Cosmic Crusader

The life of a little-known philosopher with some very big ideas.

GIORDANO BRUNO

Philosopher/Heretic

By Ingrid D. Rowland

Farrar Straus Giroux. 335 pp. $27 (forthcoming August 26)

In Rome's Campo de' Fiore, a square bustling with restaurants, markets and charmed visitors, stands a bronze statue of a man in a friar's habit and cowl, arms crossed, looking down with great sorrow. A plaque says simply, "To Bruno, from the generation he foresaw, here, where the pyre burned."

To those relatively few who know who Bruno was, the somber monument and its enigmatic inscription capture well the life being memorialized. Giordano Bruno -- philosopher, cosmologist and master of memory techniques -- was, in the Papal Jubilee year of 1600, burned at the stake in that square for the crime of obstinate heresy.

A former Dominican priest with no political ambitions, no history of violence or subversion and no real following beyond a few scholars at some obscure universities, Bruno was tried and condemned by the Inquisition for what he thought, wrote and said. And while some view him as the world's first martyr to science -- a free thinker punished for holding a distinctly modern view of the cosmos -- Bruno was no Galileo or Copernicus. He was, instead, a serious man with expansive views on the nature of God and the universe who had the misfortune of living during a time when Catholic orthodoxy was being challenged and the church was fighting back.

Nonetheless, he and his death have inspired a range of notable people such as Baruch Spinoza (who shared parts of Bruno's philosophy and was also excommunicated by his people), Gottfried Leibniz, James Joyce (who alludes to Bruno often in Finnegans Wake) and Umberto Eco. Ingrid D. Rowland's new biography of him is well timed -- not so much because the kind of intellectual intolerance that led to his death is rising (it isn't, at least in the West), but because some of his more visionary and intriguing ideas have a new relevance.

In particular, Bruno was among the first to write about the universe as infinite in both time and space. He also was entirely comfortable with the idea that the universe contains many worlds and that some of the others might well be inhabited. This kind of thinking has given rise to astrobiology, the multidisciplinary science behind a concerted and well-financed effort to find life forms beyond Earth. Such a search would have no doubt delighted a man like Bruno, whose fascination with the workings of the universe and the possibility of life elsewhere turned him, in his era, into a tragic version of space visionary Arthur C. Clarke. Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic gives some support to the view of Bruno as a visionary of and martyr to science, but Rowland, who teaches in Notre Dame's school of architecture in Rome and writes about Italian cultural history, knows too much about him and his times to accept that simple picture. Rather, she tells the story of a bright, thin-skinned, rebellious and inquisitive young man from outside Naples who became a precocious Dominican priest, had some original thoughts, wrote some interesting treatises and long poems, and pretty quickly got in trouble with the authorities.

He did untoward and, to the displeasure of his superiors, rather Protestant-like things, such as throwing out most of his religious and personal belongings and keeping a spare monastery cell. He fled Rome when he learned he might be brought before the Inquisition and for years moved around Europe, traveling from Toulouse and Paris to London and Oxford, from Frankfurt and Geneva to Padua (where he applied for an astronomy position that was later held by Galileo.) He gained and lost numerous university positions as well as royal and aristocratic benefactors across Europe before returning to Venice at the request of a wealthy young nobleman who wanted to learn Bruno's memory skills, which were based on mnemonic associations but were sometimes attributed to "magic."

Bruno was handed over to the Inquisition after the young client concluded he wasn't getting the memory training he paid for, and Bruno spent the next eight years confined in Venice and then in Rome. Rowland describes in some detail the contorted -- but by the standards of the time entirely legal and accepted -- logic that led to Bruno being declared a heretic. His personal philosophy, which he called Nolan after the town where he was born, appeared to be a high-minded and exuberant distillation of Greek atomists (who saw the universe as infinite), St. Thomas of Aquinas (a fellow Dominican whose "natural theology" sought to prove the existence of God through philosophy), and Copernicus (who moved Earth out of its formerly central position in the universe), along with a view of God as within (as opposed to transcending) nature and man and a fondness for ancient Egypt . To the Inquisition, all this was dangerous and occult and outrageous.

Rowland's tale reads like an academic treatise at times, and it would be fascinating to know more about Bruno's personal life. But perhaps that's too much to ask, considering the times in which he lived and his peripatetic existence. Maybe it's enough simply to know more about the career of the brooding man whose statue looms over Campo de' Fiore. ·

Marc Kaufman, a science writer for The Washington Post, is working on a book about astrobiology.