Perhaps it is an occupational hazard, the result of my daily consideration of ancient Chinese philosophy, but I often find Taoism lurking in unexpected places. OK, not "Taoism" per se, as a fairly clearly distinguishable stream of thought, but elements of a Taoist sensibility. That is what I discovered last night, while reading a review in the most recent New Yorker of a book about the 16th century Italian writer and heretic, Giordano Bruno.
His was an eclectic mind, in that Renaissance sort of way. He wrote about many things: memory, philosophy, science, poetry. He was obviously not a "Taoist," but he was Tao-esque, or Taoistic. Something like that. Consider this passage from the review:
Here the structural rule of Catholic theology, and of Western thought—hierarchy—is serenely discarded. The things of the world are numberless, and they are all equal, and interesting. In Bruno’s cosmology, that rule applied not just to humble matters like the goings on in Nola but also to great and sacred things.
The resistance to ideational hierarchy, the acceptance of unknowable infinitude, the embrace of a kind of equivalence of all things. These are ideas straight out of Chuang Tzu:
So the real is originally there in things, and the sufficient is originally there in things. There's nothing that is no real, and nothing that is not sufficient
Hence, the blade of grass and the pillar, the leper and the ravishing [beauty], the noble the sniveling, the disingenuous, the strange - in Tao they all move as one and the same. In difference is the whole; in wholeness is the broken. Once they are neither whole nor broken, all things move freely as one and the same again...(23)
Bruno was burned at the stake as a “impenitent, pertinacious, and obstinate heretic.” He may have gotten to the point in his thinking where there was no necessity for a distinct and omnipotent God. Rather, his nascent atomic theory led him to believe that God, or something like God, was to be found in each unique thing, an imminent divinity as it were. And that kind of immanence, where a God-like figure is really not necessary, is just about where Chuang Tzu was as well.
I wonder if there was any way that Bruno might have encountered Taoism in his travels in 16th century Europe. I doubt it, and it really doesn't matter insofar as the transcultural resonances are concerned. But I just wonder.....
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