[Serious] Giordano Bruno

[TimOneill]

Good point Bel, he was not executed for science, he was executed for thinking and speaking (rather unscientific for the most part) ideas the church disapproved of. He was more a martyr for free speech.

We could say that Bruno died because of atheist reasons because not only was he a freethinker but Eight propositions of why he was killed was that he accepted the Copernicus model of the solar system (that was against Bible and therefore religion) as well as doubting in the divinity of Jesus.

1 - The statement of "two real and eternal principles of existence: the soul of the world and the original matter from which beings are derived".

2 - The doctrine of the infinite universe and infinite worlds in conflict with the idea of Creation: "He who denies the infinite effect denies the infinite power".

3 - The idea that every reality resides in the eternal and infinite soul of the world, including the body: "There is no reality that is not accompanied by a spirit and an intelligence".

4 - The argument according to which "there is no transformation in the substance", since the substance is eternal and generates nothing, but transforms.

5 - The idea of terrestrial movement, which according to Bruno, did not oppose the Holy Scriptures, which were popularised for the faithful and did not apply to scientists.

6 - The designation of stars as "messengers and interpreters of the ways of God".

7 - The allocation of a "both sensory and intellectual" soul to earth.

8 - The opposition to the doctrine of St Thomas on the soul, the spiritual reality held captive in the body and not considered as the form of the human body.
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ft...links.html

Indeed, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine who lead a trial against Bruno and judged him to death, also believed in the literal interpretation of the Bible, for he wrote

modern commentaries on genesis, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Joshua, you will find all agreeing in the literal interpretation that the sun is in heaven and turns around the earth with great speed, and that the earth is very far from heaven and sits motionless at the center of the world.
http://www.historyguide.org/earlymod/foscarini.html

And that's why he later on persecuted Galileo. And then that Cardinal Robert Bellarmine was canonized as a saint in 1930. by Catholic Chruch.

The website you cite above doesn't give a source for these eight propositions. It says "Cardinal Bellarmin therefore drew up a list of the theories deemed to be heretical, over which Bruno again hesitated before categorically refusing to renounce his doctrine: The eight propositions that the philosopher refused to renounce were as follows ... " That sounds pretty definitive, but where exactly are these eight propositions allegedly drawn up by Bellarmine recorded?

And Bellarmine did accept the literal interpretation of certain passages of the Bible that were read as relating to the position and movement of the earth. But he did not believe the Bible should always be interpreted literally. On the contrary, he accepted that the Bible should often not be interpreted that way. He accepted, like all Catholics of his time, that purely literal interpretation of all Biblical texts was ignorant and taught that all texts could be interpreted via four levels of exegesis: literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral, and anagogical. Any given text could be interpreted via one or a combination of those four. Outright Biblical literalism is a much more modern, originally American and entirely evangelical Protestant phenomenon.

Bellarmine also made it clear that while he accepted the traditional interpretation of those texts in Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Joshua regarding the fixed position of the earth, he did so because they seemed to be supported by the scientific consensus of the time, which was at that stage (1615) firmly against heliocentrism on purely scientific grounds. At that point there was only a handful of astronomers or natural philosophers who accepted any of the two proposed heliocentric models Bellarmine was pretty clear on the science, given that he had lectured on natural philosophy and astronomy at the University of Leuven before coming to Rome.

And your brief quote above snips out the key element in Bellarmine's widely circulated 1615 Letter to Foscarini:

"If there were a true demonstration that the sun is at the centre of the world and the earth in the third heaven, and that the sun does not circle the earth but the earth circles the sun, then one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary, and say rather that we do not understand them than what is demonstrated is false. But I will not believe that there is such a demonstration, until it is shown to me . . . . and in case of doubt one must not abandon the Holy Scripture as interpreted by the Holy Fathers."

Of course, we have the benefit of hindsight and know that this "true demonstration" was eventually shown by a combination of Kepler's Three Laws and Newton's new physics. But that was almost a century later. In Bellarmine's (and Galileo's and Bruno's) time, the scientific consensus was overwhelming against heliocentrism because of a whole range of scientific problems with the heliocentric models which had not yet at that stage been resolved. 

So Bellarmine, far from being some ignorant Biblical literalist, had the scientific consensus firmly on his side, was highly scientifically literate, was open to the idea that if the scientific consensus changed the Biblical interpretations would need to change too (which is exactly what later happened) and was not some "Biblical literalist".

P.S. You won't be able to find those eight propositions above in any actual source from the time, because they are a piece of modern speculation by Luigi Firpo from his book on Bruno's trial Il processo di Giordano Bruno (Salerno, 1993). The list of charges against Bruno does not survive, only his sentence, which reads:

"Because you, Fra Giordano, son of the late Giovanni Bruno of Nola in the Kingdom of Naples, professed priest of the order of Saint Dominic, at the age of circa fifty-two years, were denounced to the Holy Office in Venice eight years ago:
That you said that it was a great blasphemy to say that bread transubstantiates into flesh, etc. et infra.
These propositions were presented to you on the eighteenth of January 1599 in the congregation of the lord prelates held in the Holy Office …"

The "etc. et. infra." refers to the other charges, now lost. But we know from other evidence that Bruno's mystical acceptance of heliocentrism (he didn't actually understand the science and didn't really care to) was not one of the charges at all.

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Good point Bel, he was not executed for science, he was executed for thinking and speaking (rather unscientific for the most part) ideas the church disapproved of. He was more a martyr for free speech.

Sounds like science was involved to me: https://famous-trials.com/bruno/266-summary

Paper volume, 320x240mm, ff. 429 (ancient, partly wrong numbering and not inclusive of many white folios), bound in parchment; on the back: VARIA. Censurae.

ASV, Misc., Arm. X, 205, ff. 230v‑231r

In the same rooms where Giordano Bruno was questioned, for the same important reasons of the relationship between science and faith, at the dawning of the new astronomy and at the decline of Aristotle’s philosophy, sixteen years later, Cardinal Bellarmino, who then contested Bruno’s heretical theses, summoned Galileo Galilei, who also faced a famous inquisitorial trial, which, luckily for him, ended with a simple abjuration.

No, that is a list of some of the things Bruno was questioned about in his earlier inquiry before the Ventian Inquisition. He was questioned about a lot of things. That doesn't mean he was condemned on account of all of them. We know that he wasn't condemned for accepting heliocentrism as part of his mystical cosmology, because the Roman Inquisition worked by case law and precedent. Bruno was condemned by the Roman Inquisition in 1599. Seventeen years later Cardinal Bellarmine, the same Inquisitor who tried Bruno, headed up an inquiry into the writings of Galileo that centred on the question of whether heliocentrism contradicted the traditional interpretation of certain passages of Scripture. This inquiry would not have been necessary if a ruling had already been made on that point back in 1599 - they would simply have pointed to that precedent. 

The fact they didn't means that, while Bruno may have been questioned about his eccentric and mystical form of heliocentrism, that did not form part of his condemnation. (See Thomas F. Mayer The Roman Inquisition: A Papal Bureaucracy and Its Laws in the Age of Galileo, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013, p.152, 169 and the Inquistions use of precedent in this period).