Aquilecchia
(Turin: Einaudi, ?
Bruno-Cause-Principle-and-Unity
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The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom
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First published in printed format 1998
ISBN 0-511-03494-6 eBook (Adobe Reader)
? ? ? ISBN 0-521-59359-X hardback
? ISBN 0-521-59658-0 paperback
? Introduction Chronology Further reading Note on the texts
page vii xxx xxxiv xxxvi
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Cause, principle and unity On magic
A general account of bonding
Index
Contents
Introduction
Giordano Bruno was born in Nola, near Naples, in ? ? ? ? . He entered the Dominican Order and, following publication of some works that are now lost, he left Italy in ? ? ? ? for Switzerland, France and eventually England, a move perhaps due to the oppressive climate in his own country, where the church felt itself threatened by the new science which he attempted to prop- agate. Having acquired a great interest in Ramon Lull (c. ? ? ? ? -? ? ? ? )1 and the art of memory, he presented in London his vision of an infinite universe in which he sought to re-unify terrestrial physics with celestial physics on the basis of a principle of universal becoming. He also reflected on the causes of the religious wars and tried to determine the origin of the theological dis- putes of the period. Beginning with the metaphysics expressed in De la causa, principio e uno (Cause, Principle and Unity), which reflected the objec- tions he encountered in England, he derived a new concept of the divinity which evolved from his cosmology and was to assume a radically anti- Christian character. The magical, animistic vision of everything which he adopted throughout all his writings, not just those of the last period of his life, is evident here. In addition to his specific contributions to the scientific revolution, he presented a general metaphysical vision that contributed sig- nificantly to the development of Renaissance philosophy.
Having returned to Italy in ? ? ? ? during the debate about the legitimacy of combining ancient knowledge with orthodoxy, Bruno was perhaps deceived by the experience of Francesco Patrizi,2 who was lecturing in
? 1 Lull designed an ars combinatoria, a code for representing reality such that its elements could be com- bined in different ways to represent various items of knowledge, from astronomy to theology. Mastery of this code and its permutations provided the person trained in its use with a sophisticated mnemonic device.
2 Francesco Patrizi (? ? ? ? -? ? ) was one of the leading Platonists of the Renaissance; his major work, A New Philosophy of the Universes, was condemned by the Congregation of the Index in Rome.
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? Platonic philosophy at the University of Sapienza at Rome. He thought he might be able to find a role for himself by renouncing or concealing the most heterodox features of his own teaching. This was an illusion, and he fell foul of the Inquisition and was executed at the stake in the Campo de' Fiori in ? ? ? ? .
I
La Cena de le Ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper) was the first of the dia- logues in Italian which Bruno published in ? ? ? ? /? . 3 The striking feature of this work, in which the author proclaims his Copernicanism, is the immediate connection established between the annual motion of the earth around the sun and the infinity of the universe. This, however, was quite different from the position of Copernicus, who, having given new dimen- sions to the traditional cosmos, recognized the immensity of the heavens but left to the natural philosopher the ultimate decision about whether or not the universe was infinite. In The Ash Wednesday Supper, on the con- trary, we find a clear affirmation of an infinite universe with infinite solar systems similar to our own. Suns and earths are composed of our own elements, they are living and inhabited beings, they are stars which are recognized not only as living things but also as divinities.
Bruno was led to these conclusions, in particular the thesis of the infin- ity of the universe, by a number of factors. In Copernicus' work, the earth was construed as a celestial body rotating round the sun like the other plan- ets; it was implicitly elevated to the status of a star, thus breaking down the rigid separation between the sublunary world and the celestial world, although Copernicus did not want to confront the enormous physical problems which derived from his heliocentrism. It is significant that, in his De revolutionibus orbium celestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies), the sphere of fixed stars no longer had a specific physical function and no longer constituted the principle of motion. This was a conclusion that could have been strengthened in Bruno's eyes by some developments in Italian philosophy of nature, especially those of Bernardino Telesio (? ? ? ? -? ? ). Bruno now went further and called into question the very
3 References to Bruno's Italian works are in the Dialoghi italiani, ? rd edn edited by G. Aquilecchia, reprinted with notes by G. Gentile (Florence: Sansoni, ? ? ? ? : reprt. ? ? ? ? ). The Latin works, Opera latine conscripta, were edited in Naples between ? ? ? ? and ? ? ? ? in three volumes (in eight parts) by F. Fiorentino, F. Tocco, G. Vitelli, V. Imbriani and C. M. Tallarigo. References to the Latin works are identifed as Op. lat. , with the volume, part and page number.
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? existence of such a sphere, which seemed to him merely the result of an optical illusion which made all the stars appear to be at an equal distance from the earth.
Bruno's comparison between himself and Copernicus in The Ash Wednesday Supper throws further light on this issue. Although Copernicus is ranked in the history of astronomy as being comparable to Hipparchus or Ptolemy, his real significance is thought to lie in the fact that he is a hero of human thought who was able to oppose the force of common prejudice, the vulgar Aristotelian philosophy, the apparently self-evident view that the earth was immobile in the centre of the heavens. Nevertheless, his work is presented as having crucial limitations which open the way to what will be Bruno's specific contribution. Copernicus was primarily a mathemati- cian - his interest was directed towards astronomy rather than towards nat- ural philosophy, and in this sense his work needed to be further developed. Certainly he started from a correct and significant physical presupposition, the earth's motion, but he sought only a mathematical description of the movements of the heavens. 4
In contrast, Bruno presents himself as a natural philosopher, as the one who is destined to become the authentic interpreter of Copernicus' dis- covery and is called to draw out the conclusions from it, beginning with the physical ones. The first of these, which is decisive for a correct under- standing of the others, is the infinity of the universe. In the Narratio of Georg Joachim Rheticus, which Bruno was able to read in the ? ? ? ? edition of De revolutionibus, Rheticus had described the astronomer as a blind man who has a stick to help him on his way, and this stick was mathematics. In order to accomplish the theoretical task which he sets himself, a task which lies at the limit of human ability, the astronomer needs a hand to guide him and inspiration from above. Thus in The Ash Wednesday Supper Copernicus becomes the inspired one to whom the gods have entrusted a message, the importance and significance of which he has not realized; he is like a blind fortune teller for whom Bruno acts as the authentic interpreter. The philosopher, therefore, is summoned on a metaphorical journey across the heavens to discover that the traditional crystalline spheres are only a vain fiction, that there is no upper limit to the physical world and thus no end to his journey, and that what opens out in front of him is an infinite space. The philosopher shows us that the divinity is present in us and in our planet no less than in every other heavenly body, that it is not situated
4 Dialoghi, ? ? -? . ix
? Introduction
? beyond the imaginary limit of a closed and finite universe, in a place which makes it accessible to man. 5
Bruno's reform, therefore, is not only philosophically significant but also has religious consequences. It challenges the developments of the Reformation, calls into question the truth-value of the whole of Christianity, and claims that Christ perpetrated a deceit on mankind. In the pages which follow, he compares the negative consequences which have resulted from traditional philosophy - negative consequences which are apparent to everyone - with the positive fruits, both civil and religious, which the new philosophy is producing, revitalizing all those fields of knowledge and life in which the ancients had excelled.
The consequences of this new philosophy are wide-ranging and radical because this new vision of the cosmos changes our relationship with the divinity, and this, in Bruno's eyes, transforms the very meaning of human life. He claims that this new vision will reconcile us with the divine law which governs nature, and free us from the fear of imaginary divinities, cruel and unfathomable, who look down from heavenly heights, control- ling the sublunary world in a mysterious way. Human beings believe that they are enclosed in an inferior world subject to generation and corruption, but this is a simple illusion. Within this world, as in Plato's cave, we can see only the shadows of reality which appear on its wall, the shadows of the ideas which take shape and form at the upper limit of the heavens. Bruno suggests that, on the contrary, we can now recognize the universal law which controls the perpetual becoming of all things in an infinite universe. Knowledge of this law reassures us in the face of the present and the future (about which, of course, we have only an imperfect knowledge), because it does not deny anything its existence in and of itself, but claims that everything is being ceaselessly transformed into something else.
More than any previous thinker, then, Bruno is aware of the fact that the fall of Aristotelian cosmology implies the end of traditional metaphysics. From this starting point he elaborates a philosophy which is new and orig- inal, despite drawing on views attributed to the Presocratics (the ens et unum of Parmenides, Anaxagoras' omnia in omnibus), whose voices are distorted by the fact that they are preserved only in Aristotle's refutations of their positions. Thus, in Cause, Principle and Unity,6 he sets about presenting a
5 Ibid. , ? ? -? .
6 See the critical edition of De la causa, principio e uno, edited by G.
Aquilecchia (Turin: Einaudi, ? ? ? ? ).
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Introduction
? metaphysics which is intended to constitute a more solid foundation for the interpretation of nature and for the consequent introduction of a new ethic, capable of establishing the outlines of the renewed relationship between man and God both at the level of civil life and at the philosopher's level of contemplation. The problem which immediately arises, however, is that of specifying how this new idea of the divinity is formed and in what sense Bruno's infinite universe radically modifies the relationship between God and the world, between God and human beings.
II
To clarify these issues, we must return to Bruno's earliest works, especially to De umbris idearum (The Shadows of Ideas) (? ? ? ? ). Here he tried to elab- orate an art of memory which was based on magical foundations; and in doing this he identified the heavenly models, the exemplars of every sensi- ble reality which the human mind can know, with the images of the thirty- six heavenly deacons which tradition attributed to Teucer the Babylonian and which he borrowed from the classic text of Renaissance magic, Agrippa's De occulta philosophia. 7 In De umbris Bruno applies, in an appar- ently arbitrary way, Nicholas of Cusa's coincidence of opposites to the con- ception of the hierarchy of being which Marsilio Ficino explained in his Theologia platonica. 8 This doctrine, which is central to that work, is an attempt to define the special privilege assigned within the framework of creation to the rational soul, a genus which includes both the anima mundi (the world-soul) and the human soul. Ficino defines this privilege in cos- mological terms. In fact, in his eyes the rational soul was at the centre of the hierarchy of being, as the very link between the sensible world and the intelligible world; descending from the former, it gave life and form to the latter.
The hierarchy of being extended between two extremes, pure act and pure potency, God and prime matter, in such a way that each of the inter- mediate levels of the hierarchy presented a different relationship between act and potency. One descended down the levels of this hierarchy, starting
? 7 Cf. E. Garin, 'Le <<elezioni>> e il problema dell'astrologia,' reprinted in Garin, L'eta` nuova. Ricerche di storia della cultura dal XII al XVI (Naples: Morano, ? ? ? ? ), ? ? ? -? ? , used, especially in ch. XI, by F. A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ? ? ? ? ).
8 M. Ficino, Theologia platonica, XI in Opera (Basel, ? ? ? ? ) I, ? ? ? -? . Ficino's doctrine is comprehensi- ble due to the theory of the primum in aliquo genere, according to which the last member of one genus coincides with the first member of the following genus.
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? from the pure act constituted by God and eventually reaching prime mat- ter. Each step downward represented an increase in potentiality. Within this overarching hierarchy, if the sensible and the intelligible are analysed as two separate categories and if each one of them is considered as a uni- tary whole, complete in itself, it would be possible to discover something new, namely the way in which the sensible world and the intelligible world, despite being radically distinct by nature, were linked together. In the intel- ligible sphere, one descended gradually to the lowest level, which was con- stituted by the rational soul; it was purely receptive to the levels above it, and could thus be considered as pure potency in relation to them. In the sensible sphere, on the other hand, one moved up within the hierarchy of being, from prime matter, through a sequence of more complex forms of corporeal organization until one reached an absolute limit. That limit was heavenly matter, which because of its purity and spirituality could be defined by Ficino as corpus quasi non corpus (a body that is almost not a body). This kind of matter, sometimes called 'spirit' and sometimes 'ether', could be considered to be pure act in comparison with prime matter. Here it seemed as if the pure potentiality which defined prime matter was trans- formed completely into its opposite, pure actuality. In conclusion, the more the act transformed itself into potency with respect to the superior levels in the intelligible world, the more the opposite process seemed to take place in the sensible sphere and potentiality seemed to be transformed progres- sively into actuality.
Here it is important to note how this analysis underpins Ficino's doc- trine of the world-soul, which linked the corporeal and the spiritual, giv- ing life and form to the entire inferior world. Bruno saw this as an instance of Nicholas of Cusa's coincidence of opposites: two spheres were gradually losing their essential characteristics by somehow transforming themselves into one another. He also saw in doctrines of this type the theoretical basis for a distinctive kind of art of memory and the foundation for an authentic astral theology. Through these it seemed possible that man, endowed with a rational soul and a spirit to mediate between the soul and his elementary body, could link himself to that privileged cosmic point on the boundary between the sensible and the intelligible which would allow him to grasp the archetypal forms, the actual generating models of every sensible real- ity, if not in their purity, then at least in their shadows, the shadows of ideas.
As already mentioned, in The Ash Wednesday Supper the sphere of fixed stars began to lose all the functions which had been assigned to it within
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? traditional cosmology. Each of the movements which had been attributed to it was reduced to a mere appearance generated by the motion of the earth. Bruno thus denied the very existence of such a sphere, relegating it simply to an optical illusion. The first casualty of all this was Ficino's doctrine of the hierarchy of being, which Bruno had used in De umbris, where he interpreted it in terms of the coincidence of opposites; nevertheless, in this work he still tried to interpret the role of human beings, their origin and destiny, within the traditional cosmological framework. Certainly, he remained faithful even in his new cosmology to the Platonic world-soul, understanding it as an intrin- sic principle of motion for all the celestial bodies which no longer needed any other forms of motion, and, as we shall see in Cause, he will speak of a uni- versal soul which effectively shapes and gives life to everything. However, he is not able to refrain from attacking, in De immenso (The Boundless), those 'shadows of ideas' that men had believed in, all those mysteria platonica et peripatetica (Platonic and peripatetic mysteries) which resulted from the belief in two ontologically separated spheres, the heavenly world and the sublunary world. In particular, he summarizes and rejects all the charac- teristics attributed to the spheres of fixed stars which, among other things, made it the access route from the intelligible world to the sensible world. 9
It is important, therefore, that he summarizes Ficino's doctrines of the hierarchy of being and of the meeting of the sensible and the intelligible in such minute detail in order to be able to reject them in a radical manner. 10 In the final, decisive book of the poem, he condemns both the theologian's empyrean heaven and the Platonic intelligible world, and undercuts the doctrine of spirit, conceived as an ethereal vehicle of the soul in its process of incarnation. The idea of a world of ideal moulds, of separated ideas, no longer has any meaning for him, and this rejection of a separate world of pure essences leads him to define as meaningless anything lacking a con- crete, real existence, anything which, as a result of a process of abstraction, has been unjustifiably hypostatized.
Bruno's reflective transformation of Ficino's doctrine of the meeting between the sensible and the intelligible is essential for understanding the
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Op. lat. , I, II, ? : ' . . . prima naturae genitura, simplicissima, capacissima, potentissima, activissima, animatissima, perfectissima, causa universalis . . . cuius portae geminae . . . divinarum animarum vehiculum, idearum characteribus signata . . . nostro verenda metuendaque superincubans mundo, divinitatis potentia . . . nunc spacii et aetheris natura, et magnitudine comperta . . . e manibus, eque oculis evanescit, portentosa umbra sine corpore tandem fuisse convincitur. ' For the reference to Macrobius, cf. Op. lat. , I, II, ? ? ? .
Op. lat. , I, II, ? ? ? -? ? .
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? development of thought in Cause. If one starts from the assumption that the universe is infinite, it no longer makes sense to conceive the coincidence between act and potency as the exclusive property of a fixed point in the hierarchy of being, a privileged point in a finite and physical cosmos con- ceived as distinct from the intelligible world. Bruno therefore tries to rethink such a coincidence on the assumption that space is infinite and homogeneous, and that there are no separate hierarchical orders of being, and he does this in the light of two key concepts, that of an infinite active potency and that of an infinite passive potency, which are directly associ- ated with each other in the cosmos. On this journey, Nicholas of Cusa guides him.
III
Nicholas of Cusa maintained, in Docta ignorantia (Learned Ignorance), that it was impossible to explain in conceptual terms the passage from the com- plicatio of everything in God to its explicatio in things; his recourse to the concept of 'contraction' to define the relationship between God and the universe has merely symbolic significance. It is not a real explanation, sim- ply a suggestive way of referring to the inexplicable. The universe, maxi- mum contractum (i. e. the limit of contraction), reproduces the unity of the divine in its proper form; it therefore is a coincidence between actuality and potentiality, although there is an insuperable limit to its actuality in the sense that the world can never realize its full potentiality. In fact, the only way the cosmos can realize its totality is through differentiation and spatial dispersion. The power to create and the power to be created coincide per- fectly in the unity and absolute distinction of God; in contrast, the poten- tiality of the universe is a pale reflection of the infinite passive potency of God. And thus there will always remain an infinite difference between the 'contracted' existence of the universe and the unity and distinction which coincide in the divinity.
For Cusa, therefore, God and God alone was absolute possibility coin- ciding with absolute actuality. Despite its limits, the concept of contraction allowed him to conclude that the relationship between God and the world could never be explained by recourse to the philosophers' matter and the world-soul of the Platonists. Matter is possibility and if, as some have claimed, it is co-eternal with God, then it would become absolute possi- bility; it would then no longer be just something created by God, nor would
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? it be contracted, as it in fact is, so as to give rise to a world of distinct entities. Bruno assigns to the Platonists' world-soul the role which it had in traditional cosmology, as mediator on the cosmic plane. This mediating role cannot be understood as the distinct possession of the exemplary mod- els of all things, because this would imply that it displaced the Word, the only place in which the ideal archetypes rest in both absolute unity and absolute difference. Thus, the traditional ways of construing the world-soul and the relation between matter and the vivifying action of a universal spirit fail. 11
Nicholas of Cusa outlines a cosmology which no longer recognizes onto- logically separated levels in the universe. In the Cusan cosmos, everything is the centre and the circumference is nowhere - a distinction which Bruno considers a mere play on words. In this way, the earth loses the subordinate status which it had until now, in that it is thought to be no less central than any other star; it is subject to influences but is a probable source of influ- ences itself. Cusa retains the traditional ontological inferiority of the heav- ens with respect to a divinity who holds them at an infinite distance from himself, and this is confirmed, in an apparent paradox, by the redemption of the earth. The fact that everything in the world is undergoing constant change implies that no absolutely precise relations exist and that we cannot have exact or real measures for any phenomenon, including motion.
This is the context for Cusa's Christology. If the distance between God and the universe is infinite, this can never be bridged by a mere man, even if he is exceptionally gifted; only the one perfect man, Christ, can achieve such a mediation through the Word, which leads creatures back to its source.
In Cause, Bruno drew the conclusion from his study of Cusa that nothing now prevents him from looking for the coincidence between the world-soul and the matter which belongs to an infinite universe as the coincidence of infinite active potency and infinite passive potency. Bruno conceives the hierarchy of being as having only ideal value, in contrast to Ficino's onto- logical conception of it, and he construes the world-soul and matter as the absolute opposites of this hierarchy. Starting from these assumptions, he tries to show how act and potency, absolute possibility and infinite actual- ity coincide. Thus it is only by starting with such a coincidence that he can apply the concept of 'contraction' to the relationship which is formed
? 11 N. Cusani De Docta ignorantia, II, ch. VIII, IX, dedicated respectively to the possibility or matter of the universe, and the soul or form of the universe.
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? between the unity of the universe and the multiplicity in which this is structured.
Certainly, at the beginning of Cause, he warns that his discussion is meant to stay within the limits of pure natural reason, that it aspires to be only a philosophical discussion, leaving to theologians the more exalted task of defining the Prime Mover. But the route he follows is inevitably destined to hold some surprises in relation to such a cautious preliminary declaration. The coincidence between infinite active potency and infinite passive potency, which Nicholas of Cusa had recorded in De possest as a peculiarity exclusive to God, is transferred in Cause to the relation of absolute opposites in the cosmos, and knowledge of this coincidence gives us a proper understanding of the unity of substance.
IV
From this perspective, the logic which guides Bruno in Cause is clear. He conceives the intellect as a superior faculty of the world-soul that pro- duces forms. This represents a significant lowering of the status of the intellect, albeit to the highest kind of faculty which can exist. The world-soul possesses intellect and does not therefore need a superior principle from which to draw forms. It should be added that it operates as an art which is intrinsic to matter, in contrast to human art which inevitably acts on the surface of matter already formed. The world-soul, therefore, shapes matter from inside because it possesses the actual models which allow it, as an authentic efficient cause, to be also a formal cause. Since it animates an infinite universe, and there is no part of the universe that is not animated or that does not possess at least a spiritual principle always capable of being actualized by it to some degree or other, differences in nature between the forms it gives are inevitably to be found.
The world-soul is therefore the authentic form of forms; it contains them all in act within matter and can therefore be considered either a cause or a principle, depending on whether we think of the forms as its posses- sion or as superficial configurations that matter assumes now and again according to its dispositions. What is at issue here are the constantly chang- ing forms of matter which the Aristotelians can only arbitrarily call forms in a strict sense. That is one of the constant features of the anti-Aristotelian polemic in Cause, because it becomes essential for Bruno to maintain that
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? these are only appearances, which are constantly changing, compared with substance, which cannot be annihilated and is the active principle and producer of real, rather than transient, forms. This polemic against the supposed substantial forms of tradition is therefore already a vindication of the authentic active potency of an infinite universe, and opens the way to Bruno's special treatment of matter considered as potency. Then the confrontation with Nicholas of Cusa's theses becomes direct, although his name is never mentioned in this particular context.
Certainly, for Bruno, as for Cusa, it is only in God that infinite actual- ization of infinite possibility can be achieved. In the universe, on the other hand, things are constantly changing, and matter is inescapably subject to these changing forms. Despite this, the universe can be said to be com- pletely infinite, to be all that it can be, provided one considers it as extended through all of time rather than at a single instant or from the point of view of eternity. However, the difference between God and the universe repre- sents only the starting point of Bruno's discussion.
The power to be, if considered as passive potency, moves towards its infinite actualization only in God; in Him alone, act and potency, power to create and power to be created, are superimposed speculatively without reference to time and place. If, however, one considers matter absolutely as passive potency, if one abstracts it from the relationship which it has, at different times, with both corporeal and incorporeal substances, one notices a significant factor. There is no difference between the passive potency of these substances except for the fact that corporeal matter is con- tracted into dimensions, qualities, quantities, shapes, etc. ; these accidental determinations (dimensions, shapes, etc. ) are what the Peripatetic tradi- tion, struggling to understand them, confused with genuine substantial forms. Dimensions, qualities, etc. do not, however, modify pure passive potency as such, and it is possible to conclude, therefore, that the matter which is conceived in these terms can be considered common to both the spiritual and the corporeal.
Bruno clinches his argument by referring to the Neo-Platonic doctrine that intelligible entities were composed of a very particular kind of intelli- gible matter. Such intelligible entities, which are forms of acting, must have something in common, although it cannot be anything that generates a dis- tinction between them or involves any passage from potency to act. In the sensible world, where becoming involves such a passage, is not matter best understood as potency, which includes in its complexity all the dimensions
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? and qualities, and does this not mean that this matter, rather than not possessing any form, in reality possesses them all? Could it be that matter, which appears not to produce distinctions, seems thus to be formless only because it is the origin of more deep-seated but less apparent distinctions - distinctions which it can be seen to possess only in a higher unity? Furthermore, this allows Bruno to claim that the two matters, the intelli- gible and the sensible, seen from the perspective of potency, can be reduced to a single genus, since the former is differentiated from act only by a dis- tinction of reason and the latter can be considered act in comparison with the ephemeral and transient forms which appear and disappear on its sur- face. It would be impossible, then, to distinguish matter understood as potency from the world-soul.
Thus in this way Bruno assimilates his treatment of matter to the tradi- tion of Aristotelianism and Neo-Platonism, which took matter to be a sub- strate, that which remains constant beneath the transformations which take place between the elements. In his eyes, the permanency of matter comes to mean that it, too, as the world-soul, is a principle which is neither passing nor transient, a principle which cannot be annihilated and which is identified with the substance of beings themselves. Bruno reminds us that the Aristotelians, as soon as they realized that they could not accept the Platonic solution which placed ideas outside the field of matter, admit- ted that matter could generate forms. Bruno called these ideas 'ideal moulds', and was more able to accept them than the Peripatetics were. It must be added that these same Aristotelians, when they state that matter passes from potency to act, speak only of the composite when specifying what has really changed. On the basis of all these elements, it seems legit- imate to think that, if it is recognized as a constant and everlasting princi- ple, prime matter cannot be classified as that prope nihil (almost nothing) of uncertain reality which figured in the views of a number of previous thinkers who tried to devise definitions of substantial form. These defini- tions, contrary to their intentions, all turn out to be reducible to pure log- ical abstractions. On the contrary, the fact that this matter presents no form would be equivalent once more, for the reasons already mentioned above, to its possessing all of them.
If, however, a spiritual principle and a material principle are recognized as the very substance of our world, it seems evident that it is their coin- cidence that constitutes its permanent substance. An analogous identi- fication could then apply to the superior world of exclusively spiritual
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? substance, which Bruno stated he would not discuss because he wished to confine his treatment to the limits of pure natural reason. This is the most ambiguous statement of the whole work, and understanding this ambiguity correctly is the key to understanding Bruno's philosophy. Bruno takes for granted here the separation which the whole dialogue tries to call into question, and at the most decisive point of the work, he refers to the notion of an intelligible matter of the superior world only to understand it in terms of corporeal substances seen from the perspective of potency. The ambiguity of such a statement allows him to leave an important fact in the background, that the relationship which he was establishing between infinite active potency and infinite passive potency created a relationship of reciprocal necessity between God and the world. 12 Thus Nicholas of Cusa's demonstration, in De possest, of the impossibility of separating, if only in God, the infinite potency of creating and the infinite potency of being created was decisive in forming Bruno's position. Bruno, however, came to the conclusion that these are present and inseparable in an infinite universe and that this involves not only their coincidence but, crucially, a relationship of reciprocal necessity between the unity to which they refer and the universe.
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? Introduction Chronology Further reading Note on the texts
page vii xxx xxxiv xxxvi
? ? ? ? ? ? ?
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Cause, principle and unity On magic
A general account of bonding
Index
Contents
Introduction
Giordano Bruno was born in Nola, near Naples, in ? ? ? ? . He entered the Dominican Order and, following publication of some works that are now lost, he left Italy in ? ? ? ? for Switzerland, France and eventually England, a move perhaps due to the oppressive climate in his own country, where the church felt itself threatened by the new science which he attempted to prop- agate. Having acquired a great interest in Ramon Lull (c. ? ? ? ? -? ? ? ? )1 and the art of memory, he presented in London his vision of an infinite universe in which he sought to re-unify terrestrial physics with celestial physics on the basis of a principle of universal becoming. He also reflected on the causes of the religious wars and tried to determine the origin of the theological dis- putes of the period. Beginning with the metaphysics expressed in De la causa, principio e uno (Cause, Principle and Unity), which reflected the objec- tions he encountered in England, he derived a new concept of the divinity which evolved from his cosmology and was to assume a radically anti- Christian character. The magical, animistic vision of everything which he adopted throughout all his writings, not just those of the last period of his life, is evident here. In addition to his specific contributions to the scientific revolution, he presented a general metaphysical vision that contributed sig- nificantly to the development of Renaissance philosophy.
Having returned to Italy in ? ? ? ? during the debate about the legitimacy of combining ancient knowledge with orthodoxy, Bruno was perhaps deceived by the experience of Francesco Patrizi,2 who was lecturing in
? 1 Lull designed an ars combinatoria, a code for representing reality such that its elements could be com- bined in different ways to represent various items of knowledge, from astronomy to theology. Mastery of this code and its permutations provided the person trained in its use with a sophisticated mnemonic device.
2 Francesco Patrizi (? ? ? ? -? ? ) was one of the leading Platonists of the Renaissance; his major work, A New Philosophy of the Universes, was condemned by the Congregation of the Index in Rome.
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Introduction
? Platonic philosophy at the University of Sapienza at Rome. He thought he might be able to find a role for himself by renouncing or concealing the most heterodox features of his own teaching. This was an illusion, and he fell foul of the Inquisition and was executed at the stake in the Campo de' Fiori in ? ? ? ? .
I
La Cena de le Ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper) was the first of the dia- logues in Italian which Bruno published in ? ? ? ? /? . 3 The striking feature of this work, in which the author proclaims his Copernicanism, is the immediate connection established between the annual motion of the earth around the sun and the infinity of the universe. This, however, was quite different from the position of Copernicus, who, having given new dimen- sions to the traditional cosmos, recognized the immensity of the heavens but left to the natural philosopher the ultimate decision about whether or not the universe was infinite. In The Ash Wednesday Supper, on the con- trary, we find a clear affirmation of an infinite universe with infinite solar systems similar to our own. Suns and earths are composed of our own elements, they are living and inhabited beings, they are stars which are recognized not only as living things but also as divinities.
Bruno was led to these conclusions, in particular the thesis of the infin- ity of the universe, by a number of factors. In Copernicus' work, the earth was construed as a celestial body rotating round the sun like the other plan- ets; it was implicitly elevated to the status of a star, thus breaking down the rigid separation between the sublunary world and the celestial world, although Copernicus did not want to confront the enormous physical problems which derived from his heliocentrism. It is significant that, in his De revolutionibus orbium celestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies), the sphere of fixed stars no longer had a specific physical function and no longer constituted the principle of motion. This was a conclusion that could have been strengthened in Bruno's eyes by some developments in Italian philosophy of nature, especially those of Bernardino Telesio (? ? ? ? -? ? ). Bruno now went further and called into question the very
3 References to Bruno's Italian works are in the Dialoghi italiani, ? rd edn edited by G. Aquilecchia, reprinted with notes by G. Gentile (Florence: Sansoni, ? ? ? ? : reprt. ? ? ? ? ). The Latin works, Opera latine conscripta, were edited in Naples between ? ? ? ? and ? ? ? ? in three volumes (in eight parts) by F. Fiorentino, F. Tocco, G. Vitelli, V. Imbriani and C. M. Tallarigo. References to the Latin works are identifed as Op. lat. , with the volume, part and page number.
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Introduction
? existence of such a sphere, which seemed to him merely the result of an optical illusion which made all the stars appear to be at an equal distance from the earth.
Bruno's comparison between himself and Copernicus in The Ash Wednesday Supper throws further light on this issue. Although Copernicus is ranked in the history of astronomy as being comparable to Hipparchus or Ptolemy, his real significance is thought to lie in the fact that he is a hero of human thought who was able to oppose the force of common prejudice, the vulgar Aristotelian philosophy, the apparently self-evident view that the earth was immobile in the centre of the heavens. Nevertheless, his work is presented as having crucial limitations which open the way to what will be Bruno's specific contribution. Copernicus was primarily a mathemati- cian - his interest was directed towards astronomy rather than towards nat- ural philosophy, and in this sense his work needed to be further developed. Certainly he started from a correct and significant physical presupposition, the earth's motion, but he sought only a mathematical description of the movements of the heavens. 4
In contrast, Bruno presents himself as a natural philosopher, as the one who is destined to become the authentic interpreter of Copernicus' dis- covery and is called to draw out the conclusions from it, beginning with the physical ones. The first of these, which is decisive for a correct under- standing of the others, is the infinity of the universe. In the Narratio of Georg Joachim Rheticus, which Bruno was able to read in the ? ? ? ? edition of De revolutionibus, Rheticus had described the astronomer as a blind man who has a stick to help him on his way, and this stick was mathematics. In order to accomplish the theoretical task which he sets himself, a task which lies at the limit of human ability, the astronomer needs a hand to guide him and inspiration from above. Thus in The Ash Wednesday Supper Copernicus becomes the inspired one to whom the gods have entrusted a message, the importance and significance of which he has not realized; he is like a blind fortune teller for whom Bruno acts as the authentic interpreter. The philosopher, therefore, is summoned on a metaphorical journey across the heavens to discover that the traditional crystalline spheres are only a vain fiction, that there is no upper limit to the physical world and thus no end to his journey, and that what opens out in front of him is an infinite space. The philosopher shows us that the divinity is present in us and in our planet no less than in every other heavenly body, that it is not situated
4 Dialoghi, ? ? -? . ix
? Introduction
? beyond the imaginary limit of a closed and finite universe, in a place which makes it accessible to man. 5
Bruno's reform, therefore, is not only philosophically significant but also has religious consequences. It challenges the developments of the Reformation, calls into question the truth-value of the whole of Christianity, and claims that Christ perpetrated a deceit on mankind. In the pages which follow, he compares the negative consequences which have resulted from traditional philosophy - negative consequences which are apparent to everyone - with the positive fruits, both civil and religious, which the new philosophy is producing, revitalizing all those fields of knowledge and life in which the ancients had excelled.
The consequences of this new philosophy are wide-ranging and radical because this new vision of the cosmos changes our relationship with the divinity, and this, in Bruno's eyes, transforms the very meaning of human life. He claims that this new vision will reconcile us with the divine law which governs nature, and free us from the fear of imaginary divinities, cruel and unfathomable, who look down from heavenly heights, control- ling the sublunary world in a mysterious way. Human beings believe that they are enclosed in an inferior world subject to generation and corruption, but this is a simple illusion. Within this world, as in Plato's cave, we can see only the shadows of reality which appear on its wall, the shadows of the ideas which take shape and form at the upper limit of the heavens. Bruno suggests that, on the contrary, we can now recognize the universal law which controls the perpetual becoming of all things in an infinite universe. Knowledge of this law reassures us in the face of the present and the future (about which, of course, we have only an imperfect knowledge), because it does not deny anything its existence in and of itself, but claims that everything is being ceaselessly transformed into something else.
More than any previous thinker, then, Bruno is aware of the fact that the fall of Aristotelian cosmology implies the end of traditional metaphysics. From this starting point he elaborates a philosophy which is new and orig- inal, despite drawing on views attributed to the Presocratics (the ens et unum of Parmenides, Anaxagoras' omnia in omnibus), whose voices are distorted by the fact that they are preserved only in Aristotle's refutations of their positions. Thus, in Cause, Principle and Unity,6 he sets about presenting a
5 Ibid. , ? ? -? .
6 See the critical edition of De la causa, principio e uno, edited by G.
Aquilecchia (Turin: Einaudi, ? ? ? ? ).
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Introduction
? metaphysics which is intended to constitute a more solid foundation for the interpretation of nature and for the consequent introduction of a new ethic, capable of establishing the outlines of the renewed relationship between man and God both at the level of civil life and at the philosopher's level of contemplation. The problem which immediately arises, however, is that of specifying how this new idea of the divinity is formed and in what sense Bruno's infinite universe radically modifies the relationship between God and the world, between God and human beings.
II
To clarify these issues, we must return to Bruno's earliest works, especially to De umbris idearum (The Shadows of Ideas) (? ? ? ? ). Here he tried to elab- orate an art of memory which was based on magical foundations; and in doing this he identified the heavenly models, the exemplars of every sensi- ble reality which the human mind can know, with the images of the thirty- six heavenly deacons which tradition attributed to Teucer the Babylonian and which he borrowed from the classic text of Renaissance magic, Agrippa's De occulta philosophia. 7 In De umbris Bruno applies, in an appar- ently arbitrary way, Nicholas of Cusa's coincidence of opposites to the con- ception of the hierarchy of being which Marsilio Ficino explained in his Theologia platonica. 8 This doctrine, which is central to that work, is an attempt to define the special privilege assigned within the framework of creation to the rational soul, a genus which includes both the anima mundi (the world-soul) and the human soul. Ficino defines this privilege in cos- mological terms. In fact, in his eyes the rational soul was at the centre of the hierarchy of being, as the very link between the sensible world and the intelligible world; descending from the former, it gave life and form to the latter.
The hierarchy of being extended between two extremes, pure act and pure potency, God and prime matter, in such a way that each of the inter- mediate levels of the hierarchy presented a different relationship between act and potency. One descended down the levels of this hierarchy, starting
? 7 Cf. E. Garin, 'Le <<elezioni>> e il problema dell'astrologia,' reprinted in Garin, L'eta` nuova. Ricerche di storia della cultura dal XII al XVI (Naples: Morano, ? ? ? ? ), ? ? ? -? ? , used, especially in ch. XI, by F. A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ? ? ? ? ).
8 M. Ficino, Theologia platonica, XI in Opera (Basel, ? ? ? ? ) I, ? ? ? -? . Ficino's doctrine is comprehensi- ble due to the theory of the primum in aliquo genere, according to which the last member of one genus coincides with the first member of the following genus.
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? from the pure act constituted by God and eventually reaching prime mat- ter. Each step downward represented an increase in potentiality. Within this overarching hierarchy, if the sensible and the intelligible are analysed as two separate categories and if each one of them is considered as a uni- tary whole, complete in itself, it would be possible to discover something new, namely the way in which the sensible world and the intelligible world, despite being radically distinct by nature, were linked together. In the intel- ligible sphere, one descended gradually to the lowest level, which was con- stituted by the rational soul; it was purely receptive to the levels above it, and could thus be considered as pure potency in relation to them. In the sensible sphere, on the other hand, one moved up within the hierarchy of being, from prime matter, through a sequence of more complex forms of corporeal organization until one reached an absolute limit. That limit was heavenly matter, which because of its purity and spirituality could be defined by Ficino as corpus quasi non corpus (a body that is almost not a body). This kind of matter, sometimes called 'spirit' and sometimes 'ether', could be considered to be pure act in comparison with prime matter. Here it seemed as if the pure potentiality which defined prime matter was trans- formed completely into its opposite, pure actuality. In conclusion, the more the act transformed itself into potency with respect to the superior levels in the intelligible world, the more the opposite process seemed to take place in the sensible sphere and potentiality seemed to be transformed progres- sively into actuality.
Here it is important to note how this analysis underpins Ficino's doc- trine of the world-soul, which linked the corporeal and the spiritual, giv- ing life and form to the entire inferior world. Bruno saw this as an instance of Nicholas of Cusa's coincidence of opposites: two spheres were gradually losing their essential characteristics by somehow transforming themselves into one another. He also saw in doctrines of this type the theoretical basis for a distinctive kind of art of memory and the foundation for an authentic astral theology. Through these it seemed possible that man, endowed with a rational soul and a spirit to mediate between the soul and his elementary body, could link himself to that privileged cosmic point on the boundary between the sensible and the intelligible which would allow him to grasp the archetypal forms, the actual generating models of every sensible real- ity, if not in their purity, then at least in their shadows, the shadows of ideas.
As already mentioned, in The Ash Wednesday Supper the sphere of fixed stars began to lose all the functions which had been assigned to it within
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? traditional cosmology. Each of the movements which had been attributed to it was reduced to a mere appearance generated by the motion of the earth. Bruno thus denied the very existence of such a sphere, relegating it simply to an optical illusion. The first casualty of all this was Ficino's doctrine of the hierarchy of being, which Bruno had used in De umbris, where he interpreted it in terms of the coincidence of opposites; nevertheless, in this work he still tried to interpret the role of human beings, their origin and destiny, within the traditional cosmological framework. Certainly, he remained faithful even in his new cosmology to the Platonic world-soul, understanding it as an intrin- sic principle of motion for all the celestial bodies which no longer needed any other forms of motion, and, as we shall see in Cause, he will speak of a uni- versal soul which effectively shapes and gives life to everything. However, he is not able to refrain from attacking, in De immenso (The Boundless), those 'shadows of ideas' that men had believed in, all those mysteria platonica et peripatetica (Platonic and peripatetic mysteries) which resulted from the belief in two ontologically separated spheres, the heavenly world and the sublunary world. In particular, he summarizes and rejects all the charac- teristics attributed to the spheres of fixed stars which, among other things, made it the access route from the intelligible world to the sensible world. 9
It is important, therefore, that he summarizes Ficino's doctrines of the hierarchy of being and of the meeting of the sensible and the intelligible in such minute detail in order to be able to reject them in a radical manner. 10 In the final, decisive book of the poem, he condemns both the theologian's empyrean heaven and the Platonic intelligible world, and undercuts the doctrine of spirit, conceived as an ethereal vehicle of the soul in its process of incarnation. The idea of a world of ideal moulds, of separated ideas, no longer has any meaning for him, and this rejection of a separate world of pure essences leads him to define as meaningless anything lacking a con- crete, real existence, anything which, as a result of a process of abstraction, has been unjustifiably hypostatized.
Bruno's reflective transformation of Ficino's doctrine of the meeting between the sensible and the intelligible is essential for understanding the
? 9
10
Op. lat. , I, II, ? : ' . . . prima naturae genitura, simplicissima, capacissima, potentissima, activissima, animatissima, perfectissima, causa universalis . . . cuius portae geminae . . . divinarum animarum vehiculum, idearum characteribus signata . . . nostro verenda metuendaque superincubans mundo, divinitatis potentia . . . nunc spacii et aetheris natura, et magnitudine comperta . . . e manibus, eque oculis evanescit, portentosa umbra sine corpore tandem fuisse convincitur. ' For the reference to Macrobius, cf. Op. lat. , I, II, ? ? ? .
Op. lat. , I, II, ? ? ? -? ? .
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Introduction
? development of thought in Cause. If one starts from the assumption that the universe is infinite, it no longer makes sense to conceive the coincidence between act and potency as the exclusive property of a fixed point in the hierarchy of being, a privileged point in a finite and physical cosmos con- ceived as distinct from the intelligible world. Bruno therefore tries to rethink such a coincidence on the assumption that space is infinite and homogeneous, and that there are no separate hierarchical orders of being, and he does this in the light of two key concepts, that of an infinite active potency and that of an infinite passive potency, which are directly associ- ated with each other in the cosmos. On this journey, Nicholas of Cusa guides him.
III
Nicholas of Cusa maintained, in Docta ignorantia (Learned Ignorance), that it was impossible to explain in conceptual terms the passage from the com- plicatio of everything in God to its explicatio in things; his recourse to the concept of 'contraction' to define the relationship between God and the universe has merely symbolic significance. It is not a real explanation, sim- ply a suggestive way of referring to the inexplicable. The universe, maxi- mum contractum (i. e. the limit of contraction), reproduces the unity of the divine in its proper form; it therefore is a coincidence between actuality and potentiality, although there is an insuperable limit to its actuality in the sense that the world can never realize its full potentiality. In fact, the only way the cosmos can realize its totality is through differentiation and spatial dispersion. The power to create and the power to be created coincide per- fectly in the unity and absolute distinction of God; in contrast, the poten- tiality of the universe is a pale reflection of the infinite passive potency of God. And thus there will always remain an infinite difference between the 'contracted' existence of the universe and the unity and distinction which coincide in the divinity.
For Cusa, therefore, God and God alone was absolute possibility coin- ciding with absolute actuality. Despite its limits, the concept of contraction allowed him to conclude that the relationship between God and the world could never be explained by recourse to the philosophers' matter and the world-soul of the Platonists. Matter is possibility and if, as some have claimed, it is co-eternal with God, then it would become absolute possi- bility; it would then no longer be just something created by God, nor would
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? it be contracted, as it in fact is, so as to give rise to a world of distinct entities. Bruno assigns to the Platonists' world-soul the role which it had in traditional cosmology, as mediator on the cosmic plane. This mediating role cannot be understood as the distinct possession of the exemplary mod- els of all things, because this would imply that it displaced the Word, the only place in which the ideal archetypes rest in both absolute unity and absolute difference. Thus, the traditional ways of construing the world-soul and the relation between matter and the vivifying action of a universal spirit fail. 11
Nicholas of Cusa outlines a cosmology which no longer recognizes onto- logically separated levels in the universe. In the Cusan cosmos, everything is the centre and the circumference is nowhere - a distinction which Bruno considers a mere play on words. In this way, the earth loses the subordinate status which it had until now, in that it is thought to be no less central than any other star; it is subject to influences but is a probable source of influ- ences itself. Cusa retains the traditional ontological inferiority of the heav- ens with respect to a divinity who holds them at an infinite distance from himself, and this is confirmed, in an apparent paradox, by the redemption of the earth. The fact that everything in the world is undergoing constant change implies that no absolutely precise relations exist and that we cannot have exact or real measures for any phenomenon, including motion.
This is the context for Cusa's Christology. If the distance between God and the universe is infinite, this can never be bridged by a mere man, even if he is exceptionally gifted; only the one perfect man, Christ, can achieve such a mediation through the Word, which leads creatures back to its source.
In Cause, Bruno drew the conclusion from his study of Cusa that nothing now prevents him from looking for the coincidence between the world-soul and the matter which belongs to an infinite universe as the coincidence of infinite active potency and infinite passive potency. Bruno conceives the hierarchy of being as having only ideal value, in contrast to Ficino's onto- logical conception of it, and he construes the world-soul and matter as the absolute opposites of this hierarchy. Starting from these assumptions, he tries to show how act and potency, absolute possibility and infinite actual- ity coincide. Thus it is only by starting with such a coincidence that he can apply the concept of 'contraction' to the relationship which is formed
? 11 N. Cusani De Docta ignorantia, II, ch. VIII, IX, dedicated respectively to the possibility or matter of the universe, and the soul or form of the universe.
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? between the unity of the universe and the multiplicity in which this is structured.
Certainly, at the beginning of Cause, he warns that his discussion is meant to stay within the limits of pure natural reason, that it aspires to be only a philosophical discussion, leaving to theologians the more exalted task of defining the Prime Mover. But the route he follows is inevitably destined to hold some surprises in relation to such a cautious preliminary declaration. The coincidence between infinite active potency and infinite passive potency, which Nicholas of Cusa had recorded in De possest as a peculiarity exclusive to God, is transferred in Cause to the relation of absolute opposites in the cosmos, and knowledge of this coincidence gives us a proper understanding of the unity of substance.
IV
From this perspective, the logic which guides Bruno in Cause is clear. He conceives the intellect as a superior faculty of the world-soul that pro- duces forms. This represents a significant lowering of the status of the intellect, albeit to the highest kind of faculty which can exist. The world-soul possesses intellect and does not therefore need a superior principle from which to draw forms. It should be added that it operates as an art which is intrinsic to matter, in contrast to human art which inevitably acts on the surface of matter already formed. The world-soul, therefore, shapes matter from inside because it possesses the actual models which allow it, as an authentic efficient cause, to be also a formal cause. Since it animates an infinite universe, and there is no part of the universe that is not animated or that does not possess at least a spiritual principle always capable of being actualized by it to some degree or other, differences in nature between the forms it gives are inevitably to be found.
The world-soul is therefore the authentic form of forms; it contains them all in act within matter and can therefore be considered either a cause or a principle, depending on whether we think of the forms as its posses- sion or as superficial configurations that matter assumes now and again according to its dispositions. What is at issue here are the constantly chang- ing forms of matter which the Aristotelians can only arbitrarily call forms in a strict sense. That is one of the constant features of the anti-Aristotelian polemic in Cause, because it becomes essential for Bruno to maintain that
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Introduction
? these are only appearances, which are constantly changing, compared with substance, which cannot be annihilated and is the active principle and producer of real, rather than transient, forms. This polemic against the supposed substantial forms of tradition is therefore already a vindication of the authentic active potency of an infinite universe, and opens the way to Bruno's special treatment of matter considered as potency. Then the confrontation with Nicholas of Cusa's theses becomes direct, although his name is never mentioned in this particular context.
Certainly, for Bruno, as for Cusa, it is only in God that infinite actual- ization of infinite possibility can be achieved. In the universe, on the other hand, things are constantly changing, and matter is inescapably subject to these changing forms. Despite this, the universe can be said to be com- pletely infinite, to be all that it can be, provided one considers it as extended through all of time rather than at a single instant or from the point of view of eternity. However, the difference between God and the universe repre- sents only the starting point of Bruno's discussion.
The power to be, if considered as passive potency, moves towards its infinite actualization only in God; in Him alone, act and potency, power to create and power to be created, are superimposed speculatively without reference to time and place. If, however, one considers matter absolutely as passive potency, if one abstracts it from the relationship which it has, at different times, with both corporeal and incorporeal substances, one notices a significant factor. There is no difference between the passive potency of these substances except for the fact that corporeal matter is con- tracted into dimensions, qualities, quantities, shapes, etc. ; these accidental determinations (dimensions, shapes, etc. ) are what the Peripatetic tradi- tion, struggling to understand them, confused with genuine substantial forms. Dimensions, qualities, etc. do not, however, modify pure passive potency as such, and it is possible to conclude, therefore, that the matter which is conceived in these terms can be considered common to both the spiritual and the corporeal.
Bruno clinches his argument by referring to the Neo-Platonic doctrine that intelligible entities were composed of a very particular kind of intelli- gible matter. Such intelligible entities, which are forms of acting, must have something in common, although it cannot be anything that generates a dis- tinction between them or involves any passage from potency to act. In the sensible world, where becoming involves such a passage, is not matter best understood as potency, which includes in its complexity all the dimensions
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Introduction
? and qualities, and does this not mean that this matter, rather than not possessing any form, in reality possesses them all? Could it be that matter, which appears not to produce distinctions, seems thus to be formless only because it is the origin of more deep-seated but less apparent distinctions - distinctions which it can be seen to possess only in a higher unity? Furthermore, this allows Bruno to claim that the two matters, the intelli- gible and the sensible, seen from the perspective of potency, can be reduced to a single genus, since the former is differentiated from act only by a dis- tinction of reason and the latter can be considered act in comparison with the ephemeral and transient forms which appear and disappear on its sur- face. It would be impossible, then, to distinguish matter understood as potency from the world-soul.
Thus in this way Bruno assimilates his treatment of matter to the tradi- tion of Aristotelianism and Neo-Platonism, which took matter to be a sub- strate, that which remains constant beneath the transformations which take place between the elements. In his eyes, the permanency of matter comes to mean that it, too, as the world-soul, is a principle which is neither passing nor transient, a principle which cannot be annihilated and which is identified with the substance of beings themselves. Bruno reminds us that the Aristotelians, as soon as they realized that they could not accept the Platonic solution which placed ideas outside the field of matter, admit- ted that matter could generate forms. Bruno called these ideas 'ideal moulds', and was more able to accept them than the Peripatetics were. It must be added that these same Aristotelians, when they state that matter passes from potency to act, speak only of the composite when specifying what has really changed. On the basis of all these elements, it seems legit- imate to think that, if it is recognized as a constant and everlasting princi- ple, prime matter cannot be classified as that prope nihil (almost nothing) of uncertain reality which figured in the views of a number of previous thinkers who tried to devise definitions of substantial form. These defini- tions, contrary to their intentions, all turn out to be reducible to pure log- ical abstractions. On the contrary, the fact that this matter presents no form would be equivalent once more, for the reasons already mentioned above, to its possessing all of them.
If, however, a spiritual principle and a material principle are recognized as the very substance of our world, it seems evident that it is their coin- cidence that constitutes its permanent substance. An analogous identi- fication could then apply to the superior world of exclusively spiritual
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? substance, which Bruno stated he would not discuss because he wished to confine his treatment to the limits of pure natural reason. This is the most ambiguous statement of the whole work, and understanding this ambiguity correctly is the key to understanding Bruno's philosophy. Bruno takes for granted here the separation which the whole dialogue tries to call into question, and at the most decisive point of the work, he refers to the notion of an intelligible matter of the superior world only to understand it in terms of corporeal substances seen from the perspective of potency. The ambiguity of such a statement allows him to leave an important fact in the background, that the relationship which he was establishing between infinite active potency and infinite passive potency created a relationship of reciprocal necessity between God and the world. 12 Thus Nicholas of Cusa's demonstration, in De possest, of the impossibility of separating, if only in God, the infinite potency of creating and the infinite potency of being created was decisive in forming Bruno's position. Bruno, however, came to the conclusion that these are present and inseparable in an infinite universe and that this involves not only their coincidence but, crucially, a relationship of reciprocal necessity between the unity to which they refer and the universe.
