BRUNO, GIORDANO (1548–1600), Italian philosopher. Bruno was a brilliant and encyclopedic though erratic thinker of the Italian Renaissance, a man who synthesized and transformed thought in terms of the situation of his own times. Born in Nola, Bruno joined the Dominican order in Naples at the age of fifteen. He was expelled for his views on transubstantiation and the immaculate conception and fled Rome about 1576. After wandering over half of Europe, he finally returned to Italy, only to be imprisoned by the Roman Inquisition for his cosmological theories and burned as a heretic, the "martyr of the Renaissance."

Bruno was strongly influenced by the German philosopher Nicholas of Cusa and the latter's theory of the "coincidence of opposites," namely, that the infinitely great coincides with the infinitely small, and that God relates to the world as does one side of a piece of paper to the other...