“You tremble more in delivering this sentence than I do in hearing it”. Reported by Kaspar Schoppe as an eyewitness to the reading of the verdict, the line captures a crucial historical point: before his judges, Giordano Bruno did not look for the safest exit. He chose to stand by his ideas, even when he knew the price would be final.
So what does it mean to “hand down a sentence” that sends a man to the stake? And are we certain that such an act belongs only to the courts of another age? Even today, within the Church and across social media, there is a portion of the People of God - and of the clergy too - who, when faced with a voice they perceive as “other”, would rather discredit it than engage with its arguments. On 17 February 1600, at dawn, Bruno was taken to Campo de’ Fiori and burned at the stake. Contemporary accounts describe a condemned man kept under watch and forced into silence to prevent any public words before the execution; they also record him turning his face away from the crucifix held up to him. Details aside, the central fact remains: the former Dominican did not recant.
And today, with no power left to burn a man in a public square, what tools are used to “extinguish” a voice? Often, the tools closest to hand: swarming the comments beneath a post with abuse; ordering someone to be silent and “withdraw from public life”; planting suspicions about the person; poisoning a reputation; circulating invented rumours and fabricated accusations - even invoking hell as a moral bludgeon. In his account of the case, Ciliberto shows how heavily depositions and the chain of testimonies weighed, recalling a list of “heresie et errori” built up also from the statements of the testes criminosi. That end point came after a long road. Bruno had left the Dominican Order, moved through European cities and courts, sought patrons and teaching posts, and repeatedly collided with academic and religious circles. In public he was a combative intellectual, able to draw both attention and hostility, with little appetite for caution when defending his positions. And when hostility hardens, how is a climate created in which punishment becomes “acceptable”? In a Venetian prison, Ciliberto writes, Bruno’s encounter with certain fellow prisoners proved “fatal”: they helped, in effect, to “light the pyre”, reporting “point by point” what Bruno said “without the slightest restraint”. In a different key and on a different scale, the mechanism is familiar: denunciation becomes a screenshot, insinuation becomes a thread, an accusation is repeated until it takes on the shape of fact.
The trial did not turn on a single “scientific” proposition. The charges cut across cosmology and theology: the idea of an infinite universe and multiple worlds; a vision of nature and the divine that pressed against the doctrinal boundaries of the time - positions read in the trial papers as incompatible with orthodoxy. For the Inquisition, the aim was to secure a formal submission. For Bruno, as the months passed, the choice narrowed to a practical either/or: sign the abjuration and live, or refuse it and face condemnation. Even today, within the Church, one encounters a kind of hypocrisy that demands that same “formal submission”: act as though everything is fine, so long as appearances are preserved. And if someone, out of moral consistency, refuses to play that part? He becomes a target: demands for public apologies, a manufactured pillory, organised online pile-ons. Ciliberto shows how the abjuration carried an enormous personal and symbolic weight for Bruno - an obstacle he found “too hard” to accept. Bruno, in any case, did not end at the stake on a whim. He spent years in prison, listened to theologians and intermediaries, endured sustained pressure, and was offered an escape route more than once: recant and “close” the matter. When the sentence was read and the outcome became unavoidable, he did not retreat. He knew precisely what it meant, under the penal logic of the time, to be declared impenitent and obstinate. His steadfastness was a deliberate choice, grounded in an acceptance of the risk. Over time, the Church has acknowledged that those procedures - that way of handling dissent - were incompatible with a genuine search for truth. Yet today similar dynamics reappear whenever someone refuses to think as “we” do, especially in the public arena of social media: arguments are not met; the person is attacked.
There is another paradox too. Often, people are more courteous and accommodating towards those outside the ecclesial boundary - an Anglican, a Buddhist - than towards a cleric or a Catholic who chooses to distance himself from the group, from the prevailing line, from a particular way of operating. The issue is not to decide whether Bruno was right or wrong, nor whether today’s dissenters are right or wrong. The issue is method: when conflict is managed through isolation, delegitimisation, and pressure to fall back into line, the Church risks slipping into patterns that resemble a sect more than a Christian community. Ciliberto uses the expression “calunnia infamante” to describe an accusation Bruno would not tolerate - a detail that helps one see how much defamation weighs in biographies and intellectual conflicts, far more than many are willing to admit.
s.G.N.
Silere non possum