: only, as usual with gaiety, it made the pa.s.sage of a peevish cloud seem all the chillier. Lit up, in the agitation of speaking, by many a harsh or scornful beam, yet always sinking, in moments of repose, to an [156] expression of high-bred melancholy, the face was one that looked, after all, made for suffering,--already half pleading, half defiant, as of a creature you could hurt, but to the last never shake a hair's-breadth from its estimate of yourself.