of Nola, lover of God, doctor in a more perfect divinity, professor of a purer and more harmless wisdom, a philosopher, known, esteemed and honorably entreated by the foremost acadamies of Europe, a stranger to none but churls and barbarians, the awakener of souls from slumber, the queller of presumptuous and recalcitrant ignorance, one who showeth in all his actions, the love he beareth to all men, whether Briton or Italian, female or male, whether bearing the mitre or the crown, the gown or the sword, the cowl or without one; but who chiefly yearns for the man whose converse is peaceful, human, true and profitable; he who seeks not for an anointed head or a crossed brow, for the washed hand or him that is circumcised, but for those true lineaments of man which be his soul and trained understanding; one who is abhorred of them that spread foolishness and are but petty dissemblers, but whom men proven and in earnest love, and who is applauded by the nobler sort The bourgeois character of the dons did not escape the observation of Bruno nor evade his caustic and bitter sarcasm. He had stated that the dons knew much more about beer than they knew about Greek, which no doubt contained a grain of truth. The Oxfordians in their turn retaliated by giving vent to a sneer at the "excitable, gesticulating foreigner, hairy as Pan." Bruno, despite the fact that his soul was replete with the music of lofty and immortal thoughts; in spite, too, of his profound gratitude and penetrative insight, was not without his shortcomings. His supreme self-confidence and missionary zest rendered him irritable, vain, resentful, passionate and indiscreet. But like the Criphon, that mythical animal who possessed the head and forepart of an eagle with the body of a lion, symbolic of the divine and human, Bruno, borne aloft upon his eagle pinions, could mount heavenward to the stars or with eyes bent in fixed gaze upon the earth, remain oblivious to his noble destiny! The great, even with the common herd, partake of the sum of human weaknesses to a greater or lesser degree. What Robert Louis Stevenson observed of the life of Goethe, who ranks with the immortals, may he appropriately applied to Bruno. The extreme ethical opposites revealed in the conduct of Goethe, demonstrated to Stevenson how greatness and weakness may co-exist in the one soul without diminishing admiration one whit for the expressed virtues. In company with the French ambassador Castelnau, Bruno repeatedly appeared at the court of Elizabeth. There he was espe cially welcomed, for Elizabeth boasted of her knowledge of Italian and took a pride in surrounding her court with gentlemen who had visited Italy and rendered themselves conversant with Italian literature. The extreme enthusiasts returned to their native England to display some "strange, antic tricks," which was the unmistakable. indication of an Italian education. Shakespeare immortalized these superfluous mannerisms through the mouth of Rosalind: "Look you lisp . . . ., etc., etc., or I will scarcely think you have swam in a gondola." The queen, Bruno eulogized in extravagant terms, well-nigh exhausting the language of adulation, in that age a point of etiquette when addressing monarchs. He named her the great Amphidrite. While at the court Bruno came into close touch with Sir Philip Sidney, a devotee of Petrarchism, who dedicated sentimental and romantic verses to a lady from whom he had stolen a kiss in youth. With his characteristic tactlessness, Bruno made some supercilious observations, adjuring him to substitute a worship of imperishable wisdom for the perishable charms of body or personality. It is said that Bruno had the Horatian contempt for the rabble. In fact he even went so far as to maintain that sublime truths should be invested in the obscurity of symbol and allegory, that it might not confuse the crass ignorance and stupidity of the vulgar mob. The hatred of the English for the foreigner is traditional. Bruno evidently was not beloved of the English populace, for in a chain of abusive epithets he describes them: "England can boast a common people which will yield to none other in disrespect, outlandishness, boorishness, savagery and bad bringing up." Bruno's The Ash-Wednesday Supper gives a vivid if repelling picture of the English savants, who with "the souls of geese that bear the shape of men," regale themselves on a miscellaneity of viands, after which they discourse on the Copernican cosmology whilst defending Aristotelian physics and cosmology with its division of space into a celestial and earthly region, upon which Dante based his Divina Commedia. At this supper Bruno explains his theories relating to the heavens. He maintained that the scintillation of stars is due to the fact that they give forth their own light while Venus does not twinkle because it simply reflects light. Also the atmosphere of the earth rotates with her. His truly sublime theory was the doctrine of the infinitude of worlds. According to Bruno the center is the middle around which any thing revolves, but the doctrine of an infinitude of worlds implies an infinitude of centers. Moreover Bruno believed that the planets were inhabited, thus considerably weakening the fundamental, orthodox doctrines-that of fall and redemption through grace. Bruno published numerous philosophical works in England and indeed his residence there was the most productive period of his life. Germany next called to the restless zealot. There he spent a tolerably peaceful period, still disseminating his ideas as he traveled from place to place. He predicted a high destiny for the Germans: "Here," he said, "is being prepared the soil for the transplanting of wisdom from the lands of Greece and Italy. May Jupiter grant that the Germans may recognize their strength and strive to aim for the highest, and they will be no longer men, but rather resemble gods, for divine and god-like is their genius." At last in an ill-fated moment Bruno accepted the invitation of the oscillating, weak, treacherous and irascible Mocenigo of Venice, to share his home and teach him the liberal arts and the sciences. His stay with Mocenigo was of short duration, the latter finally betraying him to the Inquisition for his refusal to stay longer with him. He was incarcerated in the prison of Ancona for seven years, which living death was finally terminated by the dire doom inflicted upon him by the Roman Inquisition. In the year 1600, February 16, Giordano Bruno departed from this bourne of Time and Place upon a pyre which the flames greedily consumed, in the Campo dei Fiori (the field of flowers). He rendered up the ghost with those memorable words of Plotinus upon his lips: "Vast power was needed to reunite that which is divine in me with that which is divine in the universe!" Bruno was martyred in Jubilee year, when all Rome resounded with the merrymaking of good and bad and penitential psalms arose to Heaven. But Bruno was the apostle of pain. He deemed sorrow a necessary mode of realization. This negative aspect of eternal joy is the golden spur. He had written with such a noble ardour: "O difficulties to be endured! cries the coward, the feather-head, the shuttle-cock, the faint-heart. . . . The task is not impossible though hard. The craven must stand aside. Ordinary, easy tasks are for the commonplace and the herd. Rare, heroic and divine men overcome the difficulties of the way and force an immortal palm from necessity. You may fail to reach your goal. Run the race nevertheless. Put forth your strength in so high a business. Strive on with your last breath." Again he says, in defining his mission: "The Nolan has given freedom to the human spirit and made its knowledge free. It was suffocating in the close air of a narrow prison house, whence, but only through chinks, it gazed at the far-off stars. Its wings were clipped, so that it was unable to cleave the veiling cloud and reach the reality beyond.” It wound be well to conclude with Bruno's own rapturous song, of which Boulting has rendered an excellent, free translation: "Rising on wing secure, with burning heart, What fate may scare me, smiling at the tomb, I soar beyond the mortal years, and start PASSIVE RESISTANCE OR SOUL FORCE. BY BLANCHE WATSON. "Without Swaraj there is now no possibility of Peace in India.” M. K. GANDHI. WHAT is "Swaraj?" According to Mahatma Gandhi, it is the right of a people to manage their own affairs, i. e., it means Self-government. It has been said that India is not fit to govern itself. To this Gandhi replies, "He who has no right to err, can never be forward. The history of the commons is a history of blunders." "Swaraj", says this great leader of the Indian people, "can only be built upon the assumption that most of what is national, is on the whole, sound.” This means that back of and above Swaraj must be the "Swadeshi" spirit, the spirit that is symbolized more particularly by the wearing of the national dress made of Indian-made materials, but which means the cherishing of watever is inherent in the development of the national life. In the introduction to his little book Hind Swaraj* or "Indian Self-Government" Gandhi says: * Published by S. Ganesan & Co., Triplicane, Madras, India. "It teaches the gospel of love in place of that of hate. It replaces violence with self-sacrifice. It pits soul-force against brute force. The booklet is a severe condemnation of 'modern civilization. It was written in 1908. My conviction is deeper today than ever. I feel that if India would discard 'modern civilization' she would only gain by doing so." This book is a difficult book to interpret with justice both to the author and the reader one sets out to reach. The Western mind needs to re-orient itself to take in the thought and particularly the spirit of this man whose own personal life may be said to have been modelled after the "Sermon on the Mount." Godliness, to him, is the fundamental requisite for the carrying out of a scheme of non-co-operation wholly by means of non-violent methods backed by the power of Love. |