Cause Principle Unity

A general account of bonding
I confess that I lack a beautiful form;
Yet God prefers me as more excellent,
As does a girl who is steady and not silly. 6
In a proportional way, there are bonds by which those who are ugly bind
because of their reputation for courage, vigour, eloquence, ingenuity and
other such things, for from one type of power they can cause bonds of
another type. It is not a rare occurrence that the more ugly Amazons bind
in the act of love because of their reputation for their strength or their use
of eloquence.
21. The heterogeneity of things that can be bound. Furthermore, there are
species which are bound to a different species through love, hate, admiration,
piety, compassion and other such feelings. For example, there are
some famous cases of such bonding, like Lesbia with her sparrow, Corinna
with her small dog, Cyparissus with his doe, and Arion with his dolphin.
In general, the seeds of all species are attracted to other species. I will
remain silent about the sympathy between a man and a lion, and I will pass
over what I know about the astonishing intimacy between a boy and a
snake.
22. The changing of things that can be bound. It is not difficult to change that
which can be bound from one type of bond to its contrary, since the bonding
agent is also changeable. And it makes no difference whether this occurs
actually or only in thought. Even though I was once bound in thought by
a teaching, the bonds of contempt and indignation may come later when
that opinion has been studied in a better light. And the bonds arising from
the fires of youth and beauty are relaxed and soothed in time when they do
not agree with the bonds derived from customs and skill.
23. The cause and effect of things which can be bound. What it is that bonds to
love and hate or contempt is hidden to the functions of reason. Adrastia’s
explanation is useless: namely, that the explanation of love, which arises
from seeing a beautiful object, is a recollection by the soul of divine beauty,
which was first seen as a companion to the body. If this were true, what is
6 Bruno quotes these three lines, with minor variations, from the ‘Priapea’, a set of approximately
eighty short Latin poems, mostly from the Roman era, which were collected by an unknown editor.
The poems commemorate Priapus, the mythological Greek god of plant and animal fertility, who was
depicted as having a grotesque body and an enormous phallus. The ‘Priapea’ can be found in Emil
Baehrens, ed., Poetae latini minores (Leipzig: Teubner, 1879) Vol. I, 58–87. Bruno’s quotation is from
#38 (70).
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