CAMPANELLA, TOMMASO
(1568–1639)

Tommaso Campanella, a Renaissance philosopher and scholar, was born at Stilo, in Calabria, Italy. At an early age he entered the Dominican order and devoted himself to the study of philosophy. In 1599 he was arrested by order of the Spanish government on charges of heresy and conspiracy. Although he never confessed to either charge, he was considered to be a dangerous subject and was kept in prison at Naples for twenty-seven years. Released in 1626, he was arrested again and arraigned before the Holy Office in Rome to stand trial for certain suspect propositions found in his works. After regaining his freedom, he spent some time at the Dominican monastery of Minerva in that city. In 1634, fearing further persecution, because of the suspicion that he might be involved in a new conspiracy, he followed the advice of Pope Urban VIII and fled to France, where he was befriended by Cardinal Richelieu and King Louis XIII. He died in the quiet of the Dominican monastery of Rue St. Honoré in Paris.

Campanella wrote a great number of books dealing with subjects ranging from grammar and rhetoric to philosophy and theology, from apologetics to politics, and from medicine to magic and astrology. He conceived of philosophy as an all-embracing science to which all other sciences must be referred as their ultimate source and foundation. No subsidiary science deals with all things as they are, but only as they appear, whereas philosophy, and especially metaphysics, deals with all things as they are and insofar as they are. Philosophy is an inquiry after the truth of both human and divine things, based on the testimony of God, who reveals himself either through the world of created things or by direct teaching. Consequently, nature and the Scriptures are the two codes on which philosophy must be built.

Epistemology

In his actual approach to philosophy, Campanella discussed first the possibility and reality of knowledge, thus anticipating a common trend among later thinkers. He was the first philosopher (antedating René Descartes) to assert the need of positing a universal doubt at the beginning of his system and to state the principle of self-consciousness as the basis of knowledge and certitude. He distinguished between innate and acquired knowledge. Innate knowledge (notitia innata ) is cognition through self-presence and belongs to the very essence of the soul; acquired knowledge (notitia illata ) is the soul's cognition of external things. Innate knowledge is superior to, and more certain than, acquired knowledge; for the soul cannot be mistaken about what belongs to its nature. Knowledge of the external world can be obtained either by intuition or by abstraction. By intuition one grasps a thing immediately in its concrete reality, so that nothing of the object escapes the penetrating and all-embracing act of the intellect. By abstraction, one obtains only an indistinct and confused image of a thing. This image is what Campanella called the Aristotelian universal and is the object of both sense and intellect. The Platonic universal, on the contrary, is the idea as the formal cause of a thing and can be grasped exclusively by the intellect.

As to the essence and process of knowledge, Campanella gave a twofold explanation. A first explanation is contained in his early works and developed along the general lines of Bernardino Telesio's system. It represents his empirical approach to knowledge, which he reduced mainly to sensation and explained in terms of partial assimilation of the object known. This assimilation is made by contact between the knower and the sensible species of the object known. These species are neither the intentional species of the Aristotelians nor the corporeal images of Democritus. Although they may assume as many different forms as there are sensations, they are always something material that impinges on the senses and represents to a certain extent the external object.

A second and more advanced explanation of knowledge is what may be called the metaphysical approach from the standpoint of the soul as an essentially knowing nature. Here we meet Campanella's characteristic doctrine that to know is to be (cognoscere est esse ). In this new approach, knowledge is still called sensation and assimilation, but the assimilation is carried so far as to mean a real transformation of the knower into the object known. This doctrine that to know is "being" or "to be" must not be understood in the idealistic sense of the absolute identity of object and subject. Campanella introduced a distinction between knowledge that a person has of himself in virtue of his own nature and knowledge that a person acquires from outside himself. Campanella called this the distinction between "innate" and "illate" knowledge. Both types of knowledge are said to belong to "being": But the former refers to knowledge of the original being of the knower, and the latter refers to the knowledge of being that is inferred by reasoning and is formally distinct from the being of the knower. In the first case, knowledge is the esse ; in the second case, it becomes intentionally the esse in the possession of the extramental reality.

Metaphysics

For Campanella the object of metaphysics is "being," namely, whatever exists either within or outside our mind. He denied a real distinction between essence and existence in creatures, but admitted a real distinction between essence and extrinsic existence, or that type of existence that corresponds to the particular circumstances and environment wherein an essence happens to be in the physical world. All things, whether spiritual or material, consist ultimately, although in different degrees, of power, knowledge, and love as their transcendental principles. These are called "primalities" and are found in creatures as well as in God, of whom creatures are faint imitations. Whereas God is pure and infinite being, creatures are composites of finite being and infinite nonbeing. Being and nonbeing concur in making up finite things, not as physical components but as metaphysical principles. Just as a creature is essentially and necessarily a particular and limited entity, so it also is essentially and necessarily the nonbeing of all other things and of God himself.

Psychology

In psychology Campanella accepted the trichotomic theory, according to which man is a composite of three substances, body, spirit, and mind or mens. The spirit or sensitive soul is the corporeal principle that animates the body and serves as a link between body and mind. The mind or intellective soul is created and infused by God into the body already organized by the spirit; it is a spiritual substance and the form of the whole man. With the Platonists, Campanella defended the doctrine of a world soul, and developed the theory of universal animation by endowing all things with some kind of sensation.

Philosophy of Nature

Campanella was greatly influenced by Telesio's De Rerum Natura, which he defended against the attacks of G. A. Marta (1559–1628). He conceived of space as a primary and incorporeal substance having the capacity to receive all bodies. Space is the substratum of all things. In this space God placed matter, a body that is formless and inactive but capable of being molded into many forms, just as wax is acted upon by a seal. Matter is not pure potency, as Aristotle taught, but has a reality of its own distinct from the form. This, in turn, is not a substantial principle of material beings and is only improperly called an act. In short, Campanella dismissed the Aristotelian hylomorphic theory and substituted for it Telesio's naturalistic doctrine of heat and cold as the active principles and matter as the passive principle of all material beings. He also rejected Aristotle's notion of time as measure of movement and claimed that time is not something ideal and subjective, but something real. Time is the successive duration of things having a beginning and an end. Or, more concretely, time is the thing itself considered in its successive duration through change.

Ethics

Following Telesio, Campanella taught that man's supreme good consists in self-preservation. However, this must not be understood in a purely egoistic sense, but rather as the conservation of one's existence in God in the next life. Whereas God is his own supreme good and does not look to another being outside himself for his preservation, so that to be and to be happy are for him one and the same thing, man depends entirely on God for his own preservation. God is therefore the supreme good toward which man must direct all his acts and operations.

Political Theory

Campanella advocated a universal monarchy with the pope as its supreme temporal and spiritual ruler. This ambitious but hardly realistic plan is described in the Monarchia Messiae (The Messiah's Monarchy) and represented the dream of his entire life. Civitas Solis (The City of the Sun ), on the other hand, contains the scheme of a state modeled after Plato's Republic and Sir Thomas More's Utopia, where people, who live in the pure order of nature, organize themselves into an ideal society ruled by philosophers and share everything. Many of the ideas expressed in this work have some practical value, inasmuch as they contain the germs of social, political, and educational reforms that would be beneficial to the state. In this respect, Campanella may be considered as an original thinker and a forerunner of various modern theories and practices.

Bibliography

principal works by campanella

Philosophia Sensibus Demonstrata, in defense of Telesio. Naples, 1591.

Monarchia Messiae. Jesi, 1633.

Atheismus Triumphatus. Paris, 1636.

Disputationum in Quatuor Partes Suae Philosophiae Reales Libri Quatuor. Paris, 1637.

Philosophiae Rationalis Partes Quinque. Paris, 1638.

Universalis Philosophiae, seu Metaphysicarum Rerum Iuxta Propria Dogmata Partes Tres, Libri 18. Paris, 1638.

Del senso delle' cose e della magia, edited by A. Bruers. Bari, 1925.

Epilogo Magno, edited by C. Ottaviano. Rome: Reale Accademia d'Italia, 1939.

Theologicorum Libri XXX, edited by R. Amerio. Florence and Rome, 1949–.

Civitas Solis. Frankfurt, 1623. Translated by W. J. Gilstrap as The City of the Sun. New York, 1952.

works on campanella

Amerio, Romano. Campanella. Brescia: "La Scuola" Editrice, 1947.

Bonansea, Bernardine M. "Campanella as Forerunner of Descartes." Franciscan Studies 16 (1–2) (1956): 37–59.

Bonansea, Bernardine M. "The Concept of Being and Non-being in the Philosophy of Tommaso Campanella." New Scholasticism 31 (1) (1957): 34–67.

Bonansea, Bernardine M. "Knowledge of the Extramental World in the System of Tommaso Campanella." Franciscan Studies 17 (2–3) (1957): 188–212.

Bonansea, Bernardine M. "The Political Thought of Tommaso Campanella." In Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, edited by John K. Ryan, Vol. II, pp. 211–248. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1963.

Bonansea, Bernardino M. Tommaso Campanella, Renaissance Pioneer of Modern Thought. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1969.

Corsano, Antonio. Tommaso Campanella. Bari: Laterza, 1961.

Di Napoli, Giovanni. Tommaso Campanella, filosofo della restaurazione cattolica. Padua: CEDAM, 1947.

Headley, John M. "On the Rearming of Heaven: The Machiavellism of Tommaso Campanella." Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (1988): 387–404.

Headley, John M. Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Szentpeteri, Marton. "Il Transilvano: The Image of Zsigmond Bathory in Campanella's Political Thought." Bruniana and Campanelliana 9 (1) (2003): 217–225.

Bernardine M. Bonansea, O.F.M. (1967)

Bibliography updated by Tamra Frei (2005)