Giordano Bruno’s Concept of Space: Cosmological and Theological Aspects

Abstract

Bruno’s concept of space remains constant throughout his entire work. Its main tenets are: (1) the rejection of Aristotle’s concept of ‘place’ as an accident of bodily substance and the ensuing notion of ‘natural places;’ (2) the notion of space as an infinite, homogeneous receptacle of matter; and (3) the idea that void, though conceptually prior to matter, is always and everywhere filled with matter. Edward Grant (in his masterful Much Ado About Nothing, Cambridge, 1981) argued that “the consequences of Bruno’s description of space and the properties he assigned it lead inevitably to an infinite space that is coeternal with but wholly independent of God.” In the present chapter I show that Grant’s conclusion is incompatible with the foundations of Bruno’s ontology. De immenso and Lampas triginta statuarum allow us to establish Bruno’s true concept of the relation between God and space in accordance with the doctrine of the six ‘infigurable’ primary principles distributed in two triads: Mind or Father-Intellect-Spirit; and Chaos or Void-Orcus or Privation-Night or Matter. Both triads represent, in accordance with the ontology of De la causa, the two (non hierarchized) aspects of God’s essence as a coincidence of opposites: potency and act, matter and form, void space and mind. As a consequence, since God is space and matter no less than mind and form, we can confidently say that Bruno – relying on Biblical passages describing God as unity of contradictories – had already gone as far as Spinoza in conflating God, extension, matter, and space.