Tommaso Campanella

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all The City of the Sun, On the Sense of Things and on Magic, and his poems.

All things feel

Campanella teaches that everything that exists can feel. Nothing could keep itself in being unless it sensed what harms it and what helps it: fire feels the cold and flees it, the magnet feels the iron and draws it, the plant feels the sun and turns toward it. Sensing is a being acted on, and knowing is a kind of becoming like what is known. The world is one great living creature, the statue and living image of God, and all its parts feel together.

Power, Wisdom and Love

Every being is made of three first principles: power, by which it can be; wisdom, by which it knows its being; and love, by which it loves its being and keeps itself in it. In God the three are infinite and pure. In creatures they are mixed with not being, with lack of power, ignorance and hate, so that every finite thing is a weave of being and nothing. The love by which each thing keeps itself is the root of nature, and in a human being it must widen into love of the whole and of God.

Magic, the art of sympathy

Magic is the practical science of that common feeling. Natural magic works by the sympathies and antipathies between things, as medicine and farming do, using the powers of herbs, stones, scents, sounds and lights; it is honest and belongs to philosophy. Above it is the divine magic of the saints, which works by God's grace; below it, the demonic magic that works by evil spirits and deceit, which is forbidden. Music and words move the spirit directly, because the spirit is a warm, fine air that sound and breath can stir.

The world is a book

In one of his sonnets the world is the book in which the eternal Wisdom wrote its own thoughts, and the living temple it painted with its deeds and filled with living statues. People should read that book, he says, and not the dead books copied from it, which are full of error. His first book, in defence of Telesio, gives the method: nature is to be studied through the senses, which are touched by the things themselves, and not through the authority of Aristotle. Telesio's two principles, heat and cold working on a passive matter, became the ground of his whole philosophy of nature and of his astrology.

God's two books

In his Defence of Galileo he holds that God wrote two books, Scripture and nature, and that they cannot contradict each other, since they have one author. Scripture teaches the way to salvation and speaks of nature in the language of the people; it does not settle questions that the senses can test. A theologian who condemns a philosophy of nature without having studied it errs, as the old writers erred who denied that anyone could live on the far side of the earth. The freedom to study nature does faith no harm.

The City of the Sun

The City of the Sun is his picture of a commonwealth that lives by these teachings, told by a Genoese sea captain. It stands on a hill within seven circles of walls named for the seven planets, and the walls are painted inside and out with everything that can be known: the figures of mathematics, the stones and metals, the seas and rivers, the plants, the fish, the birds and the beasts, the mechanical arts and the great founders of laws and sciences. The children walk round them with their teachers and learn by seeing and by play, so that by ten they know the outline of every science.

The ruler is a priest called the Sun, the Metaphysician, and beside him stand three princes: Power, who governs war; Wisdom, who governs the sciences; and Love, who governs birth, food, clothing and the rearing of children. Everything is held in common, because a house, a wife and children of one's own breed the self-love that ruins a city. Each works four hours a day, no work is thought shameful, and honour goes to the most skilled. The officers of Love even decide which couples may have children, and the astrologers fix the hour, as Plato's Republic had proposed for its guardians.

Times set by the stars

In the City every act is timed by the heavens: sowing, building, setting out on a journey and the begetting of children. Its people worship God, whose living image is the Sun, and never the Sun itself, in a round temple open on every side, with seven lamps that bear the names of the planets, and they pray toward the four quarters of the sky. The captain ends with the signs he sees of a new age: the great conjunctions of the planets, and the printing press, the guns and the magnet's needle, by which the last hundred years have seen more history than the four thousand before them.

Escaping the fate of the stars

The stars act by heat and light; they incline and do not compel, and what they threaten can be met. The last of his books of astrology teaches how, and tells the rite he performed when an eclipse seemed to threaten. A room is closed against the outside air and sprinkled with rose vinegar and sweet scents; laurel, myrtle, rosemary and cypress are burned; the walls are hung with white silk and green branches; two lamps and five torches are lit for the seven planets, so that the room keeps the light the eclipse takes from the sky; music of Jupiter and Venus is played; and those present hold the stones and colours of the kindly planets and keep company with people born under good stars.

It is told here as a record of what he did and held, not as a counsel. A closed room with flames and burning leaves is a danger to life, and no rite takes the place of reason, prayer or a doctor.