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4.1 Natural Philosophy

On the way back to his homeland, Campanella spent several months in Naples, where he resumed contact with his old friends, gave lectures, debated and showed the most intense interest in astral doctrines connected to prophecy.Footnote 1 According to a document that was recently found in the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the former Holy Office), a renewed attempt on the part of Mario del Tufo to find a position for Campanella as a theologian attached to the Bishop of Minervino Murge dates to this period. On 15 April 1598 Lorenzo Mongiò, called Galatino, bishop of the estate of this powerful gentleman, sent a letter to the Vice-Prefect of the Inquisition, Cardinal Giulio Antonio Santori, in which, reminding him of the request already advanced in the past at the behest of del Tufo, he informed him of having been subject to recent, insistent pressure, in response to which he had been obliged to ask Cardinal Antonio Caetani to nominate Campanella as his theologian. The letter expressed the extreme embarrassment of the Bishop, afflicted as he was by contrasting sentiments: even if he found it very difficult to turn down del Tufo’s request, he did not by the same token want to do anything that was not welcome to Rome. The prelate was indirectly suggesting that Campanella should not be appointed to the office for which he was being recommended, but he also cautiously implored Rome to relieve him of the responsibility of the negative decision, for the matter had already caused him enough annoyance: ‘and rejecting it, for the love of God do not subject me to enmity with this lord; he has constantly been reproaching me for not having agreed to his previous request.’ The Roman authorities would understand the situation perfectly and on 13 May decreed by way of response to the Bishop that he ought not to take brother Tommaso Campanella into his service as a theologian.’ In the letter there is a precise reference to Campanella’s journey to Apulia (‘the said friar having come here’) that the editors of the letter trace back to April 1598.Footnote 2 A passage of Campanella’s commentary on Urban VIII’s poetry, written many years later, confirms that he had journeyed to Apulia together with the marquises del Tufo. He also describes the conversations he had had with the local inhabitants on tarantism.Footnote 3

At Naples Campanella completed the Epilogo magno, the first five books of which were dedicated to an organic exposition of the principles of natural philosophy, while the sixth and last book dealt with ethics.Footnote 4 The Epilogo opened by affirming that, when the primary Being - omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent - decided to create the universe (meaning the totality of those ‘statues and images’ representing his own infinite goods), He extended an ‘almost infinite space’ in which this statue could be placed. This happened at the beginning of time, which flows from eternity. Space was defined as ‘the basis of being, where the beautiful work - that is, the universe - resides,’ and as ‘a substance and room and immobile and incorporeal capacity, adapted to receive any body.’ Space is homogenous in all of its parts. ‘High’ and ‘low,’ ‘behind’ and ‘in front,’ ‘right’ and ‘left’ are human words that refer to situated bodies and if the universe were not to exist, we ought to imagine empty space. But in truth, space desires plenitude and attracts entities to itself, above all those less resistant and similar to it, for ‘it enjoys so much to substantiate those entities, given that it does not ever want to be completely empty.’ Void, however, does not exist naturally and can only be obtained in a violent and artificial manner - which is fully reflected in bodies that, each in its own way, ‘abhor the vacuum that divides them, each one enjoying the contact it has with the other.’Footnote 5

God places in space the matter that ought to be considered as a physical entity. This is in stark contrast to the conception (already criticized extensively in the Philosophia sensibus demonstrata) of Aristotle and Averroes, who define it as privation and as pure ens rationis (‘mental being’). Such matter is ‘a pure body, without shape, without action, which is - however - apt to distend itself, bend, divide itself and unite and take any figure or action or artifice just as wax takes the form of all things.’Footnote 6 In imagination matter is divisible to infinity, but in reality it is divisible into the most minute particles known as atoms ‘that appear in the rays of the sun.’ This is called the ‘passive principle of the composition of things,’ and matter is described as a body that is inert, indivisible, black and shadowy, ‘because such shadowiness is as invisible to the open eye as to the closed one.’

Testifying to the delicate theological problems that could arise from new physical doctrines, Campanella, in a marginal note added to the text, explains the sense in which matter understood as body does not turn out to be incompatible with the doctrine of transubstantiation. Having noted that other theologians before him had also maintained similar principles, he specified that in transubstantiation what is transformed is the matter configured in the form of bread, not matter as such, which miraculously is not made to lose quantity. The intrinsic transformation of the ‘native heat’ that constitutes the bread does not contradict the fact that the extrinsic and accessory qualities of the bread might continue to be perceived.Footnote 7

Into this ‘corporeal, material quantity’ God imbues heat and cold, two principles that are active and diffusive in themselves, ‘two incorporeal artisans.’ Yet these are principles that could not subsist except in bodies. From the contrast between the two - in virtue of which each would like to impose itself and occupy the greatest possible quantity of matter - derive the two bodies or elements of the universe: the heavens, formed from matter transformed by heat (which is therefore extremely hot, clear, tenuous, and mobile) and the earth (constituted by matter made immobile, opaque, and dense by the cold). The sun, seat of light and heat, surrounds the earth with motions and distances that modify it in ways adapted to generating all entities, without destroying it: ‘never surrounding the earth by a single means, but trying by all the means of approach to attack it, it happens that by no means can it burn it, but instead gradually transforms it, and makes these median things that are called stones, waters, plants and animals.’

In another annotation in the margins, moreover, the author emphasized a highly significant point - namely, how providence may use the conflict of the two contrary principles to productive and preservative ends, ‘without imposing a restraint from outside, but using instead a native necessity of moving in such a manner that they might make entities without them destroying each other, a remarkable thing to contemplate.’Footnote 8 In delineating the constitutive principles of his own natural philosophy, Campanella articulated arguments that are further developed in the Metaphysica, where he insisted on the connection between naturalness and necessity. He connected the ‘nature’ of the elements and the entities that derive from them with what they receive in ‘birth, in which is sown the being that the things were capable of having, and the power and the art and the love to preserve that being.’ Focusing on the remarkable effects and finality of the artificial motion of the sun, Campanella referred to what he would call ‘Major Influences’ (Influenze Magne) - that is to say, Necessity, Fate and Harmony - that are the media through which the designs of divine providence are realized in the universe. He did so in order to conclude that ‘everywhere necessary things are done in accordance with the free will of God and those things are made by the elements with a kindly necessity, since that which is by necessity happens because it is for the best.’Footnote 9

From the conflict between the first principles derives the constitution of all the secondary beings, which in their infinite multiplicity and variety realize the infinite degrees of the first idea of God, ‘whence shine forth all the modes and beings and operations of the things that emanate from him.’ Here and in other texts Campanella insisted on emphasizing the fact that God makes use of elements as his ‘artisans’ and unwitting instruments, which - although they tend only to amplify themselves, guided by the preservative and expansive principle embedded in them originally - in fact produce the infinite variety of entities that comprise the wondrous statue of the world and that represent the infinite modes of the first idea. Without intervening in a direct way in natural processes, God makes it so that natural principles, asserting themselves, might realize at the same time what he has planned for them.

In the light of both the primary opposition between solar heat and cold, terrestrial matter and the principle of self-preservation that organizes and rules both individual entities and the universe as a whole, Campanella analyzed the various aspects and motions of the heavenly bodies. He reaffirmed their igneous nature, distancing himself from the Pythagorean conceptions discussed with Stigliola regarding the elementary composition of the stars.Footnote 10 With respect to the heavens, it is one, not subdivided into spheres, and it moves itself according to heat - that is to say, by virtue of its own intrinsic working, which preserves it and vivifies it, without the need to turn to angels or motive intelligences. Indeed, such working is ‘the habit of things that preserves them in themselves and in their being,’ and it is distinct from action and passion. The former - which is a ‘diffusion of the semblance of the active in the passive,’ exercising itself on something that is different from itself - is laborious, while the latter is realized with joy or with sorrow. Passion, which is the ‘reception of the semblance of others,’ can be natural (as when the earth, affected by the sun, becomes hot) or artificial (just as, in an illuminating comparison, the book that the author was writing is similar not to the pen with which he is writing - which is a simple ‘instrumental agent’ - but rather to the wisdom that he, Tommaso Campanella, the principal agent, has in his own mind). In the same way, the world ‘is not similar to heat and cold, instrumental agents of God, but to the divine Idea.’Footnote 11

That sensibility (understood as the ability to feel) had the function of preserving being and life was reaffirmed expressly in the fifth book, dedicated to animal organisms, at the origin of which there stands a particular grade of attenuation of celestial heat, the spiritus, that is capable of detaching itself from the portion of matter that makes of it a wrapping thanks to its subtlety and to its movement. Not being able to exit from the corpulence in which it finds itself enclosed, this spiritus organizes it and moulds it so as to guarantee its own life, preserving it from external menaces and procuring for itself the nutrition of which it has constant need:

Every living body has need of nutrition, and every vivifying spirit forms bodies with organs adapted for that life; thus, from within such bodies spirit makes feet in order to forage for food and flee from enemies, the mouth and hands to procure such nutrition, and internal organs to cook it, a liver to distribute it to all the channels of each limb, and a heart for converting it into spirit, together with lungs to light the internal fire, bones to hold the body up, flesh to defend it, nerves and ligaments to hold it together and move it.Footnote 12

All sensorial processes are directed to the same end of preservation, and the organs of sense are the parts of the body organized so as to permit the spirit to come into contact with the movements of the air, the vibrations, the heat, the fumes, and the light that comes from the exterior. All sensation is a ‘touching’ of the spirit, which comes to be modified slowly and which from these alterations can judge the qualities of external objects, and discover if such modifications cause pleasure or pain. Sensation does not arrive, thus, by way of ‘information’ - that is to say, by means of accepting external forms - but rather by ‘transformation,’ that is to say, by the alterations perceived by the spirit..Footnote 13

Dwelling upon the activity of heat, from which derive sense and spiritus, Tobias Adami emphasizes its nobility and its centrality. Even if his use of Latin is rather taxing and somewhat contorted, it is hard not to recognise precise echoes of Campanella:

Our heat is that vivid, celestial light of a most noble nature; most subtle and most pure, essential agent and cause of all motion of things, which the Creator has put into all matter as his instrument and blacksmith that gives life. It penetrates everywhere to execute its wonderous works, establishing itself in its seat in the sun, heart of the Earth, of which the divine Moses also speaks. Thus, this tireless craftsman, which is never reduced, mixes itself into all things. When it pulsates through all things touching our spirit, it is perceived as heat. When it makes contact with our eyes, it is light and color. When it reaches the tongue, it produces taste and moves all the other senses of our body, such that owing to it the matters of our internal spirit may be known.Footnote 14

4.2 Natural Ethics

The sixth book of the Epilogo is dedicated to ethics, and its contents echo the ninth book of Telesio’s De rerum natura closely. In Campanella, as in Telesio, the great law that connects and renders diverse natural entities common is that of the preservation of one’s own being. Every human action is directed at ‘acquisition of the good that preserves’ and ‘flight from the evil that damages.’ But since man is placed in a universe that is constituted by opposing forces, in which evil and good are tied to one another, and since ‘the spirit desires and hates more or less than it ought to, or in a way that works to its own detriment,’ it is necessary to find a rule ‘of how much, how, and to what it ought to be drawn - and this rule is called virtue.’Footnote 15 Virtue, therefore, is a ‘wisdom regulating every affection and action’ that imposes the right measure on the affections of the spirit. The spirit, pushed by the spurs of pleasure and pain, can fall into error ‘because it laments, rejoices, loves, and hates more or less than it ought to,’ but virtue - in light of the traces of divine wisdom that shine forth from nature - redirects every passion in the right measure towards the preservation of itself.Footnote 16

The accentuation of the importance of the original purity of the spiritus also has its origins in Telesio’s philosophy. Taking up again the Telesian comparison to gold, Campanella asserted that

The virtue that renders good - that is, pure - that which possesses it and that preserves in it its pure being is the purity of its genus, placed at birth, preserved in education, and extended in exercise. Thus, human virtue is the purity of the human spirit, which knows itself and grows in use, just as in disuse it becomes obscured.Footnote 17

In The City of the Sun too, Campanella would insist on the close connection between natural ‘complexion’ and moral virtue. He derived from that the careful choice, based on precise astrological calculations, of the moment most suited to the conception of the offspring, on which depends the purity of the complexion and the spirit. Education could do much to reinforce and exercise virtue, but virtue - in order to take root and grow - needed a suitable terrain, which is an original and not modifiable datum, the lack of which produces men devoid of an authentic, intrinsic virtue in their being.Footnote 18 In the Epilogo the diverse virtues come successively to be listed according to the degrees and kinds of self-preservation - in themselves, in children, in fame and in society. The list opens with solicitude, thanks to which man (on account of his capacity to imitate the divine art embedded in nature) invents the arts that provide necessary goods to him. Then one moves on to liberality, the virtue that permits one to make effective use of the goods procured by solicitude, and then on to sobriety and chastity, which set out the correct rules for nutrition and generation, which is a ‘sacred thing’ while its act is ‘a natural sacrament.’

The political and social virtues follow on from there. There is justice, to which belongs the equal distribution of tasks and roles, such that society emerges organized with the same wisdom and harmony as the parts of the human body. There then follows truth, without which ‘one would lose human commerce,’ given that the liar is ‘an extremely unhappy animal, because he destroys himself doing and saying that which he is not in spirit, and reducing being to non-being’. Another virtue is the noble quality of beneficence, which proceeds from similarity to God and, just as in him, ‘prizes more the whole than the part, more that which is common than that which is particular’ and effuses goodness in the form of generosity, just as God does who offers it to all, ‘being better than all, and not for self-interest, but rather for the delight he has in his own goodness.’ The opposing vice is maleficence, typical of an evil and vile spirit, ‘who does evil to others and the greatest evils to the virtuous, because it does not trust the living if it has not destroyed the best.’ This is something that is characteristic of ‘tyrannical princes,’ who ‘murder philosophers and saints, chase them from the court, and take up with base people, because they feel themselves unfit to command those who are their betters, and abhor their presence.

The list of virtues goes on: gratitude, sister of beneficence (while the ungrateful ‘would like to see the person who surpasses him in benefits dead, because he is incapable of returning favors to him and has a hatred of being obligated’); equality, opposed to arrogance; the ‘beautiful virtue’ of happiness that ‘contents itself with present goods and future hopes’ without being prompted by future evils and that derives from a ‘lucid and pure spirit, not despairing on account of evils, but rather effusive and playful with its own light’; tranquility, which willingly forgives, and kindliness, which enjoys the goods of others without hoping for anything in return; emulation which encourages imitation of the best and, finally, generosity, called also sublimity or magnanimity, a heroic virtue that regulates the divine desire for excellence in man.

The Dialoghi (Venice, 1608) of Giovan Battista Clario sheds light on the early ethics of Campanella. Fifteen or so years earlier, as we have seen, Clario had been close friends with Campanella at Padua and he had been involved in the ‘third’ trial.Footnote 19 The first three dialogues, titled Della consolazione (‘On Consolation’), Delle avversita’ (‘On Adversities’), Delle ingiurie (‘On Harm’), take up arguments that are found in the pages of Campanella. The place, suggestive and terrible, where the two interlocutors - Panfilo, the author himself, and Armenio, who represents Campanella - exchange reflections and fears is a cell of the Roman Inquisition in which they are both imprisoned. The central theme of the conversations is a meditation on the behavior of the wise man who is suffering from misfortune. The young Panfilo - who admits having been up to that point favored by fortune and having lived a happy life, devoid of any difficulty whatsoever - does not know how to give himself peace. He feels himself unjustly accused and asks for comfort from his companion, who calmly explains to him, above all, how the wise man is not altered by ­misfortune. ­Difficulties, in fact, are an exercise for the generous and strong spirit. Just as the waters of rivers and rain, mixing themselves with those of the sea, are not able to alter its taste (but, just the opposite, are forced to take on its nature), so ‘the impetus of adversity, fighting against the spirits of the wise, not only lacks the power to change them, but in fact comes itself to be transformed by their nature.’ Adversity, according to Armenio, is in point of fact an opportunity to transform a delicate spirit into a strong one, ‘like the coral that, exposed to the air, becomes hard.’ It is in this way that merit has the chance to reveal itself. The grain does not come out of the ear if it is not beaten and the saffron plant has to be trodden upon in order to produce its most beautiful flower. To Panfilo, who suffers from and refutes the dramatic conflict between appetite and reason, the friend replies that the metempsychosis imagined by Pythagoras and Plato is a projection of the continual risk on the part of man of being transformed into a beast, if he does not control himself and guide the sensible part of himself with reason. He reminds him that it is only virtue that renders life blessed and that often wise men are persecuted and put to death. In any case, the wise man is sovereign over himself and no external evil has the power to hurt him. For this reason, he should not seek revenge for the injuries he receives, which remain something extrinsic and do not have the power to offend his inner nature:

When a young boy tears out his mother’s hair, hits her and deafens her with his cries, she is not angered and does not consider herself wronged by him; just so, considering who has injured you - or better who you think has injured you - you ought not to judge yourself wronged by him.Footnote 20

In the years following, the Ethica, reworked and translated into Latin, would become the second part of the quadripartite volume of the Philosophia realis. The table of virtues would be enriched with new entries and their description would be more detailed. Later, in the Paris edition, the work would be accompanied by three dense Quaestiones, concerned with the chief good, free will, and the virtues. If the basic system remained the youthful and Telesian one, some additions and modifications turned out to be quite significant: the tension between divine mens and corporeal spiritus became more present and precise, several Stoic themes were accentuated (themes that, already present in Telesio and in the young Campanella, were coming to acquire a place ever more relevant and useful as a point of connection between the naturalism of the new philosophy and the positions of the Latin and Greek fathers - above all Ambrose, Lactantius, and John Chrysostom). The virtues that came to be added tended to underscore the convergence and harmony between religion and nature. Not by chance the list opened with sanctitas (holiness), which - positing God as end of all the virtues and the horizon within which they are collected - ‘hallows and makes holy’ (sancit et sanctificat), that is purifies all intermediate ends directing them to God himself, from whom every thing derives and to whom every thing returns. Every aspect of nature testifies to the presence of divine goodness, such that even to the man who lives in a solitary and isolated place it would suffice to look within himself or at natural entities in order to recognize divinity ‘as in an open book’; thus, the holy man ought to move through the world ‘as if in the house of God.’ After that came probitas, which one can also call bonitas or rectitudo, a virtue that regulates love towards oneself and others, coordinating the preservation of the individual and the whole.Footnote 21

A wondrous virtue, which the ancients had not taken into consideration and on which in contrast Campanella focused, was the virtue that he called protestatio - namely, the recognition, by means of exterior signs, of the goodness and the value of something with regard to its end. That virtue was divided into various kinds: simple praise; honour, which is worthy of every man in the correct and useful exercise of his profession, while the limb that is damaging to the social body merits disdain and merits being shunned; adoration, with which one celebrates the excellence of an eminent nature that as such is revered even in representations of it in so far as it is successfully conveyed. Campanella recalled having seen someone who honored and kissed the ruins of Rome, evidence of the virtue of that civilization. Worthy of praise is he who excels for wisdom and moral virtue, and above all God and the divine men who resist evil and generously spread good. Protestatio manifests itself also in fame and glory, with respect to which Campanella indicated that only a superficial examination would judge Alexander and Caesar heroes, because in truth the most difficult war is the one that one fights internally against vice and passion. Contraries of such attestation are horror, disdain, derision, the worst form of which is that belonging to the man who persecutes holy men and philosophers, accusing them of being ignoramuses, wretches, fanatics and rebels. In doing so, they would be allowing sophists, hypocrites and tyrants to rise to power, or else remain there without being challenged.Footnote 22

Other virtues, which seem to follow Christian ones closely (such as modesty, which consists in modes of dressing, speaking, and behaving so as not to offend or scandalize others), in fact had a wider expression and a different depth, such as verecundia, or demureness, which is a kind of castigation that the sinner inflicts upon himself, experiencing shame at his own errors and at everything that renders him vile and base. The contrary vices are cheek and impudence, which are not only characteristic of prostitutes, but even of sovereigns who are not ashamed to execute pointless slaughters or to torment the human race simply to satisfy their slightest whims. Pushed to the extreme, modesty can induce suicide, as in the case of Lucretia (who was not able to overcome rape) and other characters who killed themselves because of shame for crimes and violations they have suffered. But he who suffers is not guilty, Campanella observed. The greatness of the human spirit is such that, even if the body is submitted to violence, the victim is greater than he who tortures, than the executioner, than he who disdains, than the master. Or take the case of humility, another virtue noted only by Christians, which is contrasted to arrogance, based in love of oneself, and that is a kind of compass for all the other virtues (magnes omnium virtutum) and is of all the virtues the most wise, because it places man beneath God - ‘and here to serve is to rule’ (et hoc servire regnare est). Because it has no presumption to know, it is able to learn the degree to which it has become conscious of its ignorance. Humility succeeds, precisely because it adopts an attitude of continual research. He who, conversely, believes himself to be wise and holy cannot progress on the road that leads to God, as he who believes himself to be satiated cannot partake of more food.Footnote 23

In the more mature version of the Ethica too, the list of the virtues ends - as in the Epilogo magno - with sublimity. If already in the early work these are very beautiful pages (as they are in Telesio too), in the later draft they would become among the most intense and evocative pages in all of Campanella’s writings, pages in which natural values are united with divine ones so as to constitute a vibrant manifesto for the ‘dignity of man’ (dignitas hominis). Sublimity is the heroic virtue that regulates the desire for excellence that is at the heart of the human being, at the heart of his straining towards the infinite and his aspiration to make of himself an image of divinity. The limitless avidity for praise and the hatred for every kind of servitude are so strong that even the devil yields to invoking divine mercy for fear of humiliating himself. Even if men know that they are mortal, pushed by that divine image that is within them, they started believing themselves to be immortal and started presenting themselves as divinities. With the basic importance of puritas (purity) of spirit reaffirmed in these pages (so that mens may manifest its own divine splendor plainly), Campanella sketched a portrait of the magnanimity that is an ideal program of life and the whole thing is shot through with touching autobiographical elements. Conscious that the true nobility is interior, Campanella did not concern himself with whether external honors would be withheld, nor would he avenge himself for offenses received, well aware of the fact that insult could not touch his own essence. He would return evil with good, so as to set down a law and an example that others might imitate and so as to overcome wild spirits and render them human. Campanella would want to know all the arts and all the sciences, he would amend the doctrines of the ancients confronting them with the divine book of nature and he would study with attention the doctrines of the moderns. His heroes would be those like Columbus and Galileo who had dared to explore unknown terrain, discoverers of new worlds both terrestrial and celestial - or Origen, who had the boldness to push himself beyond the confines and the certainties of revelation. If one notation alluded to a program of life pathetically contrary to the reality of the facts (‘if it will be possible for him, he will travel throughout the world, so as to experience everything’), in other passages autobiographical confession is more open and transparent. The magnanimous person would like to be judge and legislator for all humanity, so as to root out the shamefulness of false doctrines and false cults, and so as to put an end to tyranny. He would do everything possible for his homeland, lamenting its misfortunes and its condition of servitude, and he would seek to leave that homeland better than he had found it. Convinced that God is present even in misfortune, he would not concern himself with sufferings and with imprisonment, holding himself to be stronger and more worthy in that condition of imprisonment than in enjoying liberty, because the persecution of virtue (that is hated and feared by impure and false political leaders) could not but render it clearer and more manifest.

To sublimity are opposed, on the one hand, cowardice or pusillanimity and, on the other hand, arrogance. If the first is timid and faithless, the second is the root of every vice, in so far as it is a kind of misdirected love of excellence. Arrogance upsets the proper relationship between man and God and, making us turn our backs on the chief good, it closes us up in ourselves, such that we end up believing ourselves worthy of every kind of honor and we are ashamed to depend on God. The arrogant man will desire honors out of a vain ostentation and in dishonors he will lose all respect for himself. On the other hand, the magnanimous man, if he is put to death for the defence of reason and of justice, will reveal himself to be a true prince by nature, oppressed by false pretenders. Today, Peter and Paul have overcome Nero, and while Socrates lives and is worthy of praise his persecutors are detested by all:

In fact, he - in his life and in his death - set down a law in sacred words that will remain forever, such that every one will want to be as he was. His persecutors, however, are so odious and detestable that no one wishes to be similar to them.Footnote 24

4.3 Machiavellism and Universal Monarchy

One of Campanella’s most significant political works is the Monarchia di Spagna, which has presented (and continues to present) difficulties with regard to date, philology, and interpretation. Campanella asserted almost constantly that he had composed this ‘secret book’ (in which he indicated to the Catholic sovereign the means by which to pursue a universal monarchy) at Stilo, in 1598 - or at least before the conspiracy - at the behest of the Spanish jurisconsult Martos Gorostiola.Footnote 25 Campanella did not forget to emphasize how the work (which favored Spain), having been written before his imprisonment, constituted a demonstration of his innocence and of the unfoundedness of the accusations of rebellion: ‘I was building the majesty of Spain and of the Church when I was incarcerated as a disruptor of precisely those things …’Footnote 26 Firpo, taking the unusual display of the date to be more suspicious than persuasive, believed that the work was written in the second half of 1600 and was opportunistically backdated by the author for the purpose of exonerating himself.Footnote 27 But since it does not appear to me that there are sufficiently strong reasons leading us to distrust the date indicated by the author (a date that is also confirmed in texts written considerably later than the dramatic events of the trials), I maintain that the date is to be accepted - bearing in mind two things.Footnote 28 For one thing, the first nucleus of the work goes back to a clearly earlier period. Testifying to the age of the text is the identification - amidst the extremely intricate maze of manuscripts - of a considerably shorter version of the work, which appears to be a first redaction composed in Campanella’s youth.Footnote 29 For another thing, it is beyond doubt that from the earliest part of the imprisonment (and then in the course of the following years), Campanella added to his own text what he thought useful or necessary, both in order to improve it and in order to make use of it in the most appropriate manner. But the understandable decision to emphasize his own pro-Spanish loyalty and to use it for apologetic purposes does not imply a feverish - and frankly improbable - drafting ex novo of so complex a work as the Monarchia in the first, extremely difficult months of his incarceration.

With respect to the philological issues arising from the text, only recently has the genuine Italian text appeared, cleansed of the interpolations taken in most cases from the Ragion di Stato of Giovanni Botero, which are present in the overwhelming majority of the manuscripts and in all the published texts.Footnote 30 The insertion of extraneous passages into Campanella’s text appears to be the result of an unscrupulous action (certainly not attributable to the author) of which he was in all probability completely ignorant. In any case, it is beyond doubt that this is an intervention that is neither casual nor involuntary. The passages, at times opportunely recast, have been inserted with care and skill, so as not to alter the flow of the text, passing themselves off as digressions or amplifications. The question of who might have been able to carry out this work (probably for editorial purposes) has not yet found a reliable answer.Footnote 31

If the philological issues surrounding the Monarchia di Spagna are complex, no less difficult are the issues of interpretation. From the end of the seventeenth century (in which the work enjoyed a notable diffusion above all thanks to the repeated Latin printings by Elsevier), the treatise did not fail to elicit both perplexity and the most harsh judgments. Some parts were viewed with particular suspicion. These included above all the explicit urgings addressed to the king asking that he establish the closest possible alliance with the Pontiff and that he eliminate all religious discord at its root, for the purpose of reconstituting that unity of faith which alone could have founded and guaranteed the unity of the dominion. The unscrupulousness of some suggestions aimed at dividing and weakening the enemies of Spain for the purpose of making it easier for the Catholic sovereign to realize a universal monarchy were also emphasized. The chapter on the Low Countries generated real indignation especially in Protestant lands. It was a chapter that, given the extreme actuality of the argument, took on a life of its own and was printed in Latin translation (and from that was translated into Flemish) independently of the text of which it was part.Footnote 32 In the furore of the polemic, the author was presented as a new, more insidious Machiavelli whose subtle stratagems it was good to know in order to oppose the best defences to them. In this way, Campanella was soon being presented as a master of the arts of dissimulation, who, while condemning the perfidy of the Florentine Secretary with his words, with his actions took from him maxims disguised in a more devious fashion. The influential notion synthesized vividly from these judgments of a Campanella who was at the same time ‘a harsh critic and a subtle master of Machiavelli’s maxims’ goes back to Hermann Conring.Footnote 33

It is beyond doubt that the encounter with Machiavelli constitutes one of the most important aspects of Campanella’s thought. That encounter took place on the terrain of the relationship between religion and politics - which is one of the central nodes of his work. Campanella’s criticism of Machiavelli is organized, above all, around two connected points. On the one hand, Campanella stressed what appeared to him to be the philosophical limits of the Florentine Secretary’s thought, which carried over into an intrinsic weakness in his construction of politics. On the other hand, Campanella developed and inserted into a Catholic and Counter-Reformation context an element that was already present primarily in Machiavelli’s Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio - that is, the attention to religion as the most powerful of the bonds holding the human community together. Right from the exordium to the Monarchia, with the articulation of the doctrine of the three causes that govern over political events, the author denounced the insufficiency of a historical vision limited to the consideration of human affairs only. Campanella articulated the necessity of going beyond the too restricted horizon of Machiavellian politics: ‘Three common causes come together in the conquest and maintenance of every great power - namely, God, prudence, and opportunity - which, united together, one calls fate, which is the coinciding of all the causes acting by virtue of the first.’Footnote 34

Thus, God is the first cause that guards and governs the others and is always present in all historical events - even if in hidden or less evident forms. This means that the able and shrewd politician has to try hard to integrate empirical causes with general ones, connecting human events to the laws of fate. To that end, recourse to the ‘highest sciences’ of prophecy and astrology becomes indispensable. These are sciences that allow the inserting of particular events into a universal background. With respect to prophecy, the Bible (as a sacred text) encompasses and prefigures the entirety of profane history. The wise interpretation of Scripture - an interpretation capable of identifying apt analogies and correspondences - enables one to read historical events in the light of the ‘archetypal’ events of the Bible. In order to comprehend the arc of the evolution of a specific political formation, it is necessary to identify the Biblical correlate to which it refers, and from here trace back the essential steps of its transformation in the past and in the future, because ‘when the auspices of fate are followed everything prospers, and when one goes against fate one encounters difficulty.’ For this reason, Spain must identify the ‘auspices of fate’ under which it might carry forward the great design of a world monarchy to happy completion. Appealing to apposite scriptural texts, Campanella concluded that the Spanish, ‘on account of fate, cannot have dominion except as liberators of the church from the hands of the Babylonians, that is of the Turks and the heretics.’ He concluded also that the Catholic King would have to be inspired by the model of Cyrus, invested by God with a mission as liberator of the church from the infidels and as the congregator of peoples under a single faith.Footnote 35

The reference to God as first and supreme cause of human history demonstrates above all the necessity of taking into account the totality into which human events are inserted, so as to identify the specific role assigned by the divine plan to each nation, and so as to act out of respect and in conformity with such an assignment. In the second place, it underscores how religion is the most potent instrument for unity, in that it constitutes an essential bond holding the political community together. Machiavelli understood this by studying the Roman republic, but then went on to condemn the Christian religion as a contributor to weakness, dispute, and division. Campanella did not hesitate to affirm in this text (as he had already asserted in the Dialogo politico ­contro Luterani and would later reaffirm in other texts) that, independently of its truth value, religion establishes itself as the first and most powerful bond pulling the body politic together on account of the fact that it masters and connects the spirits of men (on which depend all the other bonds between human beings). Thus, ‘religion - whether it be true or false - has always won out when people believed in it, because it binds the spirits of men together, on which depend bodies and swords and tongues, which are the instruments of empire.’Footnote 36

Besides these general coordinates, which, although fundamental, constitute the hardest and most difficult aspect of the Monarchia, the text possesses some more lively parts, in which the dominant theme of unity is articulated in fresh ways and adorned with images and suggestions that derive from natural philosophy. Political association too, just like natural association, is a living organism: thus, the primary duty of political action is to favor the most efficacious connection between the various members. The particular virtue of this activity is prudence, which pertains to the duty of increasing natural bonds. In general, the duty of elaborating an entire series of unifying techniques is directed at consolidating the bonds of the parts with the whole, integrating the different to the similar, and attenuating the most violent contrasts in a way that works towards the ideal functioning and the prosperity of the entire organism. Campanella insisted on differentiating prudence from Machiavellian cunning, described by the moderns as ‘reason of state,’Footnote 37 which is destined to failure because it is a technique dedicated to the affirmation of egotistical individuality. This is amply demonstrated in the tragic end of Cesare Borgia, ‘student of the impious Machiavelli,’ and in the likewise tragic ends of the various Neros and Ezzelinos, whose successes have revealed themselves to be deceptive and ephemeral: ‘and although they might use a great deal of cunning to suppress the people, I say that in the end such cunning will ruin them’. They are compelled to live the bitter life of tyrants, tormented by continual suspicions and fears, disquieted by the consciousness of not being loved, ‘which is death and not life for those who rule.’Footnote 38

A wise politician is he who, having as his aim the solidarity and the well-being of the totality, is able to promote opportune bonds at three different levels. Above all, he must be able to unite the spirits of men through the impulse given to the letters and sciences, and especially the bonds deriving from the preaching of the best religion, which is the unity of the members and the soul that vivifies the organism. In the second place, he must be able to promote the bonds of the body, and here Campanella’s attention is focused in two directions. On the one side, he stressed the necessity of military reform. Considering with interest the Turkish military schools, he proposed the institution of analogous ‘seminaries’ in which illegitimate children and the children of the poor could be raised and trained in the use of arms, not knowing any father other than the King. On the other side, Campanella insisted on the appropriateness of increasing marriages, favoring the unions of people of diverse constitution and temperament - and of the Spanish with other peoples, so as to ‘hispanisize other nations and disperse seed, as trees do’ and for the purpose of tempering the vices of Spanish blood, ‘which is hateful to almost all other nations, because it is fairly humble in serving yet haughty in dominating, boastful and cunning in small things and not in big things.’ The third type of bond is that of the goods of fortune, and in this case the issue is increasing, internally, the economic well-being of peoples and, externally, increasing goods, commerce, and above all shipping - that genuine lymph-node which permits the domination of distant lands and the connection of separate parts of the empire. Footnote 39

It is in light of these principles that Spanish bad governance was not spared criticism that was at times quite harsh. One of the worst evils - and least known - is an extremely bad administration of justice, especially on the part of magistrates at the lower level, who ‘are ready to exaggerate crimes in order to aggrandize themselves in the eyes of their superiors and who do not hesitate to condemn the innocent, because they pronounce their verdicts not according to the law, but according to the promptings of reason of state and of personal avarices and ambitions. Destructive also, for the most part, are the barons: lazy, parasitic, and overabundant, they abandon themselves to an unbridled luxury, and in order to maintain that luxury ‘they rob from a thousand hands,’ depopulating their lands and ‘ruining the people from whom every fee that comes to the King derives.’ On that score, it is better to treasure men than gold, and the greatest treasure is a large number of subjects united by reciprocal love. Campanella affirmed the common supposition that the gold of the New World had ruined the old world. It had let loose avidity and interrupted the reciprocal love between people, rendering social inequalities - and the vices deriving from them - more glaring. Men, said Campanella (and he would repeat it in The City of the Sun), ‘are either too rich, which makes them insolent, arrogant, and soft or too poor, which makes them schemers, thieves and murderers.’ This corrodes justice, because if a poor man takes legal action against a rich man ‘he cannot find justice, and then becomes an outlaw, or dies in jail, and the rich man oppresses whoever he pleases, because the judge is dependent on him, and judges are made by favor, or even more by money.’Footnote 40

The final part of the Monarchia deals more specifically with relations between Spain and other countries, which Campanella surveys one by one, so as to identify from time to time the points of strength or weakness among friendly nations and among hostile ones - such as France, England, and above all the Turkish Empire. He also surveys these countries, so as to provide opportune plans for consolidating the bonds that exist with the first and for weakening the second and making them less dangerous, in such a way that they cannot oppose the universalistic plan of the Spanish sovereign. The most famous of these chapters (and the most discussed) is the one concerned with the Low Countries, which offers a kind of cross-check of the validity of the analyses carried out and of the remedies proposed.Footnote 41 The author showed how, in following policies that he was counselling against, one would risk finding oneself in situations without means of escape. In this enterprise, Spain had wasted enormous amounts of gold and men without obtaining its objectives, because, instead of favoring union, attenuating and crushing diversity, it had exacerbated contrasts, fomenting hatred and opposition. The point of departure here was an attempted physiognomic analysis of the peoples in question, peoples who - like northerners in general - were said to be of a fierce temperament and dominated by robust passions. The cold, in fact, made it so that ‘native heat does not escape outwards with its subtle parts, whence northerners remain full of essence and blood, and the bodies - growing a fair bit - are full of spirits and are extremely strong.’ This inclines them to a liberty that is both political and religious ‘hence a broadly defined law was suited to them, because the passions of their spirits were more capable of unleashing them than the law was of restraining them, and confident in their own power they respect no superior authority.’ It is not to be wondered at that they have in large part joined the Reformation, since on both the practical level (with the elimination of fasts and other prohibitions) and the doctrinal level (with the rejection of free will) it supported the vehemence of their instincts and emancipated them politically from subjection to the Pope. On this matter, Campanella reiterated that judgment he had already expressed in the Dialogo: ‘With the excuse of maintaining their liberty of conscience, they maintained their political liberty.’

From the moment that between the fair-colored and sanguine Flemish people and the dark, melancholic Spaniards ‘love could not take root (there being no unifying similarity),’ the bonds on which they ought to have counted were those undeniable bonds of religion and politics. Spain’s most serious error, though, was that of not having immediately crushed such heretical doctrines, the diffusion of which had then favored and supported political rebellion. Campanella did not hesitate to declare that the most rapid and effective solution would have been the suppression of Luther. If that had not taken place it was only because, once again, reason of state had revealed itself to be miopic and limited. Indeed, Charles V, deluding himself that he would be able to make use of Luther as a pawn in his political game (by dressing Luther up as a scarecrow for the Pope), made a mistake in his calculations, succeeding only in weakening Christianity and his own Empire: ‘with the Pope enervated, all of Christianity was weakened. And after the heresy, all the peoples rebelled in the name of living in a freedom of conscience, as the peoples of Charles himself did in Germany and Flanders.’

In a situation that was compromised from the beginning, Spain did nothing but heap error upon error, exercising - in a counterproductive manner - a harshly repressive politics with respect to those populations inclined by nature to liberty. The continual wars, then, with their cruelty, did nothing but worsen the situation, provoking ever more fierce resistance - both moral and military - from the rebels, such that Campanella was convinced that ‘today Spain does more harm fighting them than letting them be.’ At that point, there was nothing to do but oppose the obtuse and violent machinations of Spain, interventions that were based on the ‘subtle’ arts, and go back to the wise interpretations of the ‘learned’ mythological fables of Antaeus, Cadmus, and Jason, which contain precious teachings. Campanella made an entire series of suggestions (some of which were rather unscrupulous), suggestions that echo the much deplored Machiavellianism, directed at dividing and weakening the rebels and at destroying military resistance around their leaders, drawing energy and resources from them in directions other than resistance and uniform hatred against Spain.

The two concluding chapters are dedicated to the New World and to shipping, the most ‘wonderful’ aspects of the Spanish monarchy, the extraordinary expansion of which in distant and unknown lands constituted one of the most evident signs of its prophetic mission and of the fact that Spain was guided by the forces of fate. In the Monarchia (as in the Discorso sui diritti del Re Cattolico sopra il Nuovo Emisfero (Treatise on the rights of the Catholic King over the New Hemisphere), the basis for the legitimacy of the conquest of the New World on the part of the Catholic Sovereign is identified with his prophetic role as a mystical Cyrus chosen by God for the purpose of reunifying the peoples of the earth in a single flock. Yet that did not prevent Campanella from severely criticizing the violent and cruel methods that had made the conquest and domination of those lands possible in the final pages of this text. Campanella deplored the irrationality of the preaching and the extermination of populations, who constituted a treasure much more precious than that of metals such as gold or silver. In time, such criticisms would become ever sharper, turning into a hard closing argument against those who had preferred the sinister roles of ‘executioners and instruments of the anger of God’ to the providential role of congregating the Christian flocks.Footnote 42