"Your God is too small."

[kpete]

The story of Giordano Bruno, a 16th century monk who challenged the orthodoxy of the Catholic church with his views of cosmology.


In 1543, Nicholas Copernicus created the idea of heliocentrism; in his model, the sun was the center of the universe, and Earth was just one of the planets that revolved around it. It was slow to adoption, even within the scientific community. Its simple and more elegant view of the universe began to win over converts who expanded upon his ideas, however, including Tycho Brahe, Thomas Digges and (of course) Bruno.

The Italian monk expanded upon the Copernican model with a thought experiment: what lay beyond the edge of the universe? Bruno approached the problem as that of looking at a wall that would either be the be-all end-all of the cosmos, or merely a stopping point to the next "wall". Bruno, following in the work of Nicholas of Cusa, surmised that there was no end to the universe, just as there was no end to God. Likewise he proposed that the planets were bodies just like the Earth, and that the stars were mobile bodies like the Sun, with planets (and perhaps life) of their own.


When he presented his ideas to the Church, he was censured, stripped of his position as a monk, and eventually imprisoned on charges of heresy. At his trial, Bruno was questioned about his theory and its conflicts with church doctrine. Bruno replied:

"Your God is too small."

implying that their manner of thinking was too limited by dogma to consider the possibility of an infinite universe, one that might even have multiple worlds with their own distinctive life forms. Bruno was sentenced to death at the stake, but as he was condemned, Bruno pointed at the inquisitor and declared

"Maiori forsan cum timore sententiam in me fertis quam ego accipiam (Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it)"

MORE from an xlnt diary at:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/03/13/1284382/--Your-God-Is-Too-Small

[flamin lib]

1. Mindkind lost 1000 years of scientific inquiry to the Church.

Given the advances we've made in the last 115 years where would we be now had we used those years for advancement of understanding?

Somebody tell me again why religion is a good thing . . .

[Vashta Nerada]

3. There is absolutely nothing good about religion.

Like you said, it holds back scientific and human advancement.

[FiveGoodMen]

4. +7 billion

(one for each of us)

[Damansarajaya]

6. Right, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and the Dalai Lama.

Boy, they suck.

[Vashta Nerada]

7. Mother Theresa was a phony.

So is the Dalai Lama.

[fujiyama]

9. Hmmm, you left Gandhi out...

who would rather have kept India a backwater still spinning looms.

He doesn't get a free pass either. I actually find him to be a bigger fraud than the Dalai Lama in this case.

[Vashta Nerada]

12. I like the idea of nonviolent resistance.

[hunter]

5. We're still in the Dark Ages in so many ways.

Alan Turing would be my immediate thought, along with all the moron creationists interfering with the teaching of biology, etc., etc., etc..

Worse whenever an old cult dies, some new and awful one springs up, like the anti-vaccination crowd.

[Lost_Count]

10. Nuclear ash is my guess...

[MisterP]

2. you can't fight Victorianism with more Victorianism

De Umbris was a work of 16th-c. psychology: for instance, you'd take these 36 decanate-daemons (German) and absorb them into your agentive mind; that way you're thinking with the Zodiac itself: we've known all this since the 60s

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_bruno#Retrospective_views_of_Bruno
http://armariummagnus.blogspot.com/2009/10/gods-philosophers-how-medieval-world.html

[struggle4progress]

8. Those actually interested in reading some Bruno may consult

THE ASH WEDNESDAY SUPPER

but those who do so may find themselves rather disappointed, if they expect to find there traces of a deep thinker. Bruno was, indeed, something of a free-thinker, in the sense that he did not allow the conventions of his day to constrain his creative speculations, but he was not much as an astronomer:

... I care little about Copernicus, said the Nolan, and I care little that you or others understand him; but I want to remind you of this alone, that before you come to instruct me another time, study better ...

Despite the claim of the OP, the notions that the stars might be other suns, though much more distant, and that the universe might be infinite, were not Bruno's ideas at all, but rather 1576 proposals of Thomas Digges, who actually had some astronomical knowledge -- and Bruno presumably learned of the proposals upon his 1583-1585 visit to England

The OP also gets wrong the stance of Brahe towards Copernican astronomy. Brahe objected to the Copernican theory, on the grounds that a moving earth should imply some stellar parallax -- but this was not observed until several centuries latter. Digges did, in fact, attempt to measure the parallax of the 1572 supernova, known to Brahe, and could only conclude it was further away than Mars. The failure to measure stellar parallax led Brahe to propose a composite compromise for the geocentrist and heliocentrist camps, in which the sun revolved around the earth and the other planets revolved around the sun

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Tychonian_system.svg

[struggle4progress]

11. It would be interesting to have an actual source for the claim that Bruno told his inquisitors

"Your god is too small"

Although the Inquisition typically kept very detailed records of questions and, almost all documents, of Bruno's trials over eight years or so, have been lost, with the exception of a short summary, discovered around 1940 and published by the Vatican shortly afterwards: Sommario del processo di Giordano Bruno (Citta del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1942). This might be only primary source document in which one might hope to locate the supposed quote

But the quote does not seem to appear in the discussions of Bruno's two trials in Singer's 1950 Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought

"Your god is too small" is a lovely epigram, and has often been popular in liberal theological circles, but we might suspect its true origin is not Bruno, but rather a book of the same title published in 1961 by JB Phillips, better known for his 1958 translation of the New Testament into modern English

[idendoit]

13. Wow, they really threw the book at this guy.

Last edited Fri Mar 14, 2014, 07:34 PM - Edit history (1)

Just the wiki entry is chock full of what he is accused of. The most egregious being denial of the virgin birth of Mary, which would have made Jesus little more than a smart union carpenter.(You know he would have been union.) The dudes in black dresses couldn't tolerate that.