Tommaso Campanella

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Tommaso Campanella was an Italian Dominican friar, natural philosopher, poet, and practitioner of astral magic, born in the Calabrian hill town of Stilo 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. Baptized Giovanni Domenico, he took the name Tommaso when he entered the Dominican order around the age of fifteen, in homage to Thomas Aquinas, the order’s great schoolman; the irony is that nearly everything he went on to write would set him against the Aristotelian scholasticism that Aquinas had Christianized.

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 — from heat and cold, the two active principles working upon a passive matter — rather than from the categories of the schools. Campanella read Telesio’s De rerum natura iuxta propria principia and, the story runs, traveled to Cosenza to meet him only to find the old philosopher already dead. His first book, Philosophia sensibus demonstrata (1591) — philosophy demonstrated by the senses — was a defense of the Telesian program written when he was barely past twenty. The position drew the suspicion of the Inquisition early and never left him; he was denounced, examined, and confined more than once through the 1590s, accused among other things of owing his learning to a familiar spirit rather than to study. The charge that a man’s intelligence must be diabolical in origin would shadow him for life.

The Calabrian rising

In 1599 Campanella was caught up in a conspiracy against Spanish rule in Calabria — part political revolt against a crushing imperial taxation, part the conviction, fed by astrological and prophetic signs, that a great upheaval was due. He had read the conjunctions of 1603 and the comets and the talk of a coming age, and concluded that the time was ripe for the founding of a new commonwealth, a theocratic republic in the toe of Italy with himself, it seems, at its prophetic head. The plot was betrayed before it could rise. Arrested and shipped to Naples, facing a capital charge of both heresy and sedition, he did the one thing that could save him: he feigned madness. By the law of the time a madman could not be sent to the stake, since a confession extracted from the insane was void — but the court suspected the madness was counterfeit and set out to break it. He was put to the torture seven times, the last and most terrible being the veglia, the waking, in which the prisoner was suspended over a spike and kept from sleep for some forty hours. He held. The performance, sustained under that, persuaded the judges, and the stake was exchanged for life imprisonment.

He then spent roughly twenty-seven years in Neapolitan prisons, moved among the fortresses of the city — Castel Sant’Elmo, Castel Nuovo, Castel dell’Ovo — and for a stretch kept in a lightless pit. It was there, in irons, that the greater part of his enormous output was written: a Metaphysica, a vast Theologia, a defense of monarchy in the Monarchia di Spagna, the apologetic Atheismus triumphatus, the natural-philosophical De sensu rerum et magia — on the feeling-with-which all things are endowed — and the work that has carried his name furthest, The City of the Sun.

The City of the Sun

Composed in Italian in 1602, in the first year of his captivity, and later recast by its author in Latin as Civitas Solis (printed at Frankfurt in 1623), the dialogue is told by a Genoese sea-captain to a Knight Hospitaller. It describes an imagined commonwealth on a hill in the tropics, built as seven concentric rings of wall — named for the seven planets — rising to a temple at the summit. The city is ruled by a priest-king called Sol, or Metaphysic, supreme in things temporal and spiritual alike; beneath him stand three princes of equal authority named Power, Wisdom, and Love. Power has charge of war and peace; Wisdom of all the arts and sciences; Love of breeding, food, clothing, and the health of the citizens. The Solarians hold property and families in common — there is no private household, no mine-and-thine to breed the greed Campanella took to be the root of every social ill — and the pairing of men and women for children is arranged, by Love’s officers, according to physical fitness and the favorable disposition of the heavens. They govern themselves by astrology and natural science, sow and reap and marry by the stars, and labor only some four hours a day, the rest given to learning and to contemplation. Most striking of all, they carry their entire body of knowledge painted on the city’s concentric walls — mathematics on one ring, the kinds of stones and metals on another, the beasts, the herbs, the trades, the heavens themselves — so that a child walking the circuit learns the whole of the sciences from the stones before it can read. The wall is the curriculum.

The book reads more than one way at once, and was meant to. It is a serious program of reform in the line of Plato’s Republic and Thomas More’s Utopia; it is a thought-experiment in a city ordered wholly by nature and reason; and it is, beneath the surface, the failed Calabrian rising recast in ideal form — the theocratic sun-commonwealth he had hoped to raise in the real Calabria, transposed to a place that could not be put to the question. Its closing pages turn frankly prophetic, reading in the conjunctions and the new stars of the age the sign of a universal renovation near at hand. The dialogue circulated widely in Latin and made Campanella, for later readers, the first of the modern utopians and a forerunner of the City of the Sun that the Tübingen circle and the pansophists would echo — Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis among them, carried north when Tobias Adami brought Campanella’s manuscripts to Germany in the years around 1611–13.

Living heavens and the rite for Urban VIII

Campanella’s magic was of a piece with his cosmology. He took the whole world to be ensouled and sentient — the doctrine of his De sensu rerum, that sense and feeling run through all things, stones and stars no less than animals — and the heavens above all to be alive, their light a vehicle of real influence pouring down upon the sublunary world. Here he was the heir of Marsilio Ficino, whose De vita coelitus comparanda had taught how to draw the benign spiritus of the planets into the body and the spirit through things attuned to them — through talismans, aromatics, light, and music keyed to a given star. From that Ficinian astral medicine Campanella took the premise of a treatise, De fato siderali vitando — on escaping the fate dictated by the stars — which argues that since God left no peril without a remedy, the malign pull of a bad sky might be drawn off, screened, or counterfeited by gathering about oneself the influences of the good planets instead.

Late in life this brought him into the chamber of a frightened pope. Urban VIII, the Barberini who had once been his protector, lived in dread of astrological predictions that an eclipse foretold his death, predictions his enemies were circulating to hasten the event. In 1628 he summoned Campanella to perform the remedy of the De fato. The architecture of the rite was Ficinian throughout: a room sealed against the outer air and hung with white cloth, the doors shut against the eclipse; aromatic woods and herbs — laurel, myrtle, rosemary — burning; lamps and torches kindled to stand for the Sun, the Moon, and the five planets, the room made into a little uninfected heaven; and music played and sung in the modes of Jupiter and Venus, the two benefic planets, to gather their good influence in the place of the bad. It is best understood not as a charm against God’s order but as a screen interposed within it — a private, unthreatened sky built indoors while the threatening one passed over. Urban outlived the eclipse, and the friar’s standing at the curia held a while longer.

Campanella also wrote, at real risk, in defense of Galileo Galilei. His Apologia pro Galileo, drafted from his cell in 1616 and printed at Frankfurt in 1622, argued that the new astronomy and Christian faith need not collide — that the freedom to philosophize, libertas philosophandi, served rather than threatened Scripture, since the book of nature and the book of revelation have one Author and cannot contradict. That a condemned heretic in a Spanish prison should publish, through a Protestant press and without license, a defense of the most watched scientist in Europe is of a piece with the whole shape of the man.

Sources and afterlife

The standard modern life is John M. Headley’s Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation of the World (Princeton, 1997), which sets the prophetic politics and the magic in a single frame; Léon Blanchet’s older Campanella (Paris, 1920) remains a substantial study, and Germana Ernst’s entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives the current scholarly account of the works and trials. The astral magic was placed at the center of Renaissance studies by D. P. Walker’s Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (Warburg Institute, 1958), whose title names Campanella as the terminus of the Ficinian tradition; the rite for Urban VIII is reconstructed there in detail. Frances Yates, in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), read both Campanella and Bruno as magi of a single Hermetic current descending from the Corpus Hermeticum and the prisca theologia — a reading later scholarship has narrowed but not erased. The City of the Sun is available in the public-domain English of Thomas W. Halliday (1885) through Project Gutenberg, and Campanella’s own Apologia pro Galileo has been edited and translated by Michel-Pierre Lerner (Belles Lettres, 2001). He is one of the medallions on Ettore Ferrari’s monument to Bruno in the Campo de’ Fiori — enrolled, two and a half centuries after his death, in a secular martyrology he would not have recognized as his own.

Released at last in the late 1620s and brought to Rome, then driven out again when a fresh Calabrian plot implicated his name, Campanella fled in 1634 to France, where Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIII received him with favor and granted him a pension; he passed his last years in the Dominican convent on the rue Saint-Honoré in Paris. There, in 1638, he cast the horoscope of the newborn dauphin who would become Louis XIV, and composed for him a Latin eclogue foretelling a golden age and the return of the City of the Sun. He died the following May, by some accounts having tried to avert by his own art an eclipse he feared would carry him off.

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.

→ Related: Paracelsus · Neoplatonism · Hermes Trismegistus · Marsilio Ficino · Giordano Bruno · Galileo Galilei · Astrology · Renaissance Magic · Astral Talismanic Magic · Corpus Hermeticum · Prophecy · Frances Yates · Prisca Theologia