Ethica. The concluding chapter of Campanella’s Ethica deals with sublimity, the ‘heroic virtue’ which establishes the rule of the desire for human excellence. Sublimity represents the summation and apex of all the other virtues discussed in the preceding chapters. The excellence of the sublime, or magnanimous, person does not consist in potentially fallacious extrinsic signs, such as wealth, nobility or honor, but rather in the exercise of virtue and in discovering oneself to be an image of the divine. In his description of the various characteristics of the ideal figure of the magnanimous person Campanella presents an incisive manifesto of the dignitas hominis while sketching an evident self-portrait.
