miserable, unhappy life."
So Bruno passed away; his ashes were scattered, his name almost
forgotten. His death was the merest incident amid the great doings
of the year of Jubilee. None of the many bishops and cardinals and
distinguished visitors in Rome, with the single exception of Gaspard
Schopp, makes any mention of the occurrence or of the man; and Schopp
did so only because he wished to point a moral from the case. During
his seven years' imprisonment, Bruno had almost passed out of the
short-lived memory of his fellowmen. Burnings of heretics were not
infrequent spectacles, and required no special notice. Three years
later (August 7, 1603) all his works were placed upon the Index, and
consequently became rare. They were classed with other dangerous works
on the black arts, and Bruno's name became one to avoid.
This was the death which in happier days he had foreseen for himself
should he ever enter Italy:--"Torches, fifty or a hundred, will not
fail him, even though the march be at mid-day, should it be his fate
to die in Roman Catholic country." What were the real grounds on which
his condemnation and sentence were founded? The alleged grounds we have
already seen, but they cannot have formed the actual motive of the Pope
and the Inquisition. Neither at Venice nor in Rome can much weight have
been laid upon the evidence of the weakling Mocenigo. The Cardinals
cannot have imagined that Bruno would ever open his heart or even speak
freely to so shallow a nature so utterly different in all things from
himself. The mere fact of his having left his order was not enough, nor
his refusal to return to it, nor were his heretical opinions--defended
as they might be, and as Aristotle's own teaching had to be defended in
the Church, by the subterfuge of the twofold truth. Had his chief fault
been, as some have thought, his praises of Elizabeth, Henry III., Henry
of Navarre, Luther, Duke Julius, and other enemies, real or supposed,
of the Church, he would not so long have occupied the prisons of the
Inquisition. Probably his earliest biographer, Bartholmèss, was right
in suggesting that Bruno was regarded as a heresiarch--he is several
times so described in the documents--the founder of a new sect, the
leader of an incipient but dangerous crusade against the Church. It
was as the apostle of a new religion, founded on a new intuition,
a new conception of the universe, and of its relation to God, that
Bruno died. Had he been won over to the side of the Church, his mind
conquered and his spirit crushed by the long years of waiting, and
possibly the days and nights of physical torture, it would have been
a signal triumph for the papacy. But the heart which had trembled at
the beginning, when the sudden gulf yawned before it, grew more and
more steadfast as its trials increased. We can only re-echo Carrière's
words, that in the soul of such a man, who after eight years'
confinement in the prisons of the Inquisition remained so firm, "the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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