Chapter 1

A Martyr for Infinite Worlds

        Since the soul is not found without body
        and yet is not body, it may be in one body
        or in another, and pass from body to body.
                                        Giordano Bruno
                                        Venice trial, 1592

Lighted torches pierced the pale February morning. Spectators jostled each other to see the procession. It would be a slow half mile from the Tower of Nona, where the prisoner had been confined, to the Field of Flowers, an open square where he was to be executed.         The fifty-two-year-old philosopher shuffled his way over the tufa stones that paved the streets of Rome. Barefoot and chained by the neck, he wore a white sheet decorated with crosses and splashed with devils and red flames.         Monks of the Brotherhood of Saint John the Beheaded walked with him, urging him to repent. Periodically they presented the crucifix to his lips, giving him every opportunity to obtain salvation.         Pilgrims from all over Europe packed the square. Drawn to Rome by the Church's yearlong jubilee celebration of 1600, they were eager to see the burning of a notorious heretic. Some spat and jeered as the guards stripped the small, thin man and tied him to an iron stake surrounded by bundles of wood. After he once more refused to kiss the cross, they gagged him, then piled more wood mixed with straw around the stake, heaping it up to his chin. The monks sang litanies while the officials of Rome gave him one last chance to recant, then lit the pile.         As the flames licked his beard and his lungs filled with smoke, did Giordano Bruno regret the course that had led him to the stake? As his skin began to crack and his blood hissed in the flames, did he wonder if the pain would continue for an eternity in hell? Or did he hold firmly to his dream of viewing other suns, innumerable heavenly worlds, and of journeying on "through all infinity"? 1                             *                *                *                                Burnings at the stake were less frequent in 1600 than in medieval times. Only twenty-five heretics had been burned in Rome during the entire sixteenth century. How did Bruno, formerly a Dominican monk and for many years a wandering philosopher, come to receive the Church's ultimate punishment?         He was burned for his heretical views, among them the idea that the human soul could return to earth in a new body after death and could even move on to inhabit an infinite number of worlds besides earth. He also held to an idea that often occurs alongside reincarnation the idea that man can become one with God during his soul's journey on earth. For him, religion was the process by which the divine light "takes possession of the soul, raises it, and converts it into God." 2  One does not have to wait until the end of the world for divine union to take place, Bruno believed. It can happen today.         In Bruno's view of human potential, we can find the seed of why Christianity ultimately rejected reincarnation: it undermined the authority of the Church. Under Bruno's system, salvation was not linked to a person's relationship to the Church but to his direct relationship with God. And it was on this point, as much as on reincarnation, that he collided with the Inquisition.          Bruno had been a thorn in the Church's side almost from the moment he was ordained a Dominican priest at Naples at the age of twenty-four. The son of a professional soldier, he did not fit in well with monastic life. He was a thinker and an avid reader with an irascible temper and a penchant for angering the authorities.         As a young monk, Bruno had too many of his own ideas. He defended the fourth-century heretic Arius, of whom we will hear more later, and he read the forbidden works of the Dutch humanist philosopher Erasmus. When his contraband copy of Erasmus was discovered hidden in the monastery's outhouse, Bruno found himself in serious trouble. For his heresies, Church officials at Naples prepared an indictment against him and he fled Italy in 1578.                             *                *                *

He spent the next fourteen years wandering France, England, Germany and Switzerland. Passionate, fierce and sarcastic, Bruno was repeatedly forced to flee after stirring up trouble with inflammatory remarks and writings. He attacked the Oxford fellows for their support of Aristotle and ridiculed French academics. He was put on trial in Geneva for pointing out "errors" in a Calvinist theologian's lecture.         Both the Catholic and Protestant churches excommunicated him (even though he probably never became Protestant). Yet he dreamed of reconciling Catholics and Protestants through philosophy. He took issue with both of their theologies and called himself "a citizen and servant of the world, a child of Father Sun and Mother Earth." 3         Bruno was one of the most brilliant men of his day. He instructed the French king Henry III in the art of memory, taught philosophy at the University of Toulouse and mingled with the literary circle that surrounded England's Queen Elizabeth I. His prolific and unusual writings gained a small but ardent following.         He was either far ahead of or far behind his times. His ideas about the universe presaged some of the discoveries of twentieth-century physics. But Bruno was not a scientist.         In the nineteenth century, intellectuals revered him as a martyr to scientific inquiry and freedom of thought, largely for his defense of Copernicus' sun-centered view of the solar system. Bruno even shared enemies with the Copernicans--one of his inquisitors, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, would also question Galileo about his observations that the earth revolved around the sun. However, Bruno did not share Copernicus' scientific world view.                             *                *                *                                It was mysticism and philosophy that brought Bruno to his vision of innumerable worlds. Bruno agreed with Copernicus that the earth could not be the center of the universe. But, as he saw it, neither was the sun. He believed the earth was only one among an infinite number of worlds.         At a time when most people thought the stars were permanently pasted to the sky, Bruno detailed his revolutionary beliefs: "There is a single general space, a single vast immensity which we may freely call Void; in it are innumerable globes like this on which we live and grow. This space we declare to be infinite....In it are an infinity of worlds of the same kind as our own." 4         For Bruno, the idea of infinite worlds opened the door to the idea of infinite human possibility. If there are infinite worlds, then why can't there be infinite opportunity in which to explore them? A person, whether in or out of a body, Bruno wrote, "is never completed. He has the opportunity to experience life in different forms. Even as infinite space is around us, so is infinite potentiality, capacity, reception, malleability, matter." 5

The Beast Triumphs         The Church would later claim that Bruno was not burned for his defense of Copernicus or for his doctrine of infinite worlds but rather for his theological errors 6 and belief in magic. But trial records reveal that both infinite worlds and reincarnation were at issue. The two ideas appear in his original indictment, which also accused Bruno--still officially a monk--of boasting of his female conquests and joking about the final judgment. 7         Gaspar Schopp, an eyewitness at Bruno's Rome indictment and sentencing, tells us that among Bruno's heretical doctrines were "those of an eternal universe and innumerable worlds," as well as "a libel concerning the Triumphant Beast--which is to say the Pope." 8

He was referring to Bruno's The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. Since it was the only one of Bruno's works mentioned at his sentencing, it must have hit a raw nerve with the Church. But the "triumphant beast" was not the pope. Bruno meant the "beast" to represent the evil side of man's nature, qualities such as superstition and ignorance. He argued for a religion based on reason, through which man could purge himself of this "beast" within. 9  Incidentally, the Expulsion contains Bruno's most elaborate writings on reincarnation.                             *                *                *                                Bruno used two tactics in his defense. He recanted his "errors" and "heresies," and he tried to argue his points "as a philosopher" rather than as a monk. At his trial in Venice in 1592, he said that reincarnation was, if not proven, "at least likely," according to the opinion of the fifth-century-B.C. philosopher Pythagoras. Bruno said: "I have held and hold souls to be immortal....Speaking as a Catholic, [I say] they do not pass from body to body, but go to Paradise, Purgatory or Hell. But I have reasoned deeply, and, speaking as a philosopher, since the soul is not found without body and yet is not body, it may be in one body or in another, and pass from body to body." 10         But Bruno's philosophical window dressing could not hide his very real differences with the Church. He admitted to doubting the principles behind the Trinity, especially the incarnation of the Son, and challenged the doctrine that souls are created "out of nothing" and therefore are not a part of God. 11         This doctrine, which is fundamental to Church teaching, will come up in later chapters as we examine how and why the Church denied reincarnation. It is at the root of the conflict between orthodox Christianity and mysticism.         Bruno argued that the soul originates in God and is immortal. He believed that human bodies are simply formed and re-formed from the same matter and that death is "nothing else than division and reunion." 12  In support of his belief, he quoted the Old Testament book Ecclesiastes: "There is nothing new under the Sun." 13         The Venetian Inquisition might have been willing to listen to such arguments. But Bruno had come to the attention of the Roman Inquisition, which engineered his transfer to Rome in 1593. There he faced Cardinal Robert Bellarmine for the first time, along with a panel of eight other cardinals. Bellarmine, later Saint Robert, was a formidable opponent. His tombstone was to read, "With force I have subdued the brains of the proud." 14         The Inquisition's first method of subduing Bruno was to leave him alone in prison. For the greater part of seven years, there is no record of his life. We do know he was deprived of food, books and writing materials, and he may have been tortured, as were most accused heretics at the time.                             *                *                *                                Around 1599, Bellarmine brought matters to a head. He presented Bruno with a list of eight "heretical propositions" taken from his work and required him to renounce them. A year passed, during which Bruno may have considered retracting some of the statements. But by December, Bruno hardened his position, perhaps sensing that the Church had no plans to release him whether he recanted or not. He refused to retract, saying that he had nothing to renounce. It was the beginning of the end.         On February 8, 1600, Bruno was led into the church of Saint Mary over Minerva. Guards forced him to his knees, but he held himself erect, facing the cardinals with defiance. The words that echoed in the church did not come as a surprise. The Inquisition sentenced him as "an impenitent and pertinacious heretic" and expelled him once again from the "holy and immaculate Church," telling him he had become "unworthy" of its mercy. The indictment condemned Bruno's writings "as heretical and erroneous" and placed them on the "Index of Forbidden Books." 15         To exonerate themselves, the cardinals attached to his indictment a meaningless disclaimer asking the secular court to be lenient with Bruno and not to put him "in danger of death" or "mutilation." 16  The secular authorities knew exactly what to do. Bruno was to be burned.         Before he was led from the hall, Bruno, never renowned for tact, gave his parting shot to the inquisitors: "Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it." 17 The guards turned him over to officials of the governor of Rome, who locked him in the Tower of Nona, a prison on the Tiber River. He had another eleven days to live.         Bruno's trial is an important chapter in the history of reincarnation in Christianity, significant in that it juxtaposes a fiery and independent thinker with one of the world's most powerful institutions. The chestnut-bearded philosopher was part of an ancient reincarnation tradition in the West, one that developed alongside Christianity, sometimes inside the Church and sometimes apart from it. In the upcoming chapters, we will examine reincarnation in Christianity today and explore why some Christians from the first and second centuries to the present have clung to the belief. Reincarnation Book Copyright © 2006 Summit Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 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