Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/738

 whole life awry happened when, as a lad of sixteen, he entered the Dominican Order. He early thought himself into heresy, and in his nature were fires which " all the snows of Caucasus " could not quench. In the effort to unfrock himself he became a wanderer, tried Rome, roamed over Northern Italy, crossed the Alps, and settled at Geneva, where he found neither the discipline nor the doctrine of the Reformed Church to his mind. He then emigrated to Toulouse, where he studied the New Astronomy, tried to be at home and to teach the fanatical Catholics of southern France in a city where the Inquisition had an ancient history. He next moved to Paris, where he attempted to instruct the doctors of the Sorbonne and to make his peace with the Church; and, failing, he crossed to England, where he lived for awhile, wrote and published in London, and at Oxford claimed with much literary extravagance the right to lecture. To his Italian soul England was an uncongenial clime; he praised Elizabeth, as the Inquisition remembered later to his hurt; but he despised the barbarians over whom she ruled, and the ostentatious wealth and intellectual impotence of Oxford in her day.

From England he wandered back to France and thence to Germany, where he lectured at Wittenberg and eulogised Luther, who had "like a modern Hercules fought with Cerberus and his triple crown." He was elected to a professorship at Helmstedt; which he soon forsook for Frankfort. But the home-sickness which would not be denied was on him, and he turned back to Italy where bloomed the culture which was to him the finest flower of humanity, where dwelt the men who moved him to love and not to hate, whose speech and thought threw over him a spell he could not resist. He was denounced to the Inquisition; spent eight years in prison, first in Venice and then in Rome; and, finally, on February 17, 1600, he was sent to the stake. Caspar Scioppius, a German who had passed from the Protestant to the Roman Church, and who loved neither Bruno nor his views, tells us that when the prisoner heard his sentence he only said, "You who condemn me perhaps hear the judgment with greater fear than myself." And he adds that at the stake Bruno put aside a crucifix which was held out to him, and so entered heaven proclaiming how the Romans dealt with "blasphemous and godless men." A modern admirer sees, in the eyes uplifted to the blue, a spirit that would have no dark image stand between him and the living God.

It is customary now to describe Bruno's system as a form of pantheism. The term was not known then, or indeed for more than a hundred years after his death, which means that the idea is as modern as the term. Bruno was roundly named, just as Spinoza was later, an atheist, for men thought it was all one to identify God with nature and to deny His independent existence. The systems were indeed radically unlike; for while the one was a theophantism or apotheosis of nature, the other was