On Feb. 17, 1600, a group of men led a Dominican monk to the stake in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome.  He had been indicted, intermittently tried and tortured for 8 years, and was finally excommunicated that day and had his mouth gagged so that not a word would escape from his lips: "according to one account, a pin was driven into his cheek, through his tongue, and out the other side; another pin sealed his lips, forming a cross" (Greenblatt 241). Shortly thereafter, he was burnt to death, and his remains were scattered in a river so that no one would keep his memory alive. On Aug. 7, 1603, just three years after that fateful day, the Catholic Church banned all his books, which meant anyone who dared to read, quote, or support his views would be excommunicated (아탈리 268).

　And for the next 400 years, the Church took every opportunity to arraign his ideas and justify its actions: as late as the year 2000, Cardinal Angelo Sodano defended Bruno's prosecutors and claimed that the Inquisitors "had the desire to serve freedom and promote the common good and did everything possible to save his life" ("Bruno" in WIKI). Wherefore such persistence, why do they have to hold onto what has already turned out to be absolutely untenable after all these years, centuries? Bruno himself had the prescience for this stubborn resistance to and mortal fear of truth: the moment he was condemned to death for heresy, he said defiantly, "You may be more afraid to bring that sentence against me than I am to accept it" (Greenblatt 240). What was at stake was not his ideas; what really roiled and scared them was the way he believed in and upheld his ideas no matter what.

　Of course, his views on the cosmos, the spiritual realm, and the divinity of Virgin Mary and her son were fundamentally radical and clearly heretical, and any one of those could easily cost him his life, but then a number of them had been said and published long before he ever did: Aristarcus of Samoa (c. 310 BC-230 BC) said the sun, not the earth, was the center of this universe, put other planets in the correct order and distance from the sun, and surmised that there might be other stars like it. Copernicus (1473-1543) maintained the same ("Heliocentrism") in On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres, which he published shortly before his death to avoid the Inquisition. And of course the Roman poet Lucretius (c. 99 BC-c. 55 BC), the arch-atomist, famously exulted in the multiplicity of the universe, the possibility of different life forms on any of those innumerable stars and their satellites, and asserted, among other things, that 1) there is no afterlife 2) all organized religions are superstitious delusions, and that 3) understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder (Greenblatt 193-198).

　Bruno (1548-1600) took all these a huge step further and posited that there are not only multiple worlds but also infinite number of "seeds" (atoms) to form other races of men, other creatures all over the universe. There is no center in the world, and the purely random combinations and dissolutions of any organism such as men are of no interest to any being, be it God or Fate (if there are any beings like that at all). He also fulminated at the empire of ignorance and dogma that was the Church, the supreme authority in the Western world at the time, and the cruel and inhuman ways the churchmen had to keep all the benefits and privileges of that institution to their ugly and duplicitous selves (cf. "freedom and common good"!). His courage and intellectual integrity shook and in some ways irreparably annihilated the foundation and trappings of that abominable empire at one stroke, and they had no choice but to silence him, burn his body, and ban all his books.

　All the same, the torch of his legacy burns on, and today the fiery words he spoke and wrote are easily available in many languages around the globe. It is profoundly shocking that there are still people who deny and denounce his ideas, but it is their problem, not his. He did what he had to do, I.e. demolished that ancient kingdom of lies and violence, and people will always remember the valiant and resolute way he championed his (and truthful) interpretation of the world. He is a pattern of philosophy, I. e. love for knowledge, and as long as there is such thing as pursuit of truth, his life AND death will remind and firmly reassure us that reason and compassion will win out and shine through the thick and treacherous curtain of untruths and Orwellian machinations that we are witnessing all around us at this very moment.

　

1) 자크 아탈리, 『등대: 공자에서 아리스토텔레스까지 우리에게 빛이 된 23인』, 이효숙 역, 청림출판, 2013.

2) Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, W. W. Norton, 2011.