Campanella, Tommaso

CAMPANELLA, TOMMASO. - Life and works. - Giovanni Domenico C. was born at Stilo, in Calabria, on 5 September 1568; he entered the Dominican Order, changing his baptismal name to 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 therefore encountered fierce hostility, which drove him to travel through Italy in search of more congenial circles, 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 to the abstractionism and dialecticism of the Aristotelians a cosmology founded, in his opinion, on experience.

In Padua, implicated in trials of various kinds, C. meditated on the design of a confederation of European states headed by the Pope and set it out in the writing Monarchia christianorum (1593), to which he added the proposal of disciplinary reforms in the writing De regimine Ecclesiae: both writings were lost. Firm in this hierocratic ideal, C. thought of having Spain adhere to it as the armed arm, inviting the Italian states to accept Spanish supremacy with the Discorsi ai principi d'Italia. Taken 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 composes a brief treatise on the philosophy of nature and on ethics, the Epilogo Magno, and observes the sad conditions of the people; his fixed idea, however, is that Caesaro-papist Spain must fully recognize pontifical 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 the same time to exalt Spain and invite it to recognize papal supremacy: the Monarchia di Spagna. He perceived a grave obstacle to the longed-for hierocratic unity: it was the kingdom of Naples, a pontifical fief in the hands of Spain, the apple of discord among the European powers for predominance in the Mediterranean, the root of their weakness in the face of the Turkish threat; there therefore flashed upon him the thought of bringing the kingdom back under the direct dependence of the Pope, and for this he sought to come to an understanding with discontented friars and with ambitious laymen. The affair had every appearance of a conspiracy, even if C. did not desire direct and violent action; but the Spanish officials regarded it as a conspiracy, indeed as rebellion, and as such they suppressed it.

On 6 Sept. 1599, on the basis of a denunciation by two pro-Spaniards, C., together with others of his persuasion, was arrested and, after several preliminary trials, taken to Naples. Here, amid jurisdictional disputes, threats to the accomplices who were testifying, public executions for conspiracy and tortures, the trials went forward slowly; in addition to the trial for conspiracy, that for heresy was instituted because, by the well-known method, the Spaniards and their Italian officials in Naples made their political adversaries pass for heretics. There was added C.'s desire to be judged by an ecclesiastical tribunal, for which reason he had the trial directed toward the charge of heresy. There was never a sentence for the conspiracy trial as regards C.; as for the heresy trial, moreover, it was not possible to make him convinced or confessed even after the most painful torment of the vigil lasting about forty hours; however, because of the grave though debatable depositions, the Holy Office on 13 Nov. 1602 issued the condemnation: «Omnino retineatur in carceribus S. Officii absque spe liberationis». There was no degradation and handing over to the secular arm, and therefore C. was not judged relapsus; which demonstrates that for the Holy Office C. was certainly not a heretic; the condemnation to perpetual imprisonment was in fact reduced to a few years of prison. The Spanish authorities took good care not to hand the condemned man over to the Holy Office for fear that he might be set free; and C. was transferred from one castle to another in Naples until 1626 in an imprisonment that at times became horrible. His poems of an autobiographical character well portray the painful situation of C., invoking pity everywhere and prevented from realizing his dream of hierocratic unity.

To the impediment of action, however, there corresponded a fruitful activity as a writer. To 1602 belong the Aforismi politici and the celebrated Città del sole; in the former C. outlined a scientific treatment of politics, in the latter he outlined a hypothetical natural state, founded on a strong sense of sociality and open, in its deference to reason, to Christianity. To 1603 belongs the De sensu rerum et magia, in which the panpsychist theories are set forth; of 1605 is the Monarchia Messiae, a solemn celebration of the centrality and kingship of Christ and of the papacy; of 1606 are the Antiveneti, in which the claims of Venice against the papacy are combated; of 1607 is the Atheismus triumphatus, an apologetic treatise of introduction to Christianity, of which is demonstrated, against the relativistic historicism of Averroist and Machiavellian stamp, its welding with reason and nature without reduction to them.

Meanwhile, amid continual insistent supplications for liberation, seizures of notes and manuscripts, visits from learned Italians and foreigners (among whom were the celebrated G. Schopp and T. Adami), C. continued in his production. Complete by 1613 were the Philosophia rationalis (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, poetics, historiography), the Realis philosophia epilogistica (a treatise on natural and anthropological philosophy with hints of ethics, almost the translation of the Epilogo Magno) with attached ample and numerous Quaestiones; 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 cluttered treatise on metaphysics and gnoseology, whose first beginnings are owed to the philosopher's youth and whose definitive drafting to 1614; the second (Theologiorum libri XXX) is a grandiose exposition of Catholic dogmatics, designed already in youth but brought to completion in 1624; the third is a singular collection of messages to the whole world to hasten the conversion to Catholicism and the realization of the unum ovile and the unus pastor in the return (reminiscence) to God: one could call it the code of Catholic missionary zeal. The Apologia pro Galilæo of 1615 must not be forgotten, in which, moreover, the defense of the astronomer from the attacks of others did not entail the acceptance of Copernican doctrines on the part of the philosopher.

Finally liberated from the Neapolitan prison (1626), C. was transferred to Rome and shut up in the Holy Office until 27 July 1628. Having regained definitive freedom, C., still in doctrinal polemics with his Dominican confreres, worked along three lines: the erection of a college to prepare missionaries (he did not succeed, but perhaps the philosopher has had merits as regards the erection of the college of Propaganda Fide), the approval of his works and the rapprochement with France, which was to replace Spain in the function of armed arm of the Church; Pope Urban VIII treated him with much kindness although he knew of the opposition that the two cardinal-nephews had for the philosopher. The discovery of a conspiracy hatched in Naples against Spain by a Dominican disciple of C. pushed that government to ask the Pope for the philosopher's extradition; Urban did not hand him over, but with the protection of the French diplomats he managed to make him emigrate to France, where C., esteemed and honored by politicians and scholars, occupied himself chiefly with the printing of some works, with the conversion of heretics and with political-doctrinal counsel to the France of Richelieu; he wrote still more in a foreign land; 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».

The character of C. was complex; rich in intellect, but even richer in imagination; a formidable connoisseur of almost all the sources of the culture of his time; ardent, but proud and restless; tenacious, but impulsive; sincere and no dissembler, as his best-known biographer, L. Amabile, believed he was presenting him; devoted to the Church even in his yearning for a cultural, social and disciplinary reform; indeed, the more ardent for reforms the more bound he was to the substantial orthodoxy of the Council of Trent and to the historical glory of the papacy. German Protestants and Italian regalists (Giannone) raged against him, while later the anticlerical atmosphere of certain sectors of culture in the last century sought to make him appear a rebel against the Church. In recent times the thesis of his orthodoxy has become ever more firmly established; however, some (Amerio, Firpo) distinguish two periods in C.'s life: heterodox until 1602-1603, orthodox until his death; others instead (Déjob, De Mattei, Bruers) stand for the unity and orthodox continuity of Campanellian thought; this latter position has the greater 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 a decadent Scholasticism. The synthesis between Augustine and Thomas is evident in the central concept of reality that illuminates and governs the entire Campanellian 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 triadism of posse, nosse and velle; on these primalities rest the classic transcendental properties that culminate in unity.

The entity, whose concept is analogical, finds its limit in nothingness, and from their respective synthesis the finite manifold is structured and justified.

On the intimate self-presence of the entity, particularly in the human soul, rests the Campanellian theory of knowledge. The awareness of the critical foundation of knowing is most vivid in C.: the fourteen Dubitationes, constituting the aporetic instance premised on the positing of a knowing firm in its grasp of being, are a lively expression of it; doubt is overcome by the self-consciousness with which the soul perceives a radical presence of itself to itself (notitia innata or indita, sensus inditus) obscured by the knowledge of the other than itself (notitia aliorum as notitia addita or illata which renders the notitia innata abditi); hetero-knowledge is preserved on the basis of self-knowledge, just as hetero-love functions by virtue of self-love. From this prospect of knowing, as a rather immediate grasp of being, derives in C. the exaltation of the sensus, which is not sensism, but a torment of immediacy. It is this immediacy, united with concreteness, that makes C. little tender, indeed hostile, toward the abstractionism of the Aristotelian tradition and leads him to revalue the Platonic idea as the intimate meaning of each reality; the intellectus, thus, more than an abstracting faculty, acquires the characteristics of the Platonic-mystical tradition of intimate penetration of the real, from which derives the devaluation of mathematical knowledge and the preference for metaphysical over physical knowledge, which stays fixed at the phenomenology of nature.

Self-knowledge and self-love is knowledge and love of being, but more profoundly of Being, of which the finite is a participation; whence the ascent to the Absolute. With 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 render the thesis of God's existence in need of demonstration; and therefore the knowledge of God, although radically innate, is, in fact, illata or through notitia illata. As can be seen, in the notitia innata we are at the intuitionism of the Augustinian tradition, in the notitia illata we are at the mediatism of the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition. The whole of Campanellian theodicy is essentially and vigorously the thesis of transcendence, of creation, of providence. Hence a theory of the world and of man, in which the great ideas of finalism and spirituality reign supreme. As regards the world, C., though enthusiastic about Galilean novelties, does not feel able to share either its Copernican theories or its general mechanistic inspiration; as regards man, whose concept is most lofty in the philosophy of the man from Stilo, C. strenuously defends freedom and immortality against the degenerate Aristotelianism of his time (Pomponazzi).

On these gnoseo-metaphysical foundations, moral, social and political philosophy have a character at once humanistic and transcendent. The end of man is for C. not naked virtue, but self-preservation realized consummately in the attainment of the supreme good which is God; self-love is radically theo-love, for which one must open oneself toward Being and overcome the part in the triumph of the whole: universalism. Thus are explained the strong tones of a communism of goods, for the purpose of overcoming materialistic and immanentistic individualism, and also, though on the purely hypothetical plane of a natural state, of the community 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 itself in 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 from Amabile onward is very well known. Fundamental works, such as the Theologia and the Quod reminiscentur, known to Amabile only by title and today, instead, in the possession of scholars, have supported the thesis of a full orthodoxy of the religious doctrines of the man from Stilo. What had appeared to some critics as a naturalistic reduction of Christianity has revealed itself rather as a powerful effort to lead to the faith through a rigorous rational labor, as can be observed in the Metaphysica and in the Atheismus triumphatus; C. did not stop at natural religion (religio indita), but from it he set out to invite acceptance, on the certainty of the divinity of Christ, divine bond, of the revealed Christian datum (religio addita as posita a Deo). Catholic dogmatics, in the Campanellian conception, is entirely centered on Christ, 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 over the Church and the States; the Campanellian effort of thought and action is entirely reducible to the attainment of Catholic unity, in which princes, ceding their States to the Pontiff, would have been his counselors and delegates in the government of the world, almost in a society of nations; cosmopolitanism was thus colored with 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 is to be found, without any doubt, the deep root of Spain's implacable aversion toward C.; serene Spaniards recognized it and advised the philosopher to mitigate his theses; he, rather than mitigating them, reaffirmed them ever more, to the point of courageously expounding them at the Sorbonne, a most notorious atmosphere of Gallicanism, and in the house of Richelieu who protected and subsidized him.

A notable part of Campanella's encyclopedic output are the Poesie, particularly those on philosophical subjects, in which a sample of his poetics, inspired by Neoplatonism and Christianity, is offered. His pedagogical ideas are also noteworthy, aimed at instilling in the school concreteness and activism, a spiritualistic substance rather than a humanistic form, Christian ideals rather than classical models; in C.'s opinion, culture, which represents a great value in a Christian humanism ("gran fortuna è l' saper, possesso grande più dell'aver"), must be ever more widely diffused among the people in the just recognition of technical training. And so C.'s conception of history is inspired by his great ideas of the return to God through the return to origins: from the initial hierocracy of humanity's first cry to the consummated hierocracy of a sociality of saints according to the design of the Apocalypse.

Even with its gaps and its difficulties and disconnectedness, C.'s philosophy represents the greatest effort of synthesis carried out in the Renaissance between culture and faith; the philosopher's personal failure does not correspond to a cultural failure, although C. remained, like Vico, an isolated figure in the history of thought.

Editions: The works of C. are not all printed; of these we indicate those edited by C. himself where there are no more recent and therefore more traceable editions; Philosophia sensibus demonstrata (Naples 1591); Monarchia Messiae (Jesi 1633); Atheismus triumphatus (Paris 1636); Disputationum in quattuor partes suae philosophiae realis (Philosophia realis and the related 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): of 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, ibid. 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 Politica appended, in Latin (ed. Firpo, ibid. 1941); Antiveneti (ed. Firpo, Florence 1945); Discorsi ai principi d'Italia (ed. Firpo, Turin 1945). A vast and convenient bibliographical repertory for C.'s works in their drafting, in manuscripts and in print, though debatable in several points, is that of L. Firpo, Bibliografia degli scritti di T. C. (ibid. 1940).

Giovanni di Napoli