Apologie de Galilee / Tommaso Campanell. (Reviews).

Michel Pierre Lerner, ed., Apologie de Galilee / Tommaso Campanell Paris: Les Belles Lettres,. 2001. clxxiv + 336 pp. Euro 39.64. ISBN: 2-251-34509-4.

For those interested in the Galileo Affair and its background it is of some importance that the preeminent scholar in understanding the cosmology of Galileo's contemporary, Tommaso Gampanella, as well as a leading authority on all matters in naturalibus regarding the long incarcerated Dominican, should bring out a definitive study and critical text of one of the most significant works of the notorious prisoner, namely the Apologia pro Galileo. Michel Pierre Lerner is not as widely known to Anglophone readers as he merits for scholarship bearing upon early modern science and for one who has recently published a two volume study of Renaissance cosmologies, Le monde des spheres. In the present work he provides a French translation for the first time to Campanella's defense of Galileo together with the facing Latin text, prefaced by an Introduction of 175 pages, followed by more than 130 pages of extensive, valuable annotation. As this massive scholarly statement had its inception in an earlier version of the Apo logia, a three volume doctoral these presented to the University of Paris in 1972, which has since been followed by a number of seminal articles on Campanella's naturalistic philosophy as it relates to the larger context of late Renaissance science, the present study represents the culmination of a life work of considerable value for the history of science and the origins of the Galileo Affair.

The Introduction addresses four major issues pertaining to the text: the dating and thus the entire context of its genesis; its place in Campanella's philosophical evolution and publication of his writings; its own intrinsic features - methodological and thematic; its reception. Regarding the first of these, its dating, controversy has persisted as to whether Campanella composed the manuscript, as he claimed, before or actually after the condemnation of Copernicus' work in 7 March 1616. The question is further complicated by Campanella's apparently odd claim that he had been asked by Cardinal Bonifacio Caetani for his own opinion on the earth's movement: that one whose works had been proscribed since 1603 by the Master of the Sacred Palace should now be solicited by a cardinal recently installed as a member of the Congregation of the Holy Office would here seem most unlikely. Yet Lerner's excavation and weighing of Caetani's own background and context make much more credible nor only the truth of Campanella's claim but that the composition of the work occurred immediately prior to the condemnation of heliocentrism. In constructing the background of the cardinal, Lerner discovers the profound and extensive astrological interests of Caetani and some friends and contacts common both to the prelate and the prisoner: e.g. Antonio Persio, Federico Cesi, and Francisco Ingoli. With the last our editor draws significantly from the similarly neglected 1995 study by Massimo Bucciantini, Contro Galileo: Alle origini Alle'Affaire, which treats Ingoli not in his later better known capacity as secretary of the Congregation of the Propaganda but as called upon now by the Congregation of the Holy Office to tender his learned opinion on the emerging issue of heliocentrism. Ingoli would oblige by presenting his Disputatio de situ et quiete terrae contra Copernici systema, addressed to Galileo and later triggering exchanges with Johann Kepler.

Lerner situates the intent of the Apologia broadly and convincingly in Campanella's anti-Aristotelianism, already evident in his De gentilismo of 1609-10 but even earlier in his first work, the Philosophia sensibus demonstrata in defense of Bernardino Telesio. He separates the issue of ratio philosophandi and its freedom from any specific commitment on Campanella's part to the physical theses of either Telesio or Galileo. Campanella's anti-Arisrorelianism is argued from his earliest work to the advancement of Telesio in a de-Aristorelianized view of Nature that constitutes with Scripture the two pillars of his reformed theology.

For in proceeding to attempt to represent Sr. Thomas Aquinas as faithful to the spirit of the Fathers in their common hostility to the Stagirite whose philosophy is incapable of assimilating recent astronomic, geographic, and ethnographic experience, Campanella trumpets the necessity for a more exact and new philosophy and for radical reform. Concurrently, beginning in 1613 with his huge Theologia, he appeals to the Book of the World composed by the wisdom of God in living and real characters to which the new philosophy agrees. In his celebration of the Book of the World as the living temple of God and in his confidence that the two pillars cannot disagree, Campanella is prepared to transform Ecclesiastes 3:11 from an attitude of desultory quarreling over the nature of the world to an actual invitation to freely investigating physical nature. Here Lerner unearths from the vast Theologia a text which escaped the present reviewer in earlier making the same point regarding Campanella's unusual interpretation of this difficult pericope -- mundum tradidit [Deus] disputationi [hominum] -- ordinarily understood as decrying vain curiosity.

"ex quo parer quod Deus per Moysen fabricam mundi non explicavit, neque per David, alioquin non esset tradita disputationi, sed decreto et doctrina propalata

(Theologia III, cap.7, a.2, p.156)

Wherein it becomes apparent that God has not chosen to explain the nature of the world as something Scripturally based, although humanly interpreted and imposed, but rather as something open and free to human investigation. Thus the interpretation of Scripture, not Scripture itself, must give way to new observation. Nevertheless while advancing a Telesianism strongly tainted with Platonism, Campanella is not subscribing to heliocentrism itself; rather he is committing himself to the necessity of rerelating the two Books and the need to rethink the philosophy of nature and its relation to and agreement with Scripture (LXXXII-LXXXIII).

It is important in any judgment upon Campanella's ultimate intent to remind ourselves that he constructed his defense as a disputatio ad utramque partem and even entitled it so; in order better to arrive at the truth, he sought to argue both for and against heliocentrism. One cannot claim a definitive conversion of Campanella to Copernicanism nor a definitive abandonment of geocentrism. Respecting the Dominican's Telesian principles of heat and cold, not to mention the descent of the sun toward the earth, Lerner distances himself from the earlier certainties of Leon Blanchet in this respect.

Apart from the occasional inclusion of morsels of the Apologia incorporated into other works, not until 1853 did the work appear for the first time in its entirety, followed by over a century of occasional and sometimes erratic attention: Salvatore Femiano's edition of the Latin in 1971 with Italian translation, Luigi Firpo's respectable Italian of 1968, but a defective Italian translation in 1911 and a poor English version in 1937. Then in the last decade of the twentieth century a burst of several editions attest to a major interest in the work: two Latin, three Italian, another English and one Japanese, culminating now with the present French edition and translation.

Contemporaneous with its author, the work suffered silence in Italy but enjoyed scattered responses in Northern Europe, the most significant being that of the Minim, Mann Mersenne, the secretary for the intellectual life of Europe. In his sustained opposition to Renaissance naturalism and specifically, the animist physics of Campanella, Mersenne nevertheless valued the Dominican's intervention for Galileo in the interests of freedom of inquiry. In his own philosophical breadth and generous curiosity he advanced for Campanella an interesting principle that our editor here recovers from the Quaestiones in Genesim of 1623, while deeming its latitude even unacceptable to the roving spirit of Campanella: that the Church does not reject out of hand all such astronomical beliefs as heretical but that it forbids them at times in order that some opinions of this sort do not scandalize the weaker spirits so that doctrines which at one time are forbidden for good reason as dangerous or useless, are welcomed with open ar ms in another time (CLIV-CLV). Written exactly a decade before Galileo's condemnation, the welcoming here predicted would wait far longer than the generous Minim had ever imagined.

In his concluding analysis the editor with an admirable clarity lays bare the basic difference in the cosmology of Campanella from that of Galileo: for the Calabrian the machine of the world is not ruled by immutable and inexorable laws through an ever uniform nature but that this nature ought to be considered as a living book in which God continues to inscribe his will wherein the world comes to be seen as a theophany in actu. While nothing could be more opposed to the Galilean cosmology, the two so different minds conjoin in the defense of the right of emerging modern science to free exercise in fidelity to a Christianity seeking to emancipate itself from the constraints of a paralyzing tradition (CLVII-CLVIII). Indeed this understanding of Campanella's cosmology in terms of a resonant theophany, a living Book, effectively serves to capture the friar's unique view of nature, opening it up to divine revelation and to human prophecy quite antithetical to Galileo.

If we turn to the text itself and first to Lerner's annotation, in the second endnote to the preface, "To the Reader," introduced by Campanella's publisher and most loyal friend, Tobias Adami, we encounter an apparently exhaustive treatment of the Dominican's use of the image, the Cheese and the Worms. Nevertheless the note somehow overlooks Campanella's own distinctive, most prevalent and self-revealing use of the image, not as referring to the belittlement of man as homuncalus, nor as the much trumpeted cosmogonic interpretation of Carlo Ginzburg's Menocchio, but the much more subtle cognitive one, so characteristic of the prisoner, betraying this Apostle of the Internet's own longing for outreach, communication, and intercommunication: namely, that we humans normally are content to live each "cocooned away, complacent, not wanting to be disturbed, jealous of our remove" (Remin., 221; cf also Mon. Mess. 15; Lettere, 100; Metaph. (Napoli), I, 144; Firpo, Tutte, 1228). Two notes later, on the naming of the te lescope, we would expect to find Edward Rosen's The Naming of the Telescope (New York/Oxford, 1947) at least mentioned among the subsequent studies. But it would be churlish to continue in this vein, even if it were possible. For we are treated otherwise to a rich and valuable fare for the most part in this annotation. And of notes, even more than books and learning, there is no end.

Regarding in general a lucid French translation for which we should be most grateful, I only mean to raise here the single issue of the handling of the biblical citations. There are 152 of them, expectably more than any other single source. They are all tracked down and duly logged, some having to be unearthed, almost all having to be equipped with verse numbers and possible variants where applicable. Except for note 4 to chapter 1, page 181, where adherence to the numbering of the Psalms according to the Vulgate and indication of the verses of the scriptural passages are supplied with possible variants provided, the editor apparently felt no need to announce his practice of treating scriptural texts. He is not interested in noting a clutter of minor changes that one can almost expect from Campanella. For example, with Ps. 103:2-3 instead of the Vulgate's (Stuttgart, 1969) "sicut pellem qui tegis," Campanella supplies "sicut pelles qui tegit," page 119; another example Haggai 2:7 where he omits from the passa ge what we bracket here: Adhuc [unum] modicum [est] & [com]movebo coelum ac terrain etc. at page 43. All such variants do not affect the sense for the most part but collectively they do help us to understand how Campanella works and under what conditions he works, how he conceives of scripture, its fluidity and orality, at a time when the new technology of moveable type will pinion down every pericope. Campanella belongs to another universe and will prove to be as I have attempted to demonstrate elsewhere, an ardent, radical, and most formidable cropper and splicer of pericopes.

The rendering of such passages into French raises a further problem: to what extent should one attempt to be guided by either contemporary or modern translations? Unfortunately, although understandably, French culture, unlike English or German, lacks anything like a standard version of the Bible whether then or now that might serve as a touchstone. Such being the case, the realities would dictate that the French rendering should best be determined by the perceived intent of the author, Campanella. This practice most crucially appears to be the case in the critical rendering of Eccl. 3:11 -- where the controversial disputationi is consistently rendered as examen, lifting the sense and intent of the passage from a passive, frustrated admission of vain, desultory argument to a trumpet call for inquiry. As much of Campanella and of the Apologia's import seems to be identified with that purpose, one would expect it to receive greater emphasis in the present edition.

To conclude, apart from such minor observations and suggestions, we can only respect and honor the meticulous care of the editor in providing a most elegant French edition of the Apologia pro Galileo that effectively situates this work in the larger context of its author's thought and the inception of the Galileo Affair. Students of Campanella's philosophy, of Renaissance cosmologies and of Galileo can all welcome the achievement of this considerable enterprise.