Tommaso Campanella

“ THE SONNETS OF MICHAEL ANGELO BUONARROTI I. ON DANTE ALIGHIERI. Dal ciel discese.
From heaven his spirit came, and robed in clay
The realms of justice and of mercy trod,
Then rose a living man to gaze on God,
That he might make the truth as clear as day.
For that pure star that brightened with his ray
The undeserving nest where I was born,
The whole wide world would be a prize to scorn;
None but his Maker can due guerdon pay.
I speak of Dante, whose high work remains
Unknown, unhonoured by that thankless brood,
Who only to just men deny their wage. ”

“ The Church, terrified by the Reformation, when she chanced to hear those strange voices sounding through 'the blessed mutter of the mass,' burned the prophets. The State, represented by absolute Spain, if it listened to them at all, flung them into prison. To both Church and State there was peril in the new philosophy; for the new philosophy was the first birth-cry of the modern genius, with all the crudity and clearness, the brutality and uncompromising sincerity of youth. The Church feared Nature. The State feared the People. ”

“ The men who led this weighty intellectual movement burned with the passionate ardour of discoverers, the fiery enthusiasm of confessors. They stood alone, sustained but little by intercourse among themselves, and wholly misunderstood by the people round them. Italy, sunk in sloth, priest-ridden, tyrant-ridden, exhausted with the unparalleled activity of the Renaissance, besotted with the vices of slavery and slow corruption, had no ears for spirit-thrilling prophecy. ”

“ And whoso honours thee, hath wisdom's prime.
Our cares thou canst to quietude sublime;
For dews and darkness are of peace the friend:
Often by thee in dreams upborne, I wend
From earth to heaven, where yet I hope to climb.
Thou shade of Death, through whom the soul at length
Shuns pain and sadness hostile to the heart,
Whom mourners find their last and sure relief!
Thou dost restore our suffering flesh to strength,
Driest our tears, assuagest every smart,
Purging the spirits of the pure from grief.
XLV. LOVE FEEDS THE FLAME OF AGE. Quand' il servo il signior. ”

“ The sonnets of both alike are contributions to philosophical poetry in an age when the Italians had lost their ancient manliness and energy. Both were united by the ties of study and affection to the greatest singer of their nation, Dante, at a time when Petrarch, thrice diluted and emasculated, was the Phoebus of academies and coteries.
This common antagonism to the degenerate genius of Italian literature is the link which binds Michael Angelo, the veteran giant of the Renaissance, to Campanella, the audacious Titan of the modern age. ”

“ And he who looks on beauty with sad cheer,
Gains doubtful hope and certain miseries.
XVII. THE ARTIST AND HIS WORK. Com' esser, donna, può.
How can that be, lady, which all men learn
By long experience? Shapes that seem alive,
Wrought in hard mountain marble, will survive
Their maker, whom the years to dust return!
Thus to effect cause yields. Art hath her turn,
And triumphs over Nature. I, who strive
With Sculpture, know this well; her wonders live
In spite of time and death, those tyrants stern. ”

“ IV. Though the material seat of the mind is so insignificant, the mind itself is infinite, analogous to God in its capacity. Aristarchus and Metrodorus symbolise, perhaps, the spheres of literature and mathematics. This infinitude of the intellect is our real proof of God, our inner witness of the Deity. We may arrive at God by reasoning; we may trust authority; but it is only by impregnating our minds with God in Nature that we come into immediate contact with Him. Cp. Sonnet VI., last line. ”

“ The one clung to Ficino's dream of Platonising Christianity: the other constructed for himself a new theology, founded on the conception of God immanent in nature. Michael Angelo expressed the aspirations of a solitary life dedicated to the service of art, at a time when art received the suffrage and the admiration of all Italy. Campanella gave utterance to a spirit, exiled and isolated, misunderstood by those with whom he lived, at a moment when philosophy was hunted down as heresy and imprisoned as treason to the public weal. ”

“ Vittoria Colonna and Tommaso de' Cavalieri, the two most intimate friends of his old age in Rome, received from him some of the most pathetically beautiful of his love-poems. But to suppose that either the one or the other was the object of more than a few well-authenticated sonnets would be hazardous. Nothing is more clear than that Michael Angelo worshipped Beauty in the Platonic spirit, passing beyond its personal and specific manifestations to the universal and impersonal. ”

“ Nature and the People—those watchwords of modern Science and modern Liberty—were already on the lips of the philosophers.
It was a philosophy armed, errant, exiled; a philosophy in chains and solitary; at war with society, authority, opinion; self-sustained by the prescience of ultimate triumph, and invincible through the sheer force of passionate conviction. The men of whom I speak were conscious of Pariahdom, and eager to be martyred in the glorious cause. 'A very Proteus is the philosopher,' says Pomponazzo: 'seeking to penetrate the secrets of God, he is consumed with ceaseless cares ”

“ VII. Ignorance is the parent of tyranny, sophistry, hypocrisy; and the arms against this trinity of error are power, wisdom, love, the three main attributes of God.
VIII. Human egotism inclines men to deny the spiritual life of the universe, to favour their own nation, to love their individual selves exclusively, to eliminate the true God from the world, to worship false gods fashioned from them selves, and at last to fancy themselves central and creative in the Cosmos. Adami calls this sonnet scoprimento stupendo.
IX. The quatrains set forth the condition of the soul besotted with self love. ”

“ LV. Campanella tells his friend that such trivial things as pastoral poems will not immortalise him. He bids him seek, not outside in worn out fictions, but within his own soul, for the spirit of true beauty, turn to God for praise, instead of to a human audience, and go with the tabula rasa of childlike intelligence into God's school of Nature. ”

“ Love cannot soar to what it never guessed,
But stoops its flight, and the thralled soul unnerves.
Here too is man deceived. He yields his own
To spend on others. Yet in vile delight
God's splendour still shines through love's earthliness. ”

“ Between Dante and Alfieri no Italian poet except Michael Angelo expressed so much deep thought and feeling in phrases so terse, and with originality of style so daring; and even Michael Angelo is monotonous in the range of his ideas and uniform in his diction, when compared with the indescribable violence and vigour of Campanella. Campanella borrows little by way of simile or illustration from the outer world, and he never falls into the commonplaces of poetic phraseology. His poems exhibit the exact opposite of the Petrarchistic or the Marinistic mannerism. ”

“ NOTES ON CAMPANELLA'S SONNETS. I. Line 1: the Italian words which I have translated God's Wisdom and Philosophy are Senno and Sofia. Campanella held that the divine Senno penetrated the whole universe, and, meeting with created Sofia, gave birth to Science. This sonnet is therefore a sort of Mythopoem, figuring the process whereby true knowledge, as distinguished from sophistry, is derived by the human reason interrogating God in Nature and within the soul. Line 5: Sofia has for her husband Senno; the human intellect is married to the divine. ”

“ Campanella tells the Italians they have no right to call themselves men, the children of God in heaven, while they bow to tyrants worse than beasts, and believe the lying priests who call that adulation loyalty. If they free their souls from this vile servitude, they may then pray with hopeful heart for the coming upon earth of God's kingdom, which shall satisfy poets, philosophers, and prophets with more than they had dreamed. It will be noticed that the rhymes are carried from sonnet to sonnet; so that the three form one poem, described by Adami as sonetto trigemino. ”

“ Michael Angelo and Campanella follow different rules in their treatment of the triplets. Michael Angelo allows himself three rhymes, while Campanella usually confines himself to two. My practice has been to study in each sonnet the cadence both of thought and diction, so as to satisfy an English ear, accustomed to the various forms of termination exemplified by Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, and Rossetti—the sweetest, the most sublime, the least artificial, and the most artful sonnet-writers in our language. ”

“ We may see in this picture a critique of Machiavelli's Principe, which was for Campanella the very ideal portrait of a tyrant. The love of God, rightly understood, places man en rapport with all created things. S. Francis, for example, loved not only his fellow men, but recognised the brotherhood of birds and fishes.
X. Ignorance, the source of all our miseries, blinds us to celestial beauty and makes us follow carnal lust. Yet what is best in sexual love is the radiance of heavenly beauty shining through the form of flesh. This sonnet receives abundant illustration in Michael Angelo's poems. ”

“ The love of beauty, the love of Florence, and the love of Christ, are the three main motives of his poetry. This is not the place to discuss at length the nature of his philosophy, his patriotism, or his religion; to enquire how far he retained the early teaching of Ficino and Savonarola; or to trace the influence of Dante and the Bible on his mind. I may, however, refer my readers who are interested in these questions, to the Discourse of Signor Guasti, the learned essay of Mr. J.E. Taylor, and the refined study of Mr. W.H. Pater. ”

“ The sonnet prefixed as a proem to the whole book is generally attributed to Giordano Bruno, in whose Dialogue on the Eroici Furori it occurs. There seems, however, good reason to suppose that it was really written by Tansillo, who recites it in that Dialogue. Whoever may have been its author, it expresses in noble and impassioned verse the sense of danger, the audacity, and the exultation of those pioneers of modern thought, for whom philosophy was a voyage of discovery into untravelled regions. Its spirit is rather that of Campanella than of Michael Angelo. ”

“ The philosophical group throw light on Campanella's relation to his predecessors and his antagonism to the pseudo-Aristotelian scholasticism of the middle ages. They furthermore explain his conception of the universe as a complex animated organism, his conviction that true knowledge can only be gained by the interrogation of nature, his doctrine of human life and action, and his judgment of the age in which he lived. The political sonnets fall into two groups— those which discuss royalty, nobility, and the sovereignty of the people, and those which treat of the several European states. ”

“ Telesio, says Bacon, was the prince of the novi homines, or inaugurators of modern thought. It was natural that Campanella should be drawn towards this great man. But the superiors of his convent prevented his forming the acquaintance of Telesio; and though the two men dwelt in the same city of Cosenza, Campanella never knew the teacher he admired so passionately. Only when the old man died and his body was exposed in the church before burial, did the neophyte of his philosophy approach the bier, and pray beside it, and place poems upon the dead. ”

“ Facts presented by Nature are of more value than any Ipse dixit. Line 14: he compares himself not without reason to Prometheus; for twenty-five years spent in prison were his reward for the revelation which has added a new sphere to human thought.
II. The bitter words of this sonnet will not seem unmerited to those who have studied Italian poetry in the Cinque Cento—the refined playthings of verse, the romances, and the burlesque nonsense, which amused a corrupt though highly cultivated age.
III. Campanella held the doctrine of an Anima Mundi in the fullest and deepest sense of the term. ”

“ Telesio of Cosenza, Bruno of Nola, Campanella of Stilo, Vanini and Vico of Naples are the chief among these novi homines or pioneers of modern thought. The characteristic point of this new philosophy was an unconditional return to Nature as the source of knowledge, combined with a belief in the intuitive forces of the human reason: so that from the first it showed two sides or faces to the world—the one positive, scientific, critical, and analytical ”

“ Of deathless spirits; nor eternity
Serves sordid Time, that withers all things rare.
Not love but lawless impulse is desire:
That slays the soul; our love makes still more fair
Our friends on earth, fairer in death on high.
LIII. This is the doctrine of the Symposium; the scorn of merely sexual love is also Platonic.
LIV. Another sonnet on the theme of the Uranian as distinguished from the Vulgar love. See below, LVL., for a parallel to the second terzet.
LV. The date maybe 1532. The play on words in the first quatrain and the first terzet is Shakespearian. ”

“ But when we consider that very frequently Michael Angelo's own autographs give twice as many various readings as there are lines in a sonnet, when we reflect that we do not always possess the copies which he finally addressed to his friends, and when, moreover, we find that their readings (e.g. those of the Riccio MS and those cited by Varchi) differ considerably from Michael Angelo's rough copies, we must conclude that even the autographs do not invariably represent these poems in the final form which he adopted. There is therefore much room left for critical comparison and selection. ”

“ Who mourn our end—the tyrants we endure,
The chains, the noose, the lead, the snares, the lure—
Our dismal heroes, our souls sunk in night.
Black weeds again denote that extreme folly
Which makes us blind, mournful, and woe-begone:
For dusk is dear to doleful melancholy ”

“ Campanella says it is impious to hope to change the order and facts of the world, arranged by God, except in the single category of time. He therefore thinks it lawful for him to ask, and for God to grant, a shortening of the season of his suffering. See the Canzone translated by me, forming Appendix I.
LIV. Another sonnet referring to his life in prison. He asks God how he can prosper if his friends all fail him for various reasons. ”