Thomas Campanella
05 September 568 - 21 May 1639

A brief biography.
Giovanni Domenico Campanella was born in Stilo, a village in Calabria, Italy, in 1568. At a tender age (13 or 14 years), he entered the Dominican Order. He was a great admirer of Saint Thomas Aquinas, in whose honour he assumed his name Thomas. Campanella was a prolific author, who started writing at the age of nineteen.

In his writings, - Philosophia sensibus demonstrata (1690) -, he insists that we can arrive at an understanding of reality and of nature exclusively through our senses. This was totally opposed to the Aristotelian and scholastic method, founded on blind faith and pedantic abstraction divorced from any experimental verification.
Already in 1592 he was condemned, in an ecclesiastical trial in Napoli, to return to his native Calabria, as punishment for having left the monastery.
His intellectual appetite knew no boundaries. As he himself declared,
he had studied the philosophies of Pythagoras, Epicurus, Plato, Thales,
the Stoics and the Peripatetics [Aristotelians], of all ancient and modern
sects, the laws of ancient peoples and of Hebrews, Turks, Persians,
Moors, Chinese, Brahmins, Peruvians, Mexicans, Abyssinians and
Tartars.
This was no empty boasting, because in his writings Campanella introduces numerous details and demonstrates his knowledge of the most diverse subjects.
Campanella’s modernist and renovating spirit can be summarized in his observation, made in The City of the Sun (1602), that ‘this century of ours has more history in a hundred years that the world has had in four thousand, and in these hundred years more books have been written than in five thousand.'

The writer is deeply impressed by the recent discoveries and sees in them signs of the approaching millennium; the discovery of the new world, the compass, the printing press, the harquebus, receive philosophical explanations. In 1600 another Italian thinker, Giordano Bruno,O.P. was burned at the stake as a heretic. Campanella did not suffer the same fate, but he was persecuted for his views and remained in prison in the fortification San' Elmo, Napoli, till 1626, where he was subject to privation and tortures. From 1626 till 1629 he was in prison in Rome, when Pope Urban VII set him free.
His last years he spent in the Dominican priory at the street of Saint Honoré in Paris,  where he died on 21 May 1639.

Philately

Portrait of Thomas Campanella, O.P.
(1568-21.05.1639) of  Nicholas de l' Armessin,
alias Larmessin Père (1640-1725).
Perhaps derived from the painting (1530)
by Francesco Cozza, preserved in the Casa dei
Gaetani di Sermoneta in Rome.

Italy 1968, Mi 1280, Sc 985. FDC

The Colegio Tommaso Campanella in Reggio,
Calabria.

Italy 2005, Mi 3035, Sc 2670.

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