Bruno, born Giordano Bruno, was born in 1548, was burned to death in Rome's Campo de' Fiori on February 17, 1600, at the age of 52.
Giordano Bruno
He was an Italian thinker, natural scientist, philosopher and writer of the Renaissance. As a symbol of freedom of thought, he inspired the freedom movement in Europe in the 16th century and became one of the most important figures in the history of Western thought.
Giordano Bruno
He courageously defended and developed Copernicus' heliocentric doctrine and spread it throughout Europe, and was hailed as a fearless fighter against church and scholasticism, a martyr in defence of truth. Because of his criticism of scholasticism and theology, his opposition to geocentrism, his propagation of heliocentrism and cosmology, and religious philosophy, all of which made him a figure on the cusp of the storm in his time, he was arrested and imprisoned in 1592, and finally condemned as a "heretic" by the Inquisition. On February 17, 1600, he was burned to death in Rome's Piazza de' Fiori.
Copernicus
Bruno was born in 1548 in a small town near scenic Naples in Italy. As a child, the family was poor and his father had to send Bruno to a monastery. In the monastery, Bruno read a lot of books on mathematics and astronomy. At the age of 24, he became a priest and received a doctorate in philosophy. After that, he gradually became suspicious of religion. He offended the Holy See by his bold criticism of the Bible, and had to flee Italy, where Bruno spent a long time wandering around Europe, preaching Copernicus' doctrine and his own opinions, causing fear and hatred in the Roman Inquisition. In 1592, the Romans lured him back home and arrested him. The executioners tried all their punishments but could not make Bruno submit. He said: "The glaciers of the Caucasus will not cool the flame in my heart, even if I am burned to death like Servetus." He also said, "Fighting for the truth is life's greatest pleasure." "After 8 years of brutal torture, Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 AD.
Roman Church Auditorium
Christian rule in Bruno's native Italy was deeply rooted, and religious superstitions were prevalent among the people, and the worship of icons and corpses was extremely common at that time. But Bruno, who had been baptized by modern humanism, dismissed all this with contempt. He is the most stubborn enemy of the Christian church. Bruno considered the Catholic Church's doctrine of the "Trinity" of God wrong, and he rejected the doctrines of "variation," "The Cleansing of the Conception of the Virgin," and "God's creation" propagated by scholasticists. Bruno did not even look at the statue of the Holy One, and once threw the portrait of Christ and saints out of his monastery, thus angering the church and persecuting him. He denounced Luther, Calvin, and other religious leaders as "the stupidest men in the world" and said that they were "mindless, uninformed, far removed from culture and life, and moldy and rotten in eternal pedantic." All they do is "heal the ulcers of rotten religion" and "mend the holes in the cloak of religion." In his writings and discourses, Bruno listed the dangers of religion to scientific, philosophical, moral, and social relations. He believed that religion ignored people's minds and hindered the development of science and philosophy. He abhors the evils and harms of religion and hates monks at all levels. He even called out that it was necessary not only to nationalize church property, eliminate the economic power of the church, stop the construction of churches, close monasteries, but also deprive monks of their privileges and force them to engage in social work.
Portrait of Christ Jesus
Examining and analyzing in the historical environment at that time, it can be seen that Bruno had great courage and perseverance, to some extent, his thinking also had a certain degree of advancement, his theoretical summary of the new discoveries in astronomy still shines with the brilliance of truth, providing a practical and more complete philosophical foundation for the natural science that had just been revived at that time, opening up a broad path for the development of philosophy in the future, and its entire ideological system is the essence of the spirit of the times, which has a far-reaching influence on the successors of later science and philosophy.
astronomy
Due to the times, although Bruno has such and such limitations, from a historical perspective, he is not only a giant in the history of science, but also a giant in the history of philosophy. The place of his philosophy in the history of philosophy is completely consistent with the place of the Renaissance movement in human history. His philosophy inherited the achievements of ancient philosophy, advocated rational understanding, negated medieval religious theology, marked that philosophy got rid of theology and regained its independent status, and included the germ of the comprehensive development of philosophy in the future, and the inheritance and development of its philosophical system is an inevitable stage in the history of philosophy. As a scientist and philosopher on the path of defending the truth, Bruno is undoubtedly one of the most outstanding and worthy successors.
Bruno was burned alive
After Bruno's death, the Holy See, fearing that the ashes of the great thinker would be snatched in his memory, hastily collected his ashes together with dirt and scattered them in the Tiber River. On June 9, 1889, on the Campo de' Fiori, where Bruno was martyred, a bronze statue was erected in memory of this great thinker who cried out for truth and dedicated his life to science, forever commemorating his courage and exploits.
Bruno was burned alive
Bruno was burned alive
Bronze statue of Bruno