Campanella In Paris: Or How to Succeed in Society And Fail in the Republic of Letters by David Allen Duncan In 1623, Marin Mersenne (1588-1648) published the Quaestiones in Genesim, a massive book devoted to religion, natural philosophy, music, and numerous other subjects. Anxious to stake out the borders of religious orthodoxy and to define the frontiers of natural philosophy, Mersenne attacked those ideas and thinkers that crossed those boundaries. Chief among the trespassers Mersenne included the neoplatonic naturalism (especially animism and the doctrine of the world soul) of Giordano Bruno, Bernadino Telesio, and Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639). As the Church had never condemned naturalism as heretical, Mersenne hesitated to take such a step instead; he belittled its modern theorists on mainly rational grounds (Quaestiones cols 937-942; Correspondance 1: 63-64, 122-123, editor's notes). With Campanella he was especially punishing. The writings of Campanella (De sensu rerum et magi a in particular), Mersenne remarked with the corrosive rhetoric typical of his earliest books, deserved to be burned (Quaestiones col. 464). As Mersenne must have known, Campanella had only narrowly avoided being burned himself. A lifelong figure of controversy, Campanella, a Dominican from Calabria, had repudiated the philosophy of Aristotle, adopting Telesio's naturalism (from De rerum natura of 1570) in its place as the binding of an eclectic philosophy of magic, empiricism, and protoexperimentalism. Earlier than most scholars, he also advanced Copernicus and Galileo, and in defense of the latter, he wrote Apologia pro Galileo1 a gesture that Galileo neither needed nor wanted from one so powerless and suspect (Redondi 40). Many times throughout his surprisingly long life, Campanella's indiscreet courage, bad luck, and poor 96 DAVID DUNCAN judgment converged to bring him to grief. His first brush with intolerant authorities came in 1592, when a fellow Dominican denounced him. After seven more years of accusations and periodic jail terms, he returned to Calabria to lead a Utopian reform movement which, in association with a local rebellion and an abortive Turkish attempt at intervention, moved Spanish authorities to imprison him in 1599 for heresy and treason. He saved his life by feigning madness. What followed was enough to drive him mad in fact: almost 27 years of trials, torture, starvation, and solitary confinement. During much of this pathetic interval his jailers denied him books and restricted visits to his cell. Thereby, whether intentionally or not, they curbed his access to much of the startling new scholarship of the first third of the seventeenth century. Yet Campanella bravely persevered with his writing, calling on a fabulous memory to produce many long works, among them his most enduring book, the Utopian Citta del sole (1602), published in Frankfurt in 1623 as Civitas solis. In his sunless prison cell in Naples when Mersenne's Quaestiones in Genesim appeared, Campanella apparently knew nothing of Mersenne's critique. Mersenne was not, however, entirely unknown to him, for he had written Campanella three times before 20 September 1624 to offer to help him find a publisher in Paris (Correspondence 1: 123). Campanella's reply in 1624 was cordial and did not refer to Mersenne's unflattering review of his philosophy— hence the inference that he remained ignorant of it (Correspondance 1: 177-179). Nothing had come of Mersenne's offer when in November 1627 he enrolled Lukas Holstenius in Rome to determine Campanella's opinions on musical consonance and to discover if he were at liberty to publish with the Inquisition lurking hard by (Correspondance 1:604). Campanella, now under looser confinement in Rome thanks to papal intercession, refused to answer. By then Jacques Gaffarel had probably apprised him of Mersenne's rough treatment of his philosophy (Correspondance 3: 312). In 1625, Gaffarel, a priest and doctor of canon law, had published an attack on Mersenne (Abdita divinae Cabalae mysteria) for his rejection of cabalism and his coarse handling of Campanella's thought.2 CAMPANELLA IN PARTS:... 97 Meanwhile, Campanella busily cultivated Urban VIII, who he hoped would take up the plan of Utopian reform enunciated in the Citta del sole. To stave off the death of the Pope predicted by certain astrologers as accompanying a lunar eclipse of 1628, Campanella performed an elaborate ritual replete with the occult methods and devices of sympathetic magic. The eclipse came and went. Urban continued in good health unaffected by evil astral influences, and Campanella's star rose in the districts of the Tiber, where he was becoming less a prisoner than a celebrity. He acquired further prestige in 1630 when he performed a similar ceremony for a son of the Pope's nephew, whom the Barberini's enemies had also placed under the condemnation of a lunar eclipse. He, too, prospered in the aftermath, and for a brief spell Campanella reaped the rewards due a successful magus.3 On 8 April 1634 Giovanni Battista Doni, a member of the Barberini entourage and a friend of Mersenne, attempted to arrange a rapprochement. He assured Mersenne that Campanella would not begrudge him an accommodation if he would only extend to him "the slightest satisfaction." Such a gesture would "entirely win him over," although Doni did warn that Campanella remained "a little piqued (Correspondance 4: 86-87)." Mersenne obliged with a peace offering passed through Doni, who took the opportunity to urge reconciliation on Campanella. He in turn agreed to lay aside his grievances (Correspondance 4: 384). The episode might have ended with this polite conclusion if the political climate of Rome had not taken a turn against the Barberini's "season of indulgent patronage," as Pietro Redondi has termed it. Spanish interests in Rome had forced Urban VIII into a corner over his support of France, which with the Treaty of Barwalde in 1631, had subsidized the Lutheran Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of the North currently mauling Habsburg armies in the Empire. The charge that the Pope was therefore a defender of heretics, and not only of the hoary-headed philosopher variety but also of the heavily armed Swedish species, made Campanella's position 98 DAVID DUNCAN increasingly tenuous (Redondi 232). Finally, and more menacingly, the Spanish accused Tommaso Pignatelli of plotting sedition in Naples. Under torture Pignatelli had falsely implicated Campanella, who now saw the necessity of a get-away. In the habit of a Minim, he stole out of Rome on the night of 21 October 1634 in the coach of the Comte de Noailles, the French ambassador. Chased from his comfortable protective custody, he absconded to Aix-en-Provence and to the protection of Claude Fabri de Peiresc and Pierre Gassendi, who gave him a kindly reception. Peiresc was Mersenne's and Gassendi's patron, as well as a remarkably generous and cultivated friend of many other artists and scholars. Blessed with a family fortune, he was a collector of rare books and manuscripts, an astronomer and natural historian, and an almost unbelievably prolific letter-writer. Like other French scholars, Peiresc had embraced Campanella not only for his anti-Aristotelian stand but also because of the cruel captivity he had endured, an imprisonment inflicted on him by France's most formidable enemy, an empire that represented not only political tyranny but also oppression of thought. Nor did Campanella's astrology put him off, as he was a believer in horoscopes, an adherent of the premonitory powers of dreams, and a correspodent of Cesar de Nostradamus, the son of Michel de Nostradamus. Moreover, Peiresc had appointed himself the arbiter of French and Italian culture. Situated at the crossroads of their geographic frontiers, he had also positioned himself at their intellectual marchlands. He harbored deep affection for the Italian people, from whom he was descended, and for their culture, which he had studied firsthand as a student. Behind him Campanella had left Gabriel Naude, another of Peiresc's friends, to face some fairly unpleasant music. But for Campanella, amiable conversation, relaxation, and even astronomical observations filled this happy interlude of nearly ten days (Peiresc iii; Pintard 253-255). A letter of Peiresc of 3 January 1635 indicated no portent of the bickering soon to follow, and he, Peiresc, made a point to tell Naude how often and how fondly CAMPANELLA IN PARIS:... 99 Campanella had spoken of him—a deference Campanella would soon rescind (Peiresc 27-28). Afraid of being on the road as winter deepened, Campanella pried himself from the comforts of Aix and forged north on the road to Paris in one of Peiresc's coaches. Delivered from the Spanish, Campanella plunged into the unknown territory of the French capital. First reports to Peiresc, who had also added gold to the Calabrian's purse before his leave-taking, heartened him. "He was very well received in Paris by men of letters," Peiresc was pleased to report to Naud6, and "I hope he will find more happiness there [Paris] than he has known elsewhere." At last he might reasonably expect "to live in complete peace of mind (Peiresc 27-28)." And indeed he might have done just that had he not carelessly thrown away the good will so freely lavished on him by an important segment of the French Republic of Letters. Promptly upon his advent in Paris, he delivered up indiscreet criticism of Gassendi's atomism and added curt observations against the work of other French scholars (Correspondance 5: 172). For his part, Mersenne must have dreaded Campanula's forthcoming visit. Unlike Peiresc, Mersenne was committed to mechanism and utterly dedicated to the ruination of its occult rivals. Moreover, while appreciative of Italian music, he frequently assailed other aspects of Italian intellectual life, particularly Florentine neoplatonism, to which he rightly connected Campanella.