The three convents in which successively Bruno had lived, at Naples,
at Citta di Campagna, and finally the Minerva at Rome, developed
freely, we may suppose, all the mystic qualities of a genius, in
which, from the first, a heady southern imagination took the lead.
But it was from beyond monastic bounds that he would look for the
sustenance, the fuel, of an ardour born or bred within them. Amid
such artificial religious stillness the air itself becomes generous
in undertones. The vain young monk (vain, of course) would feed his
vanity by puzzling the good, sleepy heads of the average sons of
Dominic with his neology, putting new wine into old bottles, teaching
them their own business, the new, higher, truer sense of the most
familiar terms, of the chapters they read, the hymns they sang; above
all, as it happened, every word that referred to the Spirit, the
reign of the Spirit, and its excellent freedom. He would soon pass
beyond the utmost possible limits of his brethren's sympathy, beyond
the [141] largest and freest interpretation such words would bear, to
words and thoughts on an altogether different plane, of which the
full scope was only to be felt in certain old pagan writers,--pagan,
though approached, perhaps, at first, as having a kind of natural,
preparatory, kinship with Scripture itself.
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