#GIORDANO BRUNO

[nousrose]

Divinity reveals herself in all things, everything has divinity latent within itself. For she enfolds and imparts herself even unto the smallest beings, and from the smallest beings, according to their capacity. Without her presence nothing would have being, because she is the essence of the existence of the first unto the last being.

The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast

Giordano Bruno

[undinesea]

Because our knowledge is ignorance, or because it is neither knowledge of anything there nor the understanding of any truth, or because even if there is some entrance to that [truth], the door may not come open except by means of ignorance — which is simultaneously path, gatekeeper, and gate.

Giordano Bruno, from The Cabala of Pegasus

[aitan]

"È delle anime sordide pensar come il volgo sol perchè il volgo è maggioranza."

(Giordano Bruno)

[donaruz]

Maiori forsan cum timore sententiam in me fertis quam ego accipiam.

Non mi vergogno d'aver sopportato la povertà, la malevolenza e l'odio dei miei, le esecrazioni, le ingratitudini di coloro ai quali volli giovare e giovai, gli effetti d'un'estrema barbarie e d'un'avarizia sordidissima. Per il che non mi duole d'esser incorso in fatiche, dolori, esilio: ché faticando profittai, soffrendo feci esperienza, vivendo esule imparai: ché trovai in breve fatica lunga quiete, in leggera sofferenza gaudio immenso, in un angusto esilio una patria.

Giordano Bruno, 17 febbraio 1600, Campo de' Fiori, Roma

[marina98s]

«Gutta cavat lapidem non bis sed saepe cadendo:

sic homo fit sapiens bis non, sed saepe legendo».

«La goccia scava la pietra cadendo non due volte, ma continuamente;

così l'uomo diventa saggio, leggendo non due volte ma spesso».

Giordano Bruno (probabilmente ispirato da Lucrezio...).

[italian-lit-tournament]

Italian literature tournament - Third round.

Propaganda in support of the authors is accepted, you can write it both in the tag if reblog the poll (explaining maybe that is propaganda and you want to see posted) or in the comments. Every few days it will be recollected and posted here under the cut.

[music-despite-everything]

Campo dei Fiori by Czeslaw Milosz

Czeslaw Milosz, 30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004, 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature winner.

---

In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori baskets of olives and lemons, cobbles spattered with wine and the wreckage of flowers. Vendors cover the trestles with rose-pink fish; armfuls of dark grapes heaped on peach-down.

On this same square they burned Giordano Bruno. Henchmen kindled the pyre close-pressed by the mob. Before the flames had died the taverns were full again, baskets of olives and lemons again on the vendors' shoulders.

I thought of the Campo dei Fiori in Warsaw by the sky-carousel one clear spring evening to the strains of a carnival tune. The bright melody drowned the salvos from the ghetto wall, and couples were flying high in the cloudless sky.

At times wind from the burning would drift dark kites along and riders on the carousel caught petals in midair. That same hot wind blew open the skirts of the girls and the crowds were laughing on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.

Someone will read as moral that the people of Rome or Warsaw haggle, laugh, make love as they pass by the martyrs' pyres. Someone else will read of the passing of things human, of the oblivion born before the flames have died.

But that day I thought only of the loneliness of the dying, of how, when Giordano climbed to his burning he could not find in any human tongue words for mankind, mankind who live on.

Already they were back at their wine or peddled their white starfish, baskets of olives and lemons they had shouldered to the fair, and he already distanced as if centuries had passed while they paused just a moment for his flying in the fire.

Those dying here, the lonely forgotten by the world, our tongue becomes for them the language of an ancient planet. Until, when all is legend and many years have passed, on a new Campo dei Fiori rage will kindle at a poet's word.

Warsaw, 1943

"Campo dei Fiori" from The Collected Poems 1931-1987 by Czeslaw Milosz. Copyright © 1988 by Czeslaw Milosz Royalties, Inc. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

[esarkaye]

[majestativa]

What would have happened if what lived in the hearts of the greatest individuals – Nicolaus Cusanus, Paracelsus, Agrippa, Giordano Bruno, and Campanella – would have entered the hearts of everyone? […] What if the old and the new had met and intermingled, spirit with blood, and blood with spirit?

— Gustav Landauer, Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader, transl Gabriel Kuhn, (2010)

[emscriabin]

“Unless you make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God: for the like is not intelligible save to the like. Make yourself grow to a greatness beyond measure, by a bound free yourself from the body; raise yourself above all time, become Eternity; then you will understand God. Believe that nothing is impossible for you, think yourself immortal and capable of understanding all, all arts, all sciences, the nature of every living being. Mount higher than the highest height; descend lower than the lowest depth. Draw into yourself all sensations of everything created, fire and water, dry and moist, imagining that you are everywhere, on earth, in the sea, in the sky, that you are not yet born, in the maternal womb, adolescent, old, dead, beyond death. If you embrace in your thought all things at once, times, places, substances, qualities, quantities, you may understand God.”

― Giordano Bruno

[gregor-samsung]

«Sul finire del Sedicesimo secolo la volta celeste si alzava, come la vediamo noi ancora oggi, non di venti metri come nel planetario, ma circa a non più di trenta chilometri sopra di noi, come un’inflessibile costruzione. Sopra questa fortezza celesta troneggiava il malefico Dio, la cui vista penetrava in tutti gli errori degli uomini, che puniva senza pietà con la guerra, la peste, gli incendi. La volta celeste, che sosteneva i palazzi e i giardini di Dio, cingeva come un guscio d’uovo la Terra liberamente sospesa nel vuoto. «A questo punto entrò in scena Giordano Bruno e ruppe il guscio dell’uovo cosmico aprendo lo sguardo meravigliato e felice dell’umanità sull’infinità dello spazio. Le stelle fisse non erano più i bottoni dorati inchiodati all’immobile parete celeste, ma divennero barche dorate che si muovevano liberamente nell’etere a grande distanza le une dalle altre. Tutta la magnificenza dei palazzi divini si era volatilizzata. Se fossi un grande artista come lei», disse lo zoologo volgendosi ora al pittore, «progetterei un affresco imponente che, come contraltare del Giudizio Universale di Michelangelo, raffiguri Giordano Bruno sul rogo. Ma le fiamme, che devono bruciarlo, salgono verso il cielo e incendiano la volta celeste come fosse una misera quinta teatrale. Si vedrebbero quindi la città di Dio con i suoi opulenti palazzi crollare, dissolvendosi nel fumo e nella cenere, e insieme ad essi cadrebbero vittime dell’eterna distruzione angeli e santi. In lontananza, le stelle dell’Orsa Maggiore, come sfere luminose, apparirebbero in segno di vittoria.»

Jakob von Uexküll, L'immortale spirito nella natura, traduzione dal tedesco di Nicola Zippel, Castelvecchi (collana I Timoni), 2014. [Libro elettronico]

[Edizione originale: Der unsterbliche Geist in der Natur, Christian Wegner Verlag, Hamburg; testo pubblicato in tre parti fra il 1938 ed il 1947]

[nousrose]

Divine love does not weigh down, nor carry his servant captive and enslaved to the lowest depths, but raises him, supports him and magnifies him above all liberty whatsoever.

The Heroic Enthusiasts

Giordano Bruno

[didanawisgi]

“The idea of ​​man as a microcosm, expressed so many times in the philosophical and mystical literature of old and new times, nowhere receives such an in-depth interpretation as in Kabbalah”.

— S. N. Bulgakov “Non-Evening Light”

“Sciences such as theology, philosophy and mathematics take their principles and roots from it [Kabbalah]. Therefore all these sciences (scientiae) are subordinate to this wisdom (sapientia); and their principles and rules are subordinate to her principles and rules; and therefore their argument is insufficient without it”.

— R. Lull “Works of Raymond Lull”

“Kabbalah gives the highest principle an unpronounceable name; from it she derives, in the form of an emanation of the second stage, four principles, of which each again branches into twelve, and these, in turn, into 72, etc.... to infinite further ramifications, just as there are an infinite number of species and subspecies... And, in the end, it turns out that everything Divine can be brought to one Primary Source, just as all the light that shines primordially and by itself, and the images that are refracted in many mirrors and in as many separate objects, can be brought to one to the formal ideal principle – the Source of all these images”.

— G. Bruno “Italian Works”

[explorerrowan]

Is it just me, or does Pedro Pascal look remarkably like Giordano Bruno, the 16th century Italian scientist that insisted that not only did the Earth orbit the Sun, but that stars could be other suns with their own planets, and who was burned at the stake for this "heresy"?

(Notably, that wasn't the only heresy Giordano Bruno was burned for. He also questioned eternal damnation, the virginity of Mary, and believed souls probably transmigrate/reincarnate.)

[sspacegodd]

Cosmic Trigger (by Robert Anton Wilson) deals with a process of deliberately induced brain change. This process is called "initiation" or "vision quest" in many traditional societies and can loosely be considered some dangerous variety of self-psychotherapy in modern terminology. I do not recommend it for everybody.

We find that: "reality" is always plural and mutable.

"Reality" is a word in the English language which happens to be (a) a noun and (b) singular. Thinking in the English language (and Indo-European languages) therefore subliminally programs us to conceptualize "reality" as one block like entity--sort of like a huge New York skyscraper, in which every part is just another "room" within the same building. This linguistic program is so pervasive that most people cannot "think" outside it at all, and when one tries to offer a different perspective they imagine you are talking gibberish.

Frances Yates looked into the intricate and amazingly detailed and useful world of mental memory constructs, free-range organic machinery-making with its own supplies and labor to create a helpful smartner so far constrained to the sketchy landscapes of perpetual motion machines and self-replicating robots....that can learn to repair, improve, and evolve themselves.

These Theaters of Memory, discussed in books like "Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition” (1964), “The Rosicrucian Enlightenment” (1972), and The Art of Memory (1966), calmly and enthrallingly mesmerize—Yates spins fascinating detective stories of the brain mixed with alchemy, architectures, and ways of writing down or communicating esoteric knowledge…that is, to people who know how to read it.

Is the pre-Adamic language of the birds really gone forever?

Or is it more simply that the reader hasn't arrived yet?

[giuliavaldi]

[1548 | 17 febbraio 1600]

«Giordano Bruno rappresenta la libertà di coscienza che al giorno d’oggi anche la Chiesa cattolica difende come un diritto inalienabile. Quando un Papa con un gesto simbolico percorrerà a piedi la strada che separa il Vaticano da Campo dei Fiori per deporre una rosa ai piedi della statua del filosofo bruciato vivo? Sarebbe un gesto che non significherebbe accettare completamente le idee e la filosofia di Bruno, ma un tributo dovuto a tutti i martiri del libero pensiero che la Chiesa nel suo passato ha perseguitato».

Vito Mancuso