Of Rosicrucian Utopias: Campanella’s City of the Sun, the Republic of the Apocalypse and the Quest for a Universal Monarchy
Towards New Jerusalem Part VIII
[Refer here for Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV of this ongoing series.]
Amongst the most famous of utopian writings stands Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun (1602), which is widely recognized amongst scholars as having directly inspired the utopian works of Johannes Valentinus Andreae’s Christianopolis (1618), and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626). Thus, The City of the Sun is acknowledged as the inspiration for the Rosicrucian utopias, with a direct connection between Campanella and Andreae. During Campanella’s imprisonment in Naples, Andreae’s friends visited him on numerous occasions, bringing back manuscripts from Campanella to Andrea which would greatly influence Andreae’s work.
Francis Yates writes in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1978):[1]
Campanella had two German disciples who used to visit him in his prison in Naples. They were Tobias Adami and Wilhelm Wense, and they were both friends of Andreae. They took manuscripts by Campanella to Andreae in Germany, including a manuscript of the City of the Sun, a Latin version of which was published at Frankfurt in 1623…. Wense and Adami were at Tübingen, in contact with Andreae, at about the time when the Rosicrucian manifestos were being produced.
Tobias Adami was in fact Campanella’s editor and worked to have his manuscript printed in Germany as part of Philosophia Realis.[2]
Yates goes on to write:[3]
It is clear that Christianopolis[‘s]…. immediate model was Campanella’s City of the Sun - a round city with a round sun temple in its midst – the description of which Tobias Adami and Wilhelm Wense had brought to Andreae’s circle direct from Naples. The Hermetic-Cabalist, magico-scientific atmosphere of the City of the Sun is repeated in Christianopolis and many of the details of the two cities – particularly the teaching through pictures on the walls – are recognized the same.
Recall that Andreae and Comenius, the latter a prominent member of the Bohemian Brethren who introduced the system of Pansophia into “universal education,” would be amongst the main organisers around the Rosicrucian Invisible College which would later manifest as the Royal Society of London, to which Francis Bacon is considered a founding father (more on this in a future instalment).
In Comenius’s Labyrinth of the World a city is ‘divided into many quarters and streets, in which all the sciences, learning, and occupations of men are represented. It is one of the architectural memory-systems, like Campanella’s City of the Sun, wherein the whole encyclopedia is set out. The Labyrinth is obviously influenced by Campanella’s City of the Sun, and also, probably, by Andreae’s Christianopolis.’[4]
However, when we look at the life and ideas promoted by Campanella, we are bombarded by what appear to be an endless array of contradictions which have baffled scholars and theologians to this day.
Campanella (1568-1639) was a Dominican friar and had published works that were not only supportive of the Spanish Crown before and during his imprisonment in Naples, but within these works he examines, in great detail, how Spain can establish itself as a “Universal Monarchy.” As the Rosicrucian movement emerged as an anti-Spanish Habsburg anti-Catholic movement of rebellion, the seeming paradox of Campanella’s devoted support to a pro-Catholic Universal Monarchy should not be overlooked. As we will soon discover, the paradox is an illusion.
Campanella wrote the Monarchy of Spain in 1597 promoting a universal monarchy, five years before The City of the Sun (1602), and the Monarchy of the Messiah (1605), three years later promoting a special role for the Spanish Crown within a world state.[5]
However, Campanella also has a history of being a naturalist in his early years and is associated with setting ‘forth a new philosophy that is commonly associated with Bacon,’[6] that is, Francis Bacon’s system of natural science. In addition, Campanella wrote a defense of Bernardino Telesio’s school of thought, Philosophia sensibus demonstrata (Philosophy demonstrated by the senses) published in 1592 in defense of Telesio (1509-1588), who was the teacher of Francis Bacon (1561-1626).
Adding to the level of strange surrounding Campanella, in c. 1585, he is introduced into the occult sciences by a rabbi while a friar at the Dominican monastery of Stilo in Calabria in his early years.
While at the Dominican monastery of Stilo, Campanella then about seventeen years of age met an old rabbi to whom he felt strangely attracted. During the week they spent together, Campanella was instructed in the mysteries of the occult sciences alchemy, astrology, and magic. Of these astrology exerts the strongest influence is the Civitas of Campanella.[7]
Because of his supposed activities in the occult, he is denounced by the Roman Inquisition, arrested in Padua in 1594 and confined in a convent, effectively house arrest, until 1597.[8]
In addition to all of this is the greatest perplexity to his story – his charge of heresy against the Spanish Crown and his 27-year imprisonment in Naples for his role in the Calabrian Revolt of 1599, which involved him working with the Ottoman Empire, many scholars continue to paint Campanella as some sort of folk hero, an Italian patriot who resisted the tyrannical occupation of the Spanish Crown’s rule over Calabria. After all, Campanella was born in Calabria.
Campanella was charged with heresy and witchcraft after he was captured during the failed Calabrian revolt.
Many scholars ignore, or acknowledge but brush aside as a passing fact, that not only was Campanella identified as the leading organiser of the Calabrian revolt, but that the plan to overthrow the Spanish occupation was to bring in the Ottoman Empire. So, clearly, this was not a grassroots plan for Italian liberation but was rather a plan to replace one empire with another. Why would Campanella work to bring the Ottomans into Calabria?
Throughout Campanella’s life we are uncertain as to where his true allegiance lies - is it with the Spanish Crown, Italian patriotism, the system of Telesio and Bacon, the mysterious occult sciences from an even more mysterious rabbi, the Ottoman Empire or the Dominican brotherhood?
In addition, Campanella’s powers of “divination” were famous. In fact, it was for this reason that he was eventually freed from his imprisonment in Naples. In 1626 Campanella was released by order of Pope Urban VIII (papacy 1623-1644) who personally interceded on his behalf to Philip IV of Spain (reign 1621-1665), whereupon he was taken to Rome and held by the Holy Office for a period of time and was restored to full liberty in 1629. The reason for his liberation was because Pope Urban required Campanella’s ‘magical skills to protect him from the dangers of two upcoming eclipses.’[9]
The Pope’s enemies thought they could take advantage of his credulity, and they confidently predicted that the eclipses in 1628 and 1630 surely heralded the Pope’s demise. Campanella put into effect the natural magic practices described in his short treatise De siderali fato vitando (How To Avoid the Fate Dictated by the Stars). The Pope survived and, in return for Campanella’s help, allowed the magician to set up a school in Rome to preach his ideas, while ignoring his blatant heresies.[10] He lived for five years in Rome, where he was Urban’s advisor in astrological matters.[11]
Further perplexing is the fact that in Campanella’s City of the Sun, what many have interpreted to be about a neo-pagan civilization, the tale is recounted favourably between a Genoese Sea-Captain and a Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitaller.
So what is the underlying message that Campanella intended for his highly influential utopia?
We may find our answer in two letters Campanella wrote, one to the King of Spain in 1599 and the other to the Pope in 1611 where he shared that he had ‘only wanted, in the event of the great transformation taking place, to preach and establish the republic of the Apocalypse.’[12]
Noel Malcolm writes in The Crescent and the City of the Sun:[13]
So wherein lies the special significance of Islam? The answer to this question can be found in the whole framework of prophecies with which Campanella supported his claims about the imminence of the end of the world. His thinking was dominated by a number of recent prophecies (by Ciprian Leowitz, Antonio Torquato (or ‘Arquato’), Paul Scaliger (Skalić) and the so-called Abbot Ubertino of Otranto) which asserted that the Turks would invade Italy and would actually conquer Rome—thus putting the Papacy to flight, like the woman fleeing into the wilderness in Revelation. These were supported by earlier revelations, by St Bridget of Sweden and Dionysius Carthusianus, also associating a conquest of Italy by the Turks with the coming of the last days.
Thus, Campanella’s vision for the ‘Republic of the Apocalypse’ would be to bring upon the end-times which was prophesied during his time as the invasion of the Ottoman Empire into Italy, that would bring forth a Golden New Age, where the Spanish kings (of Asturias, Navarre, Leon, Galicia, Aragon, Castile) in an alliance with the Pope were destined to be instruments of a Divine Plan and the supreme rulers of the world in a utopic New Age where they would convert all to their system of religion and governance as outlined in the City of the Sun.
Recall that the City of the Sun was made central within the Rosicrucian utopian vision…