At the age of seventeen, he formally entered the Dominican convent of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples and was assigned the religious name Giordano in honor of the Dominican Master of Metaphysics, Giordano Crispo. A native of Nola, he was sent to the University of Naples to study literature, logic, and dialectic when he was fourteen. Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei have been set down in history as casualties of this conflict.įilippo Bruno was born in 1548 to a father who was a minor military officer and a mother of German ancestry. It was only a matter of time before the traditional concepts accepted by the Church and the fresh ideas of a budding new age of science came face to face in conflict. Scripture was infallible and generally believed to describe Aristotles geocentric universe. The ecclesiastical authorities decided that it should be forbidden to interpret scripture against the unified opinion of the fathers of the Church. Meanwhile, the Council of Trent, which convened from 1545 to 1563, worked to reinstate the importance of tradition to the Catholic faith.
In 1543 Copernicus reintroduced heliocentric ideas to Western thought and added mathematical analysis in his book ∽e Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium. Though Copnernicus himself did not take his new findings as proof that Earth moved, his book opened the door to new questions about the structure of the universe. Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus adapted Aristotles geocentric conception of the universe to the demands of Christian dogma, effectively cementing it to the accepted religion of the West. The heliocentric model not only conflicted with religion at the time of Galileo and Bruno, it also disagreed with the current understanding of physics and threatened to destroy the hierarchy that put the Church in a position of power second only to God.Īristotles Physica and ∽e Coelo were translated from Arabic to Latin in the twelfth century, bringing them, and their science, into the inheritance of Western culture. This was a radical change from the geocentric model, in which Earth was the static center of the universe around which the sun, stars, and moon revolved. In the heliocentric conception of the universe, Earth rotated on its axis once every day and orbited around the sun every year. When Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei dared to believe that the universe was heliocentric, the boundaries that they crossed lead to life-changing conflicts with the Catholic Church. An introduction to Giordano Bruno and Galileo GalileiĪn image of the man as a young philosopher
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