Abstract Summary
Vinculum vinculorum amor est. Giordano Bruno’s statement, “the chain of chains is love,” served Ioan Petru Culianu, in his classic on Renaissance magic, to summarize the conception that eros is the universal principle agitating nature. The living cosmos is sentient in all of its parts; desire keeps together reality at the micro-scale of terrestrial beings, and at the level of celestial motions and their metaphysical aspiration towards their unitarian source. According to vitalistic vistas from Ficino to Bruno and beyond, an adequate knowledge of the driving force of eros is the precondition for the effective channeling of nature towards individual and collective goals. The spirit of the incipient “Scientific Revolution” conferred an operational connotation to these ideas of neo-Platonic origin. The speculative character of classical Platonism was dismissed in favor of practice, while Scholastic constructions were cast into doubt as inapt to account for the new worlds opened up by scientific novatores alongside cosmographers and cosmologists. The linkage of science and magic constituted the vitalist philosophers’ specific path to useful knowledge. Culianu regarded Tommaso Campanella as paradigmatic of this trend, although he did not expand on the conceptions of this “attardé de la Renaissance en pleine Réforme.” It is worthwhile considering Campanella’s philosophy of cosmic eros, and the continuity he established between scienza and magia, magic and technology (particularly the three Baconian technologies: compass, gunpowder and press) as a manner to reassess, continue and deepen Culianu’s inquiry into nature and desire à la Renaissance, 35 years on.
