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Tommaso Campanella

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Tommaso Campanella
OP
Portrait of Campanella by Francesco Cozza
Portrait of Campanella by Francesco Cozza
Born Giovanni Domenico Campanella
5 September 1568
Stignano, Calabria, Kingdom of Naples
Died 21 May 1639 (aged 70)
Paris, Kingdom of France
Occupations Philosopher
theologian
astrologer
poet
Known for Utopian political philosophy

Tommaso Campanella (Italian: [tomˈmaːzo kampaˈnɛlla]; 5 September 1568 – 21 May 1639),[1] baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet.

Campanella was prosecuted by the Roman Inquisition for heresy in 1594 and was confined to house arrest for two years. Accused of conspiring against the Spanish rulers of Calabria in 1599, he was tortured and sent to prison, where he spent 27 years.[2] He wrote his most significant works during this time, including The City of the Sun, a utopia describing an egalitarian theocratic society where property is held in common.

Biography

Born into poverty in Stignano, in the province of Reggio di Calabria in Calabria, southern Italy, Campanella was a child prodigy. Son of an illiterate cobbler, he entered the Dominican Order before the age of fourteen,[3] taking the name of fra' Tommaso in honour of Thomas Aquinas. He studied theology and philosophy with several masters.

Early on, he became disenchanted with the Aristotelian orthodoxy and attracted by the empiricism of Bernardino Telesio (1509–1588), who taught that knowledge is sensation and that all things in nature possess sensation. Campanella wrote his first work, Philosophia sensibus demonstrata ("Philosophy demonstrated by the senses"), published in 1592, in defence of Telesio.[4]

In 1590 he was in Naples where he was initiated in astrology; astrological speculations would become a constant feature in his writings. Campanella's heterodox views, especially his opposition to the authority of Aristotle, brought him into conflict with the ecclesiastical authorities. Denounced to the Roman Inquisition, he was arrested in Padua in 1594 and cited before the Holy Office in Rome, he was confined in a convent until 1597.[5]

After his liberation, Campanella returned to Calabria, where he was accused of leading a conspiracy against the Spanish rule in his hometown of Stilo. Campanella's aim was to establish a society based on the community of goods and wives, for on the basis of the prophecies of Joachim of Fiore and his own astrological observations, he foresaw the advent of the Age of the Spirit in the year 1600.[6] Betrayed by two of his fellow conspirators, he was captured in 1599 and incarcerated in Naples, where he was tortured on the rack.[7] Even from the confinement of the jail, Campanella managed to influence the intellectual history of the early seventeenth century, by maintaining epistolary contacts with European philosophers and scientists, Neapolitan cultural circles, and Caravaggio's commissioners.[8] Finally, Campanella made a full confession and would have been put to death had he not feigned madness and set his cell on fire. He was tortured further, a total of seven times. Crippled and ill, Campanella was sentenced to life imprisonment.[9]

Campanella spent twenty-seven years imprisoned in Naples, in various fortresses. During his detention, he wrote his most important works: The Monarchy of Spain (1600), Political Aphorisms (1601), Atheismus triumphatus (Atheism Conquered, 1605–1607), Quod reminiscetur (1606?), Metafisica (1609–1623), Theologia (1613–1624), and his most famous work, The City of the Sun (originally written in Italian in 1602; published in Latin in Frankfurt (1623) and later in Paris (1638).

His work The Monarchy of the Spain was a long letter to King Philip II, whom Campanella claimed to be the main protector of Christendom, advising him on how found a universal monarchy as his father Charles had attempted to achieve. He instructs Philip to seize, acquire or ally with all the Christian realms in order to defeat the Ottoman Empire and the Protestant nations.[10]

He defended Galileo Galilei in Galileo's first trial with his work The Defense of Galileo (written in 1616, published in 1622).[11] In 1632, before Galileo's second trial, Campanella wrote to Galileo:[12]

To my great disgust I have heard that wrathful theologians of the Congregation aim to prohibit the Dialogues of Your Excellency, and [that] no one will be present who understands mathematics or recondite things. Be aware that while Your Excellency does state that it was appropriate to prohibit the theory of the earth's motion, you are not obliged to believe that the reasons of those who contradicted you are good. This is a theological rule, and is proved by the second Council of Nicaea which decreed that Angelorum imagines depingi debent, quam'am vere corporei sunt (Images of angels must be depicted as they are in the flesh): while the decree is valid, the reasoning behind it is not, since all scholars today say angels are incorporeal. There are many other fundamental reasons. I fear violence from people who do not understand this. Our Pope makes a lot of noise against this and speaks as the Pope, but you haven't heard about that, nor can think about it. In my opinion Your Excellency should write to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, that since they are putting Dominicans, Jesuits, Theatines, and secular priests who are against your books in this council, they should also admit Father Castelli and me.

Campanella was finally released from prison in 1626,[3] through Pope Urban VIII, who personally interceded on his behalf with Philip IV of Spain. Taken to Rome and held for a time by the Holy Office, Campanella was restored to full liberty in 1629 as Urban badly needed Campanella's magical skills to protect him from the dangers of two upcoming eclipses. The Pope's enemies thought they could take advantage of his credulity, and they confidently predicted that the eclipses in 1628 and 1630 surely heralded the Pope's demise. Campanella put into effect the natural magic practices described in his short treatise De siderali fato vitando (How To Avoid the Fate Dictated by the Stars).[3] The Pope survived and, in return for Campanella's help, allowed the magician to set up a school in Rome to preach his ideas, while ignoring his blatant heresies.[13] He lived for five years in Rome, where he was Urban's advisor in astrological matters.

In 1634, a new conspiracy in Calabria, led by one of his followers, threatened fresh troubles. With the aid of Cardinal Barberini and the French Ambassador de Noailles, he fled to France, where he was received at the court of Louis XIII with marked favour.[3] Protected by Cardinal Richelieu and granted a pension by the king, he spent the rest of his days in the convent of Saint-Honoré in Paris. His last work was a poem celebrating the birth of the future Louis XIV (Ecloga in portentosam Delphini nativitatem).

Campanella's De sensu rerum et magia (1620) partly inspired the first fully-fledged it-narrative in English, Charles Gildon's The Golden Spy (1709).[14]

The historian John Headley described Campanella as "a man who strove to destabilize the regnant forces of what he identified as tyranny, sophistry, and hypocrisy and to shake the world into a new order."[15]

Independent scholar Andrew Manns has shown that the English pamphleteer and parliamentarian William Prynne distorted Campanella's political ideas in order to promote anti-Catholic propaganda during the English Civil War.[16]

Works

  • Philosophia sensibus demonstrata, 1591
  • De monarchia hispanica discursus (1601)
  • Monarchia Messiae, 1605
  • Prodromus philosophiae instaurandae, 1617
  • Apologia pro Galileo (in Latin). Frankfurt am Main: Gottfried Tampach. 1622.
  • La città del sole, 1602 (Latin Civitas solis, 1623)
  • Atheismus triumphatus, 1631, Paris 1636
  • Medicinalium libri (in Latin). Lugduni: ex officina Ioannis Pillehotte: sumptibus Ioannis Caffin, & Francisci Plaignard. 1635.
  • Metaphysica (in Latin). Vol. 1. Paris. 1638.
  • Metaphysica (in Latin). Vol. 2. Paris. 1638.
  • Metaphysica (in Latin). Vol. 3. Paris. 1638.
  • Poesie. Bari: Laterza. 1915.

See also

  • Millennialism
  • Utopian fiction

From the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia

Tommaso Campanella — (Baptized GIOVANNI DOMENICO)

Dominican philosopher and writer, b. 5 Sept. 1568 at Stilo in the province of Calabria, Italy; d. at Paris, 21 May, 1659. He was a facile writer of prose and verse at the age of thirteen, and when not yet fifteen entered the Dominican Order, attracted by the fame of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. With a predilection for philosophical inquiry, he was sent to different convents to hear the best masters. Campanella wrote his first work, "Philosophia sensibus demonstrata" (Naples, 1590) in defence of the naturalistic philosopher Bernardino Telesio. He next went to Rome and afterwards to the University of Padua, from Oct., 1592, to the end of 1594. An ardent and somewhat captious temperament led him into the expression of views offensive to many of the older and newer schools alike. He was especially vigorous in his opposition to the authority of Aristotle, and was cited before the Holy Office at Rome, where he was detained till 1597. Some accounts speak of his having been accused of magic and of his fleeing to Florence, Venice, Padua, and Bologna, thence back to Naples and Stilo. Continuing to lecture and write, however, he retained favour in certain circles. At length, in Sept., 1599, he was seized as head of a conspiracy against the Spanish rule. In the trial at Naples, involving many persons, lay and ecclesiastical, he was charged with divers heresies and with aiming to set up a communistic commonwealth. Arraigned before an ecclesiastical tribunal, he was at the same time harassed and put to torture by a political court. On 8 Jan., 1603, he was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. Among several who sought to obtain his liberation was Pope Paul V. In the meantime the viceroy, Giron, who used to visit Campanella in prison, seeking his counsel about matters of state, became involved in trouble. In his endeavours to extricate himself he laid the blame largely on Campanella, who was again subjected to many indignities. Through Pope Urban VIII, who applied directly to Philip IV of Spain, the unfortunate prisoner was at last released from his Neapolitan captivity, 15 May, 1626, an event which was commemorated by Gabriel Naude in his "Panegyricus" (Paris, 1644). He was taken to Rome and held for a time by the Holy Office, but was restored to full liberty, 6 April, 1629. In 1634 another Calabrian conspiracy under one of Campanella's followers threatened fresh complications. With the aid of Cardinal Barberini and the French ambassador, De Noailles, Campanella, disguised as a Minim, withdrew to France. Louis XIII and Richelieu received him with marked favour, the latter granting him a liberal pension. He spent the rest of his days, enjoying papal favour, in the Dominican convent of St-Honore at Paris.

Of the life and character of Campanella, conflicting estimates are given. He was well thought of by Popes Clement VIII, Paul V, and Urban VIII. Cardinal Pallavicini declared him a "man who had read all things and who remembered all things; of mighty but indomitable character." In faith and theological allegiance he was held above suspicion by Juan De Lugo, afterwards cardinal; Theophile Raynaud considered him heretical. Vincent Baron, O.P., who knew him well, gave a careful eulogy of him as skilled in mathematics, astrology, medicine, and other sciences; more famous, perhaps, than he deserved to be, but still a man of extraordinary gifts. John Addington Symonds, who translated a book of his sonnets (Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarotti and Tommaso Campanella, London, 1878), refers to him as the "audacious Titan of the modern age, possessing essentially a combative intellect; a poet and philosopher militant, who stood alone making war upon the authority of Aristotle in science, of Machiavelli in statecraft, and of Petrarch in art". His nunquam tacebo is evidenced in almost every act and utterance of his strange career. Campanella's work is critical and composite rather than constructive and original. It exhibits an almost encyclopedic acquaintance with all the known sciences of his day. His doctrine does not form a system, but discloses a syncretic adaptation of certain fundamental principles of St. Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great, modified by original opinions and fused with ideas, often unsound and bizarre, borrowed from Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Empedocles, the Christian mystics, and the Jewish and Arabic schools of thought. He aimed to reconstruct scholastic philosophy, but, lacking grasp and depth, his judgment was often obscured by an untempered imagination, and his writings, of widest scope, abound in the inequalities of undisciplined genius. With the fondness of the Renaissance for disputation and innovation, he was also singularly swayed by the popular pseudo-science of judicial astrology. Unlike Bruno, however, he remained loyal to his order and to the Church. In his theologico-cosmological theory, being, both created and Divine, is invested with three primordial properties: power, wisdom, and love. Non-being is characterized by impotence, darkness, and odium or metaphysical aversion. In God, Who is pure being, simple and infinite, the three properties of being exist and subsist in simplest unity to the absolute exclusion of non-being and its attributes. Creatures participate in God's wisdom, power, and love; but, because derived from nothingness, their essence is a mixture of being and non-being. The Divine, impressed upon, immanent in, and shared by, finite natures, is the principle, the sufficient reason, and the measure of their relative perfection and of their development in time and space. The universe is vivified, directed, and governed by a universal soul of sense and intelligence. The world is as a living statue of God. The sun and the earth are its principal parts and the common source of animal life and movement, and of the sensation which is also found in all material things, light, air, metals, and wood. Prior to Descartes, to whom he was otherwise superior in erudition, Campanella demonstrated the absurdity of scepticism and undertook to establish by psychologico-ontological argument the existence of God against Atheism. In the field of natural science Campanella preceded Bacon in insisting on the direct observation and experimental study of nature. It is noteworthy that whilst Bacon rejected the astronomical theory of Galileo, Campanella favoured it, and wrote a brilliant defence of its author. In his treatise, "De Monarchia Hispanica" ["A Discourse touching the Spanish Monarchy", tr. by Edmund Chilmead (London, 1654) and again by Wm. Prynne (ibid., 1660)], Campanella evinces, among ideas singularly strange and erroneous, considerable practical knowledge of civil government. To extend Spanish rule in Europe he advised intermarriage of the Spaniards with other nationalities, urged the establishment of schools of astronomy, mathematics, mechanics, etc., and the immediate opening of naval colleges to develop the resources of the New World and further the interests of its inhabitants. In general he advocated natural honesty and justice and the universal love of god and man in place of the utilitarian principles and egoism of Machiavelli.

Because of its political character, his "Civitas Solis" (City of the Sun), is the most celebrated of his works. It appears in "Ideal Commonwealths" (New York, 1901) and in "Ideal Empires and Republics" (Washington and London, 1901). It was probably intended by Campanella as a philosophical fiction, like Plato's "Republic" and More's "Utopia", for its essentially communistic delineation, and advocacy, of goods, education, women, labour, and all necessaries in common could hardly represent the true mind of an author who, after all, was faithful to at least the spirit of Christianity, and who vehemently resisted the rationalistic trend of his contemporaries. Various lists, some furnished by Campanella himself, show him to have been the author of about eighty-eight works. The more important are: "Prodromus Philosophiae instaurandae" (Frankfort, 1617); "Philosophiae rationalis partes quinque" (Paris, 1638); "Realis philosophiae epilogisticae partes quatour" (which contains the "Civitas Solis", Frankfort, 1623); "Medicinalium juxta propria principia libri VII" (Lyons, 1635); "Astrologicorum libri VI" (Lyons, 1629); "Apologia pro Galileo mathematico" (Frankfort, 1622); "Atheismus triumphatus" (Rome, 1631); "De praedestinatione, electione, reprobatione et auxiliis divinae gratiae, cento thomisticus" (Paris, 1636). Numerous unpublished MSS. are preserved in the archives of the Dominican Order at Rome.

References

  1. Back to citation Firpo, Luigi (1974). "CAMPANELLA, Tommaso". Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (in Italian). Vol. 17.
  2. Back to citation Malcolm, Noel (2004). "The Crescent and the City of the Sun: Islam and the Renaissance Utopia of Tommaso Campanella" (PDF). Proceedings of the British Academy. 125. Retrieved 19 June 2025.
  3. Back to citation occurrence 3.0 Back to citation occurrence 3.1 Back to citation occurrence 3.2 Back to citation occurrence 3.3 Ernst, Germana, "Tommaso Campanella", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
  4. Back to citation Chisholm 1911.
  5. Back to citation "Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639)", The Galileo Project, Rice University
  6. Back to citation "Corrado Claverini, Tommaso Campanella e Gioacchino da Fiore. "Riaprire il conflitto" a partire dal pensiero utopico e apocalittico, "Giornale Critico di Storia delle Idee" 11, 2014 (in Italian)" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 26 December 2016. Retrieved 26 December 2016.
  7. Back to citation C. Dentice di Accadia, Tommaso Campanella, 1921, pp. 43–44 (in Italian)
  8. Back to citation Giardino, Alessandro (2017). "The Seven Works of Mercy". Aries. 17 (2): 149–170. doi:10.1163/15700593-01600100.
  9. Back to citation Popkin, Richard Henry (1999). The Columbia History of Western Philosophy. Columbia University Press. p. 321. ISBN 978-0-231-10129-5. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
  10. Back to citation Fernández de San Miguel, Evaristo (1868). Historia de Felipe II, rey de España - Tomo 2. Manero. p. 445-446.
  11. Back to citation Apologia pro Galileo, Published in Latin by Impensis Godefridi Tampachii, Typis Erasmi Kemfferi in Frankfort, Germany.
  12. Back to citation Memorie y lettera inedita di Galileo Galilei, Second part, published in Modena, 1821, page 144. Il Padre Tommaso Campanella al Galileo. (Libreria Nelli) Roma 25 Settembre 1632. Con gran disgusto mio ho sentito che si fa Congregazione di Teologi irati, a proibire i Dialoghi di V. S; e non ci entra persona. che sappia matematica, nè cose recondite. Avverta che mentre V.S. asserisce che fu ben proibita l'opinione del moto della terra, non è obbligata a creder che anche e ragioni de' contraddicenti sien buone. Questa è regola teologica; e si prova perchè nel Concilio Niceno secondo fu decretato che Angelorum imagines depingi debent, quom'am vere corporei sunt: il decreto è valido, e non la ragione; giacché tutti i scolastici dicono che gli Angeli sono incorporei a tempo nostro. Ci son altri fondamenti assai. Dubito di violenza di gente che non sa. Il Padre Nostro fa fracassi contra, e dice ex ora Papa: ma tu non è informato, nè può pensare a questo. V. S. per mio' avviso faccia scriver dal Gran Duca, che siccome mettono Domenicani e Gesuiti e Teatini e Preti secolari in questa Congregazione contro i vostri libri, ammettano anche il Padre Castelli e me.
  13. Back to citation Hannam, James (2010). God's Philosophers. London: Icon Books Ltd. pp. 320–21. ISBN 978-184831-150-3.
  14. Back to citation J. Wu, " 'Nobilitas sola est atq; unica Virtus': Spying and the Politics of Virtue in The Golden Spy; or, A Political Journal of the British Nights Entertainments (1709)", Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 40:2 (2017), 237–253 doi: 10.1111/1754-0208.12412
  15. Back to citation Headley, John M. (15 January 2019). Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation of the World. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691657172.
  16. Back to citation Manns, Andrew (March 2019). Political Storytelling and Propaganda: William Prynne and the English Afterlife of Tommaso Campanella. sas.ac.uk (Thesis). School of Advanced Study, University of London. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
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