Tommaso Campanella, his life and work

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:43

Tommaso Campanella is an Italian poet, thinker and politician who spent almost half of his life in prison for freethinking and rebellion. He was very educated and in all the time allotted to him created many works on philosophy, astronomy, politics and medicine. In addition, he was the author of numerous madrigals, sonnets and other poetic works. It was like an awakened volcano, which lived in constant search and in anticipation of transformations. Confident in his mission, Campanella constantly wrote and rewrote his works, bringing them to perfection, and some of them have survived to this day as examples of his political philosophy.

Tommaso Campanella was born in 1568 in the family of a poor shoemaker in southern Italy. He received his first education from a Dominican friar, and at the age of 15 he decides to enter the Dominican order in order to continue his studies. Of particular interest to the young Tommaso are the philosophical treatises of Plato, Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, he also studied astrology and Kabbalah. The works of the free-thinking thinker Telesias had a great influence on his further worldview - he saw in the studynature is the source of knowledge. And already in 1591, he wrote his first treatise, Philosophy Proven by Sensations, in which he opposed Aristotelian principles and demanded the right to freedom of thought.

The Inquisition did not like this, and Tommaso Campanella was arrested for heresy. After his release, he never returned to the monastery. Striving for something new, dreaming about

political and religious transformations forced him to go on a long journey through Italy, in which he was constantly accused of freethinking and imprisoned. In 1598, he returned to his native places and, together with like-minded people, began to prepare an uprising in order to establish a republic in the country in which social justice would reign. But the plot failed (he was betrayed by his accomplices) and the Italian philosopher was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Thus, Campanella was in prison for 27 years, during which he wrote his main works: "The Defense of Galileo", "Defeated Atheism”, “Metaphysics”, “Theology”, as well as many other poems. Among them, it is worth highlighting the work "City of the Sun", which has retained its attractiveness to this day. The Italian writer depicted in his work a fictional state (ideal society), in which the inhabitants decided to wisely (philosophically) manage the entire community. This

and the utopian idea reflected the author's dream of creating a Catholic world state under the control of the pope.

In 1629, Tommaso Campanella was acquitted and transferred to Rome. Pope Urban VIII, who loved astrology, wanted such a great expert in this science to be always at hand. And Campanella, in turn, tried to share his ideas with the pope. Later, in 1634, he was again accused of conspiracy, and, fleeing persecution, he found refuge in friendly France, where he was revered and glorified by all pundits. The Italian philosopher also enjoyed the favor of the king, who even appointed him cash payments. And in 1639 he died.