Tommaso Campanella: Il libro e il corpo della natura.

Germana Elisa Ernst. Tommaso Campanella: Il libro e il corpo della natura.

Bari and Rome: La Nuova Italia Bibliografica-Subscriptions, 2002. vi + 296 pp. index. [euro]22. ISBN: 88-420-6086-0.

This is a well-documented and synoptic account of Campanella's life and thought. The author has published numerous books, some interpretive and critical works dealing with more particular aspects of the subject, others editions of Campanella's main works and letters.

Campanella was born in 1568 in Calabria, the most remote region of Southern Italy, which at that time was part of the kingdom of Spain and ruled by a viceroy residing in Naples. He became a Dominican friar and never left the order despite his considerable troubles with the Inquisition. The first one of his trials occurred in 1592 in Naples, on charges that he accepted the anti-Aristotelian doctrines of his compatriot Bernardino Telesio (1509-88) and that his (Campanella's) prodigious knowledge, learning, and memory derived from the devil. Although he avoided condemnation that time, he was ordered to return to his native province and to abandon Telesio's philosophy. Instead Campanella started traveling to such cities as Rome, Florence, and Bologna. In 1593 he was in Padua and soon became involved in another trial, on charge of sodomy; but again, he was acquitted. It was there that he met Galileo, who had just become professor of mathematics at the university. In 1594 Campanella was arrested by order of Padua's inquisitor on charges of having written a blasphemous sonnet against Christ (which he denied) and of possessing prohibited books. Later that year, he was extradited to the Inquisition's prison in Rome, where it is likely that he met Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), who had recently suffered a similar extradition. This time (1595) Campanella was convicted of extremely vehement suspicion of heresy, had to recite an abjuration, and was condemned to house arrest at a Dominican convent in Rome. In 1599, we find him back in his native Calabria taking part in a conspiracy for an armed insurrection against the Spanish crown; the details are complex and his role unclear, although it probably was limited to providing some intellectual foundation and inspiration, pertaining to prophecies that were supposed to be fulfilled in the year 1600. Campanella denied any wrongdoing even under prolonged torture, which was to leave him physically maimed for the rest of his life. Thus whereas many of the conspirators were executed, he was sentenced to life imprisonment and did serve this sentence for about twenty-seven years. But in 1626 pope Urban VIII, who admired Campanella as a thinker, found a pretext to have him transferred from the royal prison in Naples to the Inquisition's prison in Rome; and so for several years he enjoyed a period of relative freedom. However, in 1634 one of Campanella's disciples was condemned in Naples for anti-Spanish conspiracy, and so the pope and some French officials (whose friendship Campanella had cultivated in Rome) decided that it was safer to have him move to Paris. There he lived under the protection of the French court until his death in 1639.

Despite the difficult circumstances during almost all his life, Campanella managed to write about one hundred books, of which only a portion have survived. They reveal him to be a maverick thinker, interested in a wide range of topics ranging from metaphysics and theology to poetry, political philosophy, medicine, and astrology; he was trying to find his own way out of the Aristotelian tradition and to articulate a progressive and forward looking account of nature, God, man, and society.

Campanella's two most famous works are perhaps City of the Sun and Apology of Galileo, both published in 1623, although the former was written in 1602 and the latter in 1616. City of the Sun elaborates a communist utopia, in which private property does not exist, children are raised by the state, everyone works, and all jobs have equal dignity; the city is built as a series of seven concentric rings of walls; all available knowledge is written and illustrated on the city walls, which are thus meant to make the city not only militarily impregnable, but also intellectually and educationally superior. Apology of Galileo defends Galileo from the charge that his ideas contradicted Scripture, arguing that his manner of thinking not only did not contradict Scripture and the unanimous consensus of the Church Fathers, but was more in accordance with them than the Aristotelian manner of thinking of his opponents; this was advanced as a theological and Christian argument.

MAURICE A. FINOCCHIARO

University of Nevada, Las Vegas