points of view Bruno appears before us as
the man who most vitally and comprehensively grasped the leading
tendencies of his age in their intellectual essence. He left behind him
the mediaeval conception of an extra-mundane God, creating a finite
world, of which this globe is the center, and the principal episode in
the history of which is the series of events from the Fall, through the
Incarnation and Crucifixion, to the Last Judgment.[124] He substituted
the conception of an ever-living, ever-acting, ever-self-effectuating
God, immanent in an infinite universe, to the contemplation of whose
attributes the mind of man ascends by study of Nature and interrogation
of his conscience. The rehabilitation of the physical world and of
humanity as part of its order, which the Renaissance had already
indirectly effected through the medium of arts and literature and modes
of life, found in Bruno an impassioned metaphysical supporter. He
divinized Nature, not by degrading the Deity to matter, but by lifting
matter to participation in the divine existence. The Renaissance had
proclaimed the dignity of man considered as a mundane creature, and not
in his relation to a hypothetical other-world. It abundantly manifested
the beauty and the joy afforded by existence on this planet, and
laughingly discarded past theological determinations to the contrary of
its new Gospel. Bruno undertook the systematization of Renaissance
intuitions; declared the divine reality of Nature and of man;
demonstrated that we cannot speculate God, cannot think ourselves,
cannot envisage the universe, except under the form of one living,
infinite, eternal, divinely-sustained and soul-penetrated complex. He
repudiated authority of every sort, refusing to acknowledge the decrees
of the Church, freely criticising past philosophers, availing himself of
all that seemed to him substantial in their speculations, but appealing
in the last resort to that inner witness, that light of reason, which
corresponds in the mental order to conscience in the moral. As he
deified Nature, so he emancipated man as forming with Nature an integral
part of the supreme Being. He was led upon this path to combat Aristotle
and to satirize Christian beliefs, with a subtlety of scholastic
argumentation and an acerbity of rhetoric that now pass for antiquated.
Much that is obsolete in his writings must be referred to the polemical
necessities of an age enthralled by peripatetic conceptions,