The Paris Years

Abstract

After disembarking at Marseilles, Campanella wrote a letter in Latin to the Provençal scholar Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc on 29 October 1634, informing him of his arrival on French soil and alluding in a laconic manner to the grave matters that had forced him to abandon Rome so precipitously - without even having had time to bid farewell to his friends.¹ Peiresc had contacted Campanella by letter the previous year, in order to ask for his opinion of Herbert of Cherbury’s De veritate, a letter in which Peiresc had expressed his admiration to the Dominican friar for ‘such exquisite work and such sublime thoughts.’² Having received the letter in which Campanella manifested his own lively desire to meet as soon as possible with such a patron and protector of the learned, Peiresc hurried to send him a litter that brought him to his home in Aix, where he hosted him for about ten days. As Gassendi (who would himself also be invited to Aix for the purpose of meeting the Dominican) would later recall, Peiresc welcomed the exile with a generosity and affection that elicited from Campanella the deepest emotion and gratitude. When, after several days, Campanella resumed his journey to Paris, he was overcome with emotion upon receiving a sum of money. He confessed that, if in the past he had had the capacity to hold himself back from tears even during the most cruel tortures, he could not hold them back now after such a generous gesture from a friend.³ In a passage from the Oeconomica, he would later affirm that he who gives his own money ought to be thought of as a greater friend than he who offers his own life. This is what Peiresc, glory of the French as well as of philosophers and patron of famous men, had done.⁴

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12.1 The Arrival in France and the Stay in Paris

After disembarking at Marseilles, Campanella wrote a letter in Latin to the Provençal scholar Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc on 29 October 1634, informing him of his arrival on French soil and alluding in a laconic manner to the grave matters that had forced him to abandon Rome so precipitously - without even having had time to bid farewell to his friends.¹ Peiresc had contacted Campanella by letter the previous year, in order to ask for his opinion of Herbert of Cherbury’s De veritate, a letter in which Peiresc had expressed his admiration to the Dominican friar for ‘such exquisite work and such sublime thoughts.’² Having received the letter in which Campanella manifested his own lively desire to meet as soon as possible with such a patron and protector of the learned, Peiresc hurried to send him a litter that brought him to his home in Aix, where he hosted him for about ten days. As Gassendi (who would himself also be invited to Aix for the purpose of meeting the Dominican) would later recall, Peiresc welcomed the exile with a generosity and affection that elicited from Campanella the deepest emotion and gratitude. When, after several days, Campanella resumed his journey to Paris, he was overcome with emotion upon receiving a sum of money. He confessed that, if in the past he had had the capacity to hold himself back from tears even during the most cruel tortures, he could not hold them back now after such a generous gesture from a friend.³ In a passage from the Oeconomica, he would later affirm that he who gives his own money ought to be thought of as a greater friend than he who offers his own life. This is what Peiresc, glory of the French as well as of philosophers and patron of famous men, had done.⁴

After a brief stop at Lyon, where he checked the printing of the Medicina (which was underway), Campanella resumed his journey to Paris and arrived there on 1 December. During the first weeks, he stayed in the home of the Bishop of Saint Flour. Thereafter, he set himself up in the reformed Dominican convent, in the rue St. Honoré. In his first letter to Peiresc from the capital, while reporting to him the warm welcome he had received (‘I am the beneficiary of continual acts of care, beneficence, loving duties and visits from great men and scholars’), Campanella announced a meeting with Richelieu set for the next day, while also showing a great satisfaction at the pleasant nature of place, climate, and persons:

I admired the scale of France, its mountains and its plains … together with the fecundity of the hills and the usefulness of the ranges, the bountifulness of the plains that can provide bread for four kingdoms - and I have not yet felt cold. In fact, one finds all the lands right up to Paris verdant and flourishing, a sign of the wonderful temperateness. One notes the variety of land in its texture, color, and manner of being worked. For its abundance of meats and butters, it is superior; and all of its people are happy. I do not find either complaints or sadness, except among those boys who emerge from every village, hamlet, and tavern pleading for charity - but then immediately they proceed to laugh.⁵

On the following 9 February, he would be received by the Most Christian King, Louis XIII, who embraced him twice, welcomed him to France, and displayed a joy at the encounter and an empathy for the misfortunes that had befallen the exile: ‘he laughed with happiness and at the same time showed compassion for my troubles,’ said Campanella, ‘and empathized with a kingly decorum.’⁶

In the years spent in Paris, Campanella’s literary activity flourished to a surprising degree. He took part in philosophical and scientific debates, such as that on the size of the mathematical point, composing the Quaestio singularis in reply to the question circulated among the learned by Jean-Baptiste Poysson d’Angers.⁷ He added a fulsome appendix to the sixth article of the twentieth physiological question on the causes of the flooding of the Nile following a reading of the text by Marin Cureau de la Chambre, who years later would publish a volume of his own in response to the argument contained in Campanella’s fragment.⁸ He maintained a regular correspondence with Rome, in which he complained to the Pope and the Cardinals about old intrigues and new persecutions.⁹ He sent vivid letters to the French sovereign and to the King’s sister Henrietta Maria, married to Charles I of England. He composed eloquent dedicatory epistles for the volumes of his own Opera, which - amid myriad difficulties - began to appear, to his great satisfaction. Furthermore, we see a significant reprise of Campanella’s political thought and a renewal of his poetic voice after a long silence. On the occasion of the long-awaited birth of the Dauphin (at the first news of the event Campanella had written: ‘here one experiences a great joy and celebration on account of the Queen’s miraculous pregnancy’),¹⁰ he composed an inspired Latin Ecloga in which he took up once again astrological and prophetic themes that had always been dear to him. Conscious that even being exiled on French soil had its own significance and aware that at Paris he was completing the cycle of his extraordinary human and philosophical experience, Campanella did not hesitate to interpret even the long detention in the prisons of Naples in terms of a divine wisdom as he dedicated the huge tome of the Philosophia realis to the Grand Chancellor Pierre Séguier. Likewise, the arrival in France - homeland of liberty - was read as the result of a ‘prodigious fate.’ Cast into solitude, stripped of normal contacts with the world and with men, far from any everyday happiness, he found the kind of concentration that was necessary for bringing to completion the great project of reforming the entire encyclopedia of knowledge, a project that he had envisioned even in the years of his youth:

My mind, a terrain well prepared by persecution, had nourished deep roots. But it would never have been able to bear fruit if God had not liberated me with a miracle far more wondrous than the cunning stratagem that permitted Ulysses to escape from the cave of Polyphemus, when I was able to ­complete the book on the ages of ages, crowning achievement of every science. And while at Rome again, with the benevolence of the most wise Pontiff, I wore myself out bringing to light works completed with divine inspiration - divinely, I say, since I summon men to God as the master, and not to me or any other man. Then once again, innocent though I was (as everyone agreed), disaster struck and I was forced, by a kind of prodigious fate, to come to the most Christian kingdom of France, homeland of liberty.¹¹

Through his letters, Campanella maintained relations with scholars, such as Cassiano dal Pozzo, Fabri de Peiresc, and the chancellor Pierre Séguier. Of particular importance is the correspondence with the Provençal érudit, which continued after the meeting in Aix. In such letters, Campanella replied to questions that had been put to him by his kind and learned correspondent. Campanella would inform him of his own encounters with the most illustrious personages of the capital and volunteer information on the publication of his works, sending him exemplars at the first opportunity and communicating to him his desire to dedicate one of them to him, so as to demonstrate thereby his gratitude to a man he called ‘a great light for his speculative and moral powers.’¹² But his friend would refuse the offers of a dedication, saying that he did not seek ‘such vanities,’ and that for him ‘the love of friends without such pomp’ sufficed.¹³

These reciprocal professions of esteem and sympathy suffered a sudden rupture in the summer of 1635, when Peiresc felt himself duty-bound to write a very severe letter to Campanella after receiving some troubling information. Already in a letter to Naudé that dated from the end of June, Peiresc had had very harsh words to say about the friar, who - he felt - failed to practice the precepts of his own moral philosophy. In a letter to Campanella dated 3 July, he criticized the Dominican, on account of alleged derision for the atomistic doctrines held by Gassendi, warning him that ‘from principles that may appear ridiculous one can sometimes recognize the most weighty and exquisite things.’ Peiresc asked Campanella to weigh with greater caution his own judgments when conversing with French scholars, reminding him that in France there is ‘the greatest freedom for one man to choose one opinion and another man another.’ In a subsequent letter, he argued that, given the brevity of human life, it was not worth the trouble to invest one’s own energies in refuting the doctrines of others. It was more profitable to prize the good that one could find in every philosophy and, leaving aside inopportune and tiresome polemics, it was better to limit oneself ‘to teaching that which the light of nature has been able to make clear to you.’¹⁴

Very much embittered, Campanella rushed to reply, defending himself with passion and dignity against the criticisms that were leveled against him and that seemed to him to be derived from intolerable slanders. Emphasizing the coherence of his own doctrines with his way of living (‘I observe whatever I wrote in the new Ethics’), he reaffirmed his admiration and esteem for his friend Gassendi, even as he said once again that atomism seemed insufficient to him on many counts, in that it limited itself to a consideration of the ‘matter of the universe’ without taking into account ‘the wondrous skill’ exhibited in the cosmos. With regard to liberty, Campanella noted, he who has been brutally deprived of liberty for so many years not only respects it but also prizes it to the point that he comes to France precisely because he ‘thirsts’ for liberty ‘after so many troubles.’ He declared himself fully in agreement with regard to the respect one owes to philosophical positions different from one’s own. Echoing images from a famous letter to Monsignor Querenghi written many years earlier, Campanella reaffirmed the principles that inspired his new philosophy and at the same time expressed an interesting judgment on Galileo and the Copernican system:

I never fail to learn something from ants, from flies and from all the minute creatures of nature, and yet as Your Lordship can see I hate to learn from men … And I see that in the most disdained sects of philosophy there are wonderful thoughts. And when I examine those doctrines it is necessary that I move on to confute them, as Galileo did with Copernicus - and one should note that in this matter simple caution did not suffice for him. But I place these sects in the theater of the world for the good of all … I call all to the school of God, in the book of the universe, where God writes his concepts and dogmas in living form. I call them away from the schools of men (and indeed from my own school), and I beseech them not to mistake me for some master - unus magister vester qui in coelis est (‘your one master who is in heaven’) - but rather to dedicate themselves to the school of God.¹⁵

The regret that Campanella displayed was so sincere and heartfelt that Peiresc could not help concluding that the matter was closed. A month later, Campanella could put his mind at rest in the knowledge that he had not lost a friend.¹⁶ In the first half of the nineteenth century, three letters to Peiresc from 1636 kept in the Biliothèque Nationale in Paris were removed by Guglielmo Libri, the adventurous and unscrupulous count of Florentine origin, whose unbridled passion for manuscripts and rare books induced him to ransack the libraries of France and remove great quantities of precious materials. The third letter (cited above, dated 19 June), the most sought after, has been traced in recent years and added to the first two letters tracked down and published by Firpo. In this way, the wound inflicted by Libri on the correspondence between Campanella and Peiresc has been healed completely.¹⁷

The renewal of political interests of the French years is also reflected in the letters, as in the eloquent appeal to Henrietta Maria of Bourbon, married to Charles I, in which Campanella - returning to a theme that he held close to his heart (namely, the denunciation of the negative consequences for political life stemming from the Protestant doctrine of predestination) - encouraged the Queen to work on her consort so as to advance the cause of the Catholic religion, which, in his opinion, was the only faith compatible with a peaceful political organization.¹⁸

Also connected to the lively political interests of Campanella’s last years were the two tracts of 1636, found by Firpo in a codex containing seven political writings from the period. Firpo himself vividly described his adventurous trip to Paris hot on the heels of a codex that was pursued, lost, and finally recovered.¹⁹ In the first tract, Campanella answered the request of an unknown gentleman who was asking for explanations of ‘the prodigy and paradox’ by virtue of which the empire of Spain (by then exhausted and in economic collapse) continued to extend itself throughout the world, while the dominion of the French - which was clearly ‘superior in population, riches, military valor, and armaments’ - struggled to maintain its natural borders. The second is a passionate appeal to the sovereign Louis XIII, which - as Firpo emphasized - is more than a private communication and is written as a ‘genuinely political pamphlet,’ directed at influencing public opinion. ­Campanella intended to dissuade the sovereign from signing a peace treaty with Spain, which he presented as ruinous and humiliating even as many others hoped for its ratification after the repeated defeats of the French army. Firpo believed these to be among the most beautiful pages in the rediscovered political writings, in which ‘the humble foreign friar’ put himself forward as the authentic moral conscience of the country that was hosting him. Firpo emphasized the particular oratorical power of the letter’s peroration, in which the French sovereign is exhorted to take up decisively the role of liberator orbis (liberator of the world) against the tyranny of the Spanish (who are characterized as oppressors and destroyers of the human race). And, in an eloquent passage, Firpo pointed out that here it is not simply the political advisor who speaks, the shrewd purveyor of themes of anti-Habsburg propaganda. Instead it is the old Calabrian conspirator, witness to the oppression of the kingdom and prisoner in Neapolitan castles, who gives voice to his bursting indignation and fights lest a great opportunity for liberation be wasted.²⁰

12.2 From Spanish Decline to French Hegemony

Campanella did not fail to return the warm welcome he had received from scholars and from the court, taking up political reflection again with a renewed passion. Thus, we see, in the course of the two-year period from early 1635 to late 1636, a surprising flowering of works of varying lengths, styles, and persuasiveness that are nevertheless united by a reaffirmation of consistent themes and by the exhortation directed at France to see itself as the paladin of liberty against the tyranny of the Hispanic-Habsburg power, the inexorable decline of which Campanella pointed out with lucidity.

Already in the spring of 1635, he sent to the Pope the quick-witted Aforismi politici per le presenti necessità di Francia, which would later be translated into Latin and amplified, informing the Pope that he had ‘given [the Aforismi] in secret to the Cardinal.’²¹ In the following year, Richelieu himself would commission a discourse entitled De auctoritate Pontificis supra imperio instituendo et mutando from Campanella. The philosopher had the honor of presenting this discourse at a lecture on 8 June 1636, at Conflans, in the presence of leading dignitaries of the realm and the Cardinal himself.²² Campanella paid homage to Richelieu in the new edition of the De sensu rerum, dedicated to him with the highest praise as someone who ‘out of a divided, dismembered realm that was infested with nests of impious and rebellious men’ had made ‘a united kingdom, home to the good, scourge of the bad, secure bulwark for the Christian Church, and refuge of the Muses’ thanks to his own remarkable prudence and to the power of a most pious and most strong king.²³ The year 1635 also saw the appearance of the Documenta ad Gallorum nationem, a treatise in which it was imagined that Charlemagne himself had returned to his own nation, so as to underscore the merits of the present sovereign and his ministers, together with the insidiousness of the Spanish political agenda.²⁴

To these years dates the drafting of a vast work, untitled and incomplete, that we may refer to as the Monarchia di Francia and the texts of 1636 recovered by Luigi Firpo.²⁵ The last two unpublished writings of the codex have appeared recently. We are dealing here with two groups of brief texts, in which the style and argumentation seem at points to grow obscure, but they testify to the renewed energy of these years. The first group includes the three discourses that the author directed towards the Christian princes, so as to exhort them to reconsider once again their relationships with the papacy and so as to demonstrate to them how it might be advantageous and necessary to enter into relations of alliance and full accord with the Pontiff, who is put forward as the guarantor of peace and justice, defender of their rights, and the cause of union and defense against enemies of the faith. The final cluster of texts bears the title Avvertimenti a Venezia, and it deals, in a lucid synthesis, with various points of prime and constant importance in Campanella’s thought concerning the connections between theological and political beliefs.²⁶

At the core of the political reflection of this period we find a comparative analysis of the two great European powers, from which it was inferred that France found itself in an ascendant phase of ‘increasing fortunes,’ while Spain was experiencing an inexorable decline, as can be seen in the comparison of the two powers sketched in an effective and direct style in the exordium to the Aforismi politici per le presenti necessità di Francia:

• 1. In all wars, ventures, and negotiations that are done with speed and promptness, the French win and the Spanish lose.

• 2. In all wars and matters that are done slowly or by procrastinating, the Spanish win.

• 3. When undertakings and negotiations are conducted in secret, the Spanish win.

• 4. When such matters are brought out into the open, the French win.

• 5. It is said that, for the most part, the Spanish are by nature cunning; the French, courageous. But sometimes, by accident, these characteristics can be inverted.

• 6. He who plays his own game wins; he who plays the game of others loses - as when one plays strap with gypsies, which is their stock in trade.

• 7. Thus, when the Spanish play in the open and with speed, they lose; and the French lose when the game is played in secret and slowly.

• 8. The Spaniard is more apt to conserve; the Frenchman, to conquer.

• 9. Thus, all the great acquisitions of the Spanish have come from intrigue or marriage, and under the guidance of Italian captains; the preservation of French gains ought to be done in the same manner.

• 10. Engaging in combat with someone whose fortune is on the rise is extremely dangerous, even though he who is attacked is not powerful. And attacking he who is without fortune renders victory easy, even though he who is attacked is more powerful.

• 11. One recognizes the ebb and flow of fortune from events, stars, and from the nature of similar cases - and likewise from the origin, present state, and decline of principalities.

• 12. A principality that is dying under its own, old auspices can renew itself by using foreign, young auspices.

• 13. One ought to reckon that the aged power of the French under the house of Valois is being rejuvenated under the house of Bourbon, just as when a new branch is grafted onto an old one.

• 14. And one ought to reckon also that the power of Spain, dying under the royal houses of Castile and Lusitania, has been rejuvenated by the House of Austria, which has been tied to it.

• 15. Things that grow quickly, die quickly, as one sees in mushrooms, melons, grains, and the like, whereas on the contrary those trees that bear fruit only with time live long - as one sees with oaks, orange trees, and the like.

• 16. The monarchy of Spain grew with great speed; in 100 years it occupied more lands than the Romans occupied in 700 - whence one can conclude that it is by now in a state of decline.²⁷

The formation itself of the empire - which had come to pass remarkably quickly (thanks to exceptionally favorable external conditions such as marriages, successions, heredity, and the aggregations of states) - could not but cause astonishment. Indeed, ‘all false things that have more appearance than reality are quick to grow and quick to fail,’ as one sees in torrents that, generated by sudden rains, rise and disappear with great speed, while ‘great rivers that have their own source of water are perpetual.’ Products such as ‘marrows, melons, and oats grow quickly and bear fruit in the first year, and then die in the summer,’ while trees such as the oak and the beech that bear fruit only with time live a long life.²⁸

But for Campanella there were two points above all that more dramatically announced the fatal decline of Spain: it knew neither how to ‘hispanisize’ nor how to accumulate savings. If the Romans were masters of assimilating populations piecemeal, rendering them participants in the empire (such that the larger it became territorially, the more its population of citizens grew), the Spanish, on account of their immense arrogance, disdained any integration with other populations whatsoever. Thus, as their empire grew they came to ‘lack citizens and forces.’ Having failed to adopt the wise politics of mixed marriages proposed in the Monarchia di Spagna, the Spanish Empire experienced an alarming demographic contraction, due to the losses of troops in war and on account of the sterility of its women, who were subject to excessive heat. Thus, the Spanish, from the eight million that they had been, were now reduced by half and ‘just as marrows and grains send all of their substance, juice, and spirit outwards without setting down roots (such that luxuriating and dilating they deflate and grow old), so Spain had sent all its power and life-blood beyond its borders and was left without inhabitants and without value - left only with clergy, friars, priests, monks, and whores.’²⁹ Owing to the scarcity of inhabitants they are forced (and in Campanella’s opinion it was a very grave consequence) to depopulate the countries in which they arrived, ‘such that there are no longer any indigenous peoples in Cuba, in Hispaniola, nor in South America; they are called destroyers of the human race, and they make themselves the object of hatred.’ Chosen by occult divine providence to evangelize the entire globe, the Spanish have betrayed their own mission so as to transform themselves into executioners and instruments of divine wrath. Incapable of governing nations with laws adapted to their own particular nature, ‘they depopulate and destroy them, such that wherever they have gone, they have made a desert of the earth … and are hated by every nation for their cruelty and immense arrogance.’³⁰ They ‘destroy the nations that are not able to adjust to their customs, as they did in the New World, which was rendered desolate on their account.’ They leave nothing behind them but desolation and death: ‘you go to the Americans and in those immense lands you will not find living beings any more, but rather only bones and ashes, and the land grown fat on the blood of its inhabitants.’³¹

The second point, which condemns the politics of Spain even more gravely, is its incapacity to accumulate savings and its ruinous economic policy. Its enormous income is badly administered, and infinite sums of money are wasted on ‘buffoons, women, piazze morte (deadheads), clergymen, and a treacherous people.’³² As early as the Monarchia di Spagna Campanella had asserted that ‘we can say that in truth the gold of the New World has in part ruined the old world, because it created avarice in our minds and broke the reciprocal love between men.’ In the later works, Campanella reaffirmed that the influx of riches had rendered social inequality (and the vices that come along with it) more extreme.³³ That influx had contributed to the abandoning of agriculture and the trades, activities already gravely compromised due to the banishments of the Moors and the Jews, such that all preferred to give themselves over to ‘business deals involving money and serving rich men’ rather than work itself.³⁴ Valuable coins passed into France, for the purchasing of foodstuffs, or so as to corrupt political leaders. Thus, while the rival nation abounded with people, with money, and with goods of all kinds, Spain offered to the visitor an ever more miserable spectacle. Men were forced to enlist, so as to have something to eat and a pair of shoes to put on their feet (and only the most fortunate also had laces to tie them) and ‘the homes are few, either deserted or fallen into disrepair. Even where the population is low, there is nothing to eat and sometimes things get to the point that blinded by hunger they kill each other so that the one may rob the other of a piece of bread.’³⁵

The most dramatic results of this unwise economic policy could be confirmed precisely in southern Italy, of which Campanella repeatedly painted a desolate picture. He had not spared Spanish misgovernment from harsh criticism in some pages of the Monarchia di Spagna. In the first of the Arbitri sopra le entrate del Regno from many years earlier he had exhorted the sovereign to assume the true and natural function of father and pastor to his people by eliminating at its roots the most odious of speculative businesses: the commerce of grain, which subjected citizens to hunger and desperation. Dearth, Campanella asserted, does not come from nature or God, who gives to each country a supply of grain sufficient to keep it from hunger. It comes instead from merchants and from usurers, who acquire the whole supply in order to store it and resell it at triple the price. When ‘they do not find the profit their greed lusts after,’ they prefer storing it and let it rot:

And then they sell it putrefying or mixed with other grains and invite in this way not only famine but also pestilence. This has the effect of depopulating the country, because some flee the Kingdom altogether, while others become robbers and bandits simply in order to eat, and still others die from that noxious food, or from eating poisonous plants. Oppressed by usurers, hunger, disease, and troubles, many do not take wives so as not to pass on such miseries to their children, while women become whores in return for a piece of bread.³⁶

References to the Kingdom of Naples return in the later political writings too. In the ninth chapter of the Documenta, a particularly striking image of southern Italy is conjured. The French subjects, who complain of incessant tributes (which are in truth used for the purpose of augmenting the strength and glory of the nation), ought to consider what happens in the unhappy Kingdom of Naples, where ‘the greed and arrogance of the Spanish set the standards for what is just and what is permissible.’ In Naples, more taxes are paid than goods are possessed; there, every last person - even the poorest, without home, without field, who lives from his own labor - pays twenty ducats simply ‘to carry his own head on his neck.’ There, every month, taxes go up indiscriminately on every good, both natural and manufactured, both bought and sold. He who earns fifteen ‘carlino’ coins by extracting the thread of silk from cocoons with great effort has to hand over eleven to the tax collector. There, one pays both for real goods and for imaginary ones too. In Apulia, the king buys land from peasants in order to sell it to pastoralists and then sells it back to the peasants at a much higher price arguing that it has been fertilized by the pastoralists’ sheep. By now, almost no one is the owner of the house he lives in or the field he ploughs, and even other goods are sold for small amounts of money to usurers or the Genoese, who collect the taxes:

Therefore unfortunate souls are forced to work the fields of others so as to be able to eat and so as to pay their personal tribute; and if that is not enough, they are forced to emigrate to other regions or to enlist themselves as soldiers, abandoning wives and children. Yet they never receive the pay they are promised, and they die desperate men. What is more, if a man has something to say about all of this, he is at once condemned to death as the perpetrator of an act of treason.’³⁷

But the degradation of the country is nothing but a mirror in which is reflected the general decadence of Spain itself, which, while it lacks any of the virtues present in a nation on the rise, abounds in the vices belonging to countries in decline. It displays an extremely rapacious avarice, both in the old world and in the new, where, according to the Milanese Girolamo Benzoni, indigenous people gave a Spanish captain gold to drink. It displays the most arrogant disdain for other peoples, all of them treated as if they are slaves, and it displays the foulest ingratitude towards its benefactors. No one is ignorant of the sad end of Christopher Columbus, discoverer of the New World, and among those who had been persecuted Campanella did not hesitate to count himself - he who, although he had written admirable works for Spain, had suffered years of imprisonment. Moreover, the Spanish monarchy appeared as a monstrous organism, devoid of compactness and intrinsic unity. It was similar to a gigantic serpent with three heads (that of its essence, which was empire; that of existence, which was Spain; and that of value, which was Italy), the body of which was made up of parts that were disunited and far from one another. Stronger and more prosperous and ready to take over the role of hegemonic power from its adversary, France ought not to fear Spain and ought in fact to undertake bold initiatives suited to accelerating the fall of a power that was no longer able to hide its own fragility and inadequacy. Given that one ought never to play the games of others, the French ought to counterbalance their own strength with the cleverness of the Spanish, hitting them quickly without giving them time to recover and recourse to delaying and secret maneuvers. Thus, ‘it is necessary, as is proper for the lion, to begin the war in the French manner, that is with ceaseless rapidity, and openly, not in the manner of Spain, by delaying and operating in secret, as is characteristic of the wily fox.’³⁸ The French ought to denounce the Spanish and unmask their religious hypocrisy, hitting the most vulnerable points of the monstrous Geryon, so as to shatter it and liberate people from such odious Spanish tyranny.

Campanella’s attention was focused above all on two things: the authority of the empire and the Italian peninsula. To the first of these questions he dedicated the so-called Comparsa regia, a legal speech written in Latin and addressed by the French king to the Pope. He sought to argue that on account of its tyranny and heresy the house of Austria no longer had a just claim on the prerogatives of empire and that the pope should appoint the king of the Romans motu proprio, since the empire had become the property and an exclusive prerogative of the house of Austria and since it had lost any universal pretension whatsoever and lost also the specific purpose of defending Christianity. Just like all timid nations, the Spanish maintain themselves with hypocrisy, ‘pretending to be highly religious and reliant on God and zealous in the faith.’ On the pretext of fighting in defense of Christianity, they arrogate to themselves huge sums of money, offering in return nothing but vain titles, ‘for the purpose of cheating people.’ They accuse all other nations, France included, of being heretics; the Spanish cardinals in Rome are nothing by spies for their sovereign. So as to enforce belief, they have discovered the tribunal of the Inquisition, ‘the true instrument of their power.’ They have destroyed the populations of the New World, and, in order to justify their actions, they have cast into doubt the very membership of those peoples in the human race. They excuse every misdeed with religion, in the name of which they have ‘depopulated, occupied, killed, and acted like sharks towards people.’³⁹

Even if Campanella had plenty to work with in his demonstration of the completely political nature of the appeal to religion on the part of the Spanish, this did not mean that for him politics might be detached from religion. On the contrary, he reaffirmed that religion ‘in all nations at all times has dominated politics, regardless of whether that religion was true or false’ and that ‘political leaders are able to rule insofar as they can show themselves derived from God, lord of lords.’ Campanella concluded that ‘thus, dominion consists in the will of people, bound with the chain of religion among themselves and to the prince.’⁴⁰ To the instrumentalization of religion carried out by Spain, Campanella opposed the exhortation to follow the politics that was practiced and espoused by Charlemagne, who, turning to his own nation, combined in the following fashion the directives to which he conformed his own political actions, with a highly interesting allusion to ‘living’ faith and to the powers of the imagination and persuasion:

I, raising up the good and casting down the bad, have gained such a great glory for my fellow Franks that, owing also to the help of the virtue of the Apostles Peter and Paul, I have transferred to you the Roman Empire, master of the world, when I built my kingdom subject to God and not against him, not with a false and simulated faith (that renders the heart cowardly and vile, deprived of all hope of divine recompense and eternal immortality, a faith that is on that account attached only to the terrestrial life), but rather with a true and living faith, a faith that renders the heart steady and true and ready to act with courage in the face of any undertaking, in that it is animated by the hope of divine help that is present (although imagined in the case that it be denied that it is authentic, but it is unnecessary to prove how great is the power of the imagination) and at the same time boosted by the desire of the prize of eternal life. Believe me, o my sons, the pseudo-politicians fight with a dead heart, while pious princes fight with a living heart.⁴¹

But the most vulnerable point of the empire, that against which one ought to move quickly if one wanted to accelerate its dismemberment, was precisely the kingdom of Naples and Italy itself. Campanella was convinced that the Italian princes - even those who displayed submissiveness and friendship towards Spain - hated it in their hearts, but dared not state it publically out of fear. Above all, France ought to make it her business to reassure them, undoing the web of prejudices and fears that Spain had put about deliberately with respect to the French and make those princes understand that they do not present themselves as new masters (wishing only to displace the old rulers) but rather as liberators from a tyrannical domination. They ought to clarify that they did not aspire to territorial enlargement, and reassure the Pope and the clergy, who were fearful of what they presumed was the French desire to restrict the prerogatives and jurisdictions of the Church. On that issue, Campanella addressed three eloquent speeches to Genoa, to the Duke of Savoy, and to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, for the purpose of inviting them to sever without delay every political and economic tie with Spain, a nation from which they could receive no real advantage, but rather only ruin and shame. The reversal from the early Discorsi ai principi d’Italia, which exhorted the princes of Italy to support the universalist project of the Spanish empire, thought to be clearly ‘founded on the hidden providence of God … dedicated to the purpose of unifying the world under a single law,’ could not have been more complete.

In the appeal to Genoa, the reference to a glorious past served to emphasize the present condition of voluntary slavery to which it had been reduced, blinded by greed for a profit more imaginary than real. Genoa was forced to hand over to Spain the money that it received from the Kingdom of Naples, as a kind of loan that would never be repaid. Paying the price for taking upon itself the hatred and the disdain of its tormented vassals, the republic became impoverished and lost prestige from the point that the Genoese made themselves the ‘publicans of Spain.’ With regard to Vittorio Amedeo I, Duke of Savoy, Campanella reminded him of the false promises, the unbridled ambition, the senseless cruelty of the Spanish, dissuading him from following the ambiguous politics of his father, who, maneuvering between Spain and France, had made of their conflicts ‘a hugely profitable business.’ That double game would now be merely dangerous, because ‘now is not the time to play the fool, but rather the time either to lose all or to acquire a kingdom.’ The Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand II, was also brusquely invited to open his eyes to the reality of his submission to Spain - a nation that ‘is like a griffin,’ with claws planted in the ports and the fortresses of Tuscany. He was invited to abandon every illusion of alliance and friendship with anyone who takes him to be ‘a hare or a dove in his hands.’

Determined to awaken the Italian princes from a kind of spell (as a result of which they give money and soldiers to reinforce a power that would devour them, acting like ‘a goat who gives succor to a wolf, when it enters its herd in order to hunt’ or like the man who gives money to the executioner who will hang him), Campanella spurred them to become conscious of their own power, to emancipate themselves from the tyranny of a power in decline and by now exhausted, so as to recover - with their liberty - their own dignity. At the same time, he certainly knew that these steps required commitment, courage and sacrifice, as one can confirm contrarily from the worrying behavior of some galley slaves, who prefer to live and die as slaves when the period of their forced labor is over, because ‘they do not know the goodness of liberty, and they return to jail over and over, until they die.’⁴²

So as to dispel the hypnotic attraction of power, it is necessary for a ‘wise philosopher’ to unmask it in front of those who are being deceived and reveal the intrinsic fragility of a power in decline. The exile Campanella - notwithstanding the disappointments, the weariness of years, the bitter experiences - took this role upon himself energetically, both for the purpose of reawakening the Italian princes and also so as to exhort the French to take on the responsibility of being liberators of the globe having become conscious of their own superiority. After all, ‘it is shameful that France, more powerful in arms, in fleets, in soldiers, in captains, in valor, and in population, is overshadowed by the Spanish, who are timid, few in number, poor, beggars, without leaders, without troops, and who have to resort to subterfuge and foreign valor and the appearance of being what, in fact, they are not.’⁴³

12.3 Last Writings

During the Paris years, Campanella dedicated a great deal of energy to editing his writings for publication. Many of those writings successfully obtained the necessary permissions and were published, despite the obdurate hostility of cliques and individuals at Rome. The projected Opera omnia opened, at the beginning of 1636, with a volume comprised of the Atheismus triumphatus, the De gentilismo non retinendo, the Disputatio on the Papal bulls condemning astrology, and the De praedestinatione. Then it was the turn of the new edition of the De sensu rerum, dedicated to Richelieu, preceded by a Defensio that supported the doctrine of the animation of all beings by employing the authority of many theologians and philosophers. On 6 August 1637, Campanella dedicated the imposing tome of the new edition of the Philosophia realis to the Chancellor Pierre Séguier, ‘second sun’ of France and third patron to the author (after the King and Richelieu), to whom he noted that with the sound of his ‘bell’ he had intended to recall men to the book of nature and to the infallible school of God, the sole true master worthy of a faith free from doubt. In 1638 the Philosophia rationalis was published preceded by a dedicatory letter to the brothers François and Charles de Noailles, signed on 15 March 1635, in which the author expressed the deepest gratitude both to François (to whom he owed ‘liberty, honor, and life’ for helping him flee to France) and to Charles who had welcomed him with affection upon his arrival in Paris. Thereafter followed the Metaphysica, dedicated on 15 August 1638 to Claude Bullion, General Superintendent of Finances of the Kingdom, who generously supported the publication of Campanella’s books and his very life. Campanella praised him for his political and administrative gifts, calling him the architect of the prosperity of a nation that thanks to his work enjoyed incomes greater than those of the Turk, Spain, and England put together. Recalling a visit to his home (which, as Campanella put it, had occasioned an astonishment greater than that experienced by the Queen of Sheba as she admired the house of Solomon on account of its structure, its objects, and its order), Campanella was happy to dedicate to him the most important of his books, the true ‘Bible of philosophers.’⁴⁴

As for theology, during the final years in Paris Campanella would rework his doctrines on predestination, articulated and discussed in various places in particular books of the Theologia and in the De praedestinatione, into a limpid synthesis in the deft Compendium.⁴⁵ He sent it to the Chancellor Pierre Séguier, for the purpose of clarifying once more his own positions and seeking to rebut the criticisms and the censures that he knew came from the theologians of the Dominican convent at Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome and that he had not been able to see, despite repeated protests and supplications.⁴⁶ Campanella’s doctrine was strongly characterized by the principle of the double will of God, according to which God, as a father who created men as his own children and in his own image, extended to all without favor the natural and supernatural gifts apt to lead to salvation. Antecedenter, that is to say as part of this first will, men were loved equally and were thus all equally predestined, so that no one was doomed to damnation. As Campanella effectively underscored, ‘no father gives birth to his own children so as to send them to the gallows; a father may destine some for lesser goods, but certainly not for evil.’⁴⁷ But to this first divine will is added a second will subsequent to the first, one in which God is a righteous judge, beyond being simply a loving father. It is from this second point of view that, with a determination that follows from the foreseeing of merits and demerits in men, God does not predestine all for glory, but condemns to punishment those who have ‘defiled’ the image of and the similitude with the father and those who have persisted in sin, rejecting all divine help.

With regard to the incarnation, God - foreseeing that man, a free creature, would deviate from the end for which he had been created - knew also that the Word, by means of which he had originally created everything, would become incarnate in order to heal the wound inflicted by sin. Once again, that remedy was offered indiscriminately to all, gratiose et copiose et affluenter et efficaciter ex parte sui (‘graciously and copiously and abundantly and effectively on his part’) and not only to some. Human beings might render the remedy ineffectual, if they were to reject it and close their eyes to the light. In this way, grace (both natural and supernatural) was for all abundant and effective. But, as John Chrysostom (one of Campanella’s favorite authors and an authority he often cited in order to smooth the harsher edges of Augustine) had pointed out, such grace non salvat te sine te (‘cannot save you without you’).⁴⁸ Grace, which came to all abundantly extended by God, absented itself from no one. It was man, through his indigence and rejection, who absented himself from grace.

In this way, Campanella distanced himself decisively from the doctrine of an indiscriminate (indiscrete ad libitum) condemnation on God’s part, before considering the demerits and the final impenitence of man. This would prove either the original evil of men or of God, who who thus hate the good. The Spanish theologians, such as the Dominican friars Diego Alvarez and Domingo Bañes, in turn maintained that predestination for glory or damnation was irrevocable, without respect to the good or evil use of free will. They emphasized instead the absoluteness of the decree of God, who would have decided the matter thus, so as to demonstrate his generosity to some and his power and anger to many.⁴⁹ Campanella, who analyzed and discussed the subtle distinctions of such doctrine, did not hesitate to define it nugax et sine fructu (‘clumsy and fruitless’) and contrary to the entire tradition of the Fathers. He saw it as a doctrine that was instead in accordance with the anti-Christian positions of those who according to the prediction of Daniel would worship the god Maozim, who would operate in all things with power and not with wisdom and goodness, designating a few for heaven and the majority for hell not on the basis of justice or mercy, but only in order to show his own power in accordance with a decree that did not depend on the goodness or badness of works and that was instead an absolute and, on that account, diabolical decree. This was a god who would abandon without being first abandoned, a god who would make evil those who he had already decided to condemn in order be able to punish them and ‘to give vent to his irrational anger’ (saturare iram suam irrationalem). To these positions, Campanella did not tire of opposing those of John Chrysostom, according to whom the ‘mercy of God is given to all without exception,’ so that ‘just as fire always heats and the sun always illuminates, so God always does good and does not stop doing good on account of our sins or of some passion of God.’ This is a God that does not forsake even if he has been forsaken in the manner of a lover who runs after his beloved, as one reads in one of Chrysostom’s most beautiful passages that is often cited: ‘God did not create us in order to damn us: he never forsakes us, even when we forsake him, as a lover does who is delirious for the beloved; damnation is due to us alone and not to some defect in grace.’⁵⁰

Beyond simply his political advice, however, Campanella was appreciated in court circles for his astrological knowledge and understanding of the occult. A short work of chiromancy has recently been located that was composed at the fervent request (ardenter expostulavisti) of Richelieu, a man who harbored interests in such doctrines.⁵¹ In the 1630s, the Cardinal had not remained above the astrological-political affair regarding the Pope’s horoscope, and his curiosity in this field is confirmed by numerous pieces that were dedicated to him. Jacques Gaffarel - his chaplain, sent to Italy to search for the rarest Hebrew, Siriac, and Chaldean manuscripts - offered to him the Abdita divinae cabalae mysteria in 1625. Furthermore, in 1635 a young boy of twelve years of age dedicated to him his own translation from the Greek of the physiognomic work by Adamantius, which contained maxims very similar to ‘those that you have happily practiced for the purpose of discovering the strengths and weaknesses of enemies of this crown.’⁵² The Lyonais physician Lazare Meysonnier, translator of della Porta and author of texts imbued with mysticism and natural magic, dedicated to the Cardinal the Nova et arcana doctrina febrium (Lyon, 1641). Likewise, the Venetian Dominicus De Rubeis sent him his own Tabulae physiognomicae (Venice, 1639), emphasizing the utility of the science that aids the understanding of the inclinations and the affections of men judging from their exterior features and habits. Campanella certainly could not refuse the imperious desire of such a personage, and he composed a slender tract, conventional but not vulgar, asking for the protection of this famous dedicatee. If already in the introductory epistle to the De sensu Campanella had noted how a single look from the powerful minister could be enough to dissolve the malevolent clouds of slander and persecutions that afflicted him, he noted in the brief words of dedication for the short work that treated the lines of the palm that his own destiny lay in the hands of the Cardinal - only then to add that all matters remain in the hands of God.

After the bull Inscrutabilis, which had reiterated and intensified the condemnation of the divinatory doctrines of the Coeli et terrae of Sixtus V, Campanella adopted an attitude of extreme caution with regard to divination. He was attentive to distinctions and specifications, but did fight to preserve some space (even if meager) for predictive doctrines. The real aim of this Disputatio on the Bulls was that of specifying the limits of astrology for the purpose of salvaging from it at least its ‘natural’ aspect and, in this way, a degree of legitimacy. Distinguishing therefore the doctrines that derive from an authentic studiositas from those that make appeal to a vain curiositas and distinguishing likewise the sciences that proceed on the basis of signs placed by nature or by God from those that are based on artificial or arbitrary signs, Campanella condemned geomancy as vain and baseless along with practices such as aeromancy, hydromancy, and pyromancy. Chiromancy, however, was to be saved, because it was limited to observation of physical signs and to the expression of opinions on tendencies and aspects of character, without presuming to pronounce definitively on future events.

The minute treatise on chiromancy was limited to several general considerations on three principal lines of the hand. It made references to a successful and continuous tradition that had begun at the outset of the century with the Anastasis chiromantica, in which Bartolomeo Cocles boasted, following a motif typical of the Renaissance, of having brought back to light a doctrine that had become buried and neglected and restoring it to the dignity of a science. The art had enjoyed a wide diffusion in the first half of the sixteenth century and authors such as Cardano had dealt with it. Indeed, Cardano dedicated a chapter of his De varietate to the subject, and Giambattista della Porta wrote a detailed Latin treatise, which remained unpublished (probably because of censors) and was only published in 1677 in a beautiful Italian translation by Pompeo Sarnelli with the title of Chirophysiognomy. This is a work that is famous for its splendid autobiographical piece in which the author remembers his own association with the Neapolitan hangman, a certain Antonello Cocozza, so as to have the chance to analyze the hands and feet of those who had been hanged, convinced as he was that the doctrine could make use of observations of persons in whom the passions had prevailed and in whom rational control had proven fragile:

When he took down from the gallows those who had been hanged and carried them to the Ricciardo bridge (this is a place about a thousand yards from the city of Naples, where the wretched are left hanging, so as to terrorize those scoundrels who might pass by, until they rot, and are consumed by wind and rain), he would inform me of the hour of those transportations. Going to that place, I observed the markings on the hands and feet, and drew them with a stylus on paper made for that purpose, or took their forms in plaster so that I might apply wax later and have their prints at home. And in this way I had the chance to study them by night at home and to compare them with others. I would piece together all the signs that might reveal the truth, doing always the same thing, until I found all the signs that pointed towards a person being strung up. In this way, I satisfied my desire of knowing.⁵³

Upon the birth of the future Sun King, which finally came to pass after long years of disappointment on Sunday, 5 September 1638 (the same day on which, seventy years earlier, he himself had been born), Campanella was called to the palace, because the Queen wanted a horoscope for the new-born. Having examined the naked child with care and having considered the matter for several days, the friar announced a synthetic and not adulatory prognostication. He emphasized the future sovereign’s inclinations to luxury and to arrogance, his long reign, together with the unhappiness and confusion of his last years.⁵⁴ In the next weeks, he composed the Latin hexameters of the Ecloga in nativitatem Delphini.⁵⁵ In the last verses of this piece, there emerged, once again, a convergence between utopia, astrology, and prophecy. Already, the dedicatory epistle to Richelieu for the De sensu rerum had concluded with an invitation to the Cardinal to build the city of the sun that the author had described (with the wish that its splendor would never diminish). Then, in the eclogue the citation of the exordium from Virgil’s verses on the return of the reign of Saturn is followed by a call to the celestial signs and to the prophecy that announced the advent of a new age, which the ‘portentous child’ was called to instaurate. He called upon the Muses of Calabria to shake off old age so as to demonstrate once again signs of divine judgments and to communicate faith in the approaching of an age in which ‘somber colors, signs of grief and ignorance’ would be rejected, so as to put luminous clothing over pure hearts, an epoch in which impiety, fraud, lies, and quarrels will be over and done with; lambs will no longer fear the wolf, nor the herds the lion; tyrants will learn to rule for the good of the people; idleness will cease and painful toil will come to an end. Indeed, labor will be a game shared amicably between many, since all will recognize a single father and god.⁵⁶

Almost anticipating the approaching of the end, on 6 July 1638, Campanella had sent to Ferdinand II de’ Medici, along with a copy of the Philosophia realis, a letter in which some of the most important themes of his own life seem to come together and constitute a genuine spiritual testament: praise for the house of Medici for having favored the rebirth of Platonism and an emancipation from the yoke of Aristotle; the youthful hopes of finding a place under the protection of the Medici, wrecked by his adherence to the philosophy of Telesio; the reform of knowledge in the light of the two divine books of nature and Scripture; the ‘fatal secret’ of the arrival in French territory, for the purpose of bringing his own works to press, among which he would not fail to remember the early and still much loved Civitas Solis; the remote, but indelible encounter in his youth with Galileo at Padua, which had signaled the beginning of a constant friendship and esteem, despite the lack of agreement on some issues:

Your Highness will see in this book that in some things I am not in agreement with the admirable Galileo, your Highness’s philosopher and my dear friend and master since the time in Padua when he brought me a letter from the Grand Duke Ferdinand. Intellectual discord can co-exist with a concord of the wills of each party, and I know that he is a man so sincere and perfect that he will take more pleasure from my criticisms - for which each of us has given permission to the other - than from the approval of others.

And finally, there is also Campanella’s reflection on the destiny of prophets who, defeated and persecuted, rise on the third day - or in the third age. As he said, ‘the next age will judge us, because the present always crucifies its benefactors, who then rise again on the third day or in the third age.’⁵⁷ Worried by the approach of a solar eclipse, he sought in vain to ward off the threat with astral remedies well known to him and already practiced in the past with Pope Urban VIII. Campanella died some hours before dawn on 21 May 1639.

On 28 May, Théophraste Renaudot’s Gazette announced the sad event.⁵⁸ On July 3, Naudé wrote a long letter from Rome to Schoppe at Padua, hoping to feel himself united in grief with him at the loss of their mutual friend.⁵⁹ Amplifying both the merits of Schoppe in relation to the deceased and the conditions of his life at Paris, he related that Campanella - hit suddenly by strong colic pains that lasted for twenty days (the result perhaps of the erroneous administration of a drug) - died three or four hours before daybreak, serenely, in his sleep. As he went over the writings and the teachings of the man, the arcane doctrines and the meditation on eternal things, Naudé was pleased that Campanella had died satisfied that many of his own works had been published, works ‘in which he had stretched the nerves of his genius to their breaking point.’ Assuring his reader of his profound esteem for Campanella, Naudé asked Schoppe to hold alive the memory of their friend and asked him likewise to defend him against slander.

Rather than end with the solemn moment in which Campanella realized the impossibility of brightening the gloom and the shadows that were about to engulf him and to put an end to the life that he well knew was nothing but ‘a child’s game played in the dusk before dinner,’⁶⁰ it is better to recall a gentle anecdote, relayed by Nicolas Chorier, that testifies to his love for life and nature. Chorier had met Campanella in Paris, and he tells us that the old philosopher, with the ingenuity and happiness of a child, would run after small birds, imitating their twittering - Campanella had always been fascinated by the varied voices and languages of creation. He would throw his hat in the air, and, running with a certain ungainliness that testified to a body weighed down by the years, he would invite whoever was with him to breathe deeply in the pure air, because (as he would say) it was the soul of the world: ‘“Let us draw life from the life of the world.” He would call air the life of the world - air, which is the soul of nature.’⁶¹