CAMPANELLA, TOMMASO. – Life and works. – Giovanni Domenico C., born in Stilo, Calabria, on 5 September 1568, entered the Dominican Order, changing his baptismal name to Tommaso, but remained dissatisfied with the convent’s official teaching, inspired by Aristotelianism, and sought in Telesianism the basis for a new philosophy of nature. He therefore encountered fierce hostility, which prompted him to travel throughout Italy in search of environments more suited to him, against the injunctions of his superiors; he was in Naples, Rome, Florence, and
(from T. C., Poesie, edited by G. Gentile, Florence 1939)
CAMPANELLA, TOMMASO – Portrait of the Neapolitan school
(17th century).
Padua; in Naples he published his first work, the Philosophia sensibus demonstrata, in which he opposed the abstractionism and dialecticism of the Aristotelians with a cosmology founded, in his view, on experience.
At Padua, implicated in trials of various kinds, C. conceived the plan of a confederation of European states headed by the Pope and set it forth in the work Monarchia christianorum (1593), to which he added a proposal for disciplinary reforms in the work De regimine Ecclesiae: both writings were lost. Firmly adhering to this hierocratic ideal, C. thought of bringing Spain into it as the armed arm, inviting the Italian states to accept Spanish supremacy in the Discorsi ai principi d'Italia. Transferred to Rome and condemned in 1596 to abjuration de vehementi haeresis suspicione, he was forced to return to Calabria (1597); in March 1598 we find him in Naples, where he completed a brief treatise on the philosophy of nature and ethics, the Epilogo Magno, and observed the wretched condition of the people; his fixed idea, however, was that caesaropapist Spain ought fully to recognize papal supremacy and constitute its armed arm.
Having returned 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 at once to exalt Spain and invite it to recognize papal supremacy: the Monarchia di Spagna. He perceived a serious obstacle to the desired hierocratic unity: the Kingdom of Naples, a papal fief in Spanish hands, the apple of discord among the European powers in their struggle for predominance in the Mediterranean, and the root of their weakness in the face of the Turkish threat; he therefore conceived the idea of returning the kingdom to the Pope’s direct authority and for this purpose sought to come to an understanding with discontented friars
and ambitious laymen. The affair had all the appearance of a conspiracy, even though C. did not desire direct and violent action; but the Spanish officials regarded it as a conspiracy, indeed as a rebellion, and suppressed it as such.
On 6 September 1599, following a denunciation by two pro-Spanish men, C., together with others who shared his views, was arrested and, after several preliminary investigations, taken to Naples. There, amid jurisdictional disputes, threats against accomplices who gave evidence, public executions for conspiracy, and torture, the trials proceeded slowly; in addition to the conspiracy trial, a trial for heresy was instituted because, by their customary method, the Spaniards and their Italian officials in Naples branded their political opponents as heretics. C.’s desire to be judged by an ecclesiastical tribunal was an additional factor, and for this reason he caused the trial to be directed toward the charge of heresy. No sentence was ever issued against C. in the conspiracy trial; as for the heresy trial, they were unable to make him convinced or confessing even after the exceedingly painful torture of the vigil, which lasted about forty hours; nevertheless, on account of the grave though questionable depositions, the Holy Office issued its sentence on 13 November 1602: «Omnino retineatur in carceribus S. Officii absque spe liberationis». There was no degradation and delivery to the secular arm, and therefore C. was not judged relapsus; this demonstrates that, for the Holy Office, C. was certainly not a heretic; the sentence of perpetual imprisonment in fact amounted to only a few years in prison. The Spanish authorities were careful not to hand the condemned man over to the Holy Office, for fear that he might be released; and C. was moved from one castle in Naples to another until 1626, in an imprisonment that at times became horrific. His autobiographical poems accurately portray C.’s painful situation, as he invoked pity everywhere and was prevented from realizing his dream of hierocratic unity.
The impediment to action, however, was matched by a productive literary activity. The year 1602 saw the Aforismi politici and the celebrated Città del sole; in the former C. outlined a scientific treatment of politics, while in the latter he depicted a hypothetical natural state, founded on a strong sense of sociability and, in its obedience to reason, open to Christianity. The De sensu rerum et magio, in which panpsychist theories are expounded, dates from 1603; 1605 saw the Monarchia Messiae, a solemn celebration of the centrality and kingship of Christ and of the papacy; 1606 saw the Antiveneti, in which Venice’s claims against the papacy are challenged; and 1607 saw the Atheismus triumphatus, an apologetic treatise introducing Christianity, whose connection with reason and nature, without reducing it to them, is demonstrated against the relativistic historicism of Averroistic and Machiavellian inspiration.
Meanwhile, amid continual insistent petitions for release, the confiscation of notes and manuscripts, and visits from learned Italian and foreign men—including the celebrated G. Schopp and T. Adami—C. continued his work. By 1613 the Philosophia rationalis (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, poetics, historiography) and the Realis philosophia epilogistica (a treatise on natural and anthropological philosophy with remarks on ethics, almost a translation of the Epilogo Magno), together with extensive and numerous Quaestiones, were complete; but the principal works remain the Metafisica, the Teologia, and the Quod reminiscentur: the first (Metaphysicarum rerum iuxta propria dogmata partes tres) is a powerful and at times unwieldy treatise on metaphysics and epistemology, whose beginnings date back to the philosopher’s youth and whose definitive drafting belongs to 1614; the second (Theologiorum libri XXX) is a grand exposition of Catholic dogma, conceived already in his youth but completed in 1624; the third is a singular collection of messages addressed to the whole world, urging the conversion and realization of the unum ovile and the unus pastor in the return (reminiscence) to God: it might be called the code of Catholic missionary activity. Nor should the Apologia pro Galilæo of 1615 be forgotten, in which, moreover, the astronomer’s defence against the attacks of others did not entail the philosopher’s acceptance 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. Once he had definitively regained his freedom, C., still engaged in doctrinal controversies with his Dominican brethren, worked along three lines: the establishment of a college to train missionaries (he did not succeed, though the philosopher may perhaps have had some merit in the establishment of the College of Propaganda Fide), the approval of his works, and rapprochement with France, which was to replace Spain in the role of the Church’s armed arm; Pope Urban VIII treated him with great kindness, despite knowing of the opposition to the philosopher held by his two cardinal nephews. The discovery of a conspiracy organized in Naples against Spain by a Dominican disciple of C. prompted that government to request the philosopher’s extradition from the Pope; Urban did not hand him over, but with the protection of French diplomats succeeded in having him emigrate to France, where C., esteemed and honored by politicians and scholars, devoted himself chiefly to the printing of some works, the conversion of heretics, and providing political and doctrinal counsel to Richelieu’s France; he continued writing on foreign soil; his final composition, the Ecloga for the birth of the Dauphin, was the ultimate expression of a hierocratic dream of reform that had pursued him throughout his life. On 21 May 1639 C. ended «in pace tanti guai».
The character of C. was complex: rich in intelligence, but even richer in imagination; a formidable knower of almost all the sources of the culture of his time; ardent, yet proud and restless; tenacious, yet impulsive; sincere and not dissembling, as his best-known biographer, L. Amabile, believed he was; devoted to the Church even amid his desire for cultural, social, and disciplinary reform; indeed, all the more ardent in pursuit of reform the more closely bound to the substantive orthodoxy of the Council of Trent and to the historical glory of the papacy. German Protestants and Italian royalists (Giannone) persecuted him bitterly, while the anticlerical atmosphere prevailing in certain sectors of nineteenth-century culture later sought to portray him as a rebel against the Church. In recent times the thesis of his orthodoxy has become increasingly well established; nevertheless, some (Amerio, Firpo) distinguish two periods in C.’s life: heterodox until 1602–1603, orthodox until his death; others (Déjob, De Mattei, Bruers), by contrast, uphold the unity and continuity of the orthodoxy of Campanella’s thought. The latter position has received the greater support.
Thought. — On the theoretical plane, C.’s horizon is a new philosophical synthesis, inspired by St. Augustine and St. Thomas, through 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, which illuminates and governs the entire Campanellian system. For C., reality is being, in keeping with Thomistic Aristotelianism; but being possesses an internal dialectic constituted by three primalities: power, wisdom, and love, in keeping with the Augustinian triad of passe, nasse e selle; upon these primalities rest the classical transcendental properties, which culminate in unity.
Being, whose concept is analogical, finds its limit in nothingness, and the finite multiplicity is structured and justified by the synthesis of the two.
Campanella’s theory of knowledge rests upon the intimate self-presence of being, particularly in the human soul. C.’s awareness of the critical foundation of knowledge is exceedingly vivid: the fourteen Dubitationes, which constitute the aporetic premise for establishing a firm knowledge in its grasp of being, provide a lively expression of II. Doubt is overcome by self-consciousness, through which the soul becomes aware of 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 abditi); heteroknowledge is secured on the basis of self-knowledge, just as heterolove functions in relation to self-love. From this conception of knowledge, as a rather immediate grasp of being, derives C.’s exaltation of the sensus, which is not sensationalism but a torment of immediacy. It is this immediacy, joined to concreteness, that makes C. unsympathetic, indeed hostile, to the abstractionism of the Aristotelian tradition and leads him to re-evaluate the Platonic idea as the intimate meaning of each reality. The intellectus, accordingly, acquires, rather than the character of an abstracting faculty, the features of the Platonic-mystical tradition of an intimate penetration of the real; from this derives the devaluation of mathematical knowledge and the preference for metaphysical knowledge over physical knowledge, which remains confined to the phenomenology of nature.
Self-knowledge and self-love are knowledge and love of being, but more profoundly of Being, of which the finite is a participation; hence the ascent to the Absolute. Through the notitia innata, God is immediately present to the human spirit; but the obscuring and disturbance produced by the notitia illata of the other than the soul make the thesis of God’s existence in need of demonstration. Thus knowledge of God, although radically innata, is in fact illata, or attained through notitia illata. As can be seen, in the notitia innata we find the intuitionism of the Augustinian tradition, while in the notitia illata we find the mediacy of the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition. The whole of Campanellian theodicy is essentially and vigorously a thesis of transcendence, creation, and providence. From this arises a theory of the world and of man, in which the great ideas of finality and spirituality exercise sovereign dominion. As regards the world, C., although enthusiastic about the Galilean novelties, did not feel able to share either the Copernican theories or their general mechanistic inspiration; as regards man, whose concept is of the highest importance in the philosophy of the man from Stilo, C. strenuously defended freedom and immortality against the degenerate Aristotelianism of his time (Pomponazzi).
On these epistemological and metaphysical foundations, moral, social, and political philosophy possesses a character that is at once humanistic and transcendent. For C., the end of man is not bare virtue, but self-preservation consummately realized in the attainment of the supreme good, which is God; self-love is radically love of God, and therefore one must open oneself toward Being and overcome the part in the triumph of the whole: universalism. Thus one can explain the strong tones of a communism of goods, intended to overcome materialistic and immanentistic individualism, and also—although solely on the level of a hypothetical natural condition—of the common ownership of women. The Campanellian state, in the definitive thesis and not in the hypothesis represented by the City of the
Sun, is a state of culture, whose task is not its own power but the progress 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 Campanellian speculation remains the religious one, for which the deistic interpretation, beginning with Amabile, is well known. Fundamental works such as the Theology and the Quod reminiscentur, known to Amabile only by title but now available to scholars, have supported the thesis of the complete orthodoxy of the religious doctrines of the man from Stilo. What had appeared to some critics as a naturalistic reduction of Christianity has proved instead to be a powerful effort to lead toward faith through rigorous rational work, as can be observed in the Metaphysics and the Atheismus triumphatus. C. did not stop at natural religion (religio indita), but set out from it in order to invite acceptance—on the certainty of Christ’s divinity, the divine bond—of the revealed Christian datum (religio addita as posita a Deo). In the Campanellian conception, Catholic dogmatics is wholly centered on Christ, the first uncreated and incarnate Reason, whose kingship, magnified as in a continuous hymn in the Monarchia Messiae, is reflected in the primacy of the Supreme Pontiff before the Church and the states. Campanella’s entire intellectual and practical endeavor can be traced to the attainment of Catholic unity, in which the princes, surrendering their states to the Pontiff, would become his counselors and delegates in the governance of the world, almost as in a society of nations. Cosmopolitanism was therefore colored by hierocracy, and C.’s thesis, contrary to the various theories of indirect power, was that the Pope could act upon princes «diretissime in omnibus». In this doctrine one must undoubtedly find the deep root of Spain’s implacable aversion toward C. Serene-minded Spaniards recognized this and advised the philosopher to moderate his theses; instead of moderating them, he reaffirmed them ever more forcefully, until he boldly expounded them at the Sorbonne, a setting famously marked by Gallicanism, and in the house of Richelieu, who protected and subsidized him.
A noteworthy part of Campanella’s encyclopedic output consists of the Poesie, particularly those dealing with philosophical subjects, in which an example is offered of his poetic art inspired by Neoplatonism and Christianity. Also noteworthy are his pedagogical ideas, intended to impart concreteness and activism to the school, spiritual substance rather than humanistic form, and Christian ideals rather than classical models; in the C.’s view, culture, which represents a great value in a Christian humanism (“great fortune is knowing, a possession greater than having”), must be increasingly disseminated among the people, in the proper recognition of technical training. Thus, too, the C.’s conception of history is inspired by his great ideas concerning the return to God through a return to origins: from the initial hierocracy of humanity’s first cry to the consummate hierocracy of a society of saints according to the design of the Apocalisse.
Despite its shortcomings, difficulties, and lack of coherence, the C.’s philosophy represents the greatest effort at synthesis carried out in the Renaissance between culture and faith; the philosopher’s personal failure is not matched by cultural failure, although the C., like Vico, remained an isolated figure in the history of thought.
Editions: The C.’s works have not all been printed; of these, we list those edited by the C. himself when more recent and hence more readily obtainable editions do not exist; Philosophia sensibus demonstrata (Naples 1591); Monarchia Messiae (Jesi 1633); Atheismus triumphatus (Paris 1636); Disputationum in quattuor partes suae philosophiae realis (Philosophia realis and related Quaestiones) (there 1637); Philosophiae rationalis partes quinque (there 1638); Metaphysicarum rerum iuxta propria dogmata partes tres (there 1638); Monarchia di Spagna (ed. D'Ancona, in Opere di T. C., II, Turin 1854): for this work R. De Mattei and L. Firpo promise a new edition; Del senso delle cose e della magia (ed. Bruers, Bari 1925); Lettere (ed. Spampanato, there 1925); Theologia (ed. Amerio for book 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 appended Politica, in Latin (ed. Firpo, there 1941); Antiveneti (ed. Firpo, Florence 1945); Discorsi ai principi d'Italia (ed. Firpo, Turin 1945). A vast and convenient bibliographical repertory of the C.’s works in their composition, manuscripts, and printed editions, although debatable in several respects, is L. Firpo’s Bibliografia degli scritti di T. C. (there 1940).
31 (1939), pp. 368–87; id., C., Brescia 1947; G. Di Napoli, T. C., filosofo della restaurazione cattolica, Padua 1947: chapter I of the volume contains the whole historiography of Campanella from the seventeenth century to 1942. Giovanni di Napoli