Madam, – Mary Ellen Synon (November 17th) takes issue with the reference in an editorial (November 14th) to the execution of the priest-philosopher Giordano Bruno in 1600 following a trial by the Inquisition. She suggests that although his offence was heresy, his conviction did not result from his belief in the existence of other worlds but to “theological errors”.
In fact, Bruno was convicted on the basis of eight specific charges of heresy based on his writings. Among others, these related to his views on transubstantiation and the nature of the Trinity, but the full account of the charges is no longer available.
The Catholic Encyclopedia is wrong, however, to imply, as Ms Synon writes, that he was only executed for theological errors unrelated to his radical belief in the infinity of the universe and the plurality of worlds, not least because his theology was intimately linked to his Copernican “cosmogony” (the astrophysical study of the origin and evolution of the universe).
A recent account of his trial from the Vatican Secret Archive makes this clear: “In one of the last interrogations before the execution of the sentence (maybe in April 1599), the Dominican friar [Bruno] was questioned by the judges of the Holy Office on his cosmogony conception, supported above all in the “La cena delle Ceneri” (Ash Wednesday Dinner) and in the “De linfinito universo et mundi” (On the Infinite Universe and Worlds). Even then, he defended his theories as scientifically founded and by no means against the Holy Scriptures: ‘Firstly, I say that the theories on the movement of the Earth and on the immobility of the firmament or sky are by me produced on a reasoned and sure basis, which doesn’t undermine the authority of the Holy Scriptures . . . With regard to the Sun, I say that it doesn’t rise or set, nor do we see it rise or set, because, if the Earth rotates on his axis, what do we mean by rising and setting.’
“In the same rooms where Giordano Bruno was questioned, for the same important reasons of the relationship between science and faith, at the dawning of the new astronomy and at the decline of Aristotle’s philosophy, 16 years later, Cardinal Bellarmino, who then contested Bruno’s heretical theses, summoned Galileo Galilei, who also faced a famous inquisitorial trial, which, luckily for him, ended with a simple abjuration.”
Bruno’s refusal to recant, however, led to his execution after he was handed over by the Inquisition, as Ms Synon notes, to the civil authorities who burned him at the stake. – Yours, etc,