De Sensu Rerum Et Magia

Description

The first manuscript of the work (1592) in Latin was defaced by emissaries of the Holy Office while Campanella was travelling to Padua (the beginning of his troubled epic with the Holy Inquisition). In 1604 he rewrote it from memory in Italian, in 1609 he translated it back into Latin, and in 1620 he officially gave it to the press in Frankfurt. The work was further updated and re-edited in 1636 and 1637 in Paris. All things have conscious sensibility, the world is a “great and perfect animal”, magic allows one to unearth its secret warp: ‘As foolish is to deny sense to things because they have no eyes, no mouth, and no ears, as it is to deny motion to the wind because it has no legs, and eating to the fire because it has no teeth [...] blessed is he who reads in the book of nature, and learns what things are, from it and not from his own whim, and thus learns the divine art and government, making himself consequently, by natural magic, like and unanimous to God’. Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639), among the most important and influential philosophers of the late Renaissance. He was tried by the Inquisition in 1594, and in 1599 sentenced to 27 years in prison. During this long period of imprisonment he wrote his masterpiece “The City of the Sun”. Campanella is one of the masters of Renaissance cosmic sensism, all realities are sentient, harmoniously unified by an Anima mundi. To the sage, the task of finding the source.