This Is Far, Far too Long & Digressive to Be a Footnote in My Manuscript of "Enlarging the Bounds of Human Empire"
The story of the friar, the Inquisition, peering at utopia from inside the dungeon, and the idea of progress: reading Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun…
Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun is what you get when a tortured Counter‑Reformation Dominican, locked in a Neapolitan dungeon, being slowly ground up by the Habsburg Empire plus the Spanish Inquisition, decides to answer the question: “What would a truly rational, truly merciful commonwealth look like if it were actually run for human flourishing rather than for the comfort of princes and prelates?”
It is a utopia written from inside a prison state. It was written by a man whose body is chained but whose political imagination roams free and denies that the jailers and torturers are, in fact, God’s necessary deputies here on earth.
Tomasso Campanella (1568-1639 Stilo-Paris, France) was a Calabrian Dominican friar with dangerous habits. He read too widely. He speculated too freely. He wrote philosophy that pushed toward political and religious reform.
He did not have a happy life. By the mid-1590s he was already in some trouble with the Inquisition for heterodox views, which were a bundle of theological unorthodoxies plus a deeply subversive political‑religious project.
He drew on a strange mix of Thomism, Neoplatonism, astrology, and radicalized Augustinianism. That got him into trouble for, among other things, an excessive confidence in natural magic and astrology (cosmic influences shaping human and political order in ways orthodox theologians found dangerous), an over‑philosophical treatment of the Trinity and creation that blurred the Creator/creation boundary, and a tendency to see nature as suffused with divine “sensus” or spirit in ways that looked pantheistic. None of this was tidy Luther‑style heresy. It was, instead, that he relentlessly pushed scholastic categories until they broke.
And, somehow, along the way, he wrote the first book I am aware of that has a full consciousness of the idea of secular human progress—of better living through better technology, and of an arc of history leading us there. It is called The City of the Sun.
What was in this strange little book?