Giordano Bruno | Page 4

Ninth went abroad promptly. To his successor the
day became a sweet one, to be noted unmistakably by various pious
and other observances; and it was on a Whit-Sunday afternoon that
curious Parisians had the opportunity of listening to one who, as if with
some intentional new version of the sacred event then commemorated,
had a great deal to say concerning the Spirit; above all, of the freedom,
the independence of its operation. The speaker, though understood to
be a brother of the Order of St. Dominic, had not been present at the
mass--the usual university mass, De Spiritu Sancto, said to-day
according to the natural course of the season in the chapel of the
Sorbonne, by the Italian Bishop of Paris. It was the reign of the Italians
just then, a doubly refined, somewhat morbid, somewhat ash-coloured,
Italy in France, more Italian still. Men of Italian birth, "to the great
suspicion of simple people," swarmed in Paris, already "flightier, less
constant, than the girouettes on its steeples," and it was love for Italian
fashions that had brought king and courtiers here to-day, with great
eclat, as they said, frizzed and starched, in the beautiful, minutely
considered dress of the moment, pressing the university into a perhaps
not unmerited background; for the promised speaker, about whom
tongues had been busy, not only in the Latin quarter, had come from
Italy. In an age in which all things about which Parisians much cared
must be Italian there might be a hearing for Italian philosophy.
Courtiers at least would understand Italian, and this speaker was
rumoured to possess in perfection all the curious arts of his native
language. And of all the kingly qualities of Henry's youth, the single
one that had held by him was that gift of eloquence, which he was able

also to value in others--inherited perhaps; for in all the contemporary
and subsequent historic gossip about his mother, the two things certain
are, that the hands credited with so much mysterious ill-doing were fine
ones, and that she was an admirable speaker.
Bruno himself tells us, long after he had withdrawn himself from it,
that the monastic life promotes the freedom of the intellect by its [235]
silence and self-concentration. The prospect of such freedom
sufficiently explains why a young man who, however well found in
worldly and personal advantages, was conscious above all of great
intellectual possessions, and of fastidious spirit also, with a remarkable
distaste for the vulgar, should have espoused poverty, chastity,
obedience, in a Dominican cloister. What liberty of mind may really
come to in such places, what daring new departures it may suggest to
the strictly monastic temper, is exemplified by the dubious and
dangerous mysticism of men like John of Parma and Joachim of Flora,
reputed author of the new "Everlasting Gospel," strange dreamers, in a
world of sanctified rhetoric, of that later dispensation of the spirit, in
which all law must have passed away; or again by a recognised
tendency in the great rival Order of St. Francis, in the so-called
"spiritual" Franciscans, to understand the dogmatic words of faith with
a difference.
The three convents in which Bruno lived successively, at Naples, at
Citta di Campagna, and finally the Minerva at Rome, developed freely,
we may suppose, all the mystic qualities of a genius in which, from the
first, a heady southern imagination took the lead. But it was from
beyond conventional bounds he would look for the sustenance, the fuel,
of an ardour born or bred within them. Amid such artificial religious
stillness the air itself becomes generous in undertones. The vain young
monk (vain of course!) would feed his vanity by puzzling the good,
sleepy heads of the average sons of Dominic with his neology, putting
new wine into old bottles, teaching them their own business--the new,
higher, truer sense of the most familiar terms, the chapters they read,
the hymns they sang, above all, as it happened, every word that referred
to the Spirit, the reign of the Spirit, its excellent freedom. He would
soon pass beyond the utmost limits of his brethren's sympathy, beyond

the largest and freest interpretation those words would bear, to thoughts
and words on an altogether different plane, of which the full scope was
only to be felt in certain old pagan writers, though approached, perhaps,
at first, as having a kind of natural, preparatory kinship with Scripture
itself. The Dominicans would seem to have had well- stocked,
liberally-selected, libraries; and this curious youth, in that age of
restored letters, read eagerly, easily, and very soon came to the kernel
of a difficult old author--Plotinus or Plato; to the purpose of thinkers
older still, surviving by glimpses only in the books of
others--Empedocles, Pythagoras, who had enjoyed the original divine
sense of things, above