{"id":26825,"date":"2020-02-17T12:57:02","date_gmt":"2020-02-17T20:57:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/monkeymind\/?p=26825"},"modified":"2020-02-17T12:57:02","modified_gmt":"2020-02-17T20:57:02","slug":"giordano-bruno-is-burned-at-the-stake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/monkeymind\/2020\/02\/giordano-bruno-is-burned-at-the-stake.html","title":{"rendered":"Giordano Bruno is Burned at the Stake"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), Italian philosopher. Bruno was a supporter of the Copernican view that the Earth revolved around the Sun. He also went beyond this to propose the infinity of space and the multiplicity of worlds. He was a member of the Dominican Order but left in 1576 to travel widely in Europe and air his radical views. He was arrested by the Inquisition in 1592 and, on refusing to recant his unorthodox theories, was burned alive at the stake. This statue of Bruno was erected in 1889 in the Campo Dei Fiori in Rome, Italy, to mark the place where he was burned.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

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On this day, the 17th of February, in 1600 Giordano Bruno<\/a>, former friar, amazing thinker, difficult personality, and arguably the \u201cfirst\u201d martyr to science was burned alive at the stake.<\/p>\n

Apparently on his way to the stake they drove a spike through his tongue to stop him from talking.<\/p>\n

I am fascinated by the range of people who admire him, from as Puala Findlen notes in her essay A Hungry Mind<\/span><\/a>, main stream scientists ranging from \u201cErnst Haeckel and Herbert Spencer to leading literary figures like Vicotr Hugo and Henrik Ibsen,\u201d and I would include to pantheist philosophers<\/a>\u00a0as well as\u00a0flying saucer<\/a> enthusiasts.<\/p>\n

Clearly much of who Bruno was and is has become a canvas upon which we paint our own pictures.\u00a0Not a terrible thing. But not a particularly good thing, either.<\/p>\n

He is vastly less a scientist than his younger contemporary Galileo Galilei<\/a>. But Bruno\u2019s horrific death gives an image those of us who see the oppressions of rigorous thinking and the work of science. And so here he is\u2026<\/p>\n

And you know, the real person is always so much messier, so much more complex. And, I noticed, often so much more interesting.<\/p>\n

I know one danger for me a bit too 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.<\/p>\n

All that said, someone important died. He was silenced by a kind of authority that has done much harm to the advancing of human good.<\/p>\n

It happened on this day 419 years ago.<\/p>\n

Something to pause and notice.<\/p>\n

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