David, were you aware of the utterly scathing take on Bruno published with substantive revisions (2019) by the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy?
Scathing, I mean, if read from any theological position within Orthodoxy and from most any mode of orthodox Catholic tradition contemporaneous with him — or today for that matter.
Anyway, I know next to nothing about Giordano Bruno, and it happens that I went to the SEoP first as a source for some context. Do you have a suggestion for a more congenial introduction to his thought—and maybe some insight into its deeper motives? I have to confess that this one was kinda alarming for many reasons.
I don’t think any accurate account of his thought would be less alarming. I certainly wouldn’t recommend him to anyone who thinks one must be orthodox to be interesting—or brilliant.
Well, even this scathing intro makes obvious that he is fascinating and that his intellect advanced well beyond brilliance, of course. At this point in my early novitiate of acquaintance with his thinking, via the representation of it cited, I should clarify the roots of my sense of alarm. This is partly triggered by the stray comments quoted that position him as quite adjacent to the monstrous bigotry and deeply deranged biologism of many genocidal Nazi racial 'theorists' who surfaced in print, and then in mass murderous deeds, a few centuries later. (Wondering if Luther's last publication—which has certainly contributed mightily to this horrific trajectory— might have influenced GB? Do you happen to know, David, if he read it? Does anyone?)
(Stray comments, and quoted out of context, admittedly—although I find myself having problems envisaging how context could much mitigate their prima facie hideousness... I feel I ought to add that, to my understanding, anyway, the undoubted fact that similar POVs were more or less conventional 'wisdom' in his day would not add a bit to any case for his originality and essential freedom of spirit. Quite the contrary.)
So there's that.
But also, I will tell you that I find alarming any vaunted thinker who presumed to 1) claim the right to offer an ostensibly profound critique of the grounds of the Christian worldview but who 2) also demonstrates a nearly global absence of any real grasp of the ethical and noetic sublimity of the Christian mystical consciousness— a lack evident to me in nearly every quote (again, all out of context.) I stipulate that eisegesis on my part may be operative here, and I'm honestly open to stern corrections of any unrecognized sequelae of my ignorance of Giordano Bruno's thought — I'm going on a well-honed intuition here based on the info in this piece. But if you or anyone else should care to offer such correction I'd be genuinely grateful and consider it closely.
I'd like to begin with GB by examining carefully what he might have had to say about the writings of Sts. Ephrem the Syrian, Isaac of Nineveh, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory the Nazianzen, Basil the Great, Maximus the Confessor, Simeon the New Theologian ... I could extend the list. Did he grapple with any of them in print? Probably not, since I doubt any of these figures were exactly household names in elite Catholic circles of the time, but I would definitely enjoy starting there with GB if he had weighed in.
If one such as GB is going to wage a profound war against "orthodoxy," may I suggest that Nietzsche's advice to all wannabe combatants is worth serious consideration:
431
"The opinions of one's opponents. To assess the natural quality of even the cleverest heads, to see whether they are naturally subtle or feeble, one should take note of how they interpret and reproduce the opinions of their opponents: for how it does this betrays the natural measure of every intellect. The perfect sage without knowing it elevates his opponent into the ideal and purifies his contradictory opinion of every blemish and adventitiousness: only when his opponent has by this means become a god with shining weapons does the sage fight against him."
I confess my intuition-derived doubt that GB had seriously attempted to understand the Christian mystical geniuses. But I'd sincerely welcome correction if that original prejudice has led me too far astray. With citations I can check, please, should anyone care to bother with me.
First of all, no one spoke of Bruno as a moral exemplar, and the bigotries of his time were acutely present in him. Bringing in the Nazis is just rhetorical excess; anachronistic retrospectives are pointless. And who cares what he thought of the Christian mystical tradition? It’s not as if he had access to the texts we can now find so plentifully present on Amazon. What he knew of the tradition of Christian spirituality was what was communicated to him through the narrow channel of the debased Dominican culture of his time—the worst period in that order and in Catholic thought. Bruno is interesting in the way that Nietzsche was: not because he was right, but because he was often wrong in good faith.
Well, again, I don’t think anyone argues that Bruno was morally blameless for his prejudices. But even the nasty remarks made about Jews in his works—often by characters in a dialogue—are about as vicious as what he says about the English and about priests. They are not calls for genocide. Even the SEP article you mention cautions against assuming that Bruno’s use of the bigoted language of his time reflects his own views. Moral stupidity is more effectively denounced in proportion to what we can ascertain about intentions. And, unless you want to equate John Chrysostom with Hitler…
Bruno could have encountered Luther's antisemitic writings, but I don't see why he would need to. The perpetators of the Rhineland pogrom in 1096 seemed perfectly capable of murderous hatred of Jews without Luther's tutelage.
Incidentally, the claim that Luther's OTJATL was a significant source for Nazi ideology is often asserted and rarely demonstrated, which is why historians of the Third Reich tend to speak of it as "the consensus" rather than "correct." Luther's antisemitic works had been out of print for centuries when the Nazis rediscovered that Germany's national hero had shared their hatred of Jews. This doesn't vindicate Luther (or Bruno) for being a Jew-hating POS; it's just that we shouldn't take the Nazi's attempt's to borrow Luther's prestige (such as it was) at face value.
I don't doubt that some of Luther's antisemitism was still echoing around in the German national consciousness 400 years after his death. It's just that when one tries to get down to the details (as historians do), things get complicated. Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels, for example, were all raised Catholic and left the faith for either atheism or paganism in early adulthood, so they're not the kind of people you would expect to be influenced by the specifics of Luther's thought (even if they did know he was an antisemite).
Found myself wondering, and by wondering I mean genuinely curious, if Levering’s gross misreading of you, David Bentley Hart—especially since, by your own admission, Levering is someone you heart (pun intended)—might have very well been a deliberate though necessarily unspoken provocation to adequately set you up to bare your Hart (did it again) via your above rebuttal? I.e., perhaps what he would have liked to say about tradition but could not say because of the plausibility if not possibility of authorial, professorial, or overwhelming student/laity disapproval and/or discipline? In other words, well your words to be exact, exactly like you forthrightly admit doing to/for him though for a different purpose: “the reason for stating my position in so stark a form, after all, was to provoke debate on an issue all too often dealt with inadequately.”
If so, he's a more cunning and conniving strategist than he gives on. He did tell me in our correspondence, however, that whatever he may have gotten wrong about my book might be for the best, as it would give me an opportunity to clarify my argument against the sort of misunderstandings to which it might give rise. That was a typically self-effacing and generous thing for him to suggest. As I say, he is a saintly soul; I just wish he would shed the habit of believing he must defend an incredible position against an amorphous enemy.
Well (insert sarcasm), isn’t being “saintly” synonymous with being a good soldier, or in his case an officer, in the culture war? Who’s got time for the Kingdom of God when “war is upon you”?
But that’s not his temperament. It’s his upbringing, and he’s capable of sufficient charity to see his way past it. Unfortunately, the same is not necessarily true of his students. And there’s the great problem.
Hello Dr. DBH, I know you don't have a "pastoral bone in your body", but I wonder if you could offer any thoughts on apostolic succession and sacramental authority. My sense is that these things were in place in the very early church and they do seem to have emanated from the apostles themselves. But my cynical side tells me that, especially now 2000 years removed, the succession and sacramental authority are a means of maintaining power and control over the faith. And that the corruption in the the Orthodox and Catholic churches over the centuries makes it awfully tempting to just disregard the the whole structure and have a relationship with Christ within whatever local church community seems to be based in love and charity and the basic truth of the gospel. This is something I struggle with.
As for the historical question, I disagree with your assessment. I think those institutions took shape early on and had their roots in the apostolic age, but I do not think it sound to see them as directly instituted by the apostles. The New Testament itself gives us cause for thinking otherwise.
As for the question of personal faith, which I suppose means how you understand theological and institutional development (or innovation)—I’m afraid I still don’t have a pastoral bone in my body.
Do you think the apostles and apostolic fathers would agree more with the Orthodox / Catholic understanding of the real presence (or transubstantiation) in the eucharist or would they be more inline with the symbolic / figurative understanding of some protestant churches?
quoting The Godfather at the start of a theology article is quite apt. Bruno's mustache was just too much for some eyes to handle it shone brighter than the stars and was too much for this world. Anyways thanks for the write up as always
David, were you aware of the utterly scathing take on Bruno published with substantive revisions (2019) by the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy?
cf. '7. Religion' in particular ...
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bruno/
Scathing, I mean, if read from any theological position within Orthodoxy and from most any mode of orthodox Catholic tradition contemporaneous with him — or today for that matter.
Anyway, I know next to nothing about Giordano Bruno, and it happens that I went to the SEoP first as a source for some context. Do you have a suggestion for a more congenial introduction to his thought—and maybe some insight into its deeper motives? I have to confess that this one was kinda alarming for many reasons.
I don’t think any accurate account of his thought would be less alarming. I certainly wouldn’t recommend him to anyone who thinks one must be orthodox to be interesting—or brilliant.
Well, even this scathing intro makes obvious that he is fascinating and that his intellect advanced well beyond brilliance, of course. At this point in my early novitiate of acquaintance with his thinking, via the representation of it cited, I should clarify the roots of my sense of alarm. This is partly triggered by the stray comments quoted that position him as quite adjacent to the monstrous bigotry and deeply deranged biologism of many genocidal Nazi racial 'theorists' who surfaced in print, and then in mass murderous deeds, a few centuries later. (Wondering if Luther's last publication—which has certainly contributed mightily to this horrific trajectory— might have influenced GB? Do you happen to know, David, if he read it? Does anyone?)
(Stray comments, and quoted out of context, admittedly—although I find myself having problems envisaging how context could much mitigate their prima facie hideousness... I feel I ought to add that, to my understanding, anyway, the undoubted fact that similar POVs were more or less conventional 'wisdom' in his day would not add a bit to any case for his originality and essential freedom of spirit. Quite the contrary.)
So there's that.
But also, I will tell you that I find alarming any vaunted thinker who presumed to 1) claim the right to offer an ostensibly profound critique of the grounds of the Christian worldview but who 2) also demonstrates a nearly global absence of any real grasp of the ethical and noetic sublimity of the Christian mystical consciousness— a lack evident to me in nearly every quote (again, all out of context.) I stipulate that eisegesis on my part may be operative here, and I'm honestly open to stern corrections of any unrecognized sequelae of my ignorance of Giordano Bruno's thought — I'm going on a well-honed intuition here based on the info in this piece. But if you or anyone else should care to offer such correction I'd be genuinely grateful and consider it closely.
I'd like to begin with GB by examining carefully what he might have had to say about the writings of Sts. Ephrem the Syrian, Isaac of Nineveh, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory the Nazianzen, Basil the Great, Maximus the Confessor, Simeon the New Theologian ... I could extend the list. Did he grapple with any of them in print? Probably not, since I doubt any of these figures were exactly household names in elite Catholic circles of the time, but I would definitely enjoy starting there with GB if he had weighed in.
If one such as GB is going to wage a profound war against "orthodoxy," may I suggest that Nietzsche's advice to all wannabe combatants is worth serious consideration:
431
"The opinions of one's opponents. To assess the natural quality of even the cleverest heads, to see whether they are naturally subtle or feeble, one should take note of how they interpret and reproduce the opinions of their opponents: for how it does this betrays the natural measure of every intellect. The perfect sage without knowing it elevates his opponent into the ideal and purifies his contradictory opinion of every blemish and adventitiousness: only when his opponent has by this means become a god with shining weapons does the sage fight against him."
I confess my intuition-derived doubt that GB had seriously attempted to understand the Christian mystical geniuses. But I'd sincerely welcome correction if that original prejudice has led me too far astray. With citations I can check, please, should anyone care to bother with me.
First of all, no one spoke of Bruno as a moral exemplar, and the bigotries of his time were acutely present in him. Bringing in the Nazis is just rhetorical excess; anachronistic retrospectives are pointless. And who cares what he thought of the Christian mystical tradition? It’s not as if he had access to the texts we can now find so plentifully present on Amazon. What he knew of the tradition of Christian spirituality was what was communicated to him through the narrow channel of the debased Dominican culture of his time—the worst period in that order and in Catholic thought. Bruno is interesting in the way that Nietzsche was: not because he was right, but because he was often wrong in good faith.
Deleted by author.
I have.
Well, again, I don’t think anyone argues that Bruno was morally blameless for his prejudices. But even the nasty remarks made about Jews in his works—often by characters in a dialogue—are about as vicious as what he says about the English and about priests. They are not calls for genocide. Even the SEP article you mention cautions against assuming that Bruno’s use of the bigoted language of his time reflects his own views. Moral stupidity is more effectively denounced in proportion to what we can ascertain about intentions. And, unless you want to equate John Chrysostom with Hitler…
Bruno could have encountered Luther's antisemitic writings, but I don't see why he would need to. The perpetators of the Rhineland pogrom in 1096 seemed perfectly capable of murderous hatred of Jews without Luther's tutelage.
Incidentally, the claim that Luther's OTJATL was a significant source for Nazi ideology is often asserted and rarely demonstrated, which is why historians of the Third Reich tend to speak of it as "the consensus" rather than "correct." Luther's antisemitic works had been out of print for centuries when the Nazis rediscovered that Germany's national hero had shared their hatred of Jews. This doesn't vindicate Luther (or Bruno) for being a Jew-hating POS; it's just that we shouldn't take the Nazi's attempt's to borrow Luther's prestige (such as it was) at face value.
I don't doubt that some of Luther's antisemitism was still echoing around in the German national consciousness 400 years after his death. It's just that when one tries to get down to the details (as historians do), things get complicated. Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels, for example, were all raised Catholic and left the faith for either atheism or paganism in early adulthood, so they're not the kind of people you would expect to be influenced by the specifics of Luther's thought (even if they did know he was an antisemite).
Found myself wondering, and by wondering I mean genuinely curious, if Levering’s gross misreading of you, David Bentley Hart—especially since, by your own admission, Levering is someone you heart (pun intended)—might have very well been a deliberate though necessarily unspoken provocation to adequately set you up to bare your Hart (did it again) via your above rebuttal? I.e., perhaps what he would have liked to say about tradition but could not say because of the plausibility if not possibility of authorial, professorial, or overwhelming student/laity disapproval and/or discipline? In other words, well your words to be exact, exactly like you forthrightly admit doing to/for him though for a different purpose: “the reason for stating my position in so stark a form, after all, was to provoke debate on an issue all too often dealt with inadequately.”
If so, he's a more cunning and conniving strategist than he gives on. He did tell me in our correspondence, however, that whatever he may have gotten wrong about my book might be for the best, as it would give me an opportunity to clarify my argument against the sort of misunderstandings to which it might give rise. That was a typically self-effacing and generous thing for him to suggest. As I say, he is a saintly soul; I just wish he would shed the habit of believing he must defend an incredible position against an amorphous enemy.
Well (insert sarcasm), isn’t being “saintly” synonymous with being a good soldier, or in his case an officer, in the culture war? Who’s got time for the Kingdom of God when “war is upon you”?
But that’s not his temperament. It’s his upbringing, and he’s capable of sufficient charity to see his way past it. Unfortunately, the same is not necessarily true of his students. And there’s the great problem.
Hello Dr. DBH, I know you don't have a "pastoral bone in your body", but I wonder if you could offer any thoughts on apostolic succession and sacramental authority. My sense is that these things were in place in the very early church and they do seem to have emanated from the apostles themselves. But my cynical side tells me that, especially now 2000 years removed, the succession and sacramental authority are a means of maintaining power and control over the faith. And that the corruption in the the Orthodox and Catholic churches over the centuries makes it awfully tempting to just disregard the the whole structure and have a relationship with Christ within whatever local church community seems to be based in love and charity and the basic truth of the gospel. This is something I struggle with.
As for the historical question, I disagree with your assessment. I think those institutions took shape early on and had their roots in the apostolic age, but I do not think it sound to see them as directly instituted by the apostles. The New Testament itself gives us cause for thinking otherwise.
As for the question of personal faith, which I suppose means how you understand theological and institutional development (or innovation)—I’m afraid I still don’t have a pastoral bone in my body.
Do you think the apostles and apostolic fathers would agree more with the Orthodox / Catholic understanding of the real presence (or transubstantiation) in the eucharist or would they be more inline with the symbolic / figurative understanding of some protestant churches?
I haven’t the foggiest idea. Why assume they would all have had the same view?
quoting The Godfather at the start of a theology article is quite apt. Bruno's mustache was just too much for some eyes to handle it shone brighter than the stars and was too much for this world. Anyways thanks for the write up as always