Abstract
Giordano Bruno’s observations on the Bible can be contextualised within the history of science. According to Bruno, the Bible is primarily a book on morality, not a book on natural philosophy.1 Hence, natural philosophers should carry out their examination of nature independently of biblical authority. There are, admittedly, exceptions to this general view - he considers the Book of Job, for instance, an important work on natural philosophy.2 Such exceptions have not, however, prevented posterity from interpreting Bruno as an early spokesman for the freedom of philosophers to reflect independently of the Bible with regard to natural phenomena, this view being regarded as a proleptic feature in his interpretation of the Bible, anticipating later influential figures in the science-religion debate like Galileo Galilei (1564–1642).3
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Notes
For this interpretation, see Felice Tocco, Le opere latine di Giordano Bruno esposte e confrontate con le italiane (Florence: Le Monnier, 1889), p. 311;
Felice Tocco, Le fonti più recenti della filosofia del Bruno (Rome: Accademia dei Lincei, 1892), p. 26;
Hélène Védrine, La conception de la nature chez Giordano Bruno (Paris: J. Vrin, 1967), p. 162.
Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: les quatre sens de l’Écriture, 2 vols. in 4 parts (Paris: Aubier, 1959–64);
Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
Richard Griffiths (ed.), The Bible in the Renaissance: Essays on Biblical Commentary and Translation in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001).
For Brunolon Job, see La cena, in BOeuC, vol. 2, pp. 197–201. For Bruno’s use of David’s Psalms, see Hilary Gatti, ‘La Bibbia nei dialoghi italiani di Bruno’, in Eugenio Canone (ed.), La filosofia di Giordano Bruno. Problemi ermeneutici e storiografici. Convegno Internazionale, Roma, 23–24 ottobre 1998 (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 2003), pp. 200–201. For Bruno’s use of the Song of Solomon,
see Nicoletta Tirinnanzi, ‘II Cantico dei Cantici nel De umbris idearum di Giordano Bruno’, in Eugenio Canone (ed.), Letture Bruniane I–II del Lessico Intellettuale Europeo (1996–1997) (Pisa and Rome: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, 2002), pp. 287–306.
See Barbara Carman Garner, ‘Francis Bacon, Natalis Comes and the Mythological Tradition’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 33 (1970), 264–91.
Hesiod, The Theogony of Hesiod, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914; repr. 1998), p. 79.
For Orpheus’s hymns, see Guilelmus Quandt (ed.), Orphei Hymni (Berlin: Weidmann, 1955). For Ficino’s translation,
see Ilana Klutstein, Marsilio Ficino et la théologie ancienne. Oracles Chaldaïques, hymnes orphiques, hymnes de Proclus (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1987), pp. 55–110.
Bruno, Sigillus sigillorum, in BOL, vol. 2.2, p. 200.18–20; Bruno, De la causa ii, in BOeuC, vol. 3, p. 115: ‘Orfeo lo [Inteletto universale] chiama ‘occhio del mondo’, per ciò che il vede entro e fuor tutte le cose naturali, a fine che tutto non solo intrinseca, ma anco estrinsecamente venga a prodursi e mantenersi nella propria simmetria.’ As explained by Giovanni Aquilecchia in De la causa, n. 32, the attribution of the expression ‘occhio del mondo’ to Orpheus probably derives from Ficino’s Theologia platonica de immortalitate animorum, in Marcile Ficin, Théologie platonicienne de l’immortalité des âmes, ed. and trans. Raymond Marcel, 3 vols. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1964–70), vol. 1, p. 104.
For this combinatory wheel of Lull, see Roger Friedlein and Anita Traninger, ‘Lullismus’, in Gert Ueding (ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik 5 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2001), cols. 654–55.
Bruno refers to the ninefold order of angels in De monade, in BOL, vol. 1.2, p. 453.18–23 and to the nine muses on pp. 454.22–455.5. Similarly, Agrippa of Nettesheim, in Vittoria Perrone Compagni (ed.), De occulta philosophia libri tres, (Leiden, New York and Cologne: Brill, 1992), p. 285 describes the ninefold order of muses and angels, as well as discussing the number nine in the Bible, though he provides no theory of nine levels of meaning in holy scripture.
Vincenzo Spampanato, Vita di Giordano Bruno con documenti editi e inediti, 2 vols. (Messina: G. Principato, 1921), vol. 1, pp. 130–31.
For the importance of Aquinas’s philosophy to Bruno, see Luigi Firpo, Il processo di Giordano Bruno, ed. Diego Quaglioni (Rome: Salerno, 1993), pp. 16–17, 55–57, 60, 168, 177–78, 217, 259, 270–72, 277, 286–87.
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Catana, L. (2007). Giordano Bruno’s Hermeneutics: Observations on the Bible in De Monade (1591). In: Killeen, K., Forshaw, P.J. (eds) The Word and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230206472_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230206472_6
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