The Ash Wednesday Supper

FIRST DIALOGUE

...mind, so many affections do I welcome in my spirit, so many passions do I conceive in my life; so many tears do I pour from my eyes; so many sighs do I clear from my chest; and from my heart I spark so many flames. To you, Muses of England, I say: inspire me, breathe into me, warm me, ignite me, distill me, and resolve me into liquid; give me forth in essence, and make me appear not with a small, delicate, narrow, short, and succinct epigram A short, witty poem or statement., but with a copious and wide vein of long, flowing, grand, and solid prose; so that, not as if from a narrow reed, but as from a broad channel, I may send forth my streams. And you, my Mnemosyne The Greek personification of Memory and mother of the Muses., hidden under thirty seals original: "trenta sigilli." A reference to Bruno's book The Explanation of the Thirty Seals (Explicatio triginta sigillorum), a work on memory and mnemonics. and enclosed in the dark prison of the shadows of Ideas original: "ombre de le Idee." A reference to Bruno's first major work, De umbris idearum (On the Shadows of Ideas), published in 1582., whisper a little into my ear.

In days past, two men came to the Nolano The "Nolan," Giordano Bruno's common nickname for himself, as he was born in Nola, Italy. on behalf of a Royal squire Likely Fulke Greville, a prominent courtier and friend of Philip Sidney., making it known to him how much that gentleman desired his conversation, in order to understand his Copernicus Refers to the heliocentric (Sun-centered) theory of Nicolaus Copernicus, which Bruno championed and expanded upon with the idea of an infinite universe. and other paradoxes of his new philosophy. To which the Nolano replied that he did not see through the eyes of Copernicus, nor those of Ptolemy Claudius Ptolemy, the ancient astronomer whose geocentric (Earth-centered) model was the scientific standard until the Renaissance., but through his own, regarding judgment and determination; although, as for observations, he thinks he owes much to these and other diligent mathematicians who, successively from age to age, adding light to light, have given us sufficient principles. By these, we are led to such judgment as could not have been born except after many industrious ages.

Adding that these [mathematicians] are, in effect, like those interpreters who translate words from one language to another; but it is others who then delve deep into the meanings, and not the translators themselves. And they are like those peasants who report the movements and the form of a battle to an absent captain, and they themselves do not understand...