CAMPANELLA, TOMMASO

Dominican philosopher; b. Stilo, Calabria, Italy, Sept. 5, 1568; d. Paris, May 21, 1639. Campanella entered the religious life at an early age and was educated in the houses of studies of his order. Becoming dissatisfied with the Aristotelian teachings of his day, he favored instead the naturalistic views of B. telesio, whom he undertook to defend against his opponents. In 1599 he was arrested by order of the Spanish authorities and taken in chains to Naples, where he had to stand trial on charges of heresy and conspiracy. Although subjected to physical torture, he never confessed to crime or heresy and even resisted by feigning insanity. In 1602 he was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, and, whether rightly or not, spent a total of 27 years in a Neapolitan dungeon. Released in 1626, he was again arrested and brought before the Holy Office in Rome. After regaining his freedom, he spent some time at the Dominican priory of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, but fearing further persecution, he followed the advice of Pope Urban VIII and fled to France in 1634. The 71-year-old friar ended his troubled days in the quiet of the priory of Saint-Jacques in Paris.

Campanella was an extremely prolific writer, and the critical edition of his works (ed. L. Firpo, Milan 1954) will fill many volumes. He antedated Descartes as the first philosopher to assert the need of positing a universal methodic doubt at the beginning of his system and to state the principle of self-consciousness as the basis of knowledge and certitude. His philosophy was an attempt to fuse, into a new original synthesis, the naturalistic doctrines of his time and the traditional scholastic teaching; it showed a marked tendency toward Platonic augus tinianism. Campanella conceived being as a transcendental composition of power, knowledge, and will, which are its "primalities" or essential principles. This panpsychic conception of reality is matched by his theory that being and nonbeing are the metaphysical constituents of all creatures, which are thus distinguished from God who is pure being. For Campanella, to know is to be (cognoscere est esse ), a principle that underlies his complex theory of knowledge. The central idea of his theology is Christ as universal reason. In politics he advocated a universal monarchy headed by the pope. The City of the Sun, his best-known work, is a political dialogue in the tradition of Plato's Republic and St. Thomas More's Utopia.

See Also: renaissance philosophy.

Bibliography: Works. Del senso delle cose e della magia, ed. a. bruers (Bari 1925); Epilogo magno, ed. c. ottaviano (Rome 1939); Atheismus triumphatus (Paris 1636); Disputationum in quatuor partes suae philosophiae realis libri quatuor (Paris 1637); Philosophiae rationalis partes quinque (Paris 1638); Universalis philosophiae seu metaphysicarum rerum iuxta propria dogmata, partes tres, libri XVIII (Paris 1638); Theologicorum libri XXX, ed. in part r. amerio (Milan 1936); Aforismi politici, ed. l. firpo (Turin 1941); "The City of the Sun," tr. w. j. gilstrap, in The Quest for Utopia, ed. g. r. negley and j. m. patrick (New York 1952). Literature. r. amerio, Enciclopedia filosofica 1:866–874. n. picard, Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche (Freiburg 1957–65) 2:907. l. firpo, Bibliografia degli scritti di Tommaso Campanella (Turin 1940). g. di napoli, Tommaso Campanella, filosofo della restaurazione cattolica (Padua 1947). b. m. bonansea, The Theory of Knowledge of Tommaso Campanella, Exposition and Critique (Washington 1954); "The Concept of Being and Non-Being in the Philosophy of T. C.," The New Scholasticism 31 (1957) 34–67; "The Political Thought of T. C.," Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, ed. j. k. ryan (Washington 1963) 211–248.

[b. m. bonansea]