A 16th-century friar pictured every star as a sun with its own planets
A runaway Dominican friar proposed that the stars are distant suns with planets of their own, perhaps inhabited, in a universe with no edge and no centre. Giordano Bruno was executed in Rome in 1600. Historians still argue whether his cosmology or his theology sealed his fate.
He was born Filippo Bruno in 1548 in Nola, near Naples, the son of a soldier. Educated in Naples, he joined the Dominicans at San Domenico Maggiore at 17, taking the name Giordano after his metaphysics tutor, and was ordained in 1572. He became famous for his memory techniques and once travelled to Rome to demonstrate them to Pope Pius V.
Trouble followed his free thinking. Proceedings were twice brought against him inside the order, for throwing out images of saints while keeping only a crucifix and for recommending controversial books to a novice. Worse came when he was reported as defending the Arian heresy and a banned copy of Erasmus, annotated in his hand, turned up hidden in the monastery latrine. Learning that charges were being drawn up in Naples, he fled around 1576, wandering through Noli, Savona, Turin, Venice and Padua before crossing the Alps to Chambéry and Lyon.
His cosmology stretched the new Copernican model much further. Beyond the infinite universe and other worlds, he practised Hermeticism, wrote at length on the art of memory, and applied geometric ideas to language. The historian Frances Yates traced his thought to Empedocles, Neoplatonism and legends of Hermes Trismegistus.
The Roman Inquisition tried him for denying central Catholic doctrines, among them the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, eternal damnation and transubstantiation, and it also objected to his pantheism and belief in reincarnation of the soul. Found guilty, he was burned in the Campo de' Fiori on 17 February 1600. Nineteenth- and early 20th-century writers hailed him as a martyr for science; some historians say religion, not astronomy, drove the case, while others reject that view. Either way, his trial remains a landmark in the history of free thought.
Source: Giordano Bruno
