  These and other Platonic borrowings sometimes obscure Bruno’s overarching idea of God as the One Being in which two substances of equal ontological status, the Universal Intellect and Universal Matter, were reconciled. It was, however, only on sufferance that he engaged with Platonism. Repeatedly he suppressed Neoplatonic distinctions between one ontological entity and another (BOI I, 651–653; BOL II.2, 178) or used them instrumentally rather than in the conviction that they were philosophically valid (BOL I.4, 103). Philosophy must aim at “simplicity” (BOL I.3, 236); hence his contempt for Francesco Patrizi (1529–97), the most eminent Platonist of the day (BOI I, 676–677). All things were accidents of the One Being, intelligibilia included, and hence all things engaged with matter in some respect. Accordingly he denied, with a good dose of sarcasm, Platonism’s central tenet: that the Ideas and the intelligences apprehending them were transcendent realities (BOI I, 720-721; BOL I.2, 118, 304, 309–313, 483). In what sense could they be outside an infinite universe? Not even the separate intelligences were, in fact, separate absolutely. They constantly illuminated us whether or not we were conscious that they were doing so (BOL II.2, 173)—hence the existence, for example, of instincts (BOI II, 455–456). On these grounds, too, Bruno discounted the notion, in both its original medieval formulation (see the illustration in  Section 3) and the revised version proposed by the mysterious Renaissance thinker known as Marcello Palingenio Stellato (c. 1500–c. 1543), that an empyrean—an “infinite” extent of intelligible light, devoid of all material connotations— surrounded a finite, geocentric cosmos. Matter and form were inseparable (BOL I.2, 303–304). Abstract things, wholly separate from matter, were “chimera”, no more than logical fictions (BOL I.2, 257, 309–310). This led Bruno to speak, not of the Universal Soul/Intellect shaping Universal Matter, that is, of two distinct principles or causes, one active, the other passive, but of Universal Matter as having the forms inherent within it. To denote them as an integrated unity, he sometimes used the term “Nature” (BOL I.4,155; BOL III, 266–267, 319). “Nature works within Matter, or rather it is Matter itself” (BOL I.2, 312). It contained “the origins of forms of all things within its womb, from which it brings forth and discharges all things” (BOL III, 694; also BOI I, 716–717). The universe was like a “gastropod”, a living mass endlessly changing in configuration (BOL I.2, 313).