Descartes: A Biography

c CUNYB/Clarke     December, :

Magic, Mathematics, and Mechanics 

dangerous ideas in thes.Campanella had been arraigned before the

Inquisition in Padua in, imprisoned, tortured, and released two years

later. He was back in prison the following year, and was then returned to

his native Calabria in chains. He spent the years–and–

imprisoned in Naples and Rome, and eventually fled to France in,

where he enjoyed briefly the luxury of life outside prison until his death

in Paris five years later.Campanella’s unerring eye for controversy, his

public defence of Galileo against the findings of the Inquisition in,

and, especially, his criticism of Spanish rule in the south of Italy prompted

the church and the civil powers to co-operate in silencing him. The views

he expressed about the infinity of the universe and the place of the Earth in

the solar system were not in themselves so novel as to merit this extraordi-

nary and sustained punishment. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (–)

had expressed similar views and survived unscathed.Whatever the real

reasons why he attracted the attention of the Inquisition, they were over-

shadowed by the ferocious cruelty and duration of his mistreatment. He

provided an unwelcome and very public reminder of the likely conse-

quences of dissent or unorthodoxy.

Descartes probably did not know many of the relevant details of

Campanella’s case at this time. When he first read his works in,

the Italian friar was still in prison. He most likely knew simply that Cam-

panella was publicly associated with Galileo, in support of whom he had

written aDefence, and that, despite being a Dominican friar, he had suf-

fered execrable punishment for views he had publicly expressed. Descartes

later claimed that, although he had read Campanella fifteen years earlier,

he could not recall anything from the book’s content.While he may have

forgotten the details of Campanella’s writings, he could not have forgotten

the church’s response to it later, when he abruptly decided not to publish

the very first book that he had completed,The World.

Descartes subsequently came to be recognized as someone who was

extremely unsympathetic to the arcane and mystical philosophies of those

who dabbled in magic, hermeticism, and astrology. When writing to

Beeckman inabout the wide range of views that were defended by

many disparate authors, he distinguished among the ancients between

Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus and ‘Telesio, Campanella, Bruno, Basso,

Vanini, and all the innovators’ (i.)asacharacteristic group of

dissidents.Perhaps this brief allusion to these Italian philosophers

merely indicates Descartes’ awareness of their fate and his own implicit