Against the backdrop of a 16th Century Europe soaked in the blood of religious martyrs, renegade philosopher Giordano Bruno cut a formidable swath, separating and dividing all thinking men and women with his dangerous new ideas, fomenting change and upheaval. The Renaissance equivalent of our 20th century revolutionary, beatnik or hippie, Bruno was Buckminster Fuller with the attitude of Mick Jagger, a man on the run from the Church and Rome, one of the most notorious figures of his times who risked his life by preaching, in the highest circles of Europe, a doctrine of brotherhood, peace and free love at the same time that he alienated most of his contemporaries.

Bruno arrived in England in the year 1583, an ex-Dominican friar and heretic seeking asylum and bearing a "here-take-him" letter of introduction from the French king (who had to get him out of France because his ideas on infinity and other worlds had started near riots at the Sorbonne). Determined to enlighten Oxford, Bruno wrote to the Vice-Chancellor, introducing himself and announcing his services:

"Salutation from Philotheus Jordanus Brunus of Nola, Doctor of a more scientific theology, professor of a purer and less harmful learning, known in the chief universities of Europe, a philosopher approved and honourably received, a stranger with none but the uncivilised and ignoble, a wakener of sleeping minds, tamer of presumptuous and obstinate ignorance... Brunus, whom only propagators of folly and hypocrites detest, whom the honourable and studious love, whom noble minds applaud..."

In less than three months he was driven out. Paris, Oxford, London, Toulouse, Wittenberg, Geneva, Zurich, Rome, Naples, Venice, Padua... Driven from town to town, excommunicated by religions he'd never joined, sometimes disguised in his monk's robes, at other times, even with royalty, wearing the plain brown kersey of the common man replete with missing buttons, Bruno was never more than two years in any one place. As a self-proclaimed "awakener of sleeping souls" he placed his mission above everything else, including his life and the good-will of his fellow men.

Who was this man? And what were these 'dangerous' ideas, obscured for a few short centuries yet so prevalent today? And in the long run, is it man, or time, that decides what's relevant in who and what we see and hear? The answer is time--and Bruno's time is here. The world has at last caught up with him.

The cultural paradigm shift of the late 60's has left us with a new philosophy and a new science: a new awareness of the essential unity of all--of the Divine All that is in everything. We have a new reverence for nature. In quantum worlds, where everything is connected to everything else, we see that reality is what we make or create; we sense the interconnectedness of all life as we come at last to experience the truth that what we do unto others, we do to ourselves too. On some level, we know the deaths of butterflies can set off hurricanes; that ridicule can turn to bullets and kill, like at Columbine; that the All is in the All--and no one is safe from the effects of what they do or think.

Giordano Bruno was the Man Who Saw Through Time--prophet of these new age philosophies and The New Science. Four hundred years ago, he wrote of morphogenic resonances--quantum mechanics, chaos theory and the fractal nature of reality: As above, so below; of the idea that all systems are connected and affect other systems; he knew, intuitively, about the hundredth monkey, flowers morphing spontaneously in fields all over the world; he gave us the perfect anti-Darwinian Divine cause, that everything is connected, the fractal vision that everything is in everything--not just that God is in all, but that ALL is in ALL.

And Bruno delivered his messianic vision of an infinite universe grounded in science--a larger, more complicated, profound, and accurate universe than the first telescope would ever reveal to Galileo years later. At a time when science was separating from religion, Bruno held them together--something neither science nor religion would forgive him for. But now, four hundred years later, science reclaims the Brunian path of intuition and sees in new ways.

Armed with today's popular awareness of the All--of Bruno's essential unity underlying all things--scientists are envisioning anti-worlds and multiple string universes, and, in the last twenty-five years, are writing books with titles like: God and the New Physics; The God Particle: If The Universe Is The Answer, What Is The Question; The Mind of God: Science and the Search for New Meaning; The Left Hand of Creation; Order Out of Chaos; The Unfinished Universe...

But, four hundred years ago, when the world and man sat snugly at the center of creation--a center defined by boundaries and separation--Bruno's ideas of unity and infinity did more than threaten religion and scholarship, they ripped the very underpinnings out from under the social order. In essence, his teachings brought down the hierarchies. In England, where he had his greatest triumph and left his strongest mark, he became Marlowe's Faustus, then set the stage for a long line of Shakespeare's fallen heroes: doubting Hamlets, 'kings of infinite space', raging Lears--all leveled before the elements by one lone man's vision of an All that said, "You do not come any nearer to likeness, union and identity with the Infinite by being a man than by being an ant, by being a star than by being a man; nor do you draw any closer to that Being by being a sun or a moon, than by being a man or an ant. For in the infinite, these things are indifferent."

What happened to Bruno? In 1591 he returned to Italy where he was betrayed to the Venice Inquisition, arrested, and acquitted, then turned over to Rome. He spent the next eight years in the dungeons of the Holy Roman Inquisition while they tried to get him to recant. On February 17, 1600, as part of the Jubilee festivities to celebrate the new century, this destroyer of the hierarchies--deemed heresiarch, a would-be leader of a new faith--became a sacrificial offering to the new age; led to the stake amid the cheering throng, his tongue spiked for silence, he was stripped, then burned alive. His ashes were scattered to the winds of Rome; his books were burned and his name erased, along with all true mention of him in textbooks of history, science and literature.

Did Bruno seek his own death? Did he goad the church into burning him? And is he still a problem for many today?

How would Bruno, who denounced virginity, chastity and the Church's attitude towards abstinence as life-denying, react to Clinton's indiscretions; what would he say to Jerry Falwell and the religious right? How would Bruno, who claimed there was life on the invisible worlds throughout an infinite universe, react to SETI and the current belief in UFO's? How would Bruno, who condemned Columbus and the explorers for "disturbing the spirits of native peoples" and "...planting unheard-of follies where they did not before exist, so that he who is strongest comes to conclude he is wisest," react to colonial wars, to Vietnam?

What would Bruno, who spoke out against the popular view of women as passive and base, have to say about a woman's right to abortion and the use of contraception? How would he react to the violence of our Columbines? What would he say? How much would he have to say about nuclear weapons! Who is the Bruno of today who says: "Awake, frail creatures, and cringe at your own insignificance"?