At the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth
centuries, philosophy took a new point of departure among the Italians,
and all the fundamental ideas which have since formed the staple of
modern European systems were anticipated by a few obscure thinkers. It
is noticeable that the States of Naples, hitherto comparatively inert
in the intellectual development of Italy, furnished the five writers
who preceded Bacon, Leibnitz, Schelling, and Comte. Telesio of Cosenza,
Bruno of Nola, Campanella of Stilo, Vanini and Vico of Naples are the
chief among these _novi homines_ or pioneers of modern thought. The
characteristic point of this new philosophy was an unconditional return
to Nature as the source of knowledge, combined with a belief in the
intuitive forces of the human reason: so that from the first it showed
two sides or faces to the world--the one positive, scientific,
critical, and analytical; the other mystical, metaphysical, subjective.
Modern materialism and modern idealism were both contained in the
audacious guesses of Bruno and Campanella; nor had the time arrived for
clearly separating the two strains of thought, or for attempting a
systematic synthesis of knowledge under one or the other head.
The men who led this weighty intellectual movement burned with the
passionate ardour of discoverers, the fiery enthusiasm of confessors.
They stood alone, sustained but little by intercourse among themselves,
and wholly misunderstood by the people round them. Italy, sunk in
sloth, priest-ridden, tyrant-ridden, exhausted with the unparalleled
activity of the Renaissance, besotted with the vices of slavery and
slow corruption, had no ears for spirit-thrilling prophecy. The Church,
terrified by the Reformation, when she chanced to hear those strange
voices sounding through 'the blessed mutter of the mass,' burned the
prophets. The State, represented by absolute Spain, if it listened to
them at all, flung them into prison. To both Church and State there was
peril in the new philosophy; for the new philosophy was the first
birth-cry of the modern genius, with all the crudity and clearness, the
brutality and uncompromising sincerity of youth. The Church feared
Nature. The State feared the People. Nature and the People--those
watchwords of modern Science and modern Liberty--were already on the
lips of the philosophers.
It was a philosophy armed, errant, exiled; a philosophy in chains and
solitary; at war with society, authority, opinion; self-sustained by
the prescience of ultimate triumph, and invincible through the sheer
force of passionate conviction. The men of whom I speak were conscious
of Pariahdom, and eager to be martyred in the glorious cause. 'A very
Proteus is the philosopher,' says Pomponazzo: 'seeking to penetrate the
secrets of God, he is consumed with ceaseless cares; he forgets to
thirst, to hunger, to sleep, to eat; he is derided of all men; he is
held for a fool and irreligious person; he is persecuted by
inquisitors; he becomes a gazing-stock to the common folk. These are
the gains of the philosopher; these are his guerdon. Pomponazzo's words
were prophetic. Of the five philosophers whom I mentioned, Vanini was
burned as an atheist, Bruno was burned, and Campanella was imprisoned
for a quarter of a century. Both Bruno and Campanella were Dominican
friars. Bruno was persecuted by the Church, and burned for heresy.
Campanella was persecuted by both Church and State, and was imprisoned
on the double charge of sedition and heresy. _Dormitantium animarum
excubitor_ was the self-given title of Bruno. _Nunquam tacebo_ was the
favourite motto of Campanella.
Giovanni Domenico Campanella was born in the year 1568 at Stilo in
Calabria, one of the most southern townships of all Italy. In his
boyhood he showed a remarkable faculty for acquiring and retaining
knowledge, together with no small dialectical ability. His keen
interest in philosophy and his admiration for the great Dominican
doctors, Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, induced him at the age of
fifteen to enter the order of S. Dominic, exchanging his secular name
for Tommaso. But the old alliance between philosophy and orthodoxy,
drawn up by scholasticism and approved by the mediaeval Church, had
been succeeded by mutual hostility; and the youthful thinker found no
favour in the cloister of Cosenza, where he now resided. The new
philosophy taught by Telesio placed itself in direct antagonism to the
pseudo-Aristotelian tenets of the theologians, and founded its own
principles upon the Interrogation of Nature. Telesio, says Bacon, was
the prince of the _novi homines,_ or inaugurators of modern thought. It
was natural that Campanella should be drawn towards this great man. But
the superiors of his convent prevented his forming the acquaintance of
Telesio; and though the two men dwelt in the same city of Cosenza,
Campanella never knew the teacher he admired so passionately. Only when
the old man died and his body was exposed in the church before burial,
did the neophyte of his philosophy approach the bier, and pray beside
it, and place poems upon the dead.
From this time forward Campanella became an object of suspicion to his
brethren. They perceived that the fire of the new philosophy burned in
his powerful nature with incalculable and explosive force. He moved
restlessly from place to place, learning and discussing, drawing men
towards him by the magnetism of a noble personality, and preaching his
new gospel with perilous audacity. His papers were seized at Bologna;
and at Rome the Holy Inquisition condemned him to perpetual
incarceration on the ground that he derived his science from the devil,
that he had written the book 'De tribus Impostoribus,' that he was a
follower of Democritus, and that his opposition to Aristotle savoured
of gross heresy. At the same time the Spanish Government of Naples
accused him of having set on foot a dangerous conspiracy for
overthrowing the vice-regal power and establishing a communistic
commonwealth in southern Italy. Though nothing was proved
satisfactorily against him, Campanella was held a prisoner under the
sentence which the Inquisition had pronounced upon him. He was, in
fact, a man too dangerous, too original in his opinions, and too bold
in their enunciation, to be at large. For twenty-five years he remained
in Neapolitan dungeons; three times during that period he was tortured
to the verge of dying; and at last he was released, while quite an old
man, at the urgent request of the French Court. Not many years after
his liberation Campanella died. The numerous philosophical works on
metaphysics, mathematics, politics, and aesthetics which Campanella
gave to the press, were composed during his long imprisonment. How they
came to be printed, I do not know; but it is obvious that he cannot
have been strictly debarred from writing by his jailors. In prison,
too, he made both friends and converts. We have seen that we owe the
publication of a portion of his poems to the visit of a German knight.