"A l'nfinito m'ergo": Giordano Bruno e il volo del moderno Ulisse (review)

This volume of six chapters is another contribution by Pasquale Sabbatino dedicated to Giordano Bruno and the Renaissance literary tradition and beyond (in the last chapter the author confirms this by comparing Pirandello and Bruno). Sabbatino emphasizes the concept of "intertextual dialogue," a topic on which Brunian criticism has focused in the last decade and has achieved with varying degrees of success. As indicated by the author in the preface, the volume con-sists of reelaborated essays that have been previously presented elsewhere. Not lacking are a number of references to more specifically philosophical topics, as well as to certain "sources" — ancient and more recent — that Bruno develops in his writing. The volume appears in the series "Biblioteca dell' 'Archivum Romanicum,'" where Sabbatino published his Giordano Bruno e la "mutazione" del Rinascimento in 1993.

In this present volume, as in the proceeding one, there is a section dedicated to an iconographical documentation relative to the topics treated in the study. The volume treats a highly suggestive and problematic theme: that of delineating the image of a "modern Ulysses" in Bruno's works. It should be noted that chapter 5, "A l'infinito m'ergo.' La poesia di Bruno e il volo del moderno Ulisse," is that chapter particularly dedicated to the theme that gives the book its title, while chapter 3 focuses on the figure of Circe. Even though the title recalls the sonnet to introduce De l'infinito, universo e mondi ("E chi mi impenna, e chi mi scald' il core"), the chapter also takes into consideration topics that recall De gli eroici furori. As is well-known, in the Furori Bruno develops an original notion of poetry that can aid philosophy, in as much as the new natural philosophy and the radical infinitistic cosmology presented in his preceding works (bringing to the fore the metaphysical centrality of the human being, similar to the physical centrality of the Earth) made necessary a new ethics and a new concept of divine love as amor Dei intellectualis. Not by chance, in the Eroici furori Bruno returns to a subject present in various Renaissance treatises on the philosophy of love, that is, that nothing can be loved if one does not first know it. The subject comes to be connected to the Platonic theme of the "wings" of the soul (that is, of the soul's dual parts of intellect and will) and thus to the "flight" of the soul toward the divine. For Bruno that means that humans must search for a new agreement with the divine in its infinite nature, feeling it as part of a unity that opens onto infinite possibilities. Sabbatino parallels the "modern Ulysses" to the "frenzied hero," which for Bruno is the seeker of knowledge, comparable to the mythic Actaeon, who was transformed into a deer by Diana. The hunter becomes himself the prey in that love transforms and converts him into the beloved. Actaeon discovers himself to be prey to his own thoughts, as the divine is now within him, deus interior.

The concept of the frenzied hero is quite distinct from the idea of the learned man, recurrent in early modern culture (one can think, for example, of Charles de Bovelles's De sapiente). Sabbatino argues that the figure of the "modern Ulysses" distances itself gradually from Circe, but perhaps it is worth noting that both Circe and Ulysses are ambivalent figures in Bruno. In fact, for Bruno, the sorceress Circe (allegorically meaning "ever-present matter") is both daughter of the Sun and daughter of darkness. The figure of Ulysses, too, whom the Nolan rarely cites in his writing, is not only evoked by him in a positive way in the Eroici furori (recalling, for example, Homer we can observe that Ulysses, more than Achilles, corresponds...