Tommaso Campanella

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Tommaso Campanella was an Italian Dominican friar, natural philosopher, poet, and practitioner of astral magic, born in Calabria in 1568 and dead in Paris in 1639 — a figure whose life ran almost entirely against the grain of the Counter- Reformation church he never formally left. He is remembered for two things that sit oddly together: a utopian dialogue, The City of the Sun, sketching a society governed by reason and the stars, and a record of imprisonment, heresy trials, and torture nearly without parallel among the thinkers of his age.

The shape of the life is the first fact about it. As a young friar Campanella absorbed the anti-Aristotelian natural philosophy of his fellow Calabrian Bernardino Telesio, who held that nature should be read from the senses rather than from the schools. The position drew the suspicion of the Inquisition early and never left him. In 1599 he was caught up in a conspiracy against Spanish rule in Calabria — part political revolt, part the conviction, fed by astrological and prophetic signs, that a great upheaval was due — and was arrested. Facing execution, he feigned madness under torture, which by the law of the time spared a madman the stake. He then spent roughly twenty-seven years in Neapolitan prisons. Most of his surviving work, including The City of the Sun, was written there.

That book describes an imagined commonwealth on a hill, ruled by a priest-king called Sol, or Metaphysic, beneath whom stand three princes named Power, Wisdom, and Love. Its citizens hold property and families in common, govern themselves by astrology and natural science, and carry their entire learning painted on the city’s concentric walls. Scholarship reads it variously — as a serious program of reform, as a thought-experiment, as a coded statement of the failed Calabrian rising recast in ideal form; the text supports more than one of these at once.

Campanella’s magic was of a piece with his cosmology. Following the astral medicine of Marsilio Ficino, he held the heavens to be alive and their influences real, and he composed a treatise, De fato siderali vitando (on escaping the fate dictated by the stars), on how their pull might be drawn off or turned aside. Late in life he was summoned to perform such rites for Pope Urban VIII, who feared an eclipse foretold his death — sealed in a room hung with white cloth, burning aromatic substances, playing music keyed to the benevolent planets. He also wrote, at real risk, in defense of Galileo, arguing that the new astronomy and Christian faith need not collide.

He was, then, neither simply a heretic nor simply a man of the church, neither a modern nor a medieval. He took the world to be a single living thing, legible by the senses and answerable, in part, to the one who knew how to read it — and he held to that through decades in which holding to anything cost him nearly everything. Released at last, he died in France under the protection of a king.

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