And when a theologian does wander beyond the limits of religious dictate, this happens…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno#Imprisonment.2C_trial_and_execution.2C_1592.E2.80.931600
it does. but too much faith does limit reason.
Not all theology begins with human reason. A reasonable understanding of faith has a clear idea of where nature leaves off and revelation begins. An irrational notion of reason is that human reason alone has all possible truth accessible to it. Where is the unlimited capacity of reason established by reason?
Bruno had a problem seeing where the limits of reason were and therefore could not accept that some truths have to come via revelation or not be grasped at all.
His trial and execution were not about his proposals regarding natural science, but his insistence that he could reason to and correct supernatural revelation by his own limited means.
From your article:
*Frances Yates rejects what she describes as the “legend that Bruno was prosecuted as a philosophical thinker, was burned for his daring views on innumerable worlds or on the movement of the earth.” Yates however writes that “the Church was… perfectly within its rights if it included philosophical points in its condemnation of Bruno’s heresies” because “the philosophical points were quite inseparable from the heresies.”[35]
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “in 1600 there was no official Catholic position on the Copernican system, and it was certainly not a heresy. When …] Bruno …] was burned at the stake as a heretic, it had nothing to do with his writings in support of Copernican cosmology.”[36]
Similarly, the Catholic Encyclopedia (1908) asserts that “Bruno was not condemned for his defence of the Copernican system of astronomy, nor for his doctrine of the plurality of inhabited worlds, but for his theological errors, among which were the following: that Christ was not God but merely an unusually skillful magician, that the Holy Ghost is the soul of the world, that the Devil will be saved, etc.”[37]
*
Whether his beliefs warranted execution is an open question and one that needs to take into account the entire situation of the time, but the fact that he made grave errors about the nature of faith and revelation can be demonstrated from his writings and actions. He was a heretic. That is clear.
it was the result of a few sinners repeating a lie too often.