The Evil Eye, Thanatology, and Other EssaysPark, Roswell
Religion
The Evil Eye, Thanatology, and Other Essays
Park, Roswell
Bruno, Giordano, 1548-1600; Evil eye; Knights of Malta; Medicine; Mythology; Religion; Students
Bruno _had_ a creed, but it was too simple for his times. He rejected
certain orthodox dogmas, (e. g. the Trinity, the Immaculate Conception)
which commend themselves still less to the emancipated and cultivated
minds of to-day. He absolutely rejected authority, which was a step
toward reason comparable to the freeing of the slaves or serfs. He
evolved a theory of evolution from _a priori_ concepts, which it
remained for Darwin to complete and demonstrate. He believed in the
natural history of religions. His motives were of the loftiest, though
his methods were not always those of to-day. He believed that the
essence of truth inhered in those differences which kept men apart, and
still sever them. He believed the _law of love_ and that it sprang from
God, which is the Father of All, that it was in harmony with nature,
and that by love we may be transformed into something of His likeness.
As Bruno himself says:--"This is the religion, above controversy or
dispute, which I observe from the belief of my own mind, and from the
custom of my fatherland and my race." (McIntyre, p. 110).
And yet this sublime man was burned as a heretic! Let us stop when we
hereafter pass through the Campo dei Fiori, as I have done many a time,
and take off our hats to the memory of this great man, who, while small
in some human traits, yet was the greatest thinker in Italy during
the sixteenth century, whose memory may help us to forget some of the
hypocrisies and cant so generally prevalent during the age which and
among the men who condemned him. Let us also thank God that there is no
Tribunal of the Inquisition to-day, to pass misguided judgment upon us
for having gone further than Bruno ever dreamed, though along the same
lines, and to condemn us therefore to the Flames.
This paper has already been prolonged, perhaps tiresomely, nevertheless
I cannot refrain from quoting a few paragraphs from that most versatile
student of this period, Symonds, whose estimate of Bruno is as
follows:--(Renaissance in Italy; Catholic Reaction, II Chap. ix).
"Bruno appears before us as the man who most vitally and
comprehensively grasped the leading tendencies of his age in their
intellectual essence. He left behind him the mediaeval conception of an
extra-mundane God, creating a finite world, of which this globe is the
center, and the principal episode in the history of which is the series
of events from the Fall, through the Incarnation and Crucifixion, to
the Last Judgment. He substituted the conception of an ever-living,
ever-acting, ever-self-effectuating God, immanent in an infinite
universe, to the contemplation of whose attributes the mind of man
ascends by the study of Nature and interrogation of his conscience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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