Giordano Bruno is not only a writer of marvelous wit and virtuosity, and the only one since Plato to breathe life into the philosophical dialogue, but also a thinker of great consequence, imagination and purity. While he is generally seen to stand at the threshold between the medieval and the modern, cabilistic magic and scientific rationality, it is wrong to regard him merely as an anticipation of Leibniz and Spinoza. In certain respects, indeed, he goes farther in freeing thought from the residues of Scholasticism, and if his understanding of the coincidence of absolute potentiality and absolute actuality as the ground of Being points the way to Schelling, the freer winds of his thinking, with its wondrous openness towards the possibilities of the body as the possibilities of life, make him a kindred spirit of Nietzsche.

This book consists of 2 parts. The first part "Cause, Principle and Unity" is about his theory of an infinite universe. While you may either agree or disagree with him on certain points, I think (maybe you, too) will find the idea of a "world-soul" intriguing. This part consists of 5 dialogues.

The other part comprise two essays, one on magic and the other is his treatise on bonding in general. This part presents some ideas which I think would be interesting not just to magicians but anybody who wants to know and wonder, from a philosophical point of view, what magic is and bonding in general.

Any student of philosophy is likely to enjoy this book (either the first or second or both).

This is certainly one of the most hilarious books ever written. No philosopher has ever combined brain-busting metaphysics with slapstick comedy the way Bruno consistenly does. Bruno is known primarily as a fascinating loose cannon in the history of philosophy, but read his critique of Aristotle patiently and you will find that it has profound merits. If only more philosophy books were written in a style similar to this one!

Giordan Bruno is still today a controversial philosopher. In this book he exposes his philosophical/cosmological ideas and, in doing so, he uses the new Copernican theory as the basis for a new, daring vision of the universe.
Anybody who would like to familiarize him/herself with the work of Bruno, or is interested in the development of Western ideas will find this book extremely challenging. However I would like to say a few words on the interpretation that the translators give of Bruno's ideas. The translators appear to follow completely an interpretation of Bruno based on the theory of the english scolar Frances Yates. According to this theory Bruno was an exponent of the (then popular) Hermetic movement.
It is imperative to underscore that Yates theory is not universally accepted. While it is known that Hermetic influences can be traced in Bruno, to reduce his whole cosmology and his understanding of Copernican theory to a "hieroglyphic" is misleading if not plainly wrong.
Bruno was not a scientist, but he was the first to intuitively realize the revolutionary consequences of Copernican theory (not only for science) and to bring that theory to its logical conclusions: an infinite universe with infinite earth-like worlds. This vision can not be reconciled with the world of the hermetic "Magus". The whole purpose of the hermetic Magus was to ascend the material world to the world of the perfect spheres. In Bruno's universe there is nothing to ascend to. The universe is composed of a thin air where an infinity of worlds and stars are suspended and move following universal (animistic) principles. The other worlds are corruptible as much as the earth and may be inhabited by earth-like people. The very base of the hermetic doctrine is missing. I would therefore encourage the interested reader not to stop the investigation of Bruno's ideas to the hermetic interpretation, but to also read different points of view (for example Yates interpretation of Bruno's use of images has recently been challenged with very solid arguments by the finding of italian scholars). In particular I found the book of Hillary Gatti "Giordano Bruno and the renaissance science" extremely interesting and complete.

Giordano Bruno stands at the cusp between the Renaissance and the modern world. His unique attempts to extract philosophical and theological meaning from Copernicus's forward-looking work provide us with striking insights into the Weltanschauung of his troubled times. Gosselin and Lerner have brilliantly translated Bruno's elegant but involuted Renaissance Italian into clear modern English that nevertheless preserves the spirit of the original. Their thoughtful notes bring comprehensibility to previously misunderstood passages, and the linkage they establish between Bruno's travails and Galileo's later troubles is highly convincing. A must-read for the scientist as well as the philosopher

On Febraury 16, 1600, this former monk was burned at the stake on charges of heresy. He died in the name of free thought. Yes, at first he offered to retract all of his heretical statements, but in the end, he decided that there was more honour in the penal fires than in a life like Galilei's. This book begins with an Explanatory Epistle. This letter alone is worth reading. The dialogues that comprise the body of the work were a trifle trying for me, as i have very little knowledge of the constellations, but please don't let this deter any possible readers from this work. As with any philosophical text, every reader should bring with him or her a willingness to concentrate on the book and the understanding that numerous re-readings will be necessary to appreciate the full depth of it. The bit where the messenger of the gods is telling Sophia all of the events Zeus has ordered to take place on Earth that day is very funny, so don't think this is all esoteric gobble-dee-gook that only some Ph.d. could enjoy. Shoot, I am only a high school graduate and I was glued to this thing the first time I read it.

What is incredible about this book is its succinct restatement of the body of work these authors have worked on over the past decade and what has come to characterize the state of the field in the macropartisanship in political science. It is an easy read and will definitely become a classic

This was a well-researched, informative and entertaining read. The author's point may not be a new one, but he has done a fresh and original take on it, and we can't say it often enough: that the oppression of human beings in the name of God is a horror and an abomination, and it never seems to stop. The fact that Yanow's characters are lively, and the style so accessible, will hopefully encourage people who aren't keen on history to read it and think. The one thing that bothered me somewhat was the anachronistic dialogue (Guidotti and other characters sometimes sounded like Mafia goons), but perhaps that's the price you pay when you're trying to appeal to a big cross-section. Overall, a terrific book.

February 17,2000 is the 400th anniversary of Giordano Bruno's burning at the stake as a heretic by the Catholic Church in Rome. He said that the Earth turned and that as it turned it circled the Sun (Copernicus' 'heresy'). He also said that the Universe was infinite with many peopled worlds etc. His ideas threatened the Church then. Now we know that some of his ideas were true. Bruno was a martyr for truth, and for freedom of thought and expression. Though flawed and difficult, he was a man ahead of his time who paid dearly for rights we take for granted. We should remember and honor him in this anniversary year. A good start would be to read Yanow's excellent historic novel about Bruno: The Nolan:... It's thoroughly researched, well written and a good story. I've just finished it and highly recommend it.

A lively glimpse of the early conflict between scientific thought and discoveries versus the tightly held dogma of Western religion. Written in a highly accessible and entertaining style, the historical characters of this book become alive as we delve into their power struggles, intellectual challenges and courage. A fascinating read for people with diverse interests and in various walks of life.

Actually, this book can not be evaluated at once. Rather, you should concede four stars to the greater part of the book and not any star to the rest. For this is widely an excellent book. Yates does not only prove that Bruno is not the pioneer of modern science he is often stated to be, but convincingly exposes the background against which his works have to be understood. To that purpose, she shows the impact of the Hermetic writings, an ancient source written in the second and third centuries A.D., but by some Christian Renaissance writers such as Ficino or Pico della Mirandola held to be of an authority greater and older than even Moses, on Renaissance thought. Thus it is demonstrated in chronological order how the corpus Hermeticum was received by Renaissance writers, focussing on magic that was derived from some passages of the corpus Hermeticum. Bruno is placed within this tradition. Congeniously, Yates acknowledges the significance of Casaubon's exact dating of what had been held a prophecy of Christianism for more than two centuries and discusses the following dispute which finally made the type of the Renaissance magus disappear, although this tradition of thinking never completely vanished. So this is, without any doubt, the fundamental book about Giordano Bruno and the impact of Hermetism on Renaissance thought. It provides information clear and dear also on magic in general and thus illuminates even some passages of Shakespeare and (unconsciously) Goethe's Faust.Thus the book inspires to study Renaissance authors such as Pico or Ficino or more literature on Renaissance Thought ( I recommend the overwhelming collection „Renaissance Thought and the Arts" by Paul Oskar Kristeller).
All the more it is a pity that Yates, writing with transigating passion, is lead astray to some statements about science and antique thought in general that cannot be left uncommented upon. Ancient philosophy in the time when the corpus Hermeticum was written did NOT necessarily, not even realy, stagnate (p.4, p. 449). On the contrary, Plotinus, writing about 250 A.D., renewed philosophical thought in a way that he is now often considered to be one of the greatest metaphysicians that ever lived. Furthermore, the reason for this presumed stagnation is, according to Yates, that the ancient philosophers did not know the principle of experimentation. But this principle is completely alien to philosophy, be it ancient or modern (this is quite evident, but if someone still doubts, he should read e.g. Wenisch's „Die Philosophie und ihre Methode"). The exhausting prize of modern science at the end of the book (p. 447-55) is not to the point and ignores that ancient thought must not be treated as a failing attempt at Galileo's achievements (as the German scholar Jörg Kube emphasized). Her sideswipe against Descartes (p. 454-55), finally, seems to me completely out of place. So I recommend this book to anyone who wants to know the truth about Giordano Bruno and the essence of magic, but you should not believe what is said about ancient philosophy and philosophy in general.

Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1700 because he believed in the authenticity of the Hermetic Traditon that purported to be of ancient Egyptian origin. It proved to be a fraud more correctly dated during the first century AD adding significance to the symbolism of the Gospels written about the same time, probably in the following order: Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. The Hermetic Tradtion compliments the expanding elaborations of the Gospels when read in this order. Indeed, the Gospels can hardly be comprehended without the benefit of this work that spells out how gods are created, first in stone, then by extrapolation, converted to a spiritual power. Giordano Bruno is the vehicle by which the author makes her point because of his misguided belief. The work is an eye-opener to the serious student of the Christian religion who ought also to read Iasiah for a more rounded interpretation of the symbolism of the Bible. The book is intended for the serious student, but is essential to all who want better to understand the value of the myth and its symbolic relationship to the creation of the Christian religion. Fascinating reading for anyone who has met the prerequisites, including having read Plato's REPUBLIC and will fit into his positive philosophy.

Interesting how a modest historian should happen to write a book of such critical interest to students and practicioners of the western esoteric traditions. Sheds enourmously penetrating light, especially in the first part of the book, into the people and historical events that shaped the powerful undergound traditions of independent spiritual philosophy-- what we now know as Magick or Magic, both high and low, alchemy, illuminisms of various sorts, and the whole spectrum of western metaphysics.

It sounds like an honest review of Itailan history ... probably something not really to be proud of... and I am Italian!

Lovers of Giordano Bruno (you know who you are!) will enjoy this book, because it clarifies a vast area of Bruno's thought as it relates to the Kabbalah. It illuminates a good part of Bruno's iconography as well. It is well written, and solidly reasoned and researched (unlike another recent book on Bruno). For the few who feel cabala-teologia-filosofia collapse into each other every once in a while, this book is a must. Buy it before it goes out of print.

Having just finished a biography of Servetus (Out of the Flames by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone - which I highly recommend) - I was thirsty for more of the same, so I picked up 'The Pope and the Heretic' and bought it without a second thought (along with 'The Perfect Heresy: The Revolutionary Life and Death of the Medieval Cathars').

I was very disappointed. The author takes a prurient interest in Medieval torture techniques which lends a sensationalist slant to the book. This in microcosm, is what it wrong with his treatment of the subject as a whole: it is a sensationalised account of an important scholar which pays scant attention to the man's ideas, and too much attention to his ultimate sad fate.

I realise that the 'general reading public' probably has little taste for a dry, academic approach, but the author surely underestimates his readership badly here: anyone interested enough in the period to pick up and buy a book on an obscure 16th century heretic is likely to have a strong interest in the period, and may have a good working knowledge of the historical background. White's 'simplifications', at first simply annoying, become insulting, as they start to mount. He gets the details of Servetus' imprisonment in Calvin's Geneva wrong - understandable, maybe. He then describes Charles V's rag-tag soldiery who sack of Rome in 1527 as 'teutonic hordes': Charles was the most powerful (secular) man alive at the time, and as Holy Roman Emperor, commanded an army which was a mixture of many nations (including Spanish and French). At first I wondered if White was confusing Charles V with Atilla the Hun (it's difficult to tell, because he doesn't actually mention the name of the ruler who led the army which marched on Rome, or, for that matter why they did so). His gross characterisations of the complex and (to our modern minds) contradictory characters of the period (Elizabeth I, is a prime example) have all the heavy handedness of a poorly researched high-school essay: an analogy which occurred to me more than once as I read through this work.

The book's structure is equally annoying. Perhaps the author is aiming to shake things up by intentionally chopping around in time (we learn the details of Bruno's life when he left his monastry at second hand, whole chapters after the author has him depart) - but the end result is that the book feels fragmented and sloppily put together. Repetitive detail in subsequent chapters creates the feeling that what we have here is a succession of essays, hastily cobbled together by an author who couldn't really decide how to order his work.

But the biggest defect is in the writing, which is cliche ridden and soul-less. Important passages which deal with the turning points of Bruno's life are marred by pointless excursions into silly detail (at one point, for example, one of the characters 'pushes Bruno downstairs', while he is being arrested - and White speculates wildly on Bruno's state of mind when he is imprisoned by the Roman Inquistion - detail which he can have no way of actually knowing) in order to add colour, while there is little or no attempt to dig into the Bruno's ideas (which is surely the only reason anyone would be interested in the man - as White points out, the inquistion gave us plenty of martyrs (over a million)if all we want to contemplate is christian's inhumanity to fellow christian).

The jacket promises us that Bruno inspired Spinoza. How? Spinoza is mentioned in passing, but the subject is never explored in great enough depth to convince the reader that Bruno's ideas helped fashion Spinoza's philosophy. Other key figures in the enlightenment are dragged in (Newton, Locke etc.), but there is little or no attempt to link them and their thinking with Bruno. Instead of proof, the author falls back on assertion - and the scant footnotes do little to back the assertions with evidence.

I was left wondering if I could trust any of the history I found in this book, much less White's attempts at analysis and synthesis.

I can't say if the book will fail its audience: but I know that it failed me: not just in a lack of scholastic rigour (which is bad enough) but by being deficient in that lightness of touch which is the hallmark of great historical writing.

This is the story of the under-appreciated philosopher and scientist Giordano Bruno, who was executed by the Roman Inquisition for exercising free anti-church thought. A very specific historical episode like this requires hard history and scholarship, but Michael White writes as if this is a general interest story for a general audience. Therefore this treatment is nonsensical from the outset. White fails to deliver the goods on any of the important areas influenced by Bruno's story, and the book flies over a great many interesting areas of subject matter but lands in none of them.

The key flaw in the book is White's attempt to place Bruno's work in a historical context, which merely results in disjointed coverage of his actual philosophy and extremely unconvincing attempts to show Bruno's supposedly vast influence on figures like Galileo, Shakespeare, and Spinoza. White takes the opportunity to cover, in two short chapters, the evolution and history of scientific and religious thought in Europe (chapters II and III), but these treatments are far too basic too be of much use, and show the writing style of a quick high school research paper. White even assumes that he's qualified to call the works of Aristotle "amateurish." Another possibility that is squandered is deeper insight into the causes and effects of the Inquisition, but White only provides a basic reporter's coverage of Bruno's trial.

Worst yet is the biographical aspect of the book, as the story of Bruno's life is out of order and fragmented. His actual philosophical and scientific works, which should be the centerpiece of the book, are given short shrift, especially his important attempts at unified knowledge rather than specialization. White fails as a biographer as he includes the supposed private thoughts and opinions of Bruno and the other players in the story, men who have been dead for centuries and didn't write autobiographies. This is unprofessional and quite impossible to take seriously. In the end, we are left with little knowledge of Bruno the man and his potentially important story, so one must wonder about the very point of the book. Not recommended.

Understanding this book as a cheap detective novel is playing to the down side of things. If you really want to like this book, try thinking of the song, "True Colors" by Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg, most famously done by Cyndi Lauper and available with a lot of popular hits on the CD "Twelve Deadly Cyns." The first line of that song, "You with the sad eyes," also reminds me of the poem "Woman, Why Do You Weep?" at the end of HUNDRED WHITE DAFFODILS by Jane Kenyon, which was not published during Jane's lifetime and will never be as famous as a pop hit like "True Colors" (I remember some Paris concert where the crowd could sing the words to "True Colors," and you could see it on videotape, but you can only get the regular video on DVD). Typically emotional in that song is the line, "If this world makes you crazy and you've taken all you can bear, you call me up because you know I'll be there." (Copyright 1986, and this isn't really fair use of those lyrics, because this is not a paid, professional commercial for the contents of that song.)

Fortunately for our sanity, the church of our times is no longer imposing punishments in a manner which might now be more expected from secret military tribunals or the war on drugs as waged outside the jurisdiction of the world's greatest superpower. In THE POPE & THE HERETIC by Michael White, the church at Rome seems to have learned from the Bible how to excuse itself in the manner of Pontius Pilate, and its official condemnation of Giordano Bruno on February 8, 1600 required another hearing on the same day. "This hearing was called because the Holy See never sentenced heretics to the stake directly; with characteristic hypocrisy it always passed that duty on to a civil authority. The official statement from the Holy Office to the governor of Rome was invariable: `Take him [the heretic] under your jurisdiction, subject to your decision, so as to be punished with the due chastisement; beseeching you, however, as we do earnestly beseech you, so to mitigate the severity of your sentence with respect to his body that there may be no danger of death or of the shedding of blood. So we Cardinals, Inquisitor and General, whose names are written beneath decree.' This statement was effectively an order to the secular court. They were to take Bruno and burn him alive." (pp. 4-5). Only after sentence had been passed did the bishop of Sidonia take away his priest's insignia "and condemned his soul to suffer the perpetual flames of Hell, symbolically degrading his spirit just as the flames would degrade his physical body. The cardinals and the secular judges wanted to erase the very essence of this heretic, just as of all heretics." (p. 5). The rest of the book attempts to describe the true colors of Bruno in terms that a popular audience, certainly not as committed to the laws of science or jurisprudence as professionals in those fields would be, can easily understand.

The society of the late 16th century was exciting in a lot of ways, and this book attempts to capture that excitement more than any philosophical doctrine or memory techniques that Bruno had developed. Even modern science is only mentioned as an average person might be able to picture it. "To a degree, scientists began to conceptualize as Bruno had done, rather than only as Galileo had taught them. . . . The best example of this comes from the work of one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman, who created what have become known as Feynmann diagrams, pictorial representations of complex subnuclear transactions. And Bruno's vision of picture logic is actually used by almost everyone in the industrialized world each day, for we live in a world dominated by computers, and computers are machines that generate images." (p. 197).

My favorite part of this book is about Giovanni Mocenigo, who invited Bruno to Venice in 1591. (p. 35). There were "three popes between the death of Sixtus V in August 1590 and the accession of Clement VIII in February 1592," (p. 36, n. 1) providing the kind of confusion in which "we can only assume magnified self-confidence and an exaggerated sense of self-worth provided him with the strength he needed. He was blind to the genuine dangers and believed he would find acceptance and leniency." (p. 37). As a superpower, America seemed to feel the same way after WWII, just before Americans stopped talking about the real situation. To get his work printed, Bruno had to go to Frankfurt. He was packing on May 22, 1592, when Mocenigo "began to complain that I had not taught him what I promised. Then he used threats saying he would find means, if I did not remain of my own free will, to compel me." (p. 44). America has been about that unlucky, trying to teach the rest of the world what democracy is supposed to be like, when Americans themselves are prevented from interfering with operations of the CIA or whatever else passes for American foreign policy in the dark corners of the night. You might find some other lesson in this book if you are reading it in a prison while serving time for possession of some illegal substance, but it ought to be showing you the true color of something.