Or How to Succeed in Society and Fail in the Republic of Letters by David
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).
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