first fair days of early
Greek speculation, love had occupied a large place in the conception
of philosophy; and in after days Bruno was fond of developing, like
Plato, like the Christian platonist, combining something of the
peculiar temper of each, the analogy between intellectual enthusiasm
and the flights of physical love, with an animation which shows
clearly enough the reality of his experience in the latter. The
Eroici Furori, his book of books, dedicated to Philip Sidney, who
would be no stranger to such thoughts, presents a singular blending
of verse and prose, after the manner of Dante's Vita Nuova. The
supervening philosophic comment re-considers those earlier physical
impulses which had prompted the sonnet in voluble Italian, entirely
to the advantage of their abstract, incorporeal equivalents. Yet if
it is after all but a prose comment, it betrays no lack of the
natural stuff out of which such mystic transferences must be made.
That there is no single name of preference, no Beatrice or Laura, by
no means proves the young man's earlier desires merely "Platonic;"
and if the colours of love inevitably lose a little of their force
and propriety by such deflection, the intellectual purpose as
certainly finds its opportunity thereby, in the matter of borrowed
fire and wings. A kind of old, scholastic pedantry creeping back
over the ardent youth who had thrown it off so defiantly (as if Love
himself went in for a degree at the University) Bruno developes,
under the mask of amorous verse, all the various stages of
abstraction, by which, as the last step of a long ladder, the mind
attains actual "union." For, as with the purely religious mystics,
union, the mystic union of souls with each other and their Lord,
nothing less than union between the contemplator and the
contemplated--the reality, or the sense, or at least the name of
it--was always at hand. Whence that instinctive tendency, if not from
the Creator of things himself, who has doubtless prompted it in the
physical universe, as in man? How familiar the thought that the
whole creation longs for God, the soul as the hart for the
water-brooks! To unite oneself to the infinite by breadth and lucidity of
intellect, to enter, by that admirable faculty, into eternal
life--this was the true vocation of the spouse, of the rightly amorous
soul--"a filosofia e necessario amore." There would be degrees of
progress therein, as of course also of relapse: joys a