This contribution reconstructs the main mechanisms and issues at stake in the recourse to the figure of Giordano Bruno among the trio formed by Victor Cousin (1792–1867), Émile Saisset (1814–1863) and Théophile Desdouits (1836–1898). Each of the three claimed to be a “spiritualist”. As leader of the clan, Cousin established a framework within which Bruno’s philosophy provided a strong conception of the necessary demarcation between philosophy and theology. But while Saisset, Cousin’s faithful pupil, focuses on the potential tyranny of the latter towards the former, Desdouits, who intervenes in the debate almost twenty years after Cousin’s death, turns the tables and redirects the accusation of tyranny against the modus operandi of the Cousin historian of philosophy. The focus on this trio at work thus makes it possible to show, over a period of forty years, how the mobilisation of Bruno is a means for these spiritualists to distinguish themselves from one another, based on their positions with regard to philosophical atheism, on the one hand, and Roman dogmatic author-ity—historically symbolised by the Inquisition—on the other. The Bruno case thus becomes part of a reflection, decisive for understanding our philosophical modernity, on the limits (extent and boundaries) of philosophy itself, in relation to theology, and on the practical and political issues that circumscribe these limits.