Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

44 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE
Coming from very different directions, Telesio and Patrizi both attacked many
of the same weaknesses in the Peripatetic structure, especially Aristotle’s
concept of space or place as an attribute of body and his denial of the existence
of a void in nature. Telesio, appealing to the evidence of the senses, argued that
space could indeed exist without bodies and that empty space was therefore
possible. 169 Patrizi, building on statements in Plato’s Timaeus (49A, 52B),
regarded space as prior to all bodies, an empty receptacle which, although
incorporeal, was an extended, dimensional entity. 170 These views of Patrizi were
taken up in the seventeenth century by Pierre Gassendi, whose atomist physics
required precisely this sort of vacuist conception of space. 171 Patrizi also
maintained, against Aristotle, that there was an infinite stretch of empty space
beyond the outermost sphere of the heavens. Below the heavens, however, his
cosmos was the traditional Ptolemaic Aristotelian one: finite and closed, with the
earth—despite Copernicus —at its centre. 172
A more radical cosmology was proposed by Giordano Bruno (1548–1600),
who not merely accepted Copernican heliocentrism but expanded it by making
our solar system only one of an infinite number of worlds which existed within
an infinite universe. 173 Bruno did not come to these conclusions on the basis of
mathematics, for which he had little respect or talent. 174 Nor did he approve of
the scholarly method of Patrizi, which he described as ‘soiling pages with the
excrement of pedantry’. And while Telesio had ‘fought an honourable battle’
against Aristotle, his empirical epistemology was unable to grasp essential
notions like infinity, which were imperceptible to the senses. 175 Bruno looked
instead to the cosmological poetry of Lucretius, the metaphysical theories of the
Neoplatonists and, above all, the theological speculations of Nicholas of Cusa. 176
For Bruno, the infinity of the universe was a reflection of the infinity of its divine
creator, although God’s infinity was simple and indivisible, while that of the
universe consisted of a multiplicity of finite constituent parts. He furthermore
maintained that the universe, as the image of God, partook in His eternity, thus
giving an entirely new slant to the standard Peripatetic doctrine. In like manner,
Bruno—a renegade Dominican monk, thoroughly trained in Peripatetic
philosophy—retained much of the accepted metaphysical terminology while
dramatically transforming its significance. He still talked of form and matter,
actuality and potentiality, but he treated them (as Spinoza would later treat
Cartesian thought and extension) as aspects of a single, universal substance,
whose accidents were the particular objects which we perceive. 177
When put on trial by the Inquisition in the 1590s, Bruno stated that he pursued
philosophical ideas ‘according to the light of nature’, without regard to any
principles prescribed by faith. 178 This was as clear a statement of the autonomy of
philosophy as any made by the scholastic Aristotelians that he despised. Unlike
them, however, he did not believe in a double truth. There was only one truth for
Bruno; but it was not the single truth of faith upheld by non-Aristotelian thinkers
from Petrarch to Patrizi. While they were aiming for a pious philosophy, Bruno
sought a philosophical piety: a rationalistic and naturalistic religion, patterned on