ABSTRACT
This text from Spaccio de la bestia trionfante (The Expulsion of The Triumphant Beast),1 which ends a long passage about the divine providence disguised under the mask of humour,2 synthesizes one of the Nolan’s most profound and revolutionary theses, which would eventually reach its most advanced form in the Frankfurt poems, especially in De triplici minimo. We could summarize it as follows: reconsidering the necessity for the existence of the minima as opposed to the Aristotelian conception of the divisibility of matter to infinity, a step is taken towards the substantiation of absolute minima as necessary beings and, from there, to a radical pantheistic proposal about rationality and the intrinsic value of all existing things as a divine manifestation and as an expression of God’s identity both in act and power, of liberty and necessity, of unity and multiplicity and, in general, of the coincidentia oppositorum: an identity in which not only is the
1 Bruno, G. (1964), The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, trans. Arthur D. Imerti, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, p. 137: ‘Ma te inganni, Sophia, se pensi, che non ne sieno [i dei] a cura cossí le cose minime come le principali, talmente sicome le cose grandissime et principalissime non costano senza le minime et abiettissime. Tutto dunque, quantunque minimo, è sotto infinitamente grande providenza; ogni quantosivoglia vilissima minuzzaria in ordine del tutto ed universo è importantissima; perché le cose grandi son composte de le picciole, e le picciole de le picciolissime, e queste de gl’individui et minimi. Cossí intendo de le grande sustanze, come de le grande efficacie
necessity and rationality of the minima guaranteed, but these are presented as well as the substantial basis of existence and of rationality itself, in which providence and natural law are unified.
