The myth of Bruno, the 'scientist' fighting against superstition and darkness.....

It is a tiresome nonsense, but like the Galileo myth, much believed in by those who have little interest in real history or facts. The Galileo tale is such a sordid lie that only atheists, quacks in academia and social sciences, along with the mainstream media could possibly believe in it [see here].

Bruno is another fable, right up there with the tooth-fairy tales of evolution and globaloneywarming. In the atheist-Marxist rewriting of 'humanist' history; Bruno was a soldier of science; fighting alone, abandoned, surrounded by the hostile pagans of the Catholic Church, bloodied, beaten, gored by the wicked superstitious idiots of the Christ cult; campaigning for light and reason against morons of paleo-knuckle-dragging irrationality. Without Bruno and his martyrdom the academics say; there would never be a world of rational science.

As with most tales of quackademia and Marxist rewriting, the story of Bruno, like Galileo, is a myth.

Giordano Bruno [1548-1600] was a disgraced, defrocked monk, who was executed in 1600 not for 'science', but for magic. He was not sentenced by the Catholics for his support of heliocentricity or Copernican theory, which in 1600 was unproven. Indeed the Church in the main both funded and supported Copernicus. It was the academics invested in Aristotle and Ptolemy who vociferously objected to a new conception of the cosmos. In any event Bruno was in the main a rabble-rousing lunatic, as divorced from science and observation, as evolution and globlaoneywarming are from reality.

Catholic scientists long before Galileo, using higher mathematics and observations had radically altered the cosmology of the universe. Grosseteste, Cusa, Copernicus and others had developed math, models, formulations and observations into a narrative of a universe which was expanding, in which the earth was not the centre [though miraculously, perfectly placed and engineered for life]; and that the infinite cosmos was itself embedded with natural physical laws and ratios.

Bruno simply took this emerging science, what was already extant; and married it with magic. He was not an innovator, nor did he ever engage in the scientific method. Not one single experiment is attributed to Bruno. He was largely a mystical quack who proposed some very strange ideas about metaphysics, and who argued that God’s infinite power could only be expressed by creating infinite worlds, a theory we hear repeated today [absent the idea of God] through the magic of 'multiverses' and self-impregnating universes. Indeed, life from non-life in other words. This is not science, but fiction. Multi-verses are no more a scientific fact that walking fish with evolving human heads. [see Yates, 'Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition'].

Much of his magical nonsense derived from Neoplatonists [3^rd century AD whose doctrines were subsumed into Christian theology], from Ficino [1433-1499] an Italian humanist [today this means atheist]; and the German magician, occultist and alchemist, Agrippa von Nettesheim [1486-1535]. Bruno was influenced by these men, and developed his own philosophical view of cosmology and theology which directly opposed Church doctrine. As a [former] monk and priest, this presented a direct assault on the Church. Bruno denied the divinity of Christ and actively campaigned that the Galilean was just a clever magician. This was the crux of the problem that the Church had with Bruno. It was not about science, but simply about theology.

Historian Joel Shackleford in his book, 'Galileo goes to jail' writes that;

“the Catholic church did not impose thought control on astronomers, and even Galileo was free to believe what he wanted about the position and mobility of the earth, so long as he did not teach the Copernican hypothesis as a truth on which Holy Scripture had no bearing.”

[note; it was not until the Catholic Kepler could provide the mathematical calculations to support Copernicanism and elliptical orbits that heliocentricity could be viewed as science.]

and as Shackleford correctly states, people need to:

“look beyond the construction of the myth of Bruno as a moralistic topos in the triumphant struggle between the freedom of scientific inquiry and the shackles of conformity it the dead letter of religious revelation.  Instead we must examine the actor’s own contexts for clues to meaning and categories that can explain his history. In Bruno’s day, theology and philosophy were of one piece, inseparable.”

There never has been a conflict between science and religion. Bruno ran afoul of theological and Church dogma. He should not have been executed, and the Church had no business in creating a martyr to magic. He was a quack with a limited following and would have expired in anonymity. This is the real tragedy of Bruno.