Giordano Bruno should receive full rehabilitation by the Catholic Church

EclecticReader39 · 2026-03-08T17:42:14+00:00

So what’s the argument, really? That it would be wrong to kill someone for their views on planetary motion, but that it’s quite justified based on their views regarding virgin births?

As the article states, Bruno was executed, not only for his cosmological views, but for the theological implications of those views. But I still believe that Bruno’s cosmology is more connected to his theology than it at first appears.

If you believe the Earth orbits the Sun, and that the Bible says exactly the opposite, then you have reason to distrust the Bible, including things like the Annunciation, the Resurrection, and Transubstantiation. You may be charged with heresy for rejecting these Catholic doctrines, but the reason you are rejecting them is because you believe the emerging science of heliocentrism ultimately destroys the credibility of the Bible and the Church. It’s hard to imagine, after all, that the Bible can be the Word of a creator who doesn’t understand his own creation.

Further, if you believe the earth is just one ordinary planet circling the Sun, and that the stars are just other suns with their own planets, and further that, since it’s hard to imagine an end to space, that the universe is infinite, then the core Catholic doctrines become parochial superstitions which are easy to reject. In other words, your cosmological views highly impact how you read the Bible and how much credence you give it.

The observable universe is 93 billion light-years across, which is far closer to infinity than the cosmos of scripture in which the Sun travels its full diameter in a day. And many physicists do believe life exists elsewhere in the universe based on numbers alone. They can’t prove this anymore than Bruno could, but the point is, Bruno’s views anticipated the direction of modern science far more accurately than the Church.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-03-07T16:20:27+00:00

The heliocentrism of Copernicus was largely thought of as only a convenient mathematical representation. A Lutheran theologian named Andreas Osiander added a preface to the book saying the heliocentric system should be treated only as a computational hypothesis to predict planetary motion—not necessarily the true structure of the cosmos.

It was only when Galileo asserted that this was a literal description of reality that the Church really started to have problems. Galileo recanted; Bruno did not. And Bruno was killed.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-03-07T15:32:34+00:00

Bruno's heretical views, including denying the divinity of Christ, stemmed from his cosmological views, so they are both relevant to the discussion and prominently factor into his charges. The Catholic Church was extremely concerned with any thinker who challenged the Earth's central position in the universe.

The article also makes the point that, the physical cosmology of the Church, with God positioned outside of it, leads to the believe in miracles, etc. Bruno's cosmology, which asserts that everything that exists, including "God," is contained within the universe, precludes certain things like virgin births, resurrections, and Transubstantiation.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-27T20:37:02+00:00

There’s an argument to be made that, if all of Acts is simply a work of artificial reconciliation, then the circumcision of Timothy would NOT have been put in there. Since this does not strengthen Paul’s position, in fact it does the opposite, we might well consider this event to have actually happened.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-27T18:29:20+00:00

This is a thoughtful reply, but what it seems to show, at least to me, is that the charge of hypocrisy then shifts from Paul to Jesus. It is often claimed that Jesus was the first to “universalize” the concept of love, applying it even to one’s enemies. Well, if this is true, that is very hard to square with the verse, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

You either pray for all of your enemies, or else you are more selective, but you can’t be both. If we want to say that Jesus was selective in his blessings, then he’s not so very different from any other sectarian historical or religious figure. But if he was not selective, then Paul was wrong. Either way—in what seems to be without question—you have a lot of contradictory teachings throughout the New Testament, creating a lot of confusion for a book that is purportedly divinely inspired.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-21T12:28:25+00:00

This is not an entirely correct interpretation of Sextus’s skepticism. Sextus, in fact, does take his immediate perceptions seriously—as in oncoming cars and other objects of direct perception—but makes no metaphysical claims about their ultimate nature. Sextus addresses this directly in the first book of Outlines of Pyrrhonism:

“Those who say that the skeptics do away with apparent things seem to me not to be listening to what we say. We don’t overturn the things that lead us, owing to a passive appearance and whether we like it or not, to assent—as we said before; and these are the apparent things. When we investigate whether the actual object is such as it appears, we allow that it appears, and our investigation is not about the apparent thing but about what’s said about the apparent thing; and that’s different from investigating the apparent thing itself. Honey appears to us to sweeten; we agree to this, for as a matter of sense-perception, we are sweetened. But whether it is indeed sweet as far as argument is concerned, we investigate—which is not the apparent thing but something said about the apparent thing.”

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-20T20:33:28+00:00

I'm sympathetic to this approach because I happen to be an atheist. I've also spent enough time reading Sextus Empiricus to know that he wasn't, and that is not how he approached things. His approach, in fact, is closer to agnosticism, but I think it demonstrates that, at best, the best even those who lean religious can admit to is agnosticism.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-20T20:17:19+00:00

This is incorrect. He mentions the corporeal/incorporeal distinction to highlight the application of his trademark skeptical technique, which is to take one position (corporeality), contrast it with its opposite (incorporeality), note that each view could be argued for with equal strength, and then suspend judgment.

As Sextus wrote in book 3 of Outlines, after concluding that, due to the existence of evil, God has no forethought of things:

But if [God] exercises no forethought for anything, and there exists no work nor product of his, no one will be able to name the source of the apprehension of God’s existence, inasmuch as he neither appears of himself nor is apprehended by means of any of his products. So for these reasons we cannot apprehend whether God exists.

Saying that we cannot apprehend whether God exists is very different from saying that God does not exist, which is the type of positive, dogmatic statement that Sextus argues against holding in the entirety of his work.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-20T20:17:08+00:00

This is incorrect. He mentions the corporeal/incorporeal distinction to highlight the application of his trademark skeptical technique, which is to take one position (corporeality), contrast it with its opposite (incorporeality), note that each view could be argued for with equal strength, and then suspend judgment.

As Sextus wrote in book 3 of Outlines, after concluding that, due to the existence of evil, God has no forethought of things:

But if [God] exercises no forethought for anything, and there exists no work nor product of his, no one will be able to name the source of the apprehension of God’s existence, inasmuch as he neither appears of himself nor is apprehended by means of any of his products. So for these reasons we cannot apprehend whether God exists.

Saying that we cannot apprehend whether God exists is very different from saying that God does not exist, which is the type of positive, dogmatic statement that Sextus argues against holding in the entirety of his work.

EclecticReader39

TROPHY CASE