Tommaso Campanella

Works

• 1602The City of the Sun

  A dialogue written in prison describing an ideal city ruled by a priest-philosopher, without private property or family, where learning is painted on the walls; published in Latin in 1623.

• 1622A Defence of Galileo

  Written in 1616 during the first proceedings against Copernicanism; argues that the study of nature does not contradict Scripture and that theologians should not forbid it.

Position

Campanella is on the map as a philosopher of nature, a utopian and a defender of free inquiry. Following Telesio, he grounded knowledge in the senses but went further: all things have some form of sense, and every being is constituted by three “primalities”, power, knowledge and love, which are infinite in God. His account of an immediate self-awareness, the “sensus sui”, has been compared with Descartes’ cogito. In “The City of the Sun” he drew on Plato’s Republic to describe a community without private property, ordered by knowledge and religion; in “The Monarchy of Spain” and later writings he hoped for a universal Christian monarchy, at first led by Spain under the spiritual authority of the pope, and in his last years by France. In “Atheism Conquered” he attacked Machiavelli’s reason of state, and in 1616 he defended Galileo’s right to study nature. The socialist tradition counted him among the forerunners of communism. Since Luigi Amabile’s documentary study of the conspiracy and the trials (1882), scholars have disagreed on what role Campanella actually played in the plot of 1599 and how far it aimed at an order like that of the City of the Sun, on the sincerity of his later Catholic orthodoxy, and on whether his utopia, with its regulation of procreation and private life, describes justice or total control.

Life & context

Tommaso Campanella was born Giovan Domenico Campanella on 5 September 1568 in Stilo in Calabria, the son of a poor shoemaker. At fourteen he entered the Dominican order and took the name Tommaso. In Calabrian convents he discovered Telesio’s writings, and in 1591 he published in Naples a defence of Telesio against the Aristotelians. From 1592 he was repeatedly tried by his order and by the Roman Inquisition, which held him in Rome for several years. Back in Calabria he was arrested in 1599, accused of leading a conspiracy against Spanish rule that drew on prophecies of great changes around 1600. In Naples he escaped execution by feigning madness, which he maintained even under torture in 1601; in 1602 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for heresy. In Neapolitan prisons, until 1626, he wrote most of his works; his German friend Tobias Adami had several of them printed in Frankfurt. Released in 1626, he was held again in Rome until 1629 and then won the favour of Pope Urban VIII. In 1634, after a new plot by one of his followers in Naples, he fled to France, where Louis XIII and Richelieu granted him a pension. He lived in the Dominican convent in the rue Saint-Honoré in Paris, saw his works printed there and died on 21 May 1639.

Further main works

• Philosophy Demonstrated by the Senses (Philosophia sensibus demonstrata, 1591)
• On the Sense of Things and on Magic (De sensu rerum et magia, 1620)
• Atheism Conquered (Atheismus triumphatus, 1631)
• Metaphysics (Universalis philosophiae seu metaphysicarum rerum … partes tres, 1638)