A History of Western
Philosophy: 3
Renaissance Philosophy
BRIAN P. COPENHAVER
AND
CHARLES B. SCHMITT
Oxford New York
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Contents.
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1 The Historical Context of Renaissance
Philosophy |
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The philosophical heritage of antiquity and |
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Philosophy in a Renaissance context |
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Humanism |
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Church and state |
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The Renaissance transformation of philosophy |
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2 Aristotelianism |
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Renaissance Aristotelianisms |
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Unity and diversity in the Aristotelian
tradition |
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Eight Renaissance Aristotelians |
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3 Platonism |
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From Aristotle to Plato |
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Marsilio Ficino |
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Giovanni Pico and Nicholas of Cusa |
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Pious, perennial, and Platonic philosophies: |
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4 Stoics, Sceptics, Epicureans, and Other
Innovators |
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Humanism, authority, and uncertainty |
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Lorenzo Valla: language against logic |
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The simple method of Peter Ramus and |
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The crisis of doubt |
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Justus Lipsius on a new moral code |
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Politics and moral disorder: Erasmus, More,
and |
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-xiii-
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5 Nature against Authority: Breaking Away |
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Books of learning and nature |
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Giordano Bruno's philosophical passions |
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New philosophies of nature |
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6 Renaissance Philosophy and Modern Memory |
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Bibliography |
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Index |
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-xiv-
5
Nature against Authority:
Breaking Away from the Classics Books of learning and nature
Gabriel
Naudé was a librarian, bibliophile, pamphleteer, and a
contemporary of Descartes who moved in a circle of sceptical
French intellectuals called 'learned libertines'. One target of
Naudé's scepticism was superstitious magic. In 1625 he pub-
lished his best-known book to show that famous people accused
of magic were seldom guilty since there was really nothing
unnatural to blame them for. 1
Naudé was no philosopher, but
he was aware that beliefs about magic and other disputed
phenomena were tied to the prevailing Peripatetic system, and
he knew how the generations before him had weakened Aris-
totelianism by certifying such rival claims to philosophical
sovereignty as Ficino's resurrected Platonism or the new access
to ancient evidence on pre-Socratics, Stoics, and Epicureans.
His crusade against magic interested him mainly in natural
philosophy, so he noted how 'all those truths known to Aris-
totle are today rendered greatly suspect and dubious by a
swarm of innovators . . . who truly have no other design than
to shove aside the great edifice that Aristotle and his inter-
preters strove to build'. Naudé doubted everything, especially
the prudence of originality, so he never let go of Aristotle. Yet
he admired the novatores who
dethroned the Stagirite -- Patrizi,
Telesio, Bruno, Bacon, Campanella -- and he also sensed how
the Peripatetics had poisoned their own system by pushing its
naturalist implications past the bounds of Christian tolerance.
As he witnessed the great intellectual changes of the day,
when Descartes cut the cord that tied philosophy to humanism,
____________________
|
1 |
Naudé
( 1625); Rice ( 1939); Pintard ( 1943); Spink ( 1960); Kristeller ( 1968a; |
-285-
Naudé
stayed loyal to his eclectic erudition. 2
He lived and died
a humanist -- and a sceptic.
Naudé
was heir to a fully developed humanism and a reclas-
sicized philosophy based on doctrines constructed in antiquity,
decayed in the Middle Ages, revived in the Renaissance, and
now familiar once again to all educated people. One cost of
the triumphant humanism that shaped Naudé's education was
the damage done to canons of judgement and action as a
better-informed Europe witnessed the spectacle of authorities
in conflict. A countervailing gain was that ancient ideas re-
covered and reworked by the humanists proved the case for
cultural stability by cementing continuities between ancient
and modern Stoicism, Platonism, Epicureanism, and Aristo-
telianism; in fact, in all cases except Scepticism, lines of tradi-
tion ran unbroken from the ancient era through the Middle
Ages and into early modern times, even though sometimes
they ran thin. In 1600, when Bruno died a martyr to free
thought, Naudé was born into a century for which Ficino and
Patrizi had already secured the teachings of Plotinus and Pro-
clus, while ancient and medieval Peripatetic doctrine still sur-
vived in the writings of Case and Zabarella. None of these
renovations, from a newly Platonized theology to a Neo-Stoic
morality, could have thrived in early modern Europe without
fundamental departures from their Graeco-Roman base -- above
all because pagan sages had new Christian masters to serve.
True to its name, the Renaissance was an age of rebirth, but
also a time for reconsideration of beliefs taken for granted in
the ancient and medieval periods. Yet from the perspective of
our own culture -- one that finds meaning in the expression
'post-contemporary' long tides of continuity seem to have
run more strongly through the Renaissance than swift surges
of change, all the more reason to admire the mavericks who
moved more briskly than the sceptical Naudé to break with
revered systems that could no longer contain them.
The Middle
Ages, of course, had its own loners, dissidents,
and solitary geniuses, many of whom, like Peter Abelard,
____________________
|
2 |
Naudé
( 1625: 331); Gouhier ( 1958). |
-286-
could not
be good models for dissent in our period. At the
same time, John Scotus Eriugena, Avicebron, David of Dinant,
Roger Bacon, Ramon Lull, John Wyclif, and others found a
hearing in the Renaissance for their quarrels with tradition. In
at least one case -- the nominalist critique of ontology that still
ruled Parisian philosophy in the time of Vives and Lefèvre -- a
powerful medieval menace to authority cannot be separated at
all from its early modern expression. The Mallorquin reformer
Lull, a contemporary of Aquinas and Scotus, breached the
usual intellectual categories but still interested Leibniz and
later figures. Lull's mysticism, along with that of the German
Meister Eckhart, had an impact on early modern thinkers that
lies largely outside the scope of the classical traditions treated
in this volume, but his views none the less mingled with the
syncretisms of Ficino, Pico, and Steuco to re-emerge in Bruno's
wanton speculations. Lull did not write the alchemical works
attributed to him, but others provided an alternative, alchem-
ical view of nature entailing sharp departures from the Peri-
patetic tetrads of elements, qualities, and causes. Alchemy
began in late antiquity, developed in the Moslem world, and
arrived in Latin Europe to spread alongside Aristotelian natu-
ral philosophy from the thirteenth century onward. Alchem-
ical texts circulated abundantly, often attached to such familiar
and authoritative names as Aristotle, Aquinas, Albert, or Lull,
making it hard even today to tell the genuine from the counter-
feit. Early modern thinkers were not as quick as later critics to
assume that alchemy and other varieties of 'occultism' (like
'humanism', a nineteenth-century conception) could never be
taken seriously by serious philosophers; so they used these
alternative views along with traditional materials to construct
some of the more venturesome conceptions that the Renais-
sance produced.
One
Renaissance writer discussed above whose ideas over-
load the usual pigeonholes was Nicholas of Cusa, though he
was not so radical as Bruno or Campanella. Cusanus was an
unusual Christian, but still a more loyal one than these defec-
tors from Dominican Thomism, who put more faith in a divin-
ized nature than in any conventional God. A volatile blend of
-287-
animist
naturalism with religious temerity made the sometimes
fatal difference for a number of thinkers of the late Renais-
sance, usually called 'philosophers of nature', though they
were no more devoted to natural philosophy than Pomponazzi
or Zabarella. 3
Unlike these Peripatetics, however, the new
philosophers of nature felt that Aristotle's system could no
longer regulate honest inquiry into nature. Therefore, they
stopped trying to adjust the Aristotelian system and turned
their backs on it altogether. Fracastoro, Paracelsus, Cardano,
Telesio, Bruno, and the others (in some ways Patrizi belongs
with them) get less credit as philosophical revolutionaries than
Mersenne, Gassendi, and Descartes, but it is hard to imagine
how these later French innovators could have cleared the
ground for the scientific revolution without the subversive
work of their Italian predecessors. Drastic differences in onto-
logy, epistemology, ethics, and theology distinguish the new
philosophy of nature from Peripatetic dogmas still taught in
the schools of Naudé's time, while in other respects the philo-
sophers of nature drew on Ficino's fifteenth-century Neopla-
tonism. Their strong and, in some cases, controlling fascination
with occultism connected them with the Ficinian tradition,
while their broader aversion to book learning prepared them
for conceptions of nature relatively free of the usual Aristo-
telian strictures.
The
universe of most of the philosophers of nature, like that
of the Neoplatonists, was an enchanted world of ensouled
objects linked together and joined to a higher realm of spirit
and absolute being. A universal world-soul pervades all crea-
tion and makes all creatures, even rocks and stones, alive and
sentient in some degree. Stars and planets are mighty living
divinities, so astrological bonds and forces of sympathy unify
all things in the lower world under the rule of the higher;
microcosm reflects macrocosm as man's lesser world mirrors
the greater world of universal nature. Hidden symmetries and
illegible signatures of correspondence energize and symbolize
____________________
|
3 |
Cassirer
( 1963: 140-52; 1974: i. 208-313); Kristeller ( 1964a: 91-144); |
-288-
a world
charged with organic sympathies and antipathies. The
natural philosopher's job is to break these codes and uncover
their secrets; his tools are experiential as well as magical. He
watches nature closely to learn her arcana, and then he mani-
pulates them for practical use. As he reads the book of nature,
he foreshadows the Baconian scientist or engineer, but because
his book is also a magician's manual he also recalls the magus
of Ficino Three Books on Life. Bruno
wrote that '"magus"
means a wise man who has the power to act'.
Theory and
praxis in these new natural philosophies seem progressive
enough, but the next generations, who replaced natural philo-
sophy with a newer science, so
thoroughly discredited the idea
of a philosophically based occultism that it may be tempting to
write off Bruno, Campanella, and the others as woolly-brained
enthusiasts. 4
That it
would be wrong to dismiss them so curtly becomes
clearer, however, as one explores the physical and metaphy-
sical arguments behind their occultism and their rejection of
Peripatetic school philosophy. At times, all tradition and every-
thing classical became the enemy, as they repudiated the
humanist culture of erudition that often preferred learned cita-
tions to original ideas and seldom stooped to look at a natural
object. Instead of learning from books, the philosophers of
nature said that they went to school with experience; but the
content and utility of their observations varied from the most
exotic magical fantasies to more orderly empiricist programmes
resembling the experimental science of the seventeenth cen-
tury. The words 'experiment' and 'experience' were favourites
of the philosophers of nature, who used these terms in con-
texts so wildly different that one scarcely knows where science
begins and the seance ends. 5
No matter how misguided their
observations, Paracelsus, Telesio, and others saw the book of
____________________
|
4 |
Bruno (
1962a: iii. 400); Walker ( 1958a); Védrine ( 1967: 354); Müller-
Jahncke |
|
5 |
Zilsel (
1945); Keller ( 1950); Cassirer ( 1963: 145-52); Garin ( 1965a: 187- |
-289-
nature as
displacing the artificial textual authority of Aristotle
in philosophy and Galen in medicine. Having taunted these
ancient giants, they armed themselves with a titanic ar-
rogance that exaggerated their own detachment from tradition.
They produced more bombast than results. Perhaps their most
glaring failure was a view of mathematics that varied from
merely ingenious curiosity to misunderstanding to loathing.
True, most of the nature philosophers were more curious about
mathematics than the typical Peripatetic, yet few of them --
Cardano being the great exception got -- much further than
numerological speculation. Cardano stands with Cusanus and
Patrizi as having at least recognized the fundamental value of
mathematics. Perhaps their most important beneficiary in the
early seventeenth century was Johann Kepler, who also appre-
ciated the mystical aspects of numbers and shapes.
Giordano Bruno's philosophical passions
In 1584 the
Cambridge Puritan and Ramist, William Perkins,
published a tirade titled Antidicsonus
against a book On the
Shadow of Reason issued in the previous year by Alexander
Dicson, a Scots disciple of Giordano Bruno, whose own trea-
tise on The Shadows of Ideas had
appeared in Paris in 1582.
More Ramist battles were to come at Cambridge and conflicts
much worse would face Bruno, but this particular scuffle started
after Bruno had launched a small fad in England, a minor
craze for his odd style of mnemonics. Because memory had
long been one of the parts of rhetoric, ancient rhetoricians
devised arts of memory, of which the most popular were those
that used places and images to help the orator recall the
parts
of a speech. Consider an oration with an introduction in three
sections, a main body of seven sections, and a two-part con-
clusion: such a speech might come more quickly to mind if
pictured mentally as a temple with three steps for the introduc-
tion, seven pillars for the body, and two rooms inside for the
conclusion. If seven pillars are too plain to jog the memory,
one can imagine them not as bare locations but as places
decorated with images, preferably images so bizarre as to be
-290-
unforgettable.
Artificial memory schemes of this type were
common in medieval and Renaissance rhetoric, but Ramus
discarded the art of memory because he had no need of it. His
binary taxonomies displayed on the printed page worked better
as mnemonic than as logical devices. Whether the schematic
Ramist technique attracted Puritan ascetics as a kind of 'inner
iconoclasm' is hard to say, but there is no doubt that Perkins
preferred it as more natural and more efficient than the system
that Dicson learned from Bruno, which Perkins denounced as
evil and idolatrous. 6
Why did
Perkins react so harshly to an aid for memory?
While he and Dicson exchanged their polemics, Bruno was
making a small sensation in London and Oxford, two of many
stops on the adventurous journeys that began with his flight
from a Dominican convent in Naples in 1576, while not yet
thirty years old. 7
Born in Nola near Naples in 1548, he became
a friar while in his teens and a doctor of theology in 1575.
What conflict of belief drove him from Catholic Italy is un-
clear, but he had no better luck with the Reformed ministers
of Geneva, who jailed him in 1579, after which he spent nearly
two years in Toulouse teaching astronomy and natural philo-
sophy. His next stop was Paris in 1581, where the subjects of
his public lectures included theology and memory. Bruno's
memory system intrigued the French courtiers as a practical
yet exotic tool; years earlier, in 1571, the papacy had brought
____________________
|
6 |
Yates (
1966: 2-18, 231-42, 266-86, esp. 235). |
|
7 |
The Latin
works are in Bruno ( 1962a; 1957; 1964d; 1980); the Italian in |
-291-
the young
friar to Rome to develop powers of memory for
which he was famous even then. The appeal of artificial mem-
ory to patrons mighty enough to protect him helps explain
Bruno's continuing interest in the topic. The art of memory
was his passport through a picaresque life that bounced him
from one disappointed host to the next who might welcome
him on reputation. But memory was more than a meal-ticket
for Bruno, as one can see from his first surviving work, De
umbris idearum, dedicated to Henri III of France.
The overriding and ineffable impulse in all of
Bruno's think-
ing was an unrequited passion for infinite unity -- metaphysical,
moral, and epistemological. By treating substance as the divine
rather than the particular, he did away with Aristotle's concep-
tion of the concrete individual substance which persists while
its accidental features come and go, turning instead (like
Spinoza) to a divine substantial unity as the enduring ground
in which perishable particulars sustain their momentary being.
Through physics and metaphysics he aimed at an elusive union
with the infinite One. Through a cosmic moral reform he
wished to overcome the discord and disunity that make man-
kind vicious. On the level of epistemology, he reached for an
unreachable knowledge of the One that transcends pheno-
menal information about multiple physical objects; the paths
toward unity through epistemic diversity are imagination and
memory. 'In willing one observes [speculor] images [phantas-
mata], and thinking is either to become an image [phantasia]
or to imagine [phantasiare] something', he claimed in his last
work on memory, On the Composition of Images. 'Hence', he
continued, 'we realize that we can complete no action of any
kind befitting our nature without certain shapes and figures
conceived from sensible objects through the external senses,
then gathered and ordered internally.' 8
To understand why
memory images seemed so important to Bruno, one must start
with his use of the art of Ramon Lull, a medieval departure
from the classical technique of places and images and a system
____________________
|
8 |
Bruno ( 1962a: ii. 3. 103); Aristotle, On the
Soul431a1-19; Kristeller |
-292-
powerful
enough to have stimulated many printed versions in
the sixteenth century before attracting the interest of Descartes
and Leibniz in the seventeenth.
Lull, who
died in 1316, aimed at much more than memory. 9
He designed his ars combinatoria or
art of combinations to
represent reality directly and to give its user universal and
simplified access to all the arts and sciences. By manipulating
the letters and figures of the art, one could master nature,
convert the heathen, and know God himself. In one sense, the
Lullian art is a cosmic notation, a cipher for the structure of
the universe and a set of rules for reading it. In the concise
form most widespread in Bruno's day, the Ars
brevis, the art
starts with nine letters -- BCDEFGHIK
-- and the missing A
stands for the essence, unity, and perfection of the trinity. The
nine letters are interpreted in six ways, as virtues, vices, ques-
tions, relations, levels of reality, and, in the absolute sense, as
'dignities' or divine names, causes, and attributes. Thus, God's
bonitas or 'goodness' is the absolute
meaning of B; magnitudo
or 'greatness' of C; duratio or
'duration' of D; and so on. Lull
arranged these letters in spatial and geometrical patterns, of
which the most important were a table displaying groups of
letters in columns and a set of concentric circles divided into
nine segments, each containing one of the letters. By turning
the circles, the artist could contemplate various combinations
of letters, which could also be shown in tabular form. If B
represents divine 'goodness' absolutely but 'difference' rela-
tively and E refers to mankind in the
scale of being, then the
circular or tabular combination BBE
points to the distinction
between human goodness and divine. In a modest way, the art
works as a kind of algorithm for defining questions and setting
problems, roughly like the places of Agricola's dialectic; but
greater ambitions emerge in other applications, as in the New
Treatise on Astronomy that Lull wrote in 1297. Here, the
letters ABCD stand for various
zodiacal, planetary, elemen-
____________________
|
9 |
Yates (
1964: 173-98, 217-29, 237-41, 248-51, 306-7, 368-89; 1982-4: |
-293-
tary, and
qualitative patterns, as follows, with variable Mercury
combining all four letters and their attributes:
|
A |
Air |
Gemini,
Libra, Aquarius |
Jupiter |
Wet and
Hot |
|
B |
Fire |
Aries,
Leo, Sagittarius |
Mars, Sun
|
Hot and
Dry |
|
C |
Earth |
Taurus,
Virgo, Capricorn |
Saturn |
Dry and
Cold |
|
D |
Water |
Cancer,
Scorpio, Pisces |
Venus,
Moon |
Cold and
Wet |
If stellar
and planetary powers above govern elementary terres-
trial objects below, the permutations of ABCD
signify important
cosmological facts, which become even more meaningful when
manipulated jointly with the nine letters and the figures of the
general art. The relation between these two sets of signs has a
basis in reality, because B to K are divine causes of which A to
D are natural effects. Such patterns
arise not only in astronomy
but also in theology, medicine, law, and all the arts and
sciences. Lull's art was a simple, abstract, compendious route
to all learning and a pathway to the mystical contemplation
that lay beyond. Since Lull claimed powers so stupendous for
his method, one can see why Lullian memory need amount to
no more than recalling the Lullian art. 10
Lull was
well known throughout Europe long before Bruno
came to England; but even if Bruno had done no more than
advocate the ars combinatoria,
critics like Perkins might well
have objected to its theological pretensions and unscriptural
origins in the medieval mysticism of John Scotus Eriugena. As
usual, however, Bruno went much further. Although Lull's art
did not use the places and images of classical memory, Bruno
combined images with Lull's letters and figures in a most
provocative way in his De umbris idearum.
As in several of his
works, Bruno organized this book around the number thirty.
After a short introductory dialogue, De umbris continues with
thirty obscure paragraphs on 'intentions of shadows' and then
thirty more on 'concepts of ideas'. The point seems to be to
direct will and mind toward supercelestial ideas that cast sha-
dows in the lower reaches of the cosmos, which is darkest of
all here on earth. The person who lifts his mind higher in the
____________________
|
10 |
Yates (
1966: 173-98; 1982-4: i. 4-32, 46-59, 66-7, 78-83, 87, 98, 104, |
-294-
order of
things can dispel the gloom and enlighten his under-
standing. Access to brighter and loftier realms comes through
thirty sets of five images representing various patterns of stellar
and planetary powers. Bruno made these one hundred and
fifty images deliberately weird, sure to stick in the imagination
like those of classical memory; but at the same time he used
them as talismans, signs of planets and stars like those that
Ficino described in his Three Books on
Life as capable of
drawing down demonic forces from the skies. Moreover, Bruno
directed that the images be arranged on a memory-wheel
divided, unlike Lull's, into thirty segments marked with
Roman, Greek, and Hebrew letters. This wheel of star signs
or seals (sigilla) rests within other
concentric circles whose
thirty letters signify groups of objects, qualities, and inventors.
Like Lull's system, Bruno's art of memory was supposed to
unlock the whole universe of knowledge to the artist, thus
disclosing the unity that embraces all diversity, but Bruno also
saw his memory as a source of magical power, a way of
tapping into the hidden circuits revealed by the art.11 No
wonder that Perkins feared it and favoured the wispy abstrac-
tions of Ramist dialectic.
In 1583
Bruno published his most important work on mem-
ory, the Ars reminiscendi, whose first
part briefly describes
thirty images or sigilla named 'field', 'sky', 'chain', 'tree',
'woods', and so forth. The eleventh seal is vexillum or 'banner',
so called because its users rally to it to 'understand that many
or few, more or fewer have the same reference, replacing
things needing a word or object. Neither Plato, Aristotle and
Diogenes alone will help you, nor the Pyrrhonian, Cynic and
Epicurean alone, but many who are related, alike and propor-
tional.' In place of all the most honoured philosophies Bruno
recommended his own heroic struggle for unity, expressed in
the next section of the Art of Remembering as a search for
links among all types of animate and inanimate object mar-
shalled under a single banner. 'All things of nature and in
nature recognize commanders in all things assigned them as
____________________
|
11 |
Bruno ( 1962a: ii. 1. 20, 41); ` Yates (
1964: 192-203; 1966: 199-230). |
-295-
soldiers,'
he reasoned; 'Anaxagoras grasped this best, but
Aristotle, father of the sophistic kind, could not manage it;
from impossible, logical and fictive distinctions not befitting
the truth of things, no wonder he could derive countless others
unfit as well.' 12
Although Bruno was a supremely idiosyncratic
thinker, this passage reveals his strongest likes and dislikes
among ancient philosophers. He found much to admire in
Anaxagoras and other pre-Socratics, much to despise in Aris-
totle, whom he held chiefly liable for the logic-chopping analy-
sis that impedes a properly synthetic view of nature. In the
dialogue On Cause, Principle and One,
the pedant. Poliinio is
as silly a Peripatetic buffoon as any of Rabelais's characters,
but in the same work Bruno also attacked Aristotle's critics,
Patrizi and Ramus, because they only exchanged one vacuous
verbalism for another. A contemporary whom Bruno praised
in De la causa was Bernardino
Telesio, author of a treatise On
the Nature of Things According to Their Own Principles, and
in the second dialogue of that work he showed why he ap-
proved of Telesio's naturalism:
It's easy enough to
prepare a doctrine of proof, but proof itself is
hard. . . . Our methodists and analysts do a poor job of implementing
their organons, principles of methods and arts of arts. . . . But I say
that a natural philosopher need not find all causes and principles, but
only the physical. . . . Therefore, although [physical causes] can be
said to have the first principle and cause as their own . . ., the
relation is not always so necessary that knowledge of the one entails
knowledge of the other, so one need not treat both in the same single
discipline. . . . From knowledge of all dependent things we cannot
infer other information about the first principle and cause except by
the less effective means of the vestige. 13
These lines
are as good a summary as any of Bruno's dilemma.
Like Telesio, he wanted an autonomous philosophy of nature,
but he knew that such an inquiry must ultimately seek first
principles beyond finite understanding. In the end, he opted
____________________
|
12 |
Bruno (
1962a: ii. 2. 79-82, 84, 132-3); Yates ( 1964: 205-9, 271-3; |
|
13 |
Guzzo and
Amerio ( 1956: 327-8, 354); Bruno ( 1962b: 77-8, 98-9); |
-296-
for a
monism that comprehends the finite and the infinite in a
coincidence of opposites derived from Nicholas of Cusa. The
writings in which he worked out his ontology and cosmology,
never freed of ambiguities and contradictions, are naturally of
greater scope than the memory treatises, which none the less
form an important part of his ramshackle system. Bruno's arts
of memory aimed to illuminate the vestiges of unity in diver-
sity, to light up for the imagination traces of infinity darkly
visible in the finite world of human apprehension.
Besides De la causa, Bruno wrote five other Italian
dialogues
in 1584-5; in two of them images are prominent. Fifty poetic
emblems whose ancestry runs back to Petrarch Trionfi give
the Heroic Frenzies their literary structure, and forty-eight
images of constellations provide the framework for the Expul-
sion of the Triumphant Beast. These works, along with the
Cabala of the Horse Pegasus, are
usually called Bruno's 'moral'
dialogues. All were written and published in England in the
same burst of creativity that produced De
la causa and the two
other 'metaphysical' dialogues, On the
Infinite Universe and
Worlds and the Ash-Wednesday Supper, both of 1584. Like
most of Bruno's surviving works, all of them finished between
1582 and 1591, the six vernacular dialogues appeared in less
than serene conditions, and some show the marks of haste
more than others. None the less, schoolchildren and literary
critics in Italy still read them as monuments of prose and
poetry; they were the first major works of philosophy originally
written in Italian. Bruno's use of comedy and satire to annihil-
ate the hated pedants, and of myth and allegory to cover his
ideological tracks, produced a richer and more unruly language
than most philosophers have written. After Plato and Nietzsche,
few philosophers in any age can have matched him in comic,
poetic, or dramatic talent, which doubtless he would have
expressed with less bluster and more elegance had his life
been calmer. Besides the Italian dialogues, the memory trea-
tises, and a play, The Torchbearer,
his works fall into two
other groups, both of philosophical interest. Most important
are the three long Latin poems with prose accompaniment --
actually a single composition -- published in Frankfurt in 1591:
-297-
On the Triple Minimum; On the Monad, Number and
Figure;
and On the Innumerables, the Immense and
the Infigurable.
This 'Frankfurt trilogy' forms a
coherent sequence, but Bruno's
remaining Latin works are a miscellany, though several either
attack Peripatetic philosophy or attempt a theory of magic.
Before
Dicson's bout with Perkins, Bruno had already caused
controversy in England, where he lived in London between
1583 and 1585 as a guest of the French ambassador and a
member of the Italian émigré community. He also knew the
friends of the Earl of Leicester and Sir Philip Sidney. It may
have been one of that group -- perhaps John Florio, an Italian
born in England and Montaigne translator -- who brought
Bruno to Oxford in the summer of 1583, where he seems to
have astounded the dons by defending Copernicus in Italianate
Latin and by leaning too heavily on Ficino's theory of astral
magic. Referring in the Cena de le ceneri
to one of his Oxford
hosts, Bruno contrasted 'the incivility . . . [of] this swine . . .
[to the] patience and humanity of the other, who showed
indeed that he was a Neapolitan born, raised under a kinder
sky. Let them tell you how they cancelled his public lectures
. . . on the immortality of the soul and . . . the fivefold sphere.'
Despite the fuss in Oxford, Bruno stayed in England and
enjoyed a period of great productivity. After the Art of Re-
membering, the first fruit of these years was the Cena, in which
Bruno proved less gracious to Fulke Greville and other Eng-
lishmen who befriended him than savage to the Oxford doc-
tors, whom he found stupid and uncouth. The main burden of
the Cena is Bruno's defence of the Copernican system and his
account of an infinite universe populated by infinitely many
worlds moving in an uncentred, relative space. He did far
more than vulgarize the difficult astronomy of the De revolu-
tionibus; he was the first to locate a heliocentric system in
infinite space, though an infinite universe was by no means his
invention. Besides Copernicus, his main inspirations in this
regard were Lucretius and Nicholas of Cusa. He took a more
refined approach to the same topics in the dialogue On the
Infinite Universe, which blends Lucretian with Neoplatonic
themes. Beginning with the assertion that limited and decep-
-298-
tive senses
cannot report reliably on infinite space or countless
worlds, he turned to the intellect to test the pros and cons,
especially the principles of plenitude and sufficient reason that
compel an infinite and omnipotent cause to produce effects of
which it is capable. An infinity of particles moves through the
universe in all directions to form innumerable suns and planets
like our own, habitable by living beings like ourselves. 14
Having
adopted and transformed the astronomy of Coperni-
cus, Bruno pictured the great Polish thinker not only as a
revolutionary scientist but also as an intellectual liberator in
the broader sense, to whom
we owe our
emancipation from various false prejudices -- not to say
blindness -- of the common and vulgar philosophy. Yet he himself did
not see far beyond it because, as a student of mathematics rather than
nature, he could not penetrate deeply enough to get at the roots of
empty and improper principles or completely resolve all the difficul-
ties in his path and so free himself and others from so much empty
searching.
Trapped in
the maze of mathematics and still caged in a false
philosophy, Copernicus had started mankind on the true way,
but he could make no more progress himself. Who better than
Bruno to take the next steps?
Of the Nolan what
shall I say? My place is not to praise him, perhaps,
being as close to him as to myself. . . . If Columbus has been glorified
in our day as one . . . long ago foretold, what to make of this one
who has rediscovered how to scale the sky. . . . He has loosed man's
mind and knowledge. . . . He has forded the air, pierced the sky,
coursed among the stars, passed the borders of the world and caused
the great imaginary wall of spheres to vanish -- the first, eighth, ninth,
tenth and others added by the tales of useless mathematics or the
blind sight of vulgar philosophy. In full view of every sense and
reason, he has used the key of careful research to open the cloisters
of truth which we have the power to open, and he has stripped nature
of her veils and vestures. 15
____________________
|
14 |
Guzzo and
Amerio ( 1956: 262-3); Bruno ( 1977: 186-7); Singer ( 1950: |
|
15 |
Guzzo and
Amerio ( 1956: 196-200); Bruno ( 1977: 86-90). |
-299-
From this
lurid paean to himself, one can sense how high was
Bruno's opinion of Bruno in comparison to such lesser lights
as Copernicus and Columbus. No wonder he made so many
enemies as he roamed from country to country, changing his
outward religion as fast as his coat every time he slipped across
another border.
Lucretius
and Cusanus had talked about infinity in terms
similar to Bruno's, but one was an Epicurean pagan who
counted for little in Christian Europe, and the other covered
his cosmology with the incense of mysticism. Bruno took
method and matter from Cusanus, but not his pious motiva-
tions. His search for the undetectable One led not to mystical
abnegation but to grandeur of moral effort. Having learned
from Cusanus the cruel disproportion between man's finite
perceptions and their infinite object, and recalling the Platonic
puns on erôs and hêrôs
that led Ficino, Leone Ebreo, and
others to their notions of frenzied heroic love as divine malady,
Bruno pictured his love-crazed hero in the Heroic
Frenzies as
driven toward a divine quarry that he can never capture. The
madman's heroism consists in his persistence, even after real-
izing that the divine beloved remains cruelly distant from the
human lover, who can never see God's light directly, only its
dim reflections in nature and soul. It belongs not to theology
but to natural philosophy to undertake the furious chase or
discursus through sense, reason, and
mind that will bring
humanity as close to the One as it can come. Metaphors for
the human condition are Icarus plunging down from the sun, a
moth flying up into the flame, and, best of all, the hunter
Actaeon: when Actaeon saw Artemis bathing naked, the god-
dess turned him into a deer, the hunter's prey, to be eaten by
his own hounds.
Actaeon signifies
the intellect bent on hunting divine wisdom. . . .
Made the prey of his own dogs, chased by his own thoughts, he runs
and takes a new path, renewed to go on . . . with greater ease . . . and
a stronger wind into denser thickets, into the deserts, into the region
of things beyond comprehension. Having been a common, ordinary
man, he becomes rare and heroic. . . . Then his dogs kill him: for the
mad, sensual, blind, and fantastic world his life ends, and he begins to
live intellectually, to live the life of gods.
-300-
The
philosophical hunter's learned ignorance is to stick to a
quest that never succeeds; Bruno took this theme from Cusa-
nus, who had written a tract On Hunting
for Wisdom in 1463.
Surveying the soul within and the material cosmos without,
mankind sees God's shadows, but never the splendour itself.
Even this partial light never comes to the idle, however; the
blind must work and wander slowly and deliberately through
the wilderness toward the sun. For those of strong mind and
will, the hunt culminates when love for God annihilates bodily
perception and discursive reason, opening the hunter's inner
eyes to a beatific vision that effaces his torments in the peace-
ful glory of infinity. But, at least for mortals who can only see
God's shadows in nature and the soul, beatitude itself is merely a
vestige of infinity: vision of the divine is never direct or com-
plete. Like Plotinus, whom he respected, Bruno protected the
transcendence of the One, while pushing his naturalist monism
past the limits of contradiction. 16
The Heroic Frenzies give a morality to the
individual search-
er, derived in part from Ficino's views on will and intellect and
fed by the larger tradition of Renaissance love treatises. The
Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast
turns to social ethics and
religious reform, but in a cosmic setting. Jupiter, king of the
gods, is the protagonist of the work, but he is a god grown old
and weak with the decay of macrocosm and microcosm, re-
flected in Bruno's day by the political and religious disorder of
Europe. In order to drive the beast of vice from the world,
Jupiter begins in the skies with a plan for astrological reform.
Heaven and the gods themselves must be purged if mortal
lives are to be purified. Jupiter tells the Olympians that 'if we
cleanse our dwelling, if we renew our heaven, there will be
new constellations and influences, new impressions, new for-
tunes because the whole depends on this higher world'. From
the skies Jupiter ejects forty-eight constellations representing
vices -- 'the Twins of vile familiarity, the Bull that cares for
base things, the Ram of thoughtlessness' -- in order to replace
them with contrary virtues and thus rout the vicious beast.
____________________
|
16 |
Bruno (
1954: 62-73, 204-9, with Michel's introd.); (1964e: 123-6); |
-301-
Precedents
for cosmic renewal and celestial conflict between
virtues and vices were available to Bruno in the Hermetic
Corpus, and the. Spaccio leaves no doubt of his high regard for
the Hermetica, which he took to be the
testament of an ancient
Egyptian cult more to his liking than the anthropomorphic
worship of Christians, Jews, or Greeks. From the Hermetic
Asclepius he lifted a long passage that laments the abolition of
Egypt's ancient gods and, by implication, the arrival of the
new Christian deity who displaced them. Bruno did not ap-
prove every aspect of Egyptian idolatry, and he knew their
custom of honouring 'live images of beasts', yet he had Jupiter
defend this practice because 'animals and plants are living
effects of Nature, . . . [which] is none other than God in
things. . . . Diverse living things represent diverse divinities.
. . . Whence all of God is in all things. . . . Those wise [Egyp-
tians] . . . knew . . . Divinity to be latent in Nature.' Under-
standing how God lies hidden in things, the Egyptian sages
also learned how to manipulate them magically in order to
apply heavenly powers, including demonic powers, to earthly
purposes. 17
Magic, pantheism, idolatry, demonolatry,
apostasy -- just
these few outrages from the long list in the Spaccio would have
been enough to anger the authorities, but there were more
besides: Bruno doubted immortality, taught metempsychosis,
recommended free-thinking, deserted positive for natural re-
ligion, criticized the Bible, defamed the Jews, slandered the
Protestants, betrayed the Catholics, and condemned civil gov-
ernments besides. The strangest and most intense of Bruno's
moral homilies is the Cabala of the Horse Pegasus, whose full
punning title ( Cabala/ Cavallo) also mentions an Asino, an ass
who sometimes doubles for the noble Pegasus, a winged horse
like the soul-steeds in Plato Phaedrus. Once again, themes of
____________________
|
17 |
Guzzo and Amerio ( 1956: 499); Bruno, (
1964b: 115-16, 235-6 [ Imerti |
-302-
learned
ignorance and coincident opposites point back to
Cusanus in a dialogue that extends some of the motifs of the
Spaccio. The real fools and asses are
ministers who preach
conventional religion and pedants who corrupt education, those
too blind to see that asses, horses, and philosophers are all
vitalized by the same force of divine mind. Souls migrate from
one embodied form to another, expressing in one degree or
another the spiritual power that enlivens all matter. When he
flies up to Parnassus, the ass becomes Pegasus, but one of his
earthly incarnations was Aristotle, who was too much an ass to
understand the workings of nature. 18
Bruno's crusade against
Aristotle was a lifelong affair, and one of its liveliest moments
came with the dialogue On Cause,
Principle, and One, where a
critical issue is the central Aristotelian doctrine of matter and
form -- the hylemorphic theory of substance. Bruno's response
to Aristotle on this and other points becomes more intelligible
in the context of contemporary efforts to demolish or to aban-
don the intricate metaphysical architecture sustained over two
millennia in the Peripatetic tradition. Before we examine
Bruno's assault on. Aristotelian physics and metaphysics, some-
thing more must be said of the ancient philosophy that he
rejected and about other Renaissance philosophers who pre-
pared the way for him.
New philosophies of nature
In
Peripatetic natural philosophy, a physical substance is some
particular composite of matter and form. Generation or coming-
to-be occurs when matter (hulê)
gains form (morphê), passing-
away or corruption when form is lost. If a substance passes
from one state to another, as from hot to cold, one term of the
change may be seen as a form, the other as its negation or
privation; what persists is the material substrate. Hence, matter,
form, and privation account for the generation and corruption
of substances. Matter without form is entirely indeterminate; it
____________________
|
18 |
Guzzo and
Amerio ( 1956: 539); Singer ( 1950: 120-5); Yates ( 1964: 257- |
-303-
lacks
quality and form but has the potency to acquire them. In
order to have an identity as some one thing among others, a
substance must actually possess distinguishing forms and quali-
ties, said to be educed from the potency of its matter. Some
features of a substance -- a given colour or weight or shape in
an apple, for instance -- may not be essential; when they change
or disappear, the apple remains the same substance, so they
are called accidental forms or qualities. But suppose a human.
substance loses the feature of rationality. In Aristotelian terms,
the person will no longer be human. The individual in question
requires rationality in order to count as human; so the human
has a substantial form as well as various accidental forms, and
that substantial form is rational. Rationality is essential to
humanity. But if the form of rationality gives the human sub-
stance its being as human, this will be true of all humans, who
are members of the same species because they are rational
animals. Evidently, the substantial or specific form cannot dis-
tinguish one human or one apple from others of their species.
What makes this apple differ from that one is some definite
batch of matter, but matter as a principle of individuation
needs forms and qualities; unformed matter, prime matter, is
utterly indistinct, so it has no real existence by itself. Only the
composite substance, the real apple, actually exists on its own.
Aristotle
himself complicated the problem of form when he
gave it a leading role in sensation and intellection; these pro-
cesses occur because disembodied sensible and intelligible
forms of the object actually unite with the subject's faculties of
mind and sense. How does the form of a substance as known
differ from the form that constitutes the substance? Christian
Peripatetics had less trouble with such questions when asked
of natural objects -- apples and other such things -- than when
they themselves were involved; the human substance gave
more trouble because it had to be immortal. Having defined
man's immortal soul as a substantial form and the mortal body
as the matter informed by it, they faced such puzzles as the
status of the soul after death, before rejoining the resurrected
body. A temporarily bodiless form of the body or forms flitting
from known to knower were by no means the only chinks in
-304-
the armour
of hylemorphism, but they gave Pomponazzi and.
others much to worry about. Pomponazzi's approach to the
problem caused so much trouble because he took Aristotle's
more materialist view of the soul so seriously. More expedient
solutions tended to liberate a dematerialized substantial form
from the body and to treat it as an autonomous entity. Indeed,
by Bruno's time the doctrine of substantial or specific form
had become a crux of debate and a focus of explanation in
many areas of physics and metaphysics. Physicians, philoso-
phers, theologians, and others depended on hylemorphism as
much as we rely on evolution in biology or quantum mechanics
in physics, but many of them sensed that the hylemorphic
paradigm was crumbling.
Since the
high Middle Ages, philosophers had often tried to
adapt Peripatetic metaphysics to Christian purposes or to ad-
just it for various theoretical reasons, but Bruno did more than
tinker. In De la causa and other
works, he dismantled hylemor-
phism to replace it with a materialist naturalism that preserved
certain elements of Aristotle's terminology -- the words 'form'
and 'matter', for example -- but demolished his metaphysics.19
by Bruno's assault on Aristotle was fiercer and showier than other
such attacks, but it was part of a larger wave of discontent with
a system straining under its own excesses and elaborations
after centuries of growth and inbreeding. In the sixteenth
century and after, even professed Aristotelians from Pom-
ponazzi to Cremonini undermined Peripatetic defenses by read-
ing the Philosopher in rigorously naturalist terms. Others,
armed with new information about Stoics, Epicureans, and
pre-Socratics, proposed alternatives to part or all of Peripatetic
natural philosophy. Many of these challengers were physicians,
like Girolamo Fracastoro, who lived until 1553. Best remem-
bered for the poem that gave syphilis its name, Fracastoro was
also dedicated to an empirically based medicine. He studied
the problem of contagion, often regarded in his time as an
occult force, and treated it as one of a larger class of sym-
pathies and antipathies, which he tried to extract from the
____________________
|
19 |
Below, n.
28. |
-305-
realm of magic. Referring to the atomism of Lucretius, he
explained sympathy as a mechanical attraction resulting from a flow of
particles between objects; the seminaria
or seedparticles that carry contagion are especially fine and hence able to
cover great distances and penetrate the bodies they strike. When he made
'spirit' a part of this same mechanism, Fracastoro had in mind a subtle
material substance like the Stoic pneuma,
not a magical ectoplasm. 20
Less a philosopher in the modern sense than Fracastoro was
Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus.
His name itself was a defiance. Born in Switzerland in 1493, he wandered all
over Europe until his death in 1541, first apprenticed to his physician father,
then studying medicine at Ferrara, and perhaps also learning magic from the
monk Trithemius. He bloodied his hands as a military surgeon and earned respect
for medical practice in Strasbourg and Basle, where two of his more eminent
patients were Erasmus and his humanist publisher Johann Froben. Everywhere he
went, Paracelsus shattered conventions and exasperated expectations. Early on,
he declared his medical independence by burning the books of Galen and
Avicenna. His own writings -- a jumble of theology, chemistry, medicine,
mysticism, folklore, and plain nonsense -- resist brief description. Many of
their sources are still hidden in the obscurities of Cabala, German folklore,
and local traditions long since lost. He wrote mostly in a German dialect, and
his Latin was idiosyncratic, to say the least. Some of the most influential and
popular works published under his name are spurious. Later Paracelsian thought,
which peaked in the seventeenth century, derived almost entirely from Latin
texts and mixed the founder's doctrines with accretions and digests from his
followers. The original works abhor all except biblical authority, though like
other innovators Paracelsus owed more to tradition than he cared to admit.
He was primarily a medical reformer, but he derived his
medical theory from a much more ambitious world-view that
____________________
|
G. Rossi ( 1893); Pellegrini ( 1948); Di Leo ( 1953); P.
Rossi ( 1954); Peruzzi ( 1980). |
-306-
encompassed all philosophy. Like other philosophers of nature,
he rejected the traditional quaternaries of elements, qualities, and humours,
and he replaced them with a triad of first principles called mercury, salt, and
sulphur. He described mercury as an active and spiritual force, converted
chemically to smoke through combustion; physiologically it fixes the body's
fluid content. Salt is passive and corporeal, left as ash after combustion and
lending form and solidity to physiological change. Sulphur is an intermediate
principle; its chemistry makes things combustible, and its role in physiology
is to promote growth. When a piece of wood burns, combustion produces mercurial
vapours, sulphurous flames, and salty ash. Like Aristotle's elements in
relation to the fire, air, water, and earth of daily experience, the Paracelsian
tria prima were not the same as
ordinary mercury, salt, and sulphur. Their properties were much broader and
more powerful. Paracelsian matter-theory was certainly novel in the context of
normal natural philosophy, but it can be traced to Moslem alchemical theories
of the eighth century. Chemistry was central to the Paracelsian world picture,
and Paracelsian medicine was really 'iatrochemistry' or chemical medicine.
Paracelsus did not invent iatrochemistry but he promoted it, popularized it,
and started it on a vigorous career in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Since health was supposed to depend on a balance of the three principles,
Paracelsian medications were chemical combinations of mercury, sulphur, and
salt. Besides the three material elements, Paracelsus posited a spiritual
'archeus' which acted as a unifying principle, roughly like the Peripatetic
substantial form. Matter, spirit, and soul were fluid rather than discrete
properties of reality in a universe where everything was more or less alive.
Paracelsus believed in magic, astrology, and personal spiritual beings, but he
derived these beliefs as much from personal observation as from the traditions
that he wished to abandon. 21
____________________
|
Sudhoff ( 1894-9; 1936); Darmstaedter ( 1931); Sherlock (
1948); Goldammer ( 1953; 1954); Pagel ( 1958; 1962; 1985; 1986); Debus (
1965; 1977; 1978: 133, 101-5, 116-41); Dilg-Frank ( 1981); Webster ( 1982).
The original texts are edited in Paracelsus ( 1922-33; 1923-73); ( 1951)
groups English translations from the Sudhoff-Matthiessen edn. under various
headings. |
-307-
Another celebrated and rambunctious physician was Girolamo
Cardano, who studied medicine at Pavia and Padua to prepare for his doctorate
in 1526, after which he practised in Milan before winning his first fame for
books on arithmetic and algebra, especially the Ars Magna of 1545. Five years later he published his most famous
work, On Subtlety, a rambling
miscellany of natural philosophy which eventually grew to twenty-one books and
appeared in many reprints and revisions before and after Cardano's death in
1576. His book On Variety of 1557 was
a sequel to the successful De
subtilitate, and his treatises of 1560 On the One and On Nature extended the
antiAristotelian implications of that work. About a fifth of Cardano's nearly
fifty books deal with philosophical issues, though he is best known today for
original work in algebra and probability. Seldom read now but widely cited in
its own time and the century following was the Fifteenth Book of Exoteric
Exercises on Subtlety by Julius Caesar Scaliger, a blast from an admirer of
Aristotle bothered by Cardano's prose as well as his originality and sloppiness;
Scaliger's title implied that there was enough wrong with De subtilitate to
have filled fourteen other volumes. At one point, Scaliger thought that his
attack had literally killed its victim, but it only helped enlarge his
reputation, for better or for worse. De natura contains Cardano's strongest
critiques of Aristotle, whom he continued to honour, but the first books of De
subtilitate, which deal with physical principles, present the less pointed
material that helped turn his contemporaries against Peripatetic natural
philosophy. 22
De natura confronts
Aristotle straightforwardly on a number of topics: privation as an explanation
of change, the nature of generation and corruption, the relation of corporeal
to incorporeal substance, the existence of prime matter, the number of the
elements, and so forth. These challenges are blunted in the
____________________
|
Morley ( 1854); Margolin ( 1960; 1976a); Corsano ( 1961b);
Ore ( 1965); Ongaro ( 1969); Ochman ( 1974; 1975); Trevisani ( 1975); Zanier
( 1975a); Céard ( 1977); Ingegno ( 1980); Fierz ( 1983); Maclean (
1984); Bianchi (forthcoming); Kessler(forthcoming). |
-308-
more expansive and maddeningly disorganized De subtilitate. 23 Although
he spends the first paragraphs of the book defining subtlety', exactly what
Cardano had in mind is hard to say. He seems to have meant that problems are
subtle if they are extremely obscure and require the finest sense of
discrimination to resolve. He certainly succeeded in demonstrating the first
point. After an incredibly involved summary of the whole work, he begins with
an orthodox account of matter as what persists when form expires, but then,
with no bows to a divine creator, he goes on to describe matter as ungenerated
and imperishable. Like Aristotle, he makes form a requirement for the
actualization of matter, but he also claims that soul is everywhere because all
bodies have a source of motion within them. But what he means by soul or anima
turns out 'to be quite mechanical. He names three kinds of universal natural
motion. One type of motion begins when nature acts to avoid a vacuum in a
change which might otherwise leave too little matter for a given form; another
starts in order to prevent interpenetration of bodies when change might yield
too much matter for a particular form; the third occurs when heavy things fall
and light things rise, but, having experienced the enormous power of the first
two causes of motion in the explosive force of artillery, Cardano is ready
almost to ignore the third, which was Aristotle's paradigm of all natural
sublunar motion. He counts five natural principles -- matter, form, soul,
place, and motion -- and he makes all of them eternal. No apologies to
Aristotle. No worries about the creator. Except to suppose that it was largely
unconscious, it is hard to account for Cardano's bravado. He was once detained
by the Inquisition, but the charges are unknown.
Bernardino Telesio was
just as daring but more deliberate and less prolific. Bacon, who criticized his
empiricism as incomplete, honoured him as 'the first of the moderns'. 24 Telesio
was born in 1509 in the far south of Italy, in the Calabrian
____________________
|
Bk. I of De
subtilitate is translated in Cardano ( 1934); Cardano ( 1962) is a
translation of the autobiography. Otherwise, see Cardano ( 1967) for the
collected Latin works. |
|
|
Bacon ( 1857-74:iii. 114). |
-309-
town of Cosenza, to a family powerful in the region. At the
age of nine he left for Milan, Rome, and finally Padua, where he began to study
Aristotelian philosophy and Galenic medicine around 1530, when debate ran heavy
on faults in the scholastic system explored by secular Aristotelians and
empiricist physicians. The greatest of the former was Pomponazzi, of the latter
Vesalius, who was anatomizing in Padua while Telesio studied there in the 1530s,
when important humanist professors were also teaching in the university.
Besides Paracelsus and Fracastoro, who published his De sympathia in 1546, others who anticipated Telesio in seeking a
new basis for natural philosophy included the poet Marcello Palingenio
Stellato, whose Zodiac of Life of
1535 combined Epicurean with Neoplatonic'elements, and Simone Porzio, whose
book On Principles of 1553 examined
physical questions with notable independence of mind. After finishing his
degree in 1535, Telesio may have contemplated these developments during a
period of withdrawal in a monastery; he sought no university job, but by 1547
his ideas seem to have been in public circulation, and within a few years he
was at work on the first version of his treatise On the Nature of Things According to Their Own Principles, one of
the more incisive titles in Renaissance philosophy and a clear allusion to
Lucretius. In 1553 he was back in Cosenza, where he gave much time to the
Accademia Cosentina, while travelling frequently to Rome and Naples. Pressed by
his followers, he published the original two book version of De return natura in 1563, having
previously tested the soundness of his arguments in conversations with Vincenzo
Maggi, a noted Paduan Peripatetic. Another edition followed in 1570; in 1575
Antonio Persio gave public lectures on the Telesian system in Venice, Padua,
Bologna, and the south; and in 1586 appeared the definitive expansion to nine
books. The author died two years later in Cosenza. 25
____________________
|
For reprints of the original Latin works see Telesio (
1971a; 1971b), with introds. by Vasoli; Telesio ( 1910-23; 1965-77) are
modern edns. and translations of De
rerum natura. For brief biographies see Vasoli in Telesio ( 1971a: pp.
v-xxi); and Gentile (1968a: 193-207); see also Fiorentino (1872-4); Gentile (
1911); Troilo ( 1914); Van Deusen ( 1932); Abbagnano ( 1941: 47-79, |
-310-
The proem to De rerum
natura carries a subtitle for the work announcing it as a manifesto for
natural philosophy emancipated from Peripatetic rationalism: 'the structure of
the world and the nature and magnitude of bodies contained in it are not to be
sought from reason, as the ancients did; they must be perceived from sensation
and treated as being things themselves.' 26 True
to this principle, Telesio laid out the ground-plan of his naturalism in the
first two books of his treatise before taking on Aristotle in the third and
devoting the rest of the volume to physical, biological, epistemological, and
moral implications of his empirical premisses. If Aristotle studies being as
such in his metaphysics, his physics deals with being in motion, but physical
change (metabolê) or motion (kinêsis) includes transformations
not only of quality, quantity, and place but also of substance; hence
metaphysical issues became prominent in Peripatetic physics, as indeed they had
been in the first two books of the Philosopher's Physics. After Galileo and
Descartes, motion became a uniquely physical category, and a leading aim of
post-Newtonian science has been to account for all change, even its own changes
of mind, in terms of matter in motion. Telesio's pre-Galilean perspective was
reversed. To make physics autonomous, he had to extricate it from a natural
philosophy in which rational principles of form, matter, privation, and passage
from potency to act covered change and motion of all kinds. He began with the
crude evidence of -- his senses, all ultimately reducible to touch, and he
asserted but never proved that sensation is nature's truest witness. Taken as a
whole, the book is a frontal assault on the foundations of Peripatetic
philosophy accompanied by a proposal for replacing Aristotelianism with a
system more faithful to nature and experience.
First he noted that the sun is a light and bright body that
emits heat, while cold comes from the dark, dense earth. Since heat and cold
penetrate bodies, and body is impenetrable, these two active principles must be
incorporeal, but to exist
____________________
|
|
175-290); Soleri ( 1945); Garin ( 1961a: 432-50; 1965a:
192-6); Kristeller ( 1964a: 91-109); Delcorno ( 1967); Franco ( 1969); Di
Napoli ( 1973: 311-66). |
|
Telesio ( 1971: 1). |
-311-
they need to
act upon bodily mass or passive matter, the third basic principle. In
Aristotelian terms, they act like material and efficient causes; Telesio
distrusted Aristotle's analysis of causation, and he shied away especially from
unseen final and formal causes. Invisible, lifeless, and powerless in itself,
matter dilates or contracts as heat or cold affect it; otherwise, it can do
nothing but fall, which is not really action but absence of action. The heavens
and the sun are the region of heat; cold belongs to earthy matter below. Earth
and sun are changeless as such, but other bodies pass in and out of being as
heat and cold struggle for possession of material mass. From this Heraclitian
conflict arises the world's diversity, which Aristotle tried to explain with
privation, matter, and form, but Aristotle's account fails at various key
points. One failure was to make nature wasteful, a slumbering storehouse of
idle forms waiting to be put to work. If all possible forms are really there
waiting in matter's potency, what does it mean to say that any form is
generated or corrupted? Rejecting metaphysical principles prior to the natural
object because he considered them redundant, Telesio insisted that all the
object's features are precisely coextensive and simultaneous with its organic
development. One of these features is soul or anima, in the case of animals a material spiritus that grows from the seed and suffuses the whole body
except for the bones. Unlike the Peripatetic soul, this anima is not the substantial form of the body. If it were, the body
would vanish as soon as the soul leaves in death. The ensouled body is an
organic or structural rather than a formal unity, like a ship made of many
parts all sailing to the same port. One such part is the soul, which the body
needs for movement and perception, but not for simple physical integrity.
Human animals
like all others require a spiritual soul, but this material faculty cannot
explain man's immortality or all his moral and religious instincts, so to
account for these data of faith Telesio posited another, immaterial soul,
infused by God and left outside the bounds of nature. This implanted soul needs
its spiritual counterpart not only to perceive but also to reason. Spirit
perceives objects by contact that alters it
-312-
physically; in effect, perception occurs when spirit feels
itself expanded or contracted by heat or cold. Aristotle had claimed that the
soul becomes the forms that it perceives, but to avoid the absurdity of formal
fire lit in the mind when one sees a flame, Telesio made perception a process
of physical contact rather than ontological change; heat simply warms and
enlarges the spirit. Yet this transaction is something more than a mechanical impression.
The antipathy between cold and heat shows that even these simplest elements
sense the hostility between them. When cold reacts against heat's movement
toward some bit of matter, response to the aggressive motion requires a
perceptive act which is not motion itself. Moreover, the physical apparatus of
sensation includes not just discrete perceptions but also their comparison and
organization into concepts and patterns of judgement and recollection, all
within the ambit of the spiritual soul. Likewise, there is an appetite whose
drives are entirely material, directed toward conserving the physical organism
and maintaining the spirit in a pleasurably expansive state of warmth and
motion. Parallel to sensation and appetite, an immaterial will seeks a divine
end, and a rational soul contemplates its immortal destiny. Choices between the
objects of these twin faculties give rise to free will. At the same time,
however, Telesio proposes to naturalize even the moral basis of human action.
Conservation of the spirit in a pleasant and secure state is itself a moral
end, whose highest form consists in distinguishing ephemeral from durable pains
and pleasures. The philosopher of nature provides a materially grounded ethics
suited to the spiritual soul, leaving it to the theologian to deal with the
higher immaterial purposes of the rational Soul. 27 Telesio
left an orderly, coherent system that fails on the crude side of simplicity;
its epistemology is untested and its empiricism limited to gross and
undisciplined observation. Despite his protestations, Telesio was actually less
of an empiricist than the Aristotle of the zoological works, and he seems to
have come no closer than such Peri-
____________________
|
Abbagnano ( 1941: 47-79); Kristeller ( 1964a: 98-105);
Gentile ( 1968a: 214-31); Vasoli in Telesio ( 1971a: pp. xiv-xx). |
-313-
patetic
contemporaries as Zabarella to a systematic experimental programme. Neither he
nor Zabarella had any conception of the scientific power of mathematics. From a
modern point of view, however, it stands to Telesio's credit that he was never,
charmed by occultism, unlike other philosophers of nature. His sense of
empirical science, which included progressive ideas on space, vacuum, and other
physical topics, grew out of a disenchanted world-view remarkable for its
hardheaded clarity.
Bruno's natural
philosophy had different virtues and defects: its extraordinary subtlety often
destroys itself in the wildest inconsistency, in swings from monism to
pluralism, from unitary substance to atomic discontinuity, from disdain for
finite bodies to exaltation of material infinity. Bruno was in his early
forties when prison closed his career in 1591. Even during the previous
productive decade, his escapades in northern Europe ending in return to Venice
and betrayal to the Inquisition can scarcely have enabled him to take a long
view of his work, to eliminate contradictions and settle on a cleaner
presentation of his thought. Recklessness was so much in Bruno's character that
one hesitates to suggest that a 'mature' system was ever in the cards for him;
if his achievement was immature, it was also precocious and rich, like that of
Shelley or Nietzsche. If one can speak of a 'romantic temperament', Bruno
surely had it. Had he mellowed his conduct and softened his tongue, he might
not have gone to the stake in 1600, though before he died he attempted to
conciliate his inquisitors, who would have been satisfied only with submission,
while he kept debating. He recanted and then withdrew his recantation -- of
what we do not know because the most important records were destroyed. The
clerics who jailed him for nine years and then murdered him were surely right
to think Bruno a heretic; their worst fears seem to have focused on religious
beliefs, 'to which he was indifferent (when indifference was not an option),
rather than the liberty of philosophizing that was his grand and fatal passion.
In fact, the final change of heart that led to his grisly execution may have
occurred when philosophical issues came to the fore. One cannot say. What
horrific credo had he
-314-
transgressed to
make his judges dispense with the usual grotesque mercy of garrotting before
they lit the tinder? Bruno burned for philosophy; he was killed for moral,
physical, and metaphysical views that terrified and angered the authorities.
While pondering our irritations with his changes on such questions, it will be
well to recall the price he paid to the hobgoblin of little minds and the demon
of clear convictions.
Bruno was a
great soul, though it may not have seemed so in 1584 when he first protested at
length against Aristotelian physics and metaphysics in De la causa. In general, the position of this dialogue is monist, like
that of other works that deal with the topic of being, while those on memory
and knowledge often preserve the pluralist segregation of things from ideas.
The words 'form' and 'matter' survive Bruno's savaging of hylemorphism, but not
as independent principles of being. Unlike Aristotle, whose theory of substance
was about concrete individuals, Bruno did not care about individual objects. He
saw the particular forms that distinguish one thing from another as ripples in
the calm sea of being, mere modes or accidents of universal matter. Nature
thrives and breeds transitory forms out of living matter through her own
internal force of soul. The single universal form is the world-soul that drives
things from within as their principle. Causes that act externally are
superficial; a deeper dynamism belongs to principles that move inside. Matter
and form unite in the infinite substance that comprehends all. Infinite unitary
substance is the opposite of diversity for Bruno and therefore an inversion of
Peripatetic substantial form, whose job is to make the object the kind of thing
it is. Individual souls in Bruno's system cannot be discrete specific forms
because soul is really one; what enlivens a human and a fly are fragments of
the same world-soul, which is like a light reflected in a shattered mirror
whose splinters are the souls of particular beings. Ultimately, Bruno had
little work for form to do, but he gave matter a more dignified role than
Christian Peripatetics usually allowed it. Forms come and go as matter endures,
ensouled, alive, and divine. Matter is both corporeal and incorporeal, but its
bodily manifestations are no more than contractions of
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a primal matter unlimited by corporeal division. What harm to
call such matter divine? God is in things; divinity and the infinite living
cosmos are the same, except to timorous theologians who think that abasing
nature glorifies God. Albertus, Aquinas, and other eminent scholastics called
Avicebron (Ibn Gabirol) and David of Dinant pantheists and materialists because
their matter theory infringed the divine prerogative of incorporeality; but
Bruno found these thinkers good company. 28
Like Plotinus, Bruno made matter absolutely indeterminate, but
he took this non-feature of matter as proof of its richness. The One is
infinite, and so is its material substrate, which is also stable, unitary,
eternal, and uncreated; God and the world are the same, so they must be coeval.
The unity and stability of being are guaranteed at both extremes of quantity by
the coincidence of maximum and minimum. The atomic minimum is a real concrete
thing, not a mathematical abstraction. In fact, one of Bruno's flaws was his
attitude toward mathematics, which ranged from apathy to animosity with
occasional pauses in which he devised a dilettante numerology. Despite his wish
to destroy Aristotle's authority in natural philosophy, Bruno kept to a physics
at least as qualitative as the Stagirite's. None the less, the minimum yields
no experience of quality, so its features must be inferred rationally, by
reasons opposed to Peripatetic dogma. In his closed world Aristotle allowed
matter to be potentially divisible without limit, but the atoms in Bruno's infinite
universe are well-defined minima because they have a least size; they are tiny
spheres, indivisible, impenetrable, and homogeneous. Only their arrangement in
various structures produces material variety. Some minima -- the smallest
possible cat, for example -- may be organic or structural rather than atomic
wholes, and hence corruptible. But an atom is immutable because it is a simple
unity, while larger objects made of atoms are transitory aggregates. The
atomism of Bruno's earlier works calls on an ordering mind to regulate the
shifting swarms of particles, but in the later Latin poem
____________________
|
Singer ( 1950: 96-101); Guzzo ( 1960: 69-93);
Védrine ( 1967: 139-46, 269-97); Michel ( 1973: 126-32); Blum ( 1980:
57-75). |
-316-
On the Triple Minimum,
the atom itself becomes a soul, defined either 'privatively' as the smallest
part of the continuum (like a letter of the alphabet in an infinite library) or
'negatively' as escaping all limit and definition. The continuum of ordinary
matter disaggregates into privative atoms, but infinite soul has no breaks or
boundaries; minimal and maximal souls must coincide. Without the world-soul to
vitalize it, matter and its atoms would be nothing. Even the negative minimum
or monad differs from the Leibnizian entity of the same name, which is created,
perceptive, and radically alone -- 'windowless', in fact -- while Bruno's
uncreated and insentient monads. need the splendour of soul to activate them.
Soul's light shines from within, however; no external cause forms the atoms
into the shapes that make up the visible world. 'In everything is a share of
everything', said Anaxagoras, and Bruno added that everything is God. 29
Bruno's statue stands in Rome in the Field of Flowers, on the
spot where he was burned. Eventually, he became a hero to those who saw him as
a martyr for free science and philosophy in their fight against ideological
repression; but another view of Bruno hails him chiefly as a progressive in
morals and religion, a magical reformer who wanted to save Europe from a
decadent Christianity by reviving the Hermetic cult of ancient Egypt.
Fortunately, there was enough in Bruno's great soul to please all his friends
and annoy all his enemies: the pantheist, the materialist, the libertine
free-thinker, and philosophical rogue; the magus, the Lullist, the memory
wizard; the atomist, the Copernican, the proponent of infinite worlds, and the
advocate of spacious liberty in philosophy. Tommaso Campanella was his
immediate heir, another renegade Dominican whom the church imprisoned two years
before Bruno died and kept confined for twenty-six more. Born in 1568 in
Calabria, Telesio's region, Campanella considered himself a good Catholic, but
he was probably a worse danger to the establishment than Bruno, for he had
messianic fantasies that incited
____________________
|
Singer ( 1950: 71-9, 86-92); Guzzo ( 1960: 95-109);
Védrine ( 1967: 617, 127-57, 261-5, 288-97, 323-44); Michel ( 1973:
132-49, 242-5); above, n. 17. |
-317-
zany insurrectionist plots which might have done material
damage. 30
Having recouped some of its losses after the Reformation, the post-Tridentine
church was not amused when the author of the Monarchy of the Messiah planned to make the papacy the centre of
secular as well as spiritual world government. Today, Campanella's
best-remembered book is the City of the
Sun, a saner utopian design for social reform that gained an immense
readership in frequent translations into many languages.
Campanella's first surviving work, Philosophy Demonstrated by the Senses, is an immense
anti-Peripatetic polemic in defence of Telesio, published in 1591 against a
Peripatetic who had attacked the great Calabrian's treatise On the Nature of Things. Campanella
tried unsuccessfully to meet Telesio before he died, and he chose to build a
new philosophy on his countryman's naïve empiricism rather than devise yet
another variation on the airy constructs of the Aristotelians. For his
independent thinking he was accused of heresy and confined to his convent, the
first of many long spells of detention. From the tone and content of his book,
one can see why the Thomist Dominicans feared that they had hatched a monster:
The top Peripatetics, what empty-headed nitwits . . .! Prime
matter is supposed to be nothing really and privation nothing, and yet form
gets drawn from the potency of prime matter, which is nothing and does not
exist. . . . How great is the ignorance of these people: they want to act like
gods, not baulking at producing beings from nonbeings, making things out of
illusions to trick people.
Campanella denied hylemorphism and replaced it with his own
____________________
|
There is no comprehensive edn. of Campanella's works, and
few have been translated into English; see Campanella ( 1638; 1854; 1925;
1927; 1939; 1949-; 1957; 1960; 1962; 1974; 1975). The standard biography is
Amabile ( 1882; 1887); from the large secondary literature see esp. Blanchet
( 1920); Firpo ( 1940; 1947); Di Napoli ( 1947; 1973: 427-968); Walker (
1958a: 20336); Corsano ( 1961a); Badaloni ( 1965); Femiano ( 1965; 1968;
1969; 1973); Franco ( 1969); Tommsao
Campanella nel IV centenario ( 1969); Tommaso
Campanella . . . Miscellanea ( 1969); Amerio ( 1972); Bock ( 1974); Gadol
( 1976), Headley ( 1988; 1990a; 1990b). Part of what follows is a modified
version of the section on Campanella in my chapter on occultism in the
forthcoming Cambridge History of
Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. |
-318-
doctrine,
sometimes obscured by the old terminology in which he expressed it. The ideas
that he rejected were the core of Peripatetic philosophy: that substantial form
is a principle of being superior to matter; that form is educed from the
potency of matter; that soul is the form of the body; and that the mind knows
by abstracting forms from objects. Above all, Campanella insisted that form was
known directly through the senses. The. Peripatetics had pried form away from
sensation, so Campanella anchored it to body. Matter is simply bodily mass, the
body or matter of common experience needing no abstract forms to make it real.
'It would be wrong', he argued, 'to say that matter is bodily because of form.
. . . Body is body in its own right and . . . the same . . . as matter,
quantity, substrate and bodily mass.' We draw our first distinctions among
objects from their shape, which we also call 'form', and this leads us by
analogy to the concept of internal form. But internal form is a mode or quality
of the object, not a being in its own right. Having dispensed with substantial
form, Campanella replaced it with Telesio's heat and cold, which cause the
particles in a body to take on different arrangements or 'temperaments'. He
equated form with temperament and described temperament as the structure of
matter heated or cooled. This novel approach first appears in book two of Philosophia sensibus demonstrata, where
Campanella writes that
each thing has by nature a consimilar
constitutive heat . . . consimilar, I mean, to the heat of a particular star
[so that] each thing in the universe can have its own star . . . corresponding
to its constitutive heat and leading to procreation and growth, as Hermes,
Enoch and Mercurius said . . ., [who] saw such effects and, not knowing how to
investigate their causes, attributed them to occult influences and the souls of
the stars.
In other words, although the young Campanella
believed in astrological causation, he did not believe that celestial causes
were occult. In effect, he proposed a physical theory of manifest forces, heat
and cold, to replace the traditional doctrine of
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occult powers which had long been tied to the hylemorphic
metaphysics that he also rejected. 31
Unlike Telesio, however, who did his best to liberate physics
from metaphysics, Campanella was not unfriendly to metaphysics as such. He
wanted to change metaphysics, not destroy it. Although his Eighteen Books of Metaphysics appeared only in 1638, the year
before he died, Campanella had shown interest in writing a metaphysics by 1590
and had produced a version of it by 1602-3. In the published work, he
criticized Telesio for attributing too much to the purely natural agency of
heat and cold in forming natural bodies, suggesting that these physical powers
could act only as instruments of a diviner cause whose various levels he
identified as God, the 'primalities', their 'influences', and the world-soul.
The distinctive ingredients of Campanella's new metaphysics began to get broad
public exposure in the brief Compendium
of Nature of 1617 and in the 1620 edition of his book On the Sense in Things and on Magic. The subtitle of this ebullient
volume proclaims its subject as 'occult philosophy, showing the cosmos to be a
living, conscious statue of god' and describes the world's 'parts and particles
[as] having sensation . . . enough for their conservation'. Most of
Campanella's arguments for pansensism remain within the limits of Telesio's
physical programme. Since all natural action results from the contrariety of
heat and cold, a hot object must somehow be aware that cold is its enemy,
otherwise the natural impulse of each active force to inform matter would go
uncontested; hostilities would cease, and generation and corruption would end.
When Campanella claims that the spirits diffused through nature laugh and weep,
however, one may read him simply as expressing a physical antinomy -- the
common fact of dilation and constriction -poetically. He crossed the line
between physics and metaphysics only when he began to describe his complex
scheme for God as creator and sustainer of nature:
God is more within things than the forms themselves, . . .
impressing
____________________
|
Campanella ( 1638: 134-9; 1925: 94; 1939: 232; 1974: 63-8,
227-8, 234, 311, 447). |
-320-
in them the power not only to reach an end but to know how
to reach it. . . . All sense is participant in the first wisdom, . . . [and]
every form is participant in God. And because god is most powerful, wise, and
loving, . . . all beings are composed of Power, Wisdom, and Love, and every
being exists because it can be, knows how to be, and loves to be, and when it lacks the power
or knowledge or love of being, it dies or changes.
By placing the trinitarian God of power, wisdom, and love -the
'divine Monotriad' of the three primalities -- within all things as the ground
of their being, Campanella added a metaphysical dimension, an immaterial,
god-begotten wisdom, to the physical sense that Telesio had found in nature.
Thus, although he admitted in De sensu
that magic is an 'occult wisdom' and called certain forces and phenomena in
nature 'occult', Campanella had not reverted to the hylemorphic occultism
rejected in his earlier work, though by this time he had worked out an
alternative metaphysics of magic. 32
The doctrine of primalities and influences runs throughout
Campanella's mature work but appears most clearly in the Metaphysics, which also describes the role of these Neoplatonic
triads in occult causation. Having decided that Telesio's heat and cold needed
divine assistance, Campanella described God as directing natural events not by
external impulse, as an archer shoots an arrow, but by an internal sense;
otherwise things would be impelled
towards their ends when God intends that they should seek them.
In all things God sowed great influences -- Necessity, Fate,
and Harmony -- as participants in the primalities -- Power, Sense, and Love. .
. . God uses their actions regulated by the assistance of angels in forming
[things] so that they correspond to the divine ideas, no differently than a
blacksmith, using fire, iron, anvil, hammer . . . and assistants to hammer and
carry, adjusts [the material] to his idea and then forms it into swords,
mattocks, stoves, and clocks.
Necessity, Fate and Harmony act metaphysically in physical
nature. Taken abstractly, these three great 'influences' seem to correspond to
the distinct properties of objects; to the concur-
____________________
|
Campanella ( 1638: 141; 1925: pp. xxxi, 9, 19-20, 131-3,
221, 254). |
-321-
rent relations of those properties; and to their functional
consequences. They proceed from the primalities, which reflect the triune God,
whose ideas they transmit to objects with the aid of angels. God, primalities,
influences, ideas, and angels are all metaphysical agents in a process that
terminates in a natural object whose form -- the product of heat and cold
acting as physical instruments of those metaphysical agents -- is no less a
material structure in Campanella Metaphysics
than it was in his youthful Telesian manifesto. However, Campanella's analysis
of causation in the Metaphysics
seems, at first glance, to admit occult activity excluded in the Philosophia sensibus demonstrata, where an
occult quality is merely a mistake made by astrologers who misunderstand the
physical power of heat. 33
Writing in 1607 to a
correspondent who compared his philosophical accomplishments to Giovanni
Pico's, Campanella replied that Pico was 'too lofty' a rival for him. 'His
philosophy went more above the words of others than into nature', he wrote,
'from which he learned almost nothing, and he condemned the astrologers because
he did not look at their experiences. When I was nineteen I condemned them too,
but later I saw that within great foolishness they harboured a very lofty
wisdom.' In fact, even Campanella's youthful critique of astrology in
Philosophia sensibus demonstrata concedes much to the stars and planets within
the limits of physical action, and his later work makes astral causation compatible
with the metaphysics of the primalities. At least two motives lay behind
Campanella's growing passion for astrology: first, he found evidence in solar
astrology for his messianic and prophetic politics; second, as he once told
Galileo, his methodological commitment to an observational natural philosophy
constantly convinced him of the truth of astrology. If it seems that even a
little empiricism ought to have led Campanella away from astrology and magic,
then one should recall his early association with Giambattista Della Porta,
around the time when the latter's Natural Magic was republished in 1589.
Cassirer once described Della Porta's catalogue of unkempt observations
____________________
|
Campanella ( 1638: 138-41, 176-7). |
-322-
leading 'not to the refutation but to codification of magic'.
Because three decades in prison gave him little chance to see the world at
first hand, Campanella was in Della Porta's debt for vicarious experience. But
he criticized Della Porta's empiricism because it worked 'only to collect facts
without finding their causes'. Actually, it was Della Porta's failure to find a
'reason for the sympathy and antipathy in things' that decided Campanella to
write De sensu. In this work and
elsewhere, he felt he had achieved both empirical proof and theoretical
understanding of magic and astrology, devoting to the latter not only a
separate treatise, Seven Books on Astrology, but also considerable attention in
his other major works. His confidence in astrological power was so firm that,
after many years in prison, he risked reputation and safety by helping Pope
Urban VIII to work astrological spells against the doom forecast for. him in
1626, and later he tried to forestall his own death in the same way. 34
Campanella's philosophy
is not easy to digest. His work is forbidding in its size alone, not to mention
its complexity and its uneven development in a career that kept his books out
of circulation for long periods. During part of his imprisonment he enjoyed
some freedoms, including access to books, visitors, even students, but at other
times his jailers were brutally repressive. The Philosophia sensibus
demonstrata was never reprinted in his lifetime after the first edition of
1591. The Metaphysics appeared only a year before his death. The Theology and
the Great Epilogue were first published in this century. The Astrology saw
several editions, pirated and authorized, after 1629, and the best-known of his
works on magic, the De sensu, came out in Frankfurt in 1620, then appeared
later in Paris in 1636 and again in 1637. In effect, Campanella became an
active citizen of the republic of letters during two periods of frequent
publication. Between 1617 and 1623 his books appeared in Frankfurt, where
followers saw him as a prophet of religious reform. But from 1629 to 1638 it
____________________
|
Campanella ( 1925: 221-2; 1927: 134, 177); Blanchet (
1920: 201-6); Walker ( 1958a: 205-12); Cassirer ( 1963: 152). |
-323-
was French 'Campanellists' who championed his cause. Who were
his backers among French intellectuals in the age of Descartes, Gassendi, and
Mersenne; what did they really think of him; why did they think about him at
all? For one thing, Campanella had shown good taste and good fortune in his
choice of enemies: he disliked the right ancients, and the right moderns
disliked him. Gabriel Naudé put him among 'the swarm of innovators' who
besieged the Peripatetic fortress. 35 Campanella's
assault on Peripatetic dogma won him the enmity of the same ecclesiastical
establishment that harassed Galileo, thereby gaining him the sympathy that the
bolder French savants lavished on the
great scientist. If some of them saw the flames that consumed Bruno casting a
morbid light on Campanella, for others it was the healing shadow of Galileo's
tragedy that saved his reputation, especially when his audacious Apology for Galileo became known after
1622. The victim and the critic -- each was an effective persona for
Campanella.
Campanella De sensu
was a fashionable book, enough on the lips of the learned to have interested
the young Descartes around 1623, but to some of the Christian faithful it was also
dangerous. When Father Marin Mersenne sent his first major work to press in
1623 -- the Questions on Genesis --
the priest felt such horror at the pansensist De sensu that he wanted it burned, more than an academic
discourtesy after Giulio Cesare Vanini's execution in Toulouse only four years
earlier. But before publication was complete, Mersenne learned of the Apology for Galileo, which gave him
cause to make kinder if still cautious mention of Campanella's ideas on the
plurality of worlds in later additions to his Genesis commentary. He also
opened a correspondence with Campanella and offered in 1624 to arrange for
publication of the Metaphysics. Even
so, the kindly Mersenne's attitude toward the irreverent Dominican remained on
the whole quite hostile in his early works, where Mersenne linked Campanella
with Bruno, Vanini, and other heretics. Mersenne had not yet worked out a
philosophical position to replace the Aristotelianism that he saw collapsing
____________________
|
Above, n. 2. |
-324-
around him. He distrusted Campanella and other
anti-Peripatetics not only because their ideas -- especially the world soul so
prominent in De sensu -- threatened
his faith but also because he found them credulous. They broke Montaigne's rule
that one must establish the fact of an alleged wonder before worrying about its
cause. Perhaps Mersenne feared that someone like Campanella would stabilize
occultism just when he and his friends were ending its long career as a serious
subject of learned discourse. 36
Jacques Gaffarel, a peripheral member of the circle of learned
libertines who corresponded with Mersenne and investigated the elder Pico's
Cabala, began to see Campanella in 1628, around the time when he was working
astrological magic with the Pope. His visits helped make Campanella (like
Galileo) an obligatory stop on the Italian tours of ambitious young Frenchmen.
Gaffarel quizzed him about the magical powers that foiled the tortures of his
inquisitors. He also let him know about Father Mersenne's unkind suggestion
that his book deserved burning. Before Gaffarel's visit, Campanella had
probably not seen the Genesis commentary, but from then on he was edgy about
Mersenne, who in the mean time had tempered his opposition to Campanella and
often asked about him. By 1632, Gassendi and other French intellectuals Were in
touch with Campanella, and he received visits from Naudé, whom he sent
on important publishing errands. These people who became Campanella's cheering
section in France were instigators of the scientific revolution and sceptical
critics of superstition and dogmatism. It was probably Naudé, scourge of
the Rosicrucians and author of the Apology
for All the Great Persons Who Have Been Falsely Suspected of Magic, whose
liking for Campanella gave him this new access to Mersenne's prestigious
circle. Jailed again in 1633, released, then cornered again by the Spanish in
1634, Campanella found asylum with the French ambassador in Rome and, on the
pope's advice, fled to France in the autumn of that year. In December he
arrived in Paris
____________________
|
Mersenne ( 1623: 130, 937-46, 1164); Montaigne ( 1965:
785); on Mersenne see Lenoble ( 1971); Dear ( 1988). |
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disguised in the habit of Mersenne's own order. Mersenne
learned that Campanella was still angry with him, but he hoped for
reconciliation and looked forward to a meeting. All went well until some time
in the new year, when Campanella was overheard. making negative comments on
Gassendi's Epicureanism. Finally, he and Mersenne met several times, but their
encounters ended Campanella's moment in the sun of the French mind. Mersenne
blanched at Campanella's arrogant dismissal of French intellectual achievement,
noting that he 'treated him for what he was worth' when Campanella recommended
the astrology that Mersenne despised. Granting Campanella 'a good memory and a
fertile imagination', he concluded that 'he will teach us nothing in the
sciences' even if he was one of Italy's 'two great men'. 37
Although Louis XIII had received Campanella at court in
February, 1635, within little more than a year he was complaining to his new
friends about their slowness to comment on the 1636 edition of De sensu. Fervent Campanellists of two years
before were not answering Campanella's letters. None the less, the 1637 edition
of De sensu, augmented by a Defence, bore a dedication to Cardinal Richelieu,
who arranged for Campanella to cast the horoscope of the Dauphin born on 5
September 1638. As prelude to the reign of the Sun King, the Horoscopus
serenissimi Delphini made an odd coda to the career of the author of The City
of the Sun. Campanella's warm reception by king and cardinal did nothing to
thaw the hearts of the savants who had written him off. His death in 1639
(fated, so he thought, by an eclipse that came a few days later) passed
unnoticed in Mersenne's correspondence, but on. the last day of that year
Mersenne issued another verdict: 'he made no observations, contenting himself
with speculation and often fooling himself for want of experience.' A true if
incomplete judgement, and certainly less categorical than what Descartes had
said to Mersenne in the previous year, breaking his silence on Campanella for
the second time. Descartes had admitted to Huygens in 1638 that he remembered
reading Desensu
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|
Mersenne ( 1933-88: v. 201, 209, 214). |
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sensu and other works by Campanella fifteen years earlier,
adding that he saw 'so little solidity' in them that he could not recall them
and (curiously for such a pioneer) that he found intellectual loners like
Campanella more culpable in their mistakes 'than those who fail only in company
by following the tracks of many others'. Eight months later, when Mersenne
mentioned the newly published Metaphysics
to Descartes, the great philosopher's reply was even chillier: 'What I'have
seen previously of Campanella allows me to hope for nothing good from his book.
. . . I have no wish to see it.' 38
Thus was Campanella banished from the history of mode
philosophy by its greatest founder. For his own purposes, Descartes may have
been right to ignore Campanella, as he dropped almost all the baggage of
Renaissance erudition. But the historian can take a longer view. In the larger
sense, Campanella's challenge to Aristotle and his promotion of an empiricist
naturalism were part of a movement in Renaissance natural philosophy that began
with Achillini, Nifo, and Pomponazzi, continued with Cardano, Telesio, and
Bruno and bore its richest fruits in the work of Galileo, Mersenne, Gassendi,
and Descartes himself. In a narrower sense, Campanella was especially effective
in removing the traditional philosophical underpinnings from the branch of
pre-Cartesian natural philosophy that interested him most of all -- natural
magic. More than any of the other novatores,
including even Bruno, Campanella offered a systematic critique of hylemorphic
metaphysics in the special case of natural magic; but, although he tried to
substitute a new metaphysics of magic for the old one that he destroyed, the
anti-Peripatetic innovators who listened attentively to his polemic against
occult qualities and substantial forms would not pay equal respect to the
metaphysics of the primalities. Campanella failed where Mersenne had most cause
to fear him -- in his attempt to tie natural magic to a complete and systematic
philosophy. But, despite himself, he succeeded where Mersenne also succeeded.
He brought natural
____________________
|
Ibid.
viii. 722 ; Descartes ( 1964-76: i. 31; ii. 436, 659-60; iii. 522; iv.
718; v. 547). |
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magic very near
its end as a serious department of natural philosophy. Campanella's pansensism
or animism, grounded in an elaborate metaphysics, finally and strongly
distinguishes his organic world-view from the victorious mechanical philosophy
created by Mersenne, Gassendi, and others who made Campanella an intellectual
fashion in the early 1630s. Campanella's place in the history of philosophy
stands as much on his metaphysical differences with these libertins érudits as on the materialist habits of mind that
he shared with them. Although he lived through the fourth decade of the
seventeenth century, the Renaissance shaped his philosophical programme, and
his remarkable career, in and out of jail, shows how thinkers of the new
Cartesian age discarded the heritage of the generations before them.
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