Giordano Bruno

Philip Rösel Baker

He was not as I remembered him
from the day they had taken him down. As if the fire had already begun to consume him.
His eyes were sunk in their sockets now, like mussels - bruise-purple shells wide open,
larger, brighter, as if he already beheld that infinity of which he spoke 
with such intensity.

We had given him many chances to recant, to abandon his dance with demons.
At times, he wavered and it seemed as if his soul would be redeemed.
But accursed obstinacy barred his way as firmly as the door of the cell 
where he sat in vaulted darkness, risking his own sanity, for eight long years 
in the company of his errors and grievous vanities.

Like the others, I had recommended torture, to free his spirit 
from the importunate influences that kept it in thrall to his heresies. Not because 
I had wished him ill. Verily, strictures that lead the will to repentance and thence to life 
are better than death at the stake, unrepentant – limited use of the knife 
in interrogation gives less pain, than the flames of eternal damnation.

Of course, we could not accept his claim, that the universe was infinite.
If that was true, where would God reside? The sun, moon and all the stars 
glide round the earth on crystal spheres, and outside the outermost 
lies heaven, the Lord and all his angels – order quintessential.
The world could ill afford his potential chaos.

One day in session, when I said this, he was seized with a distemper.
He said I had surrendered my mind to lazy blind obedience. Think!
he shouted. Prove to me that the universe is finite. I said I had no need 
to prove what the ancients taught was true - and warned him to pay heed.
He said, It is not I who is on trial, but you.

Then he laughed and said my idea of God was paltry, parsimonious.
He asked me to imagine a hilltop on a winter’s night - the loneliness, the frost-clear stars,
like precious stones on a noble’s robe. Stand there, on your own, he said,
without pre-conceptions, and know each star is a fiery sun, rising new each morning
to bring dawn to its encircling worlds.

With a toss of his arrogant head, he said that God is glorified not by one 
but a thousand suns. Not by a single world but by a thousand, thousand 
- many, doubtless, with their own living beings. He invited us to see with him
an infinity of worlds in motion - and ours as but a grain of sand 
on the floor of an endless ocean.

I said I could not see a place for God in the infinity he described.
Retreating inside himself, he replied that matter and spirit are one.
That God is not in a separate heaven but is the soul of all – the leaven
that causes all forms to arise. His voice was soft but conviction spoke loud, without fear 
from his eyes. It rang in my ears like a gentle magic, and then, like a memory.

A window was open, and the cool night air breathed softly, like a friend. 
A voice said There is no beginning, as there is no end 
to the fountain of my being and my stars cannot be counted, because always 
there will be one more. I felt a freedom I had not explored since boyhood,
felt tears wet my eyes and I recognised his joy

as the joy in me, when I used to lie on the hill behind my house and stare 
up through the night, dare to wonder how a star would look if I could fly 
up close. Would my eyes be able to bear the proximity of such brightness?
Then I would go inside and play a game, light a candle
and stare as long as I could bear, deep into the flame.

Peering into the heart of a star, there were no celestial spheres.
No Aristotelian hood, placed by the Church in later years to cover my young man’s eyes.
The hood, that would calm my inquisitive mind and keep me motionless,
parked like a falcon in leather-bound dark
on his master’s gauntlet.

The memory haunted me. I did penance alone in my room, the crucifix – lead
in my hand. But instead of forgiveness I felt a dread, which I could not explain away.
Which from that day, took root in my soul and when I heard him say, 
Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear, than I receive it ,
that same dread demanded of me, that I should believe it.

I felt the dread weave and knot itself
around and through me like leash and jesses, holding a falcon in check,
however hard it tries to peck them loose and fly free.

Today in the square we will light a candle, in the square of the Field of Flowers
and I will stare at the flame, the window open to feel the heat of the power
of the Holy Office, the power that will devour him.

I will stare at the flame, my hood thrown back like an empty sack,
like the hood of a novice. I will stare at the flame. I will stare. 
Will my eyes be able to bear the proximity of such brightness?

The Science

In 1600, Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake by the Inquisition for writing and lecturing about ideas which prefigured several key aspects of contemporary cosmology, while clashing head-on with the Ptolemaic and Aristotelian world views of the time, which were supported by the Catholic Church. Derived from the, then, heretical Copernican view that the earth was not the centre of the solar system, he envisaged an acentric infinite universe, in which our sun was just one of an infinite number of stars,  many of which were orbited by (probably inhabited) planets. He rejected the duality of matter and spirit, and he would have been at home in the current neuro-scientific  and philosophical debates about the nature of consciousness and the possibility that consciousness is a universal field, similar to space-time. (See the essays in Is Consciousness Everywhere? Ed. P. Goff and A. Moran, 2022). After eight years of imprisonment, interrogation and torture by the Inquisition, he refused to recant and was found guilty of heresy. In spite of his death at the stake, his ideas were spreading (and were referenced by Shakespeare in Hamlet). My poem is imagined from the point of view of one of his Inquisitors, who is himself beginning to have doubts.

The Poet

Philip Rösel Baker is a poet of mixed European heritage, living in a remote barn under dark skies in the Suffolk countryside. Last year his poetry was long-listed for the International Erbacce Prize and he won the George Crabbe Poetry Prize. His poems have been published in the New European newspaper and in magazines and anthologies.

Next poem: Image processing / (write that paper) by Kate Johnson