Tommaso Campanella
Tommaso Campanella, originally named Giovanni Campanella, was an influential philosopher and priest from southern Italy, born in 1568 to a poor shoemaker. Despite his humble beginnings and lack of formal education, he displayed remarkable intellectual abilities from a young age, which led him to join the Dominican order at fifteen. Campanella became known for his independent thinking and resistance to the Aristotelian doctrines prevalent in his studies. He engaged with various philosophical perspectives, including those of Plato and Bernardino Telesio, advocating for empirical investigation over reliance on established authority.
Throughout his life, Campanella faced significant opposition from the religious authorities due to his controversial views, which often blended elements of pantheism and Neoplatonism. His most famous work, "La città del sole" (City of the Sun), presents a utopian vision that challenges existing societal structures. Campanella spent nearly three decades imprisoned due to his radical ideas and political activism, yet he continued to write and influence philosophical thought. He is often regarded as a precursor to modern scientific inquiry and a challenger of religious orthodoxy, earning him the title of "the last great philosopher of the Renaissance." Campanella's life and works remain significant in discussions of early modern philosophy and the evolution of utopian thought.
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Tommaso Campanella
Italian philosopher, theologian, and poet
- Born: September 5, 1568
- Birthplace: Stilo, Kingdom of Naples (now in Italy)
- Died: May 21, 1639
- Place of death: Paris, France
Despite many years of imprisonment for religious and political nonconformity, Campanella wrote voluminous works promoting both philosophical speculation and scientific explorations. His book City of the Sun is recognized as one of the classics in utopian literature.
Early Life
Tommaso Campanella (tohm-MAHZ-oh kahm-pah-NEHL-lah), baptized with the name Giovanni Campanella, was the son of an illiterate shoemaker in a small town of southern Italy. At a young age, he impressed adults with his remarkable memory, and when five years old, he was able to repeat the sermons of the priests at church. Too poor to attend the local school, he first learned to read and write by listening outside the window of the school. By the age of thirteen, he had read all the Latin works available in his town.
Campanella was attracted to the Dominicans because of the great value they placed on preaching and on the scholarship of Saint Thomas Aquinas. In 1582, before his fifteenth birthday, he entered the nearby Dominican monastery as a novitiate. He later said that he entered the priesthood because there was no other way for a poor boy to pursue an intellectual career. When taking his priestly vows in 1583, he adopted the name Tommaso. He was then sent to the monastery of San Giorgio to study philosophy, which at that time concentrated almost entirely in the study of Aristotle. Soon he was demonstrating an independent spirit and resisting the efforts of his teachers at indoctrination.
In 1586, Campanella was transferred to the monastery at Nicastro. Increasingly, he grew dissatisfied with Aristotelian philosophy, particularly the doctrine of hylemorphism, which explained objects of nature as based on their underlying forms. He irritated his teachers with his constant arguments. Imbued with the questioning spirit of the late Renaissance, he read voraciously in the writings of ancient and contemporary philosophers, and he was particularly influenced by Plato and the Neoplatonic works of Marsilio Ficino. He also studied skeptical writers such as the ancient Greeks Pyrrho and Democritus. One night he cried as he thought about the logical weaknesses of the arguments for immortality of the soul.
Admitted to the theological seminary at Cosenza in 1588, Campanella became familiar with the writings of a local Humanist, Bernardino Telesio, whose views corresponded to his own. Telesio advocated the empirical study of nature rather than appealing to authority, and he accepted the validity of spiritual illumination. When the aging Humanist died before he could arrange a meeting, Campanella composed a Latin eulogy to the memory of “the prince of philosophers.” Transferred to the rural monastery at Altomonte, Campanella became indignant when he read Giacomo Marta’s book attacking Telesio’s principles. He felt compelled to write a response.
Life’s Work
In 1589, Campanella composed his first book, Philosophia sensibus demonstrata (pb. 1591; philosophy demonstrated by the senses). Defending Telesio as a Christian philosopher worthy of esteem, Campanella attacked Aristotle as an impious pagan who did not believe in an afterlife. He also asserted that contemporary Peripatetics, or Aristotelians, were heretics. Although the work did not deny any basic Christian doctrines, leaders of the Dominican order viewed it as an attack on their authority. Finding life at the monastery unpleasant, Campanella moved to the city of Naples, where he was received in the home of a nobleman, Mario del Tufo.
Naples was an exciting place for a curious young person from a small town. Campanella became actively associated with a famous author, Giambattista della Porta, whose circle conducted simple experiments in physics and magic. By the end of 1590, Campanella had written De sensu rerum et magia (pb. 1620; on the sense and feeling of all things and on magic), which became the most influential and widely ready of his philosophical works. It was here that he first recorded his developing pan-sensism, the speculative theory that the entire universe is alive and sentient. At the same time, he began to write a projected series of twenty books devoted to the philosophy of nature.
In May of 1592, Campanella was arrested after a fellow friar denounced him as a heretic practicing demoniac magic. Following a four-month trial, Dominican authorities in Naples pronounced a mild sentence, which included penitential prayer, affirmation of Aquinas’s theology, repudiation of Telesio, and a return to the monastery in Calabria. Instead of returning, however, Campanella traveled to Rome, Florence, and Padua in an unsuccessful effort to obtain a professorship in philosophy. In Padua in 1593, he established a friendship with Galileo and would later write a defense of Galileo’s investigations. Also, he was prosecuted in Padua on charges of homosexuality, but he was acquitted, His later poetry, however, suggests there might have been some truth to the “accusation.”
In this age of Counter-Reformation and Inquisition, Campanella’s views were considered dangerous. Although he defended basic Catholic doctrines on matters such as salvation, biblical miracles, and the seven sacraments, he tended to interpret doctrines metaphorically rather than literally. Inspired by Renaissance Neoplatonism, he asserted a form of pantheism, the idea that all reality is infused with a spiritual essence. Every human mind, moreover, makes up part of a larger whole, and spiritual knowledge comes not from the senses but from an innate self-awareness. This worldview was somewhat difficult to harmonize with the claims that Christianity possesses ultimate truth based on a unique revelation. In 1594, the Holy Office in Padua arrested Campanella and sent him to Rome for trial, where he was condemned to make a public adjuration. After another imprisonment in 1597-1598, he returned to the monastery of his native Stilo.
As the new century approached, Campanella began preaching that signs and prophecies were pointing to the coming of a millenarian government under the authority of the pope. To bring about this universal cleansing, he said it would be necessary to end Spanish rule in Naples and Calabria. The political and religious authorities of Italy would not tolerate such talk.
On September 6, 1599, Campanella, betrayed by friends, was arrested and taken to Naples in chains. During a series of trials, he was tortured four times on the rack—once for thirty-six hours. His feigning of insanity probably saved his life. On November 13, 1602, the Holy Office sentenced him to life imprisonment. He would spend twenty-seven years in prison, much of the time in dark dungeons.
During the trial, Campanella completed the most famous of his works, La città del sole (pb. 1623; City of the Sun , 1886), in which the captain of a merchant vessel describes a utopian society where everyone was happy and had the equal obligation to work four hours each day. The society had no nuclear families or private property, and it fused secular and religious authority. Campanella apparently envisioned the utopia as a model for a universal monarchy ruled by a priest-king.
After making numerous appeals to Rome for clemency, he was finally released by Pope Urban VIII in 1626. Campanella then moved into the monastery at Frascati, where he continued to write books that attracted the attention of the Inquisition. He was jailed once again in 1628-1629. When faced with even more accusations in 1634, King Louis XIII and Cardinal de Richelieu agreed to give him refuge in France, where he was awarded a pension and allowed to continue his writing. Occasionally, he praised Richelieu as possibly a universal ruler, but few people paid much attention. He was seventy years old when he died at the Dominican convent of St.-Honoré in Paris.
Significance
Sometimes called “the last great philosopher of the Renaissance,” Campanella was a major participant in the intellectual debates of his day, and he anticipated several philosophical currents of the next two centuries, including René Descartes’s method of universal doubt in the pursuit of knowledge. His challenges to the orthodoxies of his time encouraged others to question religious authority. Even though he practiced magic, his emphasis on empirical investigation of nature probably had some influence on the development of modern science.
His best-known work, City of the Sun, was not especially original, but it has attracted many admirers over the centuries. It is possible that Francis Bacon read the work before developing his own utopian vision.
Bibliography
Bonansea, Bernardino. Tommaso Campanella: Renaissance Pioneer of Modern Thought. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1969. Gives an adequate account of Campanella’s life and a useful analysis of his writings.
Campanella, Tommaso. The City of the Sun. Translated by A. M. Elliott and R. Millner. Introduction by A. L. Morton. West Nyack, N.Y.: Journeyman Press, 1981. Campanella’s best-known literary work, a utopian text.
Copenhaven, Brian, and Charles Schmitt. Renaissance Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. A favorable analysis of Campanella that emphasizes his scientific and anti-Aristotelian views.
Garber, Daniel, and Michael Ayers, eds. The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. 2 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. A standard work organized into broad philosophical themes, but not particularly helpful for the study of individual philosophers.
Headley, John. Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation of the World. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. An excellent examination of Campanella’s political and religious writings, within the context of the intellectual life of the century.
Manuel, Frank, and Fritzie Manuel. Utopian Thought in the Western World. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwood, 1979. A detailed account of the significant utopian writers from Plato to the late twentieth century. Highly recommended.
Tod, Ian, and Michael Wheeler. Utopias. New York: Harmony Books, 1977. Provides a good but relatively short summary of Campanella and other utopian thinkers, with many beautiful illustrations.
Walker, D. P. Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Demonstrates that magic was considered a respectable science from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries.