Religious Syncretism and Social Reform in the Cosmologies of Giordano Bruno and Domenico Scandella, Pt. 3

Finally, it is important to understand the cosmologies of both Bruno and Menocchio to understand the Church’s difficulties with them. Menocchio’s constant use of analogy to explain his own beliefs demonstrated an internal desire to clarify his own oftentimes disorganized thoughts by bringing the theoretical in line with the practical. His vocabulary corresponded to those things to which he related on an everyday basis. This cosmology did not come directly from the books he had read but from a sometimes uncomfortable combination of his imperfect knowledge of these texts, practical experiences, Friulian folk beliefs, and popular interpretations of the Catholic faith.[1] This uneasy alliance of assorted beliefs denoted an attempt on his part to reconcile Catholic theology with folk practices and beliefs. In the most famous example, Menocchio explains the origins of the cosmos by combining the traditional Ptolemaic-Aristotelian description of “chaos…that is earth, air, water, and fire…all mixed together” with down-to-earth terminology: “out of that bulk a mass formed—just as cheese is made out of milk—and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels. The most holy majesty decreed that these should be God and the angels, and among the number of angels there was also God, he too being created out of that mass at the same time.”[2] Similarly, he described the Trinity in material terms:

Questioned: “What do you think God is?” he replied: “Light, happiness, consolation, that signifies the Trinity. The Trinity resembles a candle: The wax is the Father, the wick is the Son, and the light is the Holy Spirit. I believe that there is the Trinity in the Sacrament of the Eucharist because there is happiness, consolation, and light, and what makes me believe this is that when I go to this sacrament of communion repenting for my sins and have done my penance, I feel happiness, consolation, and light.”[3]

While Menocchio was almost certainly unaware of the new materialistic outlook of the burgeoning empirical sciences of Kepler, Galileo, and others, he imbued physical descriptions with metaphysical significance, which suggests that these new ways of thinking were not confined to the elite classes.

The reasons for Menocchio’s heavily analogous language are twofold. On the one hand, his Inquisitors asked him specific questions regarding his own personal theology, and his lack of theologically elite vocabulary required him to explain his beliefs through these practical examples. On a deeper level, however, Menocchio seems to have consciously endeavored to reconcile a lifetime of religious thought that heretofore had been an incoherent mass of diverse philosophical statements. Considering his tendency to fuse the material and spiritual, it is bizarre that he had difficulty resolving the nature of God the creator. Menocchio was not only a miller but also a “carpenter, sawyer, mason and other things”[4] requiring manual labor, and he expresses pride in Christ’s profession as a carpenter, but seems unable to conceive of the creator of the universe as a mere craftsman:

Questioned: “Could God have done everything himself without the existence of angels?” he replied: “Yes, just as someone who is building a house uses workers and helpers, but we say that he built it. Similarly, in making the world, God used the angels but we say that God made it. And just as that master carpenter in building a house could also do it by himself, but it would take longer, so God in making the world could have done it by himself, but over a longer period of time.[5]

In a sense, Menocchio’s cosmology was materialistic without being informed by the incipient rational discourses of the day.

Members of the upper and lower classes communicated with one another in a variety of ways. Carlo Ginzburg notes the dialectical relationship between the popular or peasant classes and the elite classes, and asserts that it was a reciprocal one not necessarily characterized by dominant and repressed categories. True, elites retained the power to discredit erroneously interpreted theology, especially when it infringed upon the doctrinal territory of Church officials. However, for peasants, this relationship was marked both by the natural convergence of elite and common ideas through increased access to vernacular literature and by a conscious amalgamation of popular folk beliefs with elite intellectual thought. Rather than a distortion based on lack of knowledge or inability to comprehend knowledge, many peasants actively pursued an understanding of theological concepts from which they had been excluded. The authorities seemed to have had trouble comprehending the nature of Menocchio’s beliefs precisely because they constituted a confusing admixture of elite theoretical concepts and bizarre descriptions based on practical popular experience.[6]

Popular religion is not an easily definable term, for it is often employed to describe the resultant culture born out of the Protestant Reformation as well as the various non-Christian folk traditions of European peasantry.[7] Not all popular religious movements of the sixteenth century were specifically Protestant or Catholic. What of the nominally Catholic peasants, like Menocchio, who came to new understandings of religion apart from those beliefs imposed by the Catholic Church following the Council of Trent? Certainly, Menocchio’s own preconceived notions of religion, his inadequate doctrinal knowledge, and his limited theological vocabulary deeply colored his textual exegesis.[8] Martin D.W. Jones has termed it “highly artificial” to describe popular and elite cultures as distinct from one another, but the mere existence of a Catholic reform movement reveals that Church elites assumed lower class religious beliefs were in need of modification.[9] At the very least, popular religion and the Catholicism of the Church elites intermingled in way that required reconciliation. Peasants grew more educated and literate and the elites attempted to direct this education where possible.

Scholars have interpreted Bruno’s cosmology in a number of ways.[10] From the 1880s until the 1930s, Bruno was regarded as an Italian hero and harbinger of the Scientific Revolution, and his trial and execution distinguished him as a martyr for science and free thought. This idea of martyrdom emerged out of Bruno’s acceptance of Copernicus’ heliocentric theory decades before Galileo’s observations, despite the fact that Bruno, unlike Galileo, arrived at this conclusions independent of the empirical scientific method.[11] Bruno was far more interested in Hermetic magic and Neoplatonic philosophy, both of which posited the possibility of an infinite universe full of many worlds. According to Frances Yates, Bruno’s condemnation was more closely tied to his involvement in these occult activities;[12] however, these areas of study were common in pre-Revolutionary Renaissance science and it seems unlikely that this alone contributed to his denunciation.

As scientific thinking evolved to be more materialistic and came to depend more and more upon empirical evidence, Bruno’s quasi-religious dabbling in these topics simply “rel[ied] on the wrong sort of discourse.”[13] The astronomer and historian Owen Gingerich, who has examined more first and second edition copies of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus than any other scholar, claims that there is little evidence that Bruno even read the book because his copy contains no annotations and his references to Copernicus elsewhere contain numerous errors.[14] “I care little about Copernicus,” wrote Bruno, “and little care I whether you or I understand him.”[15] Beyond geometry, Bruno was decidedly non-mathematical, because his religiously motivated belief in a sun-centered universe required no familiarity with the rational and quantitative world of physics and mathematics. Rather, his heliocentrism was spiritual, magical, and qualitative. It may seem counterintuitive from a modern perspective, but for Bruno, mathematics reduced the accuracy of these cosmological theories because finitely quantifying an infinite Copernican universe or Platonic world of forms proved impossible to Hermetic modes of thinking.[16] In short, Bruno was not a Copernican for “scientific” reasons but for “external” reasons that portended a wider and more comprehensive religion in closer harmony with the natural world.[17] Bruno’s cosmology was syncretic: he seems to have been in search of a truly universal religion, and it was this universality that especially appealed to him during the religious strife of late sixteenth century Europe. According to Giuseppe Candela, Bruno’s “return to Hermetic magic” was “the cure for the wars, persecutions, and social miseries of contemporary Europe, and certainly an improvement of the bloody feuds of Western Christendom.”[18]

Were Giordano Bruno and Menocchio consciously in search of a new religion combining the theology of Catholicism with more esoteric notions of the universe? Probably not. However, the aggregation of decidedly non-Christian elements in their own personal descriptions of the cosmos suggests that a synthesis of their diverse ideas was necessary to reconcile their cosmological beliefs with their Christianity. For the authorities, no readily available categories accurately defined their offenses other than simple heresy—they were variously accused of Lutheranism, Catharism, pantheism, and other identifiable Catholic infractions that all failed to comprehensively describe their beliefs. Giordano Bruno subscribed to a set of quasi-scientific precepts that had been part of the intellectual dialogue for centuries but only a generation later would cease to be acceptable under the new auspices of empirical science. The paradox for Menocchio is that he directly benefited from the rise of literacy and lay education following the decrees of the Council of Trent but his free use of this education is precisely what offended the Church authorities. In spite of their social and intellectual differences, both Bruno and Menocchio succumbed to the sweeping reforms and purgations of the late sixteenth century Church.


So, there's the paper. I thought it turned out all right, though I have some criticisms of it myself and received some very constructive criticism from my panel at the conference. My own biggest complaint with myself is that I didn't really get into the actual texts that Bruno wrote, especially his "Italian dialogues," four books written across fewer than two years (1584-1585) while he was in England. These really enunciated his worldview rather forcefully, and while I read them cursorily for my research, I didn't really integrate them or cite them into the text. In part, this was because my space was limited, and this was one of the things that that simply got left out. But looking back, I think his Copernican, Neoplatonic, and Hermetic tendencies really can't be understood without looking very directly at what he wrote, and these assertions are couched in very difficult, poetic, symbolic texts. It doesn't help matters much that these were written in Italian, not a language I understand, and though I have the English translations, it's just not the same. I've had a difficult enough time trying to muddle my way through Latin and French without throwing that into the mix. In short, I guess I feel like I focused a bit too much on historiographical context rather than primary source analysis for Bruno, This wasn't as big of a problem with Menocchio, about whom almost everything is know through his trial records, which, though difficult to follow at times, are relatively easy to read. Surprisingly, this is not something I was criticized for at the conference. Rather, my commentator said that his greatest problem with the paper was the fact that I conceded to Menocchio a certain level of typicality that he felt did not represent him. That is, I was comparing Bruno and Menocchio as socially very different but in the eyes of the Church and Inquisition, heretics all the same. He felt that my treatment of Bruno was sound and that viewing him through the lens of a post-Council of Trent offender made a lot of sense. For Menocchio, he thought it made a lot more sense to look at him as essentially an oddity who was castigated for his bizarre behavior and his unwillingness to relent to the authorities. In a sense, I very much agree, but I think, in some ways, the personalities of both Bruno and Menocchio were congruent enough to merit some serious analysis.

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[1] Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, 56-57.

[2] Andrea del Col, Dominico Scandella Known as Menocchio, 25.

[3] Ibid., 49.

[4] Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, 1.

[5] Andrea de Col, Domenico Scandella Known as Menocchio, 57.

[6] Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, xii and xix.

[7] Martin D. W. Jones, The Counter Reformation, 2 and 118-124.

[8] Ibid. 33.

[9]Ibid., 118-119. Jones is rightly wary of this distinction because it has often been cast in terms of lower class “superstition” versus upper class “religion” and he proffers evidence that elites followed similar “superstitious” practices as commoners. However, he minimizes the important distinction of “devotional” religion and “functional” religion. The latter aptly describes the nature of many peasant beliefs, while the former seems to have transcended class structures. See also William Monter, Ritual, Myth, and Magic in Early Modern Europe (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1983).

[10]Hilary Gatti, “The State of Giordano Bruno Studies at the End of the Four-Hundredth Centenary of the Philosopher’s Death,” Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001): 252-261. Bruno studies have undergone enormous historiographical shifts since the 1880s when students in Rome commissioned and erected a statue of him on the spot of his execution in the Campo de’ Fiori. This statue’s creation occurred less than two decades after Italian unification and coincided with the rise in late nineteenth century Italian nationalism. Gatti tracks the shifting attitudes toward Bruno from his earlier place as a hero of science to his later place as a Renaissance Hermeticist to his still later place as a traveling scholar and political participant in the affairs of his many adoptive nations of residence. Gatti attempts to bring Bruno full circle and resituate him within the history of science by contending that since Hermetic and Neoplatonic thought were both a part of the scientific outlook of the late sixteenth century—and would remain so until after Galileo and Newton—Bruno was a perfectly representative scientific thinker of his age.

[11] For an early critique of Bruno’s Copernicanism, see K.F. Herzfeld, “The Process of Giordano Bruno,” Science 75 (1932): 241-242.

[12] Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 450.

[13] Ernan McMullin, “Bruno and Copernicus,” Isis 78 (1987): 65.

[14] Owen Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus (New York: Penguin Books, Ltd., 2004), 64 and 255 and Ernan McMullin, “Bruno and Copernicus,” 56. For example, Bruno supposed that the Earth and the Moon share an orbit about the sun and that the planets still revolved around the sun in epicycles.

[15] Giordano Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper, trans. and ed. Edward A. Gosselin and Lawrence S. Lerner (Hamden, Connecticut: Shoestring Press, 1977), 192. In a manner much like Plato’s dialogue, the Symposium, Bruno uses the Copernican theory as an analogy for his own Hermetic/Neoplatonic beliefs. He expounds the theory that the universe is infinite, has no center, and is populated by multiple worlds.

[16] Paul Henri Michel, The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno, trans. R.E.W. Maddison (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1973), 40.

[17] Ernan McMullin, “Bruno and Copernicus,” Isis 78 (1987): 66.

[18] Giuseppe Candela, “Overview of the Cosmology, Religion, and Philosophical Universe of Giordano Bruno,” Italica 75 (1998): 361.