Tommaso Campanella is an Italian poet, thinker and politician who spent almost half his life in prisons for free thought and rebellion. He was very educated and for all the time allotted to him, he 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 transformation. Confident in his mission, Campanella constantly wrote and rewritten his works, bringing them to perfection, and some of them have survived to our time as examples of his political philosophy.
Tommaso Campanella was born in 1568 in the family of a poor cobbler in southern Italy. He received his first education from a Dominican monk, and at the age of 15 he decides to enter the
Dominican Order in order to continue his studies. The philosophical treatises of Plato, Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle are especially interesting to the young Tommaso, he also studied astrology and Kabbalah. The works of the freethinking thinker Telezius had a great influence on his further worldview - he saw in the study of nature the primary 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 rights to freedom of thought.
The Inquisition did not like this, and Tommaso Campanella was arrested for heresy. After his release, he no longer returned to the monastery. The pursuit of new dreams of
political and religious transformations forced him to go on a long
trip to Italy, in which he was continually 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 reigned
. But the plot failed (it was betrayed by 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. In his work, the Italian writer depicted a fictional state (ideal society) in which the inhabitants decided to wisely (philosophically) manage the entire community. Et
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 connoisseur of this science to be always at hand. And Campanella, in turn, tried to share his ideas with dad. 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 learned men. The Italian philosopher used the location of the king, who even appointed him cash payments. And in 1639 he died.