The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (review)

278 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY theosophy in the works of Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Agrippa, Saint Thomas More, Shakespeare, Campenella, Fludd, Kepler, and the Cambridge Platonists, to name but a few Renaissance personalities discussed in the book. Ample footnotes provide intensive bibliographic data for further studies and altogether make this an indispensible reference for the history of ideas in the Renaissance. Another study is planned by Professor Yates to deal with Bruno's mnemonic studies and Lullian tradition, which are treated here only insofar as they are part of the Hermetic core of Bruno's philosophy. All in all, this is a very exciting and interesting volume. GLENNONANTHONYDONNELLY Claremont, Cali]ornia The Expulsion o] the Triumphant Beast. By Giordano Bruno. Translated and edited by Arthur D. Imerti, with an Introduction and Notes. (New Brunswick, N. J., Rutgers University Press [1964].Pp. ix [i] § 324.) It is highly gratifying to have these dialogues of Bruno available in English, with an informative biographical introduction by the translator, and with copious critical notes. Arthur Imerti has performed a difficult task with scholarly care, and the publisher has made an attractive volume of an extraordinary composition. These dialogues are not noteworthy as dialogues, but they give us an excellent example of the extravagant rhetoric and "heroic furors" of this revolutionary martyr of the Renaissance. In his dedicatory epistle to Sir Philip Sidney, Bruno presents these "preludes" as "material for a future work...treating moral philosophy" (p. 73). However, he immediately launches into an exposition of his basic doctrines as if he were including the whole of moral philosophy in the dedication. In fact, without this "explanatory epistle" the allegories of the dialogues would be difficult to follow. Bruno was about to leave England. He had made himself within a few weeks of lecturing at Oxford thoroughly persona non grata by his violent repudiation of Aristotle. He was accustomed to offending wherever he went and was apparently committed to a "belligerent life," as he put it. "We see how this man, as a citizen and servant of the world, a child of Father Sun and Mother Earth, because he loves the world too much, must be hated, censured, persecuted, and extinguished by it. But, in the meantime, may he not be idle or badly employed while awaiting his death, his transmigration, his change" (p. 72). The central thesis of Bruno's moral philosophy is that the human organism is a system of contrary forces held together by the divine, central, unifying power and principle of "Intellectual Light," "called by some synderesis" (p. 79), here presented under the mythic form of an exiled Greek divinity named Momus, whom Jove has now decided to recall in order to execute a radical moral reform in the heavens. The full title of the dialogues is: The Expulsion o] the Triumphant Beast proposed by Jove, Achieved by the Council, Revealed by Mercury, Narrated by Sophia, Heard by gaulino, Recorded by the Nolan. The triumphant beast that is to be expelled from its privileged position beside the royal North Star of the heavens is Ursa Major, the Big Dipper; and with his expulsion there is to be a general housecleaning of the heavens ridding them of the whole galaxy of pagan constellations and the astrology over which they presided. In place of the scandals which these figures of the zodiac represented, a repentant Jove is enthroning new constellations of genuine virtues. Among them are: truth, peace, repentance, simplicity, diligence , humanity, philanthropy, sagacity, generosity, tolerance, friendship, and research. This new heaven is to preside over a reformed mankind, guided by the universal life of divine Intellectual Light. Such a radical judgment and purification is supposed to come every 36,000 years, when heaven and earth are periodically purged and renewed. As "the Nolan" reports the heavenly dialogues, he takes occasion incidentally to make savage criticisms of his contemporaries on earth. He also scatters into the dialogues bits of his philosophy, gathered from BOOK REVIEWS 279 Epicureanlsm, Stoicism, Hermetism, Copernicanism, and sheer fantasy. "Heretic" was obviously a mild term for this belligerent prophet, sage, and magus. HF.aBERT W. SCHNEIDER Claremont, California Bernard Lamy (1640-1715), dtude biographique et bibliographique. Textes in~dits. By...