CAMPANELLA, Tommaso. - Life and works. Giovanni Domenico C. was born in Stilo, in Calabria, on 5 Sept. 1568, entered the Dominican Order, taking the baptismal name Tommaso, but remained dissatisfied with the official teaching of the convent, which was inspired by Aristotelianism, and sought in Telesianism the basis for a new philosophy of nature. He consequently encountered fierce hostility, which drove him to travel through Italy in search of more congenial environments, against the injunctions of his superiors; he was in Naples, Rome, Florence, and Padua. In Naples he published his first work, the *Philosophia sensibus demonstrata*, in which he opposed the abstraction and dialecticism of the Aristotelians with a cosmology founded, in his view, on experience.
In Padua, embroiled in various legal proceedings, C. conceived the plan of a confederation of European states under the leadership of the Pope, which he set out in the writing *Monarchia christianorum* (1593), to which he added proposals for disciplinary reforms in the writing *De regimine Ecclesiae*; both writings were lost. Firm in this theocratic ideal, C. thought to secure the adherence of Spain as its armed arm, inviting the Italian states to accept Spanish supremacy in the *Discorsi ai principi d’Italia*. Taken to Rome and condemned in 1596 to abjure *de vehementi haeresis suspicionis*, he was forced to return to Calabria (1597); in March 1598 he is found in Naples, where he composed a brief treatise on the philosophy of nature and ethics, the *Epilogo Magno*, and observed the wretched conditions of the people; his fixed idea, however, was that the Caesaropapist Spain should fully recognize the supreme authority of the papacy and constitute its armed arm.
Returning to Calabria, C. gave concrete form to his ideologies: he took part in jurisdictional disputes, siding with the bishops against the officials of the Kingdom of Naples, and drafted the political work that was to exalt Spain at the same time as inviting it to recognize papal supremacy: the *Monarchia di Spagna*. He perceived a grave obstacle to the longed-for theocratic unity: it was the Kingdom of Naples, a papal fief held by Spain, an apple of discord among European powers for dominance of the Mediterranean, the root of their weakness in the face of the Turkish threat; he therefore conceived the idea of restoring the kingdom to direct dependence on the Pope and for this sought to come to an understanding with discontented friars.
And with ambitious laymen. The affair had all the appearance of a conspiracy, even if C. did not desire direct and violent action; but the Spanish officials regarded it as a conspiracy, indeed a rebellion, and suppressed it as such.
On 6 September 1599, on the denunciation of two pro-Genoese informers, C., together with others of his persuasion, was arrested and, after several preliminary trials, transferred to Naples. There, amid jurisdictional disputes, threats to accomplices who were giving evidence, public executions of conspirators, and torture, the trials dragged on slowly. In addition to the charge of conspiracy, a charge of heresy was brought against him, for the Spanish and their Italian officials in Naples habitually used the well-known method of turning political opponents into heretics. C. himself, desiring to be judged by an ecclesiastical tribunal, directed that the trial should proceed on the charge of heresy. No sentence was ever passed on him in the conspiracy trial; as for the heresy trial, he could not be convicted or made to confess, even after the most painful ordeal of sleeplessness lasting about forty hours. Nevertheless, on 13 November 1602, the Holy Office issued the sentence: «Omnino retineatur in carceribus S. Officii absque spe liberatio». There was no degradation and delivery to the secular arm, and consequently C. was not judged a relapsed heretic; which shows that the Holy Office did not consider him certainly a heretic. The sentence of perpetual imprisonment was in fact reduced to a few years in prison. The Spanish authorities carefully avoided handing the condemned man over to the Holy Office, fearing that he might be released; and C. was transferred from one Neapolitan castle to another until 1626, in a captivity that sometimes became horrible. His autobiographical poems well depict the painful situation of C., who everywhere invoked pity and was prevented from realizing his dream of a hierocratic unity.
To the impediment of action, however, there corresponded a fruitful activity as a writer. The Political Aphorisms and the celebrated City of the Sun belong to 1602; in the former C. outlined a scientific treatment of politics, in the latter he delineated a hypothetical natural state, founded on a strong sense of sociality and, in its reverence for reason, open to Christianity. The De sensu rerum et magia (1603) expounds pansensist theories; the Monarchia Messiae (1605) is a solemn celebration of the centrality and kingship of Christ and the papacy; the Antiveneti (1606) combats Venetian pretensions against the papacy; the Atheismus triumphatus (1607) is an apologetic treatise introducing Christianity, demonstrating, against historicist relativism of anti-Tridentine and Machiavellian stamp, its harmony with reason and nature without reduction to them.
Meanwhile, amid continual and insistent pleas for release, seizures of notes and manuscripts, and visits from learned Italians and foreigners (among them the celebrated G. Schopp and T. Adami), C. continued his literary production. By 1613 he had completed the Philosophia rationalis (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, poetics, historiography), the Realis philosophia epilogistica (a treatise on natural and anthropological philosophy with ethical observations, almost a translation of the Epilogo Magno) together with numerous and extensive Quaestiones; but his principal works remained the Metaphysics, the Theology, and the Quod reminiscentur. The first (Metaphysicarum rerum iuxta propria dogmata partes tres) is a vast and at times rambling treatise on metaphysics and epistemology, whose first beginnings go back to the philosopher’s youth and the final version to 1614; the second (Theologorum libri XXX) is a grand exposition of Catholic dogma, planned in youth but completed in 1624; the third is a singular collection of messages to the whole world urging the conversion to Catholicism and the realization of the unum ovile and unus pastor through a return (reminiscence) to God: it might be called the code of Catholic missionary activity. Nor should we forget the Apologia pro Galliae (1615), in which, however, the defence of the astronomer from the attacks of others did not imply acceptance by the philosopher of Copernican doctrines.
Finally released from the Neapolitan prison (1626), C. was transferred to Rome and confined in the Holy Office until 27 July 1628. Having regained his final freedom, C., still engaged in doctrinal polemics with his Dominican brethren, worked along three lines: the establishment of a college to train missionaries (he did not succeed, but perhaps the philosopher deserves credit for the founding of the College of Propaganda Fide), the approval of his works, and the rapprochement with France, which was to replace Spain as the armed arm of the Church; Pope Urban VIII treated him with great kindness, despite knowing of the opposition of the two cardinal-nephews to the philosopher. The discovery of a conspiracy hatched in Naples against Spain by a Dominican disciple of C. prompted that government to ask the Pope for the philosopher’s extradition; Urban did not hand him over, but with the protection of French diplomats managed to have him emigrate to France, where C., esteemed and honoured by politicians and scholars, devoted himself chiefly to the printing of some works, the conversion of heretics, and political-doctrinal advice to Richelieu’s France; he still wrote in foreign soil. His last composition, the Ecloga for the birth of the Dauphin, is the final expression of a hierocratic dream of reform that had pursued him all his life. On 21 May 1639 C. ended «in pace tanti guai».
C. had a complex character: rich in intellect, but even richer in imagination; a formidable knower of almost all the sources of the culture of his time; ardent, but proud and restless; tenacious, but impulsive; sincere and not dissembling, as his best-known biographer, L. Amabile, believed him to be; devoted to the Church even in his anxiety for cultural, social, and disciplinary reform; indeed, the more ardent for reform the more he was attached to the substantial orthodoxy of the Council of Trent and the historical glory of the papacy. Against him were ranged German Protestants and Italian regalists (Giannone), while later anticlerical trends in certain sectors of nineteenth-century culture sought to portray him as a rebel against the Church. In recent times the thesis of his orthodoxy has increasingly gained ground; yet some (Annerio, Firpo) distinguish two periods in C.’s life: heterodoxy until 1602–1603, orthodoxy until his death; others (Déjò, De Mattei, Bruers), however, maintain the unity and continuity of the orthodox thought of Campanella. The latter position has the greatest support.
Thought. — On the theoretical plane, C.’s horizon is a new philosophical synthesis, inspired by St Augustine and St Thomas, with which to overcome the heterodoxy of Renaissance Aristotelianism and the sterility of decadent Scholasticism. The synthesis of Augustine and Thomas is evident in the central concept of reality that illuminates and governs the entire Campanellan system; for C. reality is being, and this in line with Thomistic Aristotelianism; but being possesses an internal dialectic constituted by three primalities: power, wisdom, and love, and this in line with the Augustinian triad of posse, nosse, and velle; upon these primalities rest the classic transcendental properties that culminate in unity.
The entity, whose concept is analogical, finds its limit in nothingness, and from its respective synthesis the finite multiplicity is structured and justified.
Upon the intimate self-presence of the entity, particularly in the human soul, rests Campanella’s theory of knowledge. The awareness of the critical foundation of knowing is most vivid in him: the fourteen *Dubitaciones*, which constitute the aporetic premise preceding the positing of a knowledge firmly grounded in its grasp of being, are a vivid expression of this; doubt is overcome by self-consciousness, through which the soul perceives a radical presence of itself to itself (*notitia innata* or *indita*, *sensus inditus*), obscured by knowledge of what is other than itself (*notitia aliorum* as *notitia addita* or *illata*, which renders the *notitia innata* hidden). Hetero-consciousness is preserved on the basis of self-consciousness, just as hetero-affection is in function of self-affection. From this perspective of knowledge as an immediate grasp of being, Campanella derives an exaltation of *sensus*, which is not mere sensation but a torment of immediacy. It is this immediacy, united with concreteness, that makes Campanella unverse to, indeed hostile toward, abstraction—beyond the Aristotelian tradition—and leads him to revalue the Platonic idea as the inner meaning of each reality. Thus, *intellectus*, rather than a faculty of abstraction, takes on the traits of the Platonic-mystical tradition of intimate penetration of the real, from which follows the devaluation of mathematical knowledge and the preference for metaphysical over physical knowledge, which remains at the level of the phenomenology of nature.
Self-consciousness is self-affection and knowledge and affection of being, but more profoundly of *Being*, of which the finite is a participation; hence the ascent to the Absolute. With the *notitia innata*, God is immediately present to the human spirit; yet the obscuring and disturbance produced by the *notitia illata* of what is other than the soul render the thesis of God’s existence in need of demonstration. Thus, knowledge of God, though radically innate, is in fact *illata* or by *notitia illata*. As we see, in *notitia innata* we have the intuitionism of the Augustinian tradition, while in *notitia illata* we have the mediationalism of the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition. All of Campanella’s theodicy is essentially and vigorously the thesis of transcendence, creation, and providence. From this arises a theory of the world and of man in which the great ideas of finalism and spirituality reign supreme.
With regard to the world, Campanella, though enthusiastic about Galileo’s innovations, does not share either the Copernican theories or the general mechanistic inspiration. With regard to man, whose concept is supremely exalted in his philosophy, he vigorously defends—against the Aristotelian degeneration of his time (Pomponazzi)—freedom and immortality.
On these gnoseological and metaphysical foundations, his moral, social, and political philosophy take on a character at once humanistic and transcendent. For Campanella, the end of man is not bare virtue but self-preservation realized consummately in the attainment of the supreme good, which is God. Self-affection is radically theodicy, so that one must open oneself to Being and transcend the part in the triumph of the whole: universalism. Thus are explained the strong tones of a communism of goods, aimed at overcoming materialistic and immanentistic individualism, and even—though on the purely hypothetical plane of naturalness—the community of women. Campanella’s state, in its definitive thesis and not in the hypothesis represented by the *Città del Sole*, is a state of culture whose task is not itself in power but the advancement of man on the plane of spirituality. Nationalistic egoism must therefore be overcome and a balanced and fruitful cosmopolitanism affirmed.
The central problem, however, of Campanella’s speculation remains the religious one, for which the deistic interpretation from Amabile onward is well known. Fundamental works, such as the *Teologia* and the *Quod reminiscentur*, known to Amabile only by title and now in the possession of scholars, have confirmed the thesis of a plan of orthodoxy in Campanella’s religious doctrines. What to some critics appeared as a naturalistic reduction of Christianity has revealed itself rather as a powerful effort to lead to faith through rigorous rational labor, as is evident in the *Metafisica* and the *Atheismus triumphatus*. Campanella did not stop at natural religion (*religio indita*) but set out from it to invite acceptance, on the certainty of Christ’s divinity as the divine bond, of the revealed Christian datum (*religio addita* as *posita a Deo*). Catholic dogma, in Campanella’s conception, is entirely centered on Christ, the first incarnate Reason, whose kingship—magnified as in a continuous hymn in the *Monarchia Messiae*—reflects upon the primacy of the Supreme Pontiff before the Church and the states. Campanella’s effort of thought and action is entirely directed toward the attainment of Catholic unity, in which princes, ceding their states to the Pope, would be his counselors and delegates in governing the world, almost as in a society of nations. Thus cosmopolitanism took on a hierocratic hue, and Campanella’s thesis, contrary to various theories that could direct it otherwise, was that the Pope could act upon princes “directissime in omnibus.” In this doctrine is to be found, without doubt, the deep root of Spain’s implacable opposition to Campanella; Spanish moderates recognized it and advised the philosopher to moderate his theses. He, far from mitigating them, reaffirmed them ever more strongly, even courageously presenting them at the Sorbonne, notorious for its Gallican atmosphere, and in Richelieu’s house, where he was protected and supported.
A notable part of Campanella’s encyclopedic output is his poetry, particularly that of philosophical subject matter, in which he offers a sample of his poetics inspired by Neoplatonism and Christianity. Notable too are his pedagogical ideas, aimed at infusing into the school concreteness and activism, spiritual substance rather than humanistic form, Christian ideals rather than classical models. In Campanella’s view, culture—representing a great value in Christian humanism (“great fortune is the spirit, a greater possession than wealth”)—must be ever more widely diffused among the people, with due recognition of technical training. Thus, too, his conception of history is inspired by his grand ideas of return to God through return to origins: from the hierocracy of humanity’s first cry to the consummated hierocracy of a society of saints according to the design of the Apocalypse.
Despite its lacunae, difficulties, and inconsistencies, Campanella’s philosophy represents the greatest effort at synthesis achieved in the Renaissance between culture and faith. The philosopher’s personal failure does not correspond to a cultural failure, though Campanella, like Vico, remained an isolated figure in the history of thought.
Editions: Not all of C.’s works have been printed; of these we list those edited by C. himself unless more recent and therefore more accessible editions exist: *Philosophia sensibus demonstrata* (Naples 1591); *Monarchia Messiae* (Jesi 1633); *Atheismus triumphatus* (Paris 1636); *Disputationum in quattuor partes suae philosophiae realis* (*Philosophia realis e relative Quaestiones*) (ibid. 1637); *Philosophiae rationalis partes quinque* (ibid. 1638); *Metaphysicarum rerum iuxta propria dogmata partes tres* (ibid. 1638); *Monarchia di Spagna* (ed. D’Ancona, in *Opere di T. C.*, II, Turin 1854): R. De Mattei and L. Firpo announce a new edition of this work; *Del senso delle cose e della magia* (ed. Bruers, Bari 1925); *Lettere* (ed. Spampanato, ibid. 1925); *Theologia* (ed. Amerio for vol. I, Milan 1936); *Epilogo Magno* (ed. Ottaviano, Rome 1939); *Poesie* (ed. Gentile, Florence 1939); *Quod reminiscentur* (ed. Amerio for parts 1 and 2, Padua 1939); *La città del sole* (ed. Bobbio, Turin 1941); *Aforismi politici* with the annexed *Politica*, in Latin (ed. Firpo, ibid. 1941); *Anticeneti* (ed. Firpo, Florence 1945); *Discorsi ai principi d’Italia* (ed. Firpo, Turin 1945). A wide and convenient bibliographical repertory for C.’s works in their various versions, manuscripts, and printed editions—though in several points debatable—is that of L. Firpo, *Bibliografia degli scritti di T. C.* (ibid. 1940).
*Campanello* – Bronze of the 15th century. Brescia, Museo Civico Cristiano.