Giordano Bruno’s death was a very tragic event in Europe’s history.
Before Bruno’s death, several hermetists had made very serious efforts to convince Vatican to accept Corpus Hermeticum as a part of Christian teachings.
The Croatian humanist and philosopher Frane Petrić (1529 -1597) tried to convince the Pope Clement VIII to include hermetism into the program of Catholic schools. The Pope rejected Petrić’s suggestion and put an anathema to his scripts. If the Pope decided differently it could have happened that Christianity would start slowly recognizing the European pagan tradition as a part of its own heritage.
Fransoa Foa de Candal (1512-1594) was very said before his death that Ficcino’s translations of Corpus Hermeticum had not been canonized.
Christian hermetists insisted that the Church should stand on three pillars: Pagan, Jewish (Old Testament) and Christian (New Testament). It was a visionary concept of a European culture standing upon all of its three traditions.
The time for the church to accept such a concept was not ripe then, nor it is now, nor it will be in the future, but the hope among the learned man was real and still in the air until 1600.
Just a few years after the Pope had rejected Petrić’s proposal, Giordano Bruno was sentenced to death by the Church. And it was a tereible set-back and came as a shock to the whole civilized humanity, because at that time many learned people truly belived in spirituality, progress and human prosperity.
