The Heroic Enthusiasts, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) · 20 of 49 · tr. L. Williams
First Dialogue-s
Weary and hoarse I yield me, impotent, And seek no more to elude my destiny, Or make endeavour to escape my death: Let every other life to me be null, And let not the extremest torment fail, Which my hard fate for me prescribed.
Type of my own deep ills, Is that which thou for pastime didst entrust To hostile breast.
Oh, careless boy.
Here I would not pretend to understand or determine all that the enthusiast means.
Yet there is well expressed the strange condition of a soul cast down by the knowledge of the difficulty of the operation, the amount of the labour, the vastness of the work on one side, and on the other the ignorance, want of knowledge of the way, weakness of nerves and peril of death.
He has no knowledge suitable to the business, he does not know where and how to turn, no place of flight or refuge presents itself; and he sees that, from every side, the waves threaten, with frightful, fatal impetus.
Ignoranti portum, nullus suus ventus est.
Behold him, who has committed himself indeed to fortuitous things, and has brought upon himself trouble, prison, ruin, and drowning.
See how fortune deludes us, and that which we put carefully into her hands, she either breaks or lets it fall from her hands, or causes it to be removed by the violence of another, or suffocates and poisons, or taints with suspicion, fear, and jealousy to the great hurt and ruin of the possessor.
Fortunae au ulla putatis dona carcere dolis?
For strength which cannot give proof of itself is dissipated; magnanimity, which cannot prevail, is naught, and vain is study without results; he sees the effects of the fear of evil, which is worse than evil itself.
Peior est morte timor ipse mortis.
He already suffers, through fear, that which he fears to suffer, terror in the limbs, imbecility in the nerves, tremors in the body, anxiety of the spirit, and that which has not yet appeared becomes present to him, and is certainly worse than whatsoever may happen.
What can be more stupid than to be in pain about future things and absent ones which at present are not felt?
Ces.
These considerations are on the surface and belong to the external of the figure.
But the proposition of the heroic enthusiast, I think, deals with the imbecility of human nature (ingegno) which, intent on the Divine undertaking, finds itself all at once engulphed in the abyss of incomprehensible excellence, and the sense and the imagination become confused and absorbed, and not knowing how to pass on, nor to go back, nor where to turn, vanishes and loses itself as a drop of water vanishes in the sea, or as a small spirit, becomes attenuated, losing its own substance in the space and immensity of the atmosphere.
Mar.
Well.
But let us go towards our chamber and talk as we go, for it is night.
John of the Cross's stage of contemplative purgation: a felt absence and aridity of God that strips the soul of attachments to its own consolations en route to deeper union.
The passage depicts the soul cast down by ignorance, fear, and anxiety during the divine undertaking, resembling the purgative night.
Ecstatic irrational rapture — Plato's mania, Bruno's furore — by which the soul transcends ordinary reason and attains direct contact with divine reality; madness reframed as higher knowledge.
[auto] The confusion of sense and imagination reflects the ecstatic irrational rapture characteristic of Bruno's furore.
Sufi self-effacement in God — the via by which the lover is unmade as a separate ego and recovered as God's act; specifies the practice/event rather than mystical_union's resulting state.
[auto] The metaphor of a drop vanishing in the sea and losing its own substance directly illustrates self-effacement in God.
Bruno's eroici furori — a passionate, ennobling spiritual ardor that drives the soul toward divine wisdom; distinguished from base or animal passions by its orientation to infinite truth.
[auto] The passage explicitly discusses the proposition and state of the heroic enthusiast as its central subject.
The doctrine of the universe as boundless and without center or circumference, populated by innumerable worlds — Bruno's rejection of the closed Aristotelian sphere; the divine and the cosmos as ontologically infinite.
[auto] References to the abyss and immensity of the atmosphere align with the doctrine of an ontologically infinite universe.