Giordano Bruno

"Giordano was born five years after Copernicus died. He had bequeathed an intoxicating idea to the generation that was to follow him. We hear a lot in our own day about the expanding universe. The thought of the Infinity of the Universe was one of the great stimulating ideas of the Renaissance... He suffered a cruel death and achieved a unique martyr's fame. He has become the Church's most difficult alibi. She can explain away the case of Galileo with suave condescension. Bruno sticks in her throat."

-Dr. John Kessler


The Catholic Church condemned this Renaissance thinker and in 1600 burned him alive. Still the Church does not fully own up to its reactionary brutality against the philosopher friar more valuable than a hundred of their popes who have at times been small, greedy, and impotent representatives of the Nazarene they claim to serve. Before he was taken to his place of execution the jailers stopped his tongue with a leather gag and set him on a mule. Today Giordano Bruno's statue faces the Vatican and his passion for knowledge and intellectual fortitude should not be forgotten in the flames at the hands of an insecure institution. He was against the small world of the Catholic hierarchy and for the great expansive universe. He stood up to a stale and stagnant order that no longer served human progress but only its earthly king.


"I fought, and that's a lot. I thought I could win ... but nature and luck curbed my endeavour. But it's already something that I took up the struggle, because I see that victory is in the hands of Fate. In me was what was possible and what no future century will be able to deny to me: what a winner could give from his own; that I did not fear death, that I did not submit, my face firm, to anyone of my breed; that I preferred courageous death to pavid life."

- Giordano Bruno