It was a matter of bad luck that Giordano Bruno found himself back in his birth-land, Italy, after years of work and wanderings in France, England and Germany. It was his Venetian host Giovanni Moncenigo who denounced him to the Catholic inquisitors and after seven years of trail and imprisonment he was burned at the stake in 1600.
Bruno was an ordained priest, but his ideas, including that of pantheism and of many worlds in the universe that might harbor life, earned him the category of a heretic. I could not help but think that Avijit Roy, in many ways, resembled Giordano Bruno. An ever-curious soul, Avijit met his fate outside the Dhaka Book Fair where he came from the USA to see his books being published in his birth-land. The irony is even more pronounced if we knew that Bruno was invited by Moncenigo to Venice at the historic Frankfurt Book Fair in 1591.
Unlike Bruno, Avijit Roy was not put up for any formal trial. However, in a country, where citizens pride themselves for their religious devotion, many saw his assassination as something that he brought upon himself. Ironically, many of the same people hold Giordano Bruno in highest esteem. The strange logic behind such math is complicated, but understandable if we factor in such parameters as hypocrisy and compromise.
Campo de Fiori is a square in Rome where Bruno was burned, a statue of him stands there today. Czesław Miłosz, the Polish-American poet and a Nobel laureate, writes about this place in one of his poems:
There is an interesting word in English called Atavism which is derived from Latin Atavus (ancestor). It means the recurrence of or reversion to a past style or outlook. I wonder if the glazed eyes of many spectators who witnessed the brutal assault on Avijit Roy and his wife Bonya Ahmed or the numbed minds of the citizens who imbibed the news next day reflected the same sentiments expressed by the Roman denizens four hundred years ago. Milosz writes further:
Avijit Roy’s murder is no less painful than Giordano Bruno’s; it was not done on a flaming pyre, but was done with hatchets. Both of them were not afraid to speak their minds. In both cases, their countrymen failed to appreciate the importance of their acts. A plaque denoting the site of Avijit’s assassination is yet to be placed, it took a few hundred years for Bruno’s statue to be erected at Campo de Fiori. In the meantime, we can only fight against our atavistic tendencies and don’t let our memories be trampled by historical apathy.
America led the world in the sciences and inventions in the 20th Century, until the primacy of 16th Century “God” was compromised by future shock, oppositional defiant disorder, and a fundamentalist culture backlash that was enraged by the hippy culture, the joy of sex publications, the culture of the “in crowd”, Woodstock, and finally drug culture that was part of the many heresies strangling tradition. I identify with both the difficulties of facing future shock, and trying to save some of tradition while realizing that every person has to face the mystery of the sophistication of DNA that gives each person a center of being, a point of view bestowed by birth in all of its many contexts. The word “karma” comes to mind as we who are reading these words are among the most exquisitely blessed humans out of roughly 104 billion humans ever born, not being born into extreme hardships of the vast majority who face poverty, starvation, fear, terrorism, disease, ignorance, war, and all of the other unfortunate fates we were fortunate not to be subjected to, with a retrospective like that of the martyr-like progressive thinker and activist Avijit Roy, assassinated in Pakistan, his more fortunate colleagues securing safety by coming to Canada with the help of Pastor Gretta Vosper of the United Church of Canada. Pastor Vosper is performing the spiritual fire walk of atheism in a state of grace far beyond many scholars and scientists who keep their opinions hidden. As a liberated woman and as an atheist pastor, Pastor Vosper is a fount of wisdom, literature, kindness, and a modestly heroic attempt to live the life of a modernized spiritual guide and at times a life guard.