Campanella believed that a new golden age would dawn and that it would be realized by a state order like the Land of the Sun.
(1568-1639) He is a thought hero who paid for his act of thinking with twenty-seven years in prison. The period in which he lived coincides with the days when the European Catholic world began to disintegrate and the political, economic, and cultural events that prepared the modern world occurred. More XIV. and XV. In the centuries, against the strict dogmas of the Catholic Church, its great and unjust wealth, against the evils of the feudal order, uprisings that took place under the leadership of various sects gained a quality that engulfed Europe. These sectarian uprisings, suppressed and destroyed by the Church on the one hand and the royal forces on the other, were reorganized and mobilized elsewhere, under different names. Here are the Picards or Adamists, long active in Bohemia! Here are the Beggards in Italy, France, and Germany, who want "man to be happy in this world"! Here are the Wyclifists in England, and the Hussites in central Europe! All these sects, besides religious innovations, were in an effort to establish a more just social order. The Taborites, a branch of the Hussites, not only abolished most of the religious ceremonies, they wanted to complete the religious reform with a social revolution based on the commons of goods.
Here, Campanella sets out from this socialist view, these revolutionary principles, and says "I am the bell of the new mornings to be born". Unfortunately, he will not be able to see this new morning on the horizon. But his name has lived and will live on, as a herald, in the history of philosophy and social doctrines.
Campanella was born in the town of Stilo in the Calabria region of Italy. From a young age, he stands out for his superior intelligence and his extreme passion for reading. At the age of thirteen, he writes poems on various subjects and gives long speeches. At the age of fifteen, Cosenza enters the Dominican convent, where he repeatedly reads the "Summa Theologica" by the saint Augustine of Aquino. Before long, there is no work left in the monastery that he did not read. He expresses his thirst for knowledge in one of his poems: “All the books in the world cannot satisfy my hunger. What have I not read? But I'm still starving in my head... As my understanding grows, my knowledge diminishes…»
Tommaso Campanella (5 September 1568 – 21 May 1639), baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet. Campanella was prosecuted by the Roman Inquisition for heresy in 1594 and was confined to house arrest for two years. Accused of conspiring against the Spanish rulers of Calabria in 1599, he was tortured and sent to prison, where he spent 27 years. He wrote his most significant works during this time, including The City of the Sun, a utopia describing an egalitarian theocratic society where property is held in common.
Getting tired of religious issues in a short time, Campanella gives herself to philosophy. The great Italian philosopher finds the leader he seeks in Telesio. Seeking the truth in the observation of nature rather than in books, Telesio defended the philosophy of nature against Aristotle's philosophy that affected an entire age. For this purpose, he founded a philosophy society called Academia Telesiana. Telesio's basic idea was this: Science should start from real entities, not abstract concepts; Experiment is the basic rule that science should apply.
Campanella is writing her first work at the age of twenty-two. This is Philosophia sensibus demostratat, which he wrote to defend Telesio against his enemies and to refute Aristotelian philosophy. The work is attacked by the Jesuits. Accused of heresy and witchcraft, Campanella is forced to leave Cosenza and return to Stilo by order of the Pope. Campanella, who spends her spare time studying and improving her knowledge at Stilo monastery, soon escapes from "this narrow and dark prison house". Ten years traveling throughout Italy. In Venice, he meets Galilee and many other historians and philosophers. When he stops by, he fights with habitual thoughts and superstitions. After seeing almost all the great cities of Italy, he returns to Stilo, belligerent and determined.
Campanella's life drama begins here. By the 1600s, all of southern Italy had become a colony of Spain. The region of Calabria, in particular, was further impoverished at the hands of the clergy. On the one hand, the brutality of the Inquisition, on the other hand, poverty led to social demands. Libraries and academies, which were cultural centers, were closed. Free thought could only be found in monasteries.
Thinking of liberating his homeland from the Spanish yoke, Campanella begins to organize an uprising. Pietro Giannone says of this uprising in his "History of Naples": "Campanella was about to turn Calabria into a mess with his new ideas, his plans for freedom and a republic. He had taken it as far as putting the kingdoms in a new order, establishing constitutions to govern societies.” It seems that Campanella had already designed the social order of the Land of the Sun, which he would later write about in prison, and tried to complete the political upheaval with social reform, as previous heretical sects had done.
Believing in the special effects of astrology such as Pope Paulus V, Urbanus VII, Bacon, and Richelieu, Campanella looked at some signs in the stars and said that there would be revolutions in the world, especially in the kingdom of Naples and Calabria. He had adopted the ideas of innovation, which he deemed necessary in the religious and social field, too many monks. According to Giannone, more than three hundred priests participated in this uprising. Many preachers come among the people and invite him to "Unite to gain freedom, to end the torments of kings who shed money with human blood and oppress the poor." Many bishops, along with many nobles from Naples, supported this uprising. Meanwhile, the assistance of a Turkish navy is also being provided.
However, the uprising is averted with forewarning, and Campanella, who is waiting for a boatman he has hired to flee to a Turkish ship, is caught in a hut and taken to Naples. He is subjected to terrible tortures in the prison where he was thrown. In the preface to his work "Atheimus triumphatus", Campanella describes his tortures as follows:
“I went to fifty prisons and got out. Seven times I was subjected to horrific torture. The final torture lasted forty hours. They wrapped my body tightly with ropes and left it drenched in blood. They tied my hands behind my back and hung me on a sharp stake. Forty hours later they thought I was dead, so they stopped the torture. To hurt me even more, some of my torturers were constantly moving the rope I was hanging on and swearing at my neck. Some of them couldn't help saying, "Fierce man, indeed." They couldn't shake me with anything, they couldn't beat me, they couldn't take a word from my mouth. After miraculously surviving a six-month illness, they threw me into a ditch. I was there for fifteen months. Then I was brought before a judge. First, he said to me: “How can you know what you have not learned? Is the devil at your command?" they asked. I replied, "I have spent ten times the amount of candle oil you drink, to find out what I know." They accused me of writing the book called Üç Flatmeci. However, this book was published before I was even born. They accused me of adopting the ideas of Democritus, of harboring hostile feelings towards the church, and of breaking the rules of religion. They accused me of opposing Aristotle, who showed the world eternal and incorruptible, of preparing uprisings by putting forward signs that herald revolutions in the Sun, Moon, and stars. Because of all this, they stuck me in an airless, lightless pit, just like Jeremiah.”
Campanella's prison life lasted twenty-seven years. Only a person like Campanella, strong in spirit and mind, and unwavering in his beliefs, could endure such a long life of torture. As a matter of fact, his head is always up in the air against his torturers, he neither asks for forgiveness nor expects help from them. All he wants is a book, paper, and pen; that is, feeding his head and scattering the products of his head out.
Campanella's prison life ends in 1626. After the death of King Philip III of Spain (1621), he was released after five years of effort by Pope Urbanus VIII and went to Rome. Before long, he is attacked by his lurking enemies and flees to France with the help of the French ambassador. Having received closeness and help from Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIII, Campanella spends the rest of his life quietly and comfortably in a Dominican convent in Paris. He dies in 1639, at the age of seventy-one.
Campanella wrote numerous works, almost all in Latin. In the history of philosophy, Campanella's name is mentioned as the enemy of Aristotelian philosophy and the pioneer of the experimental method. Before Bacon, it was he who said that in physics, no solid knowledge can be reached without observation, without checking assumptions by experiment.
No matter how great the value of his works of philosophy is, the thing that has survived from Carnpanella and immortalized his name is undoubtedly the idea of a social order expressed in the Land of the Sun. The Land of the Sun (Civitas Solis), which was first published in Utrecht in 1643, is one of the works written with the purest desires to lead human beings to a happy life, on the same line of thought as Plato's Republic and Thomas More's Utopia.
The Land of the Sun is a philosophical project of the state that Campanella thinks will one day come true. Campanella finds the source of all evil and injustice in thinking of no one but himself, in the division of the world's wealth as mine and yours. According to him, as long as people are free from the concern of general benefit, they do not think of anyone but themselves in their narrow circles. However, the purpose of people united in society should be a general benefit. Let's remove private interests, nothing will be left but the public good. Selfish behavior ultimately leads to a clash of community forces. However, the orientation of these forces towards the general good creates a consistent balance between the forces. For him, everything in the Land of the Sun is under the command of the state, of the general interest.
But, it will be said, how do we make people work if there is no private property? Campanella will respond by creating a sense of solidarity in people and a desire to be useful to society. Doesn't history show us that the Romans, despite their poverty, willingly went to war for their homeland? In the time of the first Christians, weren't the priests, who were far from the thought of profit and possessions, who were away from the world, who disregarded their own interests, love, and even their lives for the sake of the community, did not give us the same example of altruism? Even in today's society, do we not see examples of fraternal work and disinterested competition? Why shouldn't these examples, which are on a camel's ear for now, become generalized one day? There is also this: work in the Land of the Sun has ceased to be a chore, it has become a pleasure. Idleness is a shameful thing there.
In his philosophic state bill, Campanella deals with women's partnerships as well as property partnerships. Before him, Plato also advocated that women and children should be common, as it would create agreement and cohesion within the state. However, Plato envisioned this partnership only for rulers. Campanella wants this partnership for the whole community. It should not be forgotten that before the fictional Plato, women's partnership existed in some Scythian tribes, as Herodotus stated. In these tribes, women rode horses and accompanied men in hunts and wars. According to the Greek historian, the purpose of this partnership was to bind everyone together by blood ties and to prevent jealousy and hatred.
On the other hand, the Lykurgos Laws set certain age limits for marriage and allow debilitated old men to offer their wives from time to time to unmarried men who wish to have children, so as not to disturb their family nest.
It is seen that Campanella while adopting the partnership of women due to the importance it gives to the reproduction of the lineage and the education of children, was inspired by the laws of ancient nations as well as benefiting from Plato's thoughts.
Campanella believed that a new golden age would dawn and that it would be realized by a state order like the Land of the Sun.