LET鈥橲 hear it for the papal executioners who gave Giordano Bruno a roasting
400 years ago this week. Bruno, a lapsed Dominican monk, was tied to a stake and
burnt to death in front of a capacity crowd in Rome. His crime was promoting a
heresy that happened to place the Sun, rather than the Earth, at the centre of
the Universe.
Hang on, says a voice at the back, surely Bruno got it right. Wasn鈥檛 this
lapsed monk a tragic martyr of the struggle between religion and science?
Get with it, I say. Bruno鈥檚 tenure as a martyr to science expired around
1960. It was only for the preceding half century or so that historians tended to
idolise the Reformation and those who took part in it. They saw in the
lives鈥攐r deaths鈥攐f people like Bruno the sort of bravery in the face
of superstition that paved the way for modern science, capitalism and Yankee
ingenuity. Perhaps not surprisingly, many of these scholars were American
Protestants in institutions funded by big business. Unfortunately, their thesis
had some gigantic flaws. For starters, in 16th-century Rome, heliocentralism
wasn鈥檛 against the law, much less a capital rap. Copernicus published his On the
Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres in 1543, and it wasn鈥檛 until 1616 that the
Vatican got around to banning it.
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Then there鈥檚 the awkward fact that Bruno鈥檚 model of the heliocentric Universe
owed precious little to astronomical observation. It owed much more to the
mystical teachings of Hermes Trismegistus, supposedly an Egyptian wise
man鈥攕ome say god鈥攆rom the time of Moses, but more likely a
3rd-century Greek. Although no copy of his indictment survives, Bruno is as
likely to have been burnt for suggesting that Jesus Christ was a magician as for
anything he might have said about the Solar System.
These days, Bruno still occupies one corner of science鈥檚 hall of fame:
extraterrestrial life enthusiasts credit him with the idea that the Universe is
full of suns and planetary systems. But for mainstream scholars, he is a martyr
to magic, not science. And this, paradoxically, could be the making of him now
that magic is making a comeback.
One school of science history connects the work of Bruno and the Elizabethan
astrologer John Dee with that of true scientific pioneers such as Isaac Newton.
This is respectable enough. Several discoveries of the scientific revolution,
from planetary orbits to gravity and magnetism, owed more to magic than
empiricism鈥攚ith the crucial difference that, unlike astrology, they
survived later experimental tests.
But by all accounts, Bruno was a poor astronomer who made a complete arse of
explaining the Moon鈥檚 orbit at a supper debate in Oxford in 1585. The occult
texts of Bruno鈥檚 own guru have plenty of modern followers. To quote the authors
of a book picked at random from the pyramidology shelf, The Stargate Conspiracy:
hermeticism is 鈥渢he highest and most noble search for knowledge the world has
ever known鈥�. The book goes on to suggest that the pyramids mark a gateway to the
stars which intelligence agencies are keeping secret.
Splendid stuff, but if these people want to be taken seriously they should be
prepared to follow Bruno鈥檚 example. The Vatican is now a bit namby-pamby about
the death penalty, but I鈥檓 sure there are others who would oblige. Pass the
tinder box, someone.