Briefest Thoughts Sparked by Reflecting On Giordano Bruno’s Life and Death

On this day in 1600 Giordano Bruno the former friar, amazing thinker, difficult personality and arguably the “first” martyr to science was burned alive at the stake.

I am fascinated by the range of people who admire him, from as Puala Findlen notes in her essay A Hungry Mind, main stream scientists “like Ernst Haeckel and Herbert Spencer to leading literary figures like Vicotr Hugo and Henrik Ibsen,” and I would include to pantheist philosophers to flying saucer enthusiasts.

Clearly much of who he was and is has become a canvas upon which we paint our own pictures. Not a terrible thing, but not a particularly good thing, either.

The real person is always so much messier, so much more complex, so much more interesting.

Perhaps that’s true in all our encounters. I know the danger for me often is to drop someone into a tidy box rather than to let the real person in all her or his complexity to present, to challenge, and, maybe, to transform me…

For the text for this video, written by John Kessler.