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INGRID ROWLAND A Catholic Reader of Giordano Bruno in Counter-Reformation Rome: Athanasius Kircher, SJ and Panspermia Rerum Sic tellus recipit vitalia solis ab orbe Semina, et ob motum radiorum temperat aestus. De immenso et innumerabilibus, book IV, chapter 14.1 In 1601, the Roman Inquisition added “all the writings” of Giordano Bruno, omnia scripta, to its Index of Prohibited Books. Although the phrase omnia scripta sounded decisive, it also reflected an uncomfortable fact: the philosopher ’s inquisitors were still uncertain about what, and how much, he had actually written in his troubled, well-traveled life. The search for his published work had dragged his trial for heresy in Rome into a seven-year ordeal, and even so, Giordano Bruno’s condemnation to death for “obstinate and pertinacious heresy” in 1600 drew mostly from verbal testimony given during the course of his trial rather than from the defendant’s written legacy. Until his death, however, Bruno’s contemporaries had been able to read his work without interference from the Church; these readers included both Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei. And because the Index had no binding effect in the Protestant world (even Kepler, writing from nominally Catholic Prague, could mention Bruno openly in 1610 without fear of reprisal), several of Bruno’s late works on memory, the De Specierum Scrutinio (Prague, 1588), and the De Lampade Combinatoria Lulliana, De Progressu Logicae Venationis and De Venatione Logicorum (all Wittenberg, 1587), were actually reprinted in (then) Protestant Strasbourg in 1617.2 More surprisingly, perhaps, Giordano Bruno also continued to exert his influence in Catholic Europe: half a century after his death, for example, his name appears in the work of two German-born Jesuits with long experience in Italy, Father Athanasius Kircher and Father Gaspar Schott, both of them born after the Holy Office’s ban on all of the heretic’s works had gone into effect, and both clearly unafraid to cite Giordano Bruno openly in their own publications. 222 Reflections of an Intellectual Burning Like Bruno himself, Kircher and Schott were exceptionally well-traveled men, and like him, they made their way through a Europe wracked by the violent conflict between Catholics and Protestants—a conflict formally identified from 1618 to 1648 as the Thirty Years’ War. Indeed, it was an important episode in that war, the penetration of Swedish troops into Germany under King Gustavus Adolphus in 1631, that forced Kircher and Schott to flee the Jesuit College at Würzburg, where they had first met as professor and student. Kircher fled to Avignon, and then on to Rome; Schott was sent to Sicily. Both, then, were acutely aware of the dangers, subtle and overt, created by religious dissension, and both faced those dangers with a combination of courage—Kircher once faced down a Protestant mercenary who threatened him with a knife to his throat—and the cleverness that had already become proverbial for their order. The Jesuits’ reputation for cleverness was well founded. Their Society may have been founded by a former soldier, who stressed absolute agreement among his companions and their absolute collective service to the papacy, but somehow those companions quickly came to exhibit a remarkable variety of opinions within their disciplined ranks. At heart, after all, the Jesuits were innovators: a new order created to face the challenges of the contemporary world; hence, adapting to circumstance often played as central a role in their experience as their carefully standardized curriculum and their Spiritual Exercises. Almost from the outset, this ability to adapt and adjust put the Society of Jesus at the center of research into natural philosophy, as first-rank participants in what would later be termed the scientific revolution. Galileo Galilei’s first lecture in Rome took place in the great hall of the Jesuits’ Roman College. The Society had extended the invitation through its eminent Professor of Mathematics, Christoph Clavius, the astronomer who had also supervised the revision of the Julian calendar for Pope Gregory XIII. Clavius, over his decades of service to teaching, maintained a cautious openness to the theories of Copernicus and the observations of Galileo, but many other Jesuits also harbored ideas about cosmology that differed significantly from the accounts of Aristotle and Ptolemy. Ironically , these dissenters included Bruno’s lethal inquisitor, Robert Bellarmine , the first Jesuit to hold such an official position in the Holy Office; like Fathers Kircher and Schott after him, he was convinced that space...

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