Tommaso Campanella

Campanella, Tommaso (1568–1639)

Tommaso Campanella was a Counter-Reformation theologian, a Renaissance magus, a prophet, a poet and an astrologer, as well as a philosopher whose speculations assumed encyclopedic proportions. As a late Renaissance philosopher of nature, Campanella is notable for his early, and continuous, opposition to Aristotle. He rejected the fundamental Aristotelian principle of hylomorphism, namely the understanding of all physical substance in terms of form and matter. In its place he appropriated Telesio’s understanding of reality in terms of the dialectical principles of heat and cold; and he adopted a form of empiricism found in Telesio’s work that included pansensism, the doctrine that all things in nature are endowed with sense. Especially after 1602, Campanella’s exposure to Renaissance Platonism also involved him in panpsychism, the view that all reality has a mental aspect. Thus his empiricism came to show a distinctly metaphysical and spiritualistic dimension that transformed his philosophy. At the same time his epistemology embraced a universal doubt and an emphasis on individual self-consciousness that are suggestive of Descartes’ views.

Campanella’s career as a religious dissident, radical reformer and leader of an apocalyptic movement presents a political radicalism that was oddly associated with more traditional notions of universal monarchy and the need for theocracy. The only one of his numerous writings that receives attention today, La Città del Sole (The City of the Sun) (composed 1602, but not published until 1623), has come to occupy a prominent place in the literature of utopias though Campanella himself seems to have expected some form of astronomical/apocalyptic realization.

Campanella’s naturalism, especially its pansensism and panpsychism, enjoyed some currency in Germany and France during the 1620s, but in the last five years of his life it was emphatically rejected by the intellectual communities headed by Mersenne and Descartes, as well as by Galileo.

1 Life

Son of an illiterate Calabrian cobbler, Giovanni Domenico Campanella adopted the name ‘Tommaso’ when he joined the Dominican Order in 1582. He was attracted to Naples as an intellectual centre, where he encountered the primitive experimentalism and magic of Giambattista Della Porta and his circle. There too in 1591 he published his first work, Philosophia sensibus demonstrata (Philosophy Demonstrated by the Senses), which registered both his emphatic anti-Aristotelianism and his reception of Telesio’s naturalism. As a result of his increasingly radical thought, he was hounded by the Inquisition. He suffered a series of trials, tortures and imprisonments, culminating with his twenty-seven year incarceration (1599–1626) by the Spanish viceregal regime for leading an abortive uprising. No matter how severe the conditions of his confinement, he managed to produce a vast number of works, some of which have never been recovered. It was through his writing that he managed to win his way out of prison to freedom in Rome (1626–34) where his astrological talents won him high favour from Pope Urban VIII. However, he was once more threatened by Spain, and fled to Paris where he was granted asylum by Louis XIII and Richelieu. During the last years of his life he prepared his works for publication while under royal protection.

2 Epistemology

It was in Campanella’s De sensu rerum et magia (On the Sense and Feeling in All Things and On Magic), first composed in 1590 and published in 1620, that he initially presented his emerging empiricism and his view that the perceived world is alive and sentient in all its parts. This work became the most widely read and influential of all his philosophical works, and remains central to his combination of naturalism and a degree of magic that enables us to manipulate natural processes. However, the most comprehensive and formal presentation of his philosophy is found in his Metafisica (1602–24; first published in 1638), which is representative of his mature thought. He divides the work into three parts: principia sciendi (epistemology), principia essendi (metaphysics) and principia operandi (moral and political philosophy); and it is noteworthy that he begins with the theory of knowledge. Thus, before he constructs a metaphysics, Campanella finds it necessary to establish the reality of knowing and of individual self-consciousness. He seems to have been the first philosopher to feel the need of explicitly stating the problem of knowledge as an introduction to his philosophy.

Although he had previously been satisfied through his long exposure to Telesio that the nature of all things including human beings was basically sensory, by 1604 he had become convinced that the mind that God has infused into human beings not only has sensation and animal memory but something higher and more divine. This higher level of the intellect’s functioning established individual self-consciousness. Here Campanella was more inspired by Augustine (§§5–6) than by Aquinas (§10) (his ostensible guide in most matters), especially in his pursuit of a universal theoretical doubt. He entertained the possibility of his own self-deception, and he made explicit reference, paraphrasing it at length, to the famous passage in De civitate Dei (The City of God) where Augustine counters the Academic sceptics with his ‘If I am mistaken, I am’ (XI.26). It is this direct intuition of oneself, this direct knowledge of our being, our knowing and our willing that is now grafted onto the general sensory nature in which the self, like all other things, participates. Although between 1617 and 1623 Descartes (§§3, 7–8) read more of Campanella than he ever wished to admit, the striking similarities between Descartes’ views and Campanella’s universal doubt, his emphasis on self-consciousness, and his principle cognoscere est esse (knowing is being) are more apparent than real. While Descartes creates an emphatic distinction between soul and body, Campanella, instead of separating the two substances, makes a Neoplatonic identification of being with thought, in which all things now share. The difference between them is that between a philosophy of instinct, sensation and élan vital, and a philosophy of mathematical certitude, clear and distinct ideas, and a universal, impersonal reason.

By intellect, Campanella understands two distinct faculties. The first is sensation (the intellectus sensualis), which humans have in common with animals, and which is capable of grasping particulars but is unable to go beyond the senses. The second is mind (the intellectus mentalis) which aspires to invisible and eternal realities. This two-fold view of the intellect is quite similar to that offered by Telesio (§5) in the later editions of his De rerum natura iuxta propria principia (On the Nature of Things According to Their Own Principles) (1586). Sense exhibits its own inherent certainty in its apprehension of singulars. Experience shows that to sense fire one need not apprehend the form of fire; rather it suffices simply to be slightly burned. On the basis of this initial passive perception, sense ‘can infer the rest of the power of the object acting upon itself’. For Campanella, however, knowledge does not remain at this sensory, Telesian, level, but comes to involve a process of assimilation. Proceeding on the basis of his principle that knowing is being, he claims that things are known inasmuch as the knower becomes similar to them. However, he means by this something quite different from the assimilation of form to which Aristotle and Aquinas had referred. Each thing is sensed and known in so far as it is itself a sentient part of nature, and the knowing essence of the thing becomes the object to be known.

In practical terms, Campanella’s empiricism manifests a clear respect for testimonia (the evidence of direct witness or experience) in preference to opinio (traditional belief based upon some distant authority). The best and most repeated example of this distinction is the witness of Christopher Columbus against the authority of Augustine and Lactantius on the existence of antipodes. Sense, here reading from Nature, God’s book, attests to things as they are; opinion to what we have read from others.

Especially in his Apologia pro Galileo (written in 1616, published in 1622), Campanella accepts and pays considerable attention to the popular notion of the two Books of Scripture and of Nature. In the Apologia, he presents an important statement about freedom of thought and the relationship between God’s two Books, though without in any way committing himself to the Copernican system that Galileo had defended (see Copernicus, N.; Galilei, Galileo §§1, 4). In what seems to be a continuous adjustment of the evidence from the two Books in order to achieve their conformity or agreement, Campanella grants both precedence and pre-eminence to the first Book, that of Nature. Yet while the new discoveries provided by the first Book would seem to dictate a reinterpretation of the second that would bring Scripture into conformity with Nature, the entire intellectual enterprise is predicated on the underlying assumption and confidence that there can be no disagreement between what is offered in the Book of Scripture and the findings of the Book of Nature.

3 Metaphysics

Campanella’s philosophy of nature is inspired by Telesio’s effort to explain nature through its own principles (iuxta propria principia) (see Telesio §2). From his first published work, he announced his opposition to Aristotle’s hylomorphism. He rejects the idea of matter as pure potency actualized by form, and attributes to it a measure of reality all its own. Nor does he accept form in the scholastic sense, seeing it as the mode or quality of an object. Scorning the Aristotelian structure of matter as potency and form (whether substantial or accidental) as act, Campanella hoped to build a new edifice on the Telesian foundation of heat and cold as active principles contending for sole mastery of matter as passive substratum. Unfortunately, inconsistency in terminology obscures the clarity of his distinctions and he was by no means completely successful in disentangling himself from the conceptual world and terminology of the Aristotelian tradition.

Campanella confidently asserted that the senses perceived body directly: body is body in its own right without needing an abstract form to make it so. Having renounced substantial forms, he substituted the two active principles of heat and cold. Form is replaced by temperamentum, the arrangement and blending of internal parts, as the structure of matter. A more positive evaluation of Campanella’s rejection of hylomorphism has detected in this departure from the traditional Aristotelian metaphysical supports a desire to reduce occult phenomena to mechanical contact, to some sort of material force, or to an inhering structural resonance in all things.

Also in reaction to Aristotle, Campanella presented a Neoplatonizing metaphysics that seeks to be in accord with Telesian physics. The subtitle to his De sensu (1620) reads: ‘the world is shown to be a living and truly conscious image of God, and all its parts and details to be endowed with sense perception, some more clearly, some more obscurely to an extent sufficient for their preservation and that of the entirety in which they share sensation…’. Sense makes the entire world a gigantic, feeling creature.

Campanella goes on to explicate the nature and structure of Being by means of his original doctrine of the primalities (primalitates), Power, Wisdom and Love. His reading of the universe as consisting of power, sense or knowledge, and love seems to be a natural outgrowth both of his pansensism and his Augustinian base. The three primalities, his ‘Monotriad’, provided him with the philosophical counterpart to the central Christian theological doctrine of the Trinity. As metaphysical principles, the primalities are so inherent in the effects they produce that Campanella can speak of their ‘essentiating’ a being. Lesser beings do not merely participate in the primalities; they are totally pervaded or ‘coessentiated’ by them.

While the three principles of this ‘coessentiation’ are the same by virtue of their function, they differ in terms of their origin. Love derives from wisdom and power, and wisdom derives from power alone. Power is thus the source of the other two, though the operation and functioning of all three primalities presupposes their transcendent unity. These relationships are seen in all created beings, for being itself is a transcendental composite of power, knowledge and love. Wisdom, the second primality, is particularly important, for its effects help explain Campanella’s doctrine of universal sensation. Primal wisdom endows all things, whether rational, animal, or material, with some measure of sense perception, and it is in this way that all created beings are essentially related to one another and participate in the essence of the infinite being. Love as the third primality is the manifestation of wisdom, for love and knowledge, appetite and perception are conjoined. Love involves a process of becoming something else, the subject becoming imperfectly the object loved. Thus the doctrine that knowledge involves assimilation has a metaphysical basis. Here, as with Campanella’s understanding of magic and of natural religion, a general indebtedness to Ficino (§§2, 4) is perceptible.

From this cosmology, the human being emerges as a microcosm or little universe, though Campanella preferred the term epilogo (epilogue) for this familiar Renaissance idea. The human microcosm conjoins five worlds or orders: (1) the archetypal world, which is infinite, eternal, and contains the archetypes of all possible worlds; (2) the mental or metaphysical world, that of angelic and human minds, composed of the primalities; (3) the mathematical world or universal space, which constitutes the basis or substratum of all bodies in an unchanging space; (4) the material world whose regular alterations place it above time, so that it participates in the perpetuity of the mathematical world; (5) the fifth, localized world, characterized by time, which is found within the fourth world and is the product of the two active principles. The five orders of being are so interrelated that whatever is in a superior world is by participation in the lower worlds, and whatever is in an inferior world is in an eminent way in those above. The human being as epilogo is understood as the ultimate epitome of all five worlds. This account of the microcosm is the corollary of the doctrine that the universe itself, the macrocosm, is a most perfect animal with its own body, spirit and soul (see Cosmology §1).

4 Moral and political philosophy

Campanella distinguishes three aspects of moral or practical philosophy: ethics, economics and politics, the last of which far outweighed the other two in importance. In his ethics he rejects the idea of the supreme good as something extrinsic to humans, and he also rejects Aristotle’s belief that the contemplation of truth is the supreme end for humans. Instead, he affirms the ideal of happiness as consisting in self-conservation, and the direction of all one’s efforts towards God, who alone can guarantee this conservation. Beatitude then becomes a union effected with God through power, wisdom and love rather than through any intellectual contemplation. Campanella’s understanding of virtue and the virtues follows from his understanding of the supreme good, for virtue has its ground in the three primalities. Virtue is seen as a power proceeding from the very nature of being, and manifesting itself in the operations of power, wisdom and love, which it helps perfect. In his deployment of a number of virtues, Campanella departed from the traditional framework of the four cardinal virtues, and made considerable use of St John Chrysostom, among the Church Fathers.

The focus and realization of the basically social nature of human beings occurs in the individual household, which includes the immediate family, its servants and even the domestic animals. In considering the economy of the family, which differs only in degree rather than in kind from the political state, Campanella asserts the centrality of marriage as a contract of natural law, sanctified by Christ as a sacrament. If some of his recipes for sexual relations, child-rearing and the education of the young suggest the calculations and concerns of the Solarians in his imaginary City of the Sun (see below), there is no hint of the Solarian community of women to be found in his treatment of marriage. Campanella is thus generally orthodox in his understanding of marriage within the present temporal dispensation, although the wife exercises a responsible role within the conservative structure headed by the paterfamilias.

Politics early became the pre-eminent consuming interest of the radical Dominican reformer – an interest, which when driven by the heady combination of astrology, magic and messianism led to a popular uprising, and to Campanella’s long imprisonment. His famous work La Città del Sole (The City of the Sun) (first published in 1623), traditionally understood as being simply the account of an ideal society, and thus relegated to utopian literature (see Utopianism §1), is more accurately understood as representing part of Campanella’s millenarian expectation. It seems hardly accidental that he composed the work in 1602 only a year before the expected astronomical conjunction of planets figuring the sun’s descent towards the earth, set for December 1603. Despite the apparent incommensurability of the then-current Christian economy with the rationally organized, communistic millenarian economy which Campanella saw as impending, there is a complementarity between the City of the Sun and the theocratic papal monarchy advanced by his other political writings: namely, the amalgamation of secular and spiritual into a comprehensive universal monarchy ruled by a priest-king.

From the very beginning two themes pervade Campanella’s political philosophy: (1) the necessity of religion’s informing politics; (2) the necessity for universal monarchy. These two threads, running through his entire thinking, intersect in his affirmation of the papal office as the effective expression and realization of power on earth. Monarchy is not simply the noblest form of government, but in Campanella’s hands it came to be understood as something universal, all-inclusive and above the present clutter of kingdoms and empires. With Christ seen as the founder of universal monarchy, the designation of monarch properly pertains to the Pope, who when endowed with both temporal and spiritual arms, can serve as moderator among princes, and can prevent any Christian prince from arriving at the monarchy of Christendom. Campanella was scandalized by Dante’s dualism of church and empire (see Alighieri, Dante §3), and wished to fuse secular and spiritual power in the monarchy of the priest-king. Thus one can only understand the monarchy of Spain (the ruler of Naples, and together with the Roman Inquisition, author of Campanella’s misfortunes) as the Arm of God when it is in close association with, dependence on, and service to the papacy; the territorial aggrandizement of Spain can have the papal blessing only in so far as it serves the universal propagation of the true religion. After 1634, Campanella was to put France forward as the Pope’s secular agent.

Campanella is a Machiavellian of sorts. Although apart from Aristotle himself no other so provoked the hostility of Campanella as did Machiavelli and his reason of state, none the less Campanella could accept much of his predecessor’s appreciation of power, its defence and increase through deception and harsh, sometimes immoral measures. On the other hand, he could not admit the divorce of politics from religion or the reduction of religion to some form of political manipulation and a mere means of ruling (see Political philosophy, history of §5). Affirming religion’s political utility, Campanella seeks to incorporate the state into his church, empowering Christianity under the aegis of the armed priest-king. He wants to have his religion both ways: as justified on utilitarian grounds, and as the comprehensive, informing, living truth.

Campanella’s entire thought reflects an emotional predisposition to innovation and a commitment to mint a new philosophy, eclectic and Platonizing, that is ostensibly more supportive of Christianity than the philosophy of Aristotle.