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The question: How does Giordano Bruno specifically fit into Blumenberg's argument?

The answer: Bruno, self-proclaimed human portent of infinitism, is of great importance to Hans Blumenberg because the Nolan's life, thought, death, and each of their subsequent interpretations stand as examples of the problem that man discovered at the heart of the Christian theological system. Blumenberg explains:

Bruno's assertion of the infinitude of the world and of the number of worlds was a challenge aimed at this center of the system of Christian dogma: According to Bruno's great premise, no individual contingent fact, no person, no saving event, not even an individual world could claim to represent, to contain, to exhaust the power and the will, the fullness and the prodigal self-expenditure of the divinity. (Copernican 373)

If infinitism is the result of heliocentricity and the rebuke of anthropocentrism, then it should follow that Copernicus sits on the modern side of the epochal threshold. Why then is it that when Copernicus provided evidence for heliocentricity, we do not soar into the modern age but with Giordano Bruno we do? As is well known, Rheticus, fearing the consequences of publishing Copernicus's theory, prefaced the Polish astronomer's work with a disclaimer, positing that the theory constituted no more than a hypothetical curiosity. This was not Copernicus's belief—though the fear might have been shared to some degree. Since Copernicus's work stood as a mathematical elucidation and not an ethical interpretation of the moral repercussions of such a cosmic overhaul, the

astronomer's work did not cripple Christianity's geocentrically organized dogma thereby constituting an epochal overhaul. In fact, it was not until 1616, nearly three quarters of a century after its publication, that De revolutionibus orbium coelestium was placed on the

Index. Might Bruno's trial and death, starting some twenty-four years earlier, have evinced a darker and more worrisome concern for the Church?

[...] [Copernicus] appears to Bruno as the still groping beginner who had not yet recognized the emerging process of a great clarification, but instead, as the last in a long series of astronomical laborers, had only surveyed the basis for a bold extrapolation without daring to make the leap into speculative totality. [...] He must, it is true, put trust in the specialists' observations, but not in their interpretation. They are only the translators of a text, not its expositors – only the messengers, not the strategists. (Copernican 360)

It is Bruno half a century after Copernicus who was to assume the role of bringing a "new light" to the Western world, and, as he pompously pens in his Cena de le ceneri, he alone, unlike Copernicus, grasped the moral and spiritual implications of such a revolution. He did this through paradox and fancy rhetoric.68

Giordano Bruno was an expert in the art of 'fleeing forward': He took what filled his contemporaries with uneasiness or alarm – namely, the

expansion of the cosmic housing to an unimaginable magnitude – and drove it one step further, into the pure negation of conceivability. (Copernican 356)

Bruno cues the shift because he is the first post-Copernican supporter ruthlessly and mercilessly to change the seemingly unchangeable: the Christian God. Geocentricity and anthropocentrism held that God was made in man's image—one could cite many

examples of this (Augustine, Aquinas, Dante). If we alter the substantive nature of the universe, however, we subsequently alter the immaterial nature of God. Contrary to the Medieval God that was revealed unto and reflected in man, Bruno's God was the only one to know Himself. Man must therefore come to know Him no longer from the vantage of the center of His project, but rather as one living thing within an entire universe of things.

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God is everywhere and in everything and no creature, of this world or of another, is more privileged in His eyes.

The modern age might best be defined as the massive scission that took place when man came to realize that he needed to reinvent his own God. That is, man needed to redefine the greatest myth of them all: the myth of totality. How frightening this must have been to those of the era—man playing God's role upon God! But this is Bruno's exact sympathy, which was shared by many other "heretical" thinkers of the early modern age. In fact, the often maligned and ubiquitous metaphor of the "Universe as Book" is significant because therein we find the replacement of The Book of God with The Book of Nature—that is, the reoccupation of the position held by The Book of God. The logos

as represented by the Christian Pantokrator no longer served its revelatory intent,

supplanted conversely by a new logos, that of nature, wherein God wrote his finest verse. This is no better exemplified than in Tommaso Campanella's sonnet, "Modo di

filosofare": The world is the book where the Eternal Wisdom wrote his own concepts, […]" (La Città del Sole e Poesie 66)69 Campanella once stated that he learned more from studying an ant that from any book he had ever read—the ant is a metaphoric

representation of the new logos of the natural world, distinct from the logos of the

Christian tradition. Galileo reiterated Campanella's position, stating that he read from the book of nature, as did countless other "magicians," "scientists," and "astronomers"— Kepler, Patrizi, Newton, Brahe, Harvey. As such, all the mechanical advancements of

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The whole sonnet follows: "Il mondo è il libro dove il Senno Eterno / scrisse i proprii concetti, e vivo tempio / dove, pingendo i gesti e 'l proprio esempio, / di statue vive ornò l'imo e 'l superno; /

perch'ogni spirito qui l'arte e 'l governo / leggere e contemplar, per non farsi empio, / debba, e dir possa: – Io l'universo adempio, / Dio contemplando a tutte cose interno. – / Ma noi, strette alme a' libri e tempii morti, / Copïati dal vivo con piú errori, / Gli anteponghiamo a magistero tale. / O pene, del fallir fatene accorti, / Liti, ignoranze, fatiche e dolori: / Deh, torniamo, per Dio, all'originale!"

the seventeenth century—most simply the telescope—appear the tools used not to conquer the universe, not to reaffirm the logos as pronounced by the Christian tradition, but rather used to interpret the new-found code encrypted in the heavens. In this light Bruno's complex system of mnemonics propounded in numerous treatises, including De umbris idearum, Sigillus sigillorum, and Cantus circaeus, may be seen as a new

interpretive system designed to unlock a new level of significance in the natural world— the magus (in effect, the mystic semiotician) would, through a series of images and words, ensnare inside his circular, interpretive net a new brand of signification born out of a new logos of reality. Such radical notions were dangerous at the time. In order to protect themselves, the heretics would emphatically espouse belief in (a) God, evidently revealed in their prose (e.g. "[...] dove il Senno Eterno / scrisse i proprii concetti [...]"), and manipulate the term as a means to gain ground in a world governed by Christian dogmatists. Not all had perceived a changed God, so it was safe—to some degree—to accept God as an abstract concept, overtly praising His dominion. The dogmatists

thought that putting forth heretical views bespoke atheism—presenting oneself as a theist, therefore, secured one's safety in the turbulent times of the Counter-Reformation. The heretics had come to perceive a shift in the logos—the new God—but they knew that

expounding such views would certainly lead to an encore in Campo de' Fiori. To the modern age's great advantage, many of history's most resolute minds sought cover under the blanket of convoluted rhetoric, mercurial terminology, and crafty circumlocution.70

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For a discussion on the shape of language in the early modern period, see A. Saiber's recent contribution, Giordano Bruno and the Geometry of Language.

But it was not just rhetoric. One finds in their words the first inklings of a tragic separation. For many who were not fully convinced of the necessity of science to replace the logos of Christianity, the birth of the modern age signified the separation of science and religion.71 Was this necessary? Or rather, did this separation actually happen? Might science not be religion? Is science not myth? What we do know, however, is that the initial effects of the shock—man's new-found knowledge of the universe, and the calamity that was the destruction of his previous anthropocentric vision of God—have yet to be reconciled. Albert Einstein sympathized with this very notion when he said that one day, hopefully sooner than later, a "cosmic religious feeling"—a brand of "scientific mysticism" that he took from Leibniz, and, one could argue, also from Bruno—, which would wed scientific thought with religious thought, would be born unto man.72 As Blumenberg has presented the nature and rise of the modern age, science appears not a secularized version of the Christian religion, but instead a new vision of nature that has not yet come to grips with the notion that it must have a new God. The hope is that science and religion shall some day come face to face with the very dilemma they, in seeking maturation, have desperately avoided: what is it that holds the universe together, why is it here, and how is man to understand himself in relation to it? This might stand as the only truly significant "post-modern" experience: not the contemporary explanation of the displacement of signifiers and its ensuing chaos, exemplified by Jacques Derrida in books and David Lynch in films, but rather the recompartmentalization of the

Renaissance's subcategories of knowledge—mutually aspirant toward a universalized

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D. Lindberg and R. Numbers explore this tumultuous relationship in their article, "Beyond War and Peace: A Reappraisal of the Encounter between Christianity and Science."

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encyclopedia of knowledge—into a new aeon where science and religion are fully united. How else does one supersede infinity? How else does one surpass the modern age if it is true that epochal shifts require reconstitution of an entire mythos of the human condition? "Post-modernity," as such, resembles a new genre more than a reconstitution of myth.

Blumenberg interprets the Christian God—that inexpressible breath of air: "______________"—as a mutable projection of man's fears and born out of the death instinct.73 God did not die—only a specific vision of God, the Christian God as described by man, died. While Nietzsche may have uttered the phrase "God is dead" in his

mythologized tablets comprising Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Rapallo, Italy, in 1883, it appears this death took place even earlier: at the onset of the modern age. Polish critic Charles Glicksberg, who died in 1998 after a near century on earth, exposed most

articulately this sentiment in his volatile article, "Science and the Literary Mind" (1950). We might say that Glicksberg sits neatly at the end of Löwith's "secular dream of

progress."

God is no longer in his heaven. All is wrong with the world. We no longer need theological hypotheses in our thinking in order to account for the world we live in. Energy is our God, and Einstein is its articulate prophet. The anthropocentric illusion, though it still lingers regressively in some literary minds, has been abandoned for good. (352)

However, even Glicksberg does not waver from using the terms "prophet" and "God." Moreover, he recognizes that residues of the "anthropocentric illusion" still exist in the minds of some, especially literary. What is it, then, that these "literary minds" hold on to? What is it about the universe that causes Glicksberg, a literary critic with deep faith in science, to have to invoke the name "God," or the mythologizing factor, for matters of simplification, in this passage? I believe it is because, as Blumenberg would argue and is

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exemplified in Glicksberg and prominent figures like Bruno and Nietzsche, there is a very human need to ground ourselves in a principle of mythologization—we must live, and myth helps us do just that. Science is not the anti-myth, thus making religion the

almighty-myth. They are both one in the same: myths. Truth, however, is another question; a mistress who will, perhaps, always wear a veil.

I.V: A BLUMENBERGIAN APPROACH: FROM HISTORICISM TO