Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 3 (of 3)Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 3 (of 3)
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy -- History
Giordano Bruno was of an equally restless and effervescent temperament,
and we see in him a bold rejection of all Catholic beliefs resting
on mere authority. In modern times he has again been brought into
remembrance by Jacobi (Werke, Vol. IV. Section II. pp. 5-46), who
appended to his letters on Spinoza an abstract of one of Bruno’s
works.[68] Jacobi caused great attention to be paid to Bruno, more
especially by his assertion that the sum of Bruno’s teaching was the One
and All of Spinoza, or really Pantheism; on account of the drawing of
this parallel Bruno obtained a reputation which passes his deserts. He
was less restless than Cardanus; but he had no fixed habitation on the
earth. He was born at Nola in the province of Naples, and lived in the
sixteenth century; the year of his birth is not known with certainty. He
roamed about in most of the European states, in Italy, France, England,
Germany, as a teacher of philosophy: he forsook Italy, where at one time
he had been a Dominican friar, and where he had made bitter reflections
both upon various Catholic dogmas—for instance, on transubstantiation and
the immaculate conception of the Virgin—and upon the gross ignorance and
scandalous lives of the monks. He then lived in Geneva in 1582, but there
he fell out in the same way with Calvin and Beza, and could not live with
them: he made some stay in several other French cities, such as Lyons;
and after a time he came to Paris, where in 1585 he formally challenged
the adherents of Aristotle, by following a practice greatly in favour
in those days (_supra_, p. 112), and proposing for public disputation
a series of philosophic theses, which were specially directed against
Aristotle. They appeared under the title _Jord. Bruni Nol. Rationes
articulorum physicorum adversus Peripateticos Parisiis propositorum,
Vitebergæ apud Zachariam Cratonem, 1588_; he was not successful in them,
however, as the position of the Aristotelians was still too well assured.
Bruno was also in London; he visited Wittenberg in the year 1586; he
likewise stayed in Prague and other universities and towns. In Helmstedt
he was high in the favour of the Dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg in 1589;
after that he went to Frankfort-on-Main, where he had several of his
works printed. He was a wandering professor and author. Finally he came
back to Italy in 1592, and lived in Padua for some time undisturbed, but
at last he was seized in Venice by the Inquisition, cast into prison,
sent on to Rome, and there in the year 1600, refusing to recant, he
was burned at the stake as a heretic. Eye-witnesses, and amongst them
Scioppius, recount that he met death with the most unflinching courage.
He had become a Protestant when in Germany, and had broken the vows of
his order.[69]
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