The Italian astronomer, and poet who wrote with great philosophical and lyrical insight into the cosmic and spiritual sense of love.

Giordano Bruno, the Italian astronomer, philosopher, and poet who wrote with great philosophical and lyrical insight into the cosmic and spiritual sense of love.

Giordano Bruno was one of the great intellectual figures of the Renaissance. Practicing both philosophy and magic as cosmological speculation, Bruno saw in love the binding force of the cosmos and incorporated into his cosmology a platonic understanding of love. He also applied his theory of love in his magical doctrine, since the magician could use the erotic force of the cosmos to manipulate and attract. Giordano Bruno believed that love was the link of ties -vinculum quippe vinculorum love est- that held the entire universe together and could be used to attract anything.

Like some Platonic philosophers, he considered Eros to be the "daemon magnus," the supreme spirit that magnetized the cosmos - and the first among the divinities. In his book on bonds in general, Bruno writes: "In all things, there is a divine force, that is, love, the father in himself, the source, the divine ocean of all ties." It is through this link, Bruno adds, that lower things rise to higher ones. In this Bruno echoed the neo-Platonic notion of a hierarchy of being, in an emanationist cosmos, in which the soul should climb, as if it were, and undertake a return driven by love and knowledge towards divine intelligence. Marsilio Ficino in his Commentary on The Banquet of Plato had written:

Love is nothing more than a certain virtue of conjugation and unity, which induces the superior things to provide the inferior ones; and reconcile equal things in mutual communion; and also awakens the lower ones, so that they become the noblest.

Bruno differentiates spiritual love from mere animal eros, that is, the heroic love that tends to the spiritual or that takes the material as a platform towards the spiritual, in line with the doctrine of Diotima:

All loves - if they are heroic and not merely animals - are aimed at divinity, tend to divine beauty, which communicates first to souls and shines in them; and from the souls - or, rather, by them -, it is then communicated to the bodies: hence the well-ordered affection loves the bodies or bodily beauty, so that in them there is an indication of spiritual beauty. Moreover, what the body falls in love with is a certain spirituality that we see in it, which is called beauty and that does not consist in the dimensions being greater or less, or in certain colors or shapes, but in a certain harmony and harmony of members and colors. This harmony shows a certain affinity with the spirit, which is perceptible to the most acute and penetrating senses; follow this that those who are endowed with such senses fall in love more easily and intensely and in the same way, more easily fall out of love.

(Of the heroic furores)

After all, love for this tradition, which in the case of Ficino and Bruno has already been mixed with Christianity, which in turn, due to the influence of Alexandrian theologians, was filled with Platonic Logos, is always a deific force Love is in the human being that divine, that same divine flame that rises in its epistrophe towards itself. Love is an anagogic ecstatic rage.

These furores are not oblivion, but a memory, they are not the negligence of oneself, but love and longing for the beautiful and good, with which one seeks to achieve perfection, transforming and resembling the perfect. They are not enthralled in the ties of ferrous conditions, under the laws of an unworthy fatality, but a rational impetus that pursues the intellectual apprehension of the beautiful and good and that he already knows what he would like to please trying to conform to him, in such a way that he inflames its nobility and its light and comes to be covered with quality and condition that make it appear illustrious and dignified. By intellectual contact with that divine object, he becomes a god; No one attends that they are not divine things, being insensitive and impassive to those things that are usually considered more principal and for which so many others are tormented; nothing fears and despises for the sake of divinity the rest of the pleasures, without taking care of life.

... the butterfly advances towards the flame, the deer towards the arrow and the unicorn towards the loop that catches it, but for the lover that flame is the burning desire for divine things, that arrow is the impression of the ray of beauty

(Of the heroic furores)