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Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639)
Campanella, Tommaso (käm-pän-el’ā). A famous Italian philosopher; born at Stilo, Calabria, Sept. 5, 1568; died at Paris, May 21, 1639. At an unusually early age he had embraced the monastic life, astonishing his religious superiors with the precocious ripeness of his Thomistic scholarship, and writing poems and treatises that are still not beneath respect. For twenty-seven years, however, he lay in a Spanish prison, because of his political indiscretions with the pen. During this period many of his treatises were compiled: but the ordeal broke his spirit and induced the impotence so characteristic of his thought in the very hour of its realization; the consequence being that even such great works as the ‘Treatise on Material Philosophy’ (1623) and ‘Rational Philosophy’ (1637) are painfully inadequate. Only his ‘Kingdom [or City] of the Sun’ (1623), a work not unlike More’s ‘Utopia,’ is very widely known.