BOOKS
Savonarola
'BY CHRISTOPHER HILL Athe age of twenty-two Girolamo Savona- rola abandoned his worldly prospects to become a Dominican friar. In 1482 he was sent by his order to Florence, where he was a prodigious success as a preacher. He specialised in denunciations of the wickedness of the times, especially in Rome; and he prophesied that a scourge would come to chasten and purify the sinful land. When Charles VIII of France invaded Italy in 1494, Savonarola's prophecies seemed to have been realised. The friar came to dominate Florence and its politics, and brought her into alliance with France against the Papacy. For three years he was the dominant influence in the city. Then in 1498 he was sud- denly overthrown by a revolt, bestially tortured until he confessed his prophecies had been fraudulent. Then he was burnt as a heretic.
It is a remarkable career, and it raises a number of problems. Was Savonarola just a hell- fire mediawal revivalist? Or was he (as early protestant historians liked to think) one of those morning stars of the Reformation with which they peopled the fifteenth-century sky? How far was he, in fact if not in intention, a French puppet? Why did he fall so suddenly and so completely? Machiavelli, who attended Savonarola's sermons and had a rather unex- pected respect for him, had him in mind when he said that 'all armed prophets have conquered, whilst the unarmed ones have been destroyed.' Why did Savonarola remain unarmed? What, in fact, was he trying to do?
The art of popular biography has been subject to curious vicissitudes of fashion. The after- math of the First World War was the age of de- bunking, when Lytton Strachey and hordes of lesser fry painted in the warts of history's tradi- tional heroes. This type of biography at least had the merit of counteracting the 'great man' history in which some of us were brought up at school. It did no harm. It was not so obviously political in its inspiration as the fashion which succeeded the Second World War, of rehabilitating the tra- ditional bad characters of history and of defending the establishment—any old establish- Merit—against the idealistic rebels and martyrs Whom our old-fashioned Whig fathers used to admire. The modern biographer is more sympa- thetic to the hard-pressed administrator whose Plans are upset by such unruly characters. Galileo was not the disinterested pursuer of truth We used to believe in, but a fuzzy-minded intellec- tual incapable of seeing the consequences of his subversive discoveries. Faced by such a man, the Inquisition with its wider view of the hest interests Of society, had' no alternative but to act or abdicate. Wyclif? He was just a trouble- maker who suffered from high blood pressure and disappointed ambition. The sixteenth-century
Puritans? Tiresome, quarrelsome. donnish fellows, whom dear Archbishop Whitgift was well advised to clap in gaol. And Savonarola- how cheap and easy it would be to depict him as the rash unthinking demagogue, from whom Holy Church was saved only just in time by that misjudged man, Pope Alexander Borgia.
It is to the credit of Marchese Ridolfi's life of Savonarola* that it is not concerned with whitewashing the establishment. Alexander VI is 'this infamous Pope,' whose objections to Savonarola arose mainly from political con- siderations, and partly from understandable resentment of the friar's public criticism of the Pope's sex life. This is a biography of a more old- fashioned type. It is scholarly in its apparatus and in its concern for precise dating and docu- mentation. Yet it is conceived in black and white non-analytical terms. ('Truly, the ignorant were, are and always will be the only enemies of Savonarola, the only slanderers of his doctrine.') Savonarola's enemies are described as 'bad men,' as no doubt they were; but with no indication of whether they were rich bad men or poor bad men, whether they disliked Savonarola because he was good, because he stirred up the lower orders, or because he was pro-French. (One of the few sociological generalisations occurs when an opponent of Savonarola's is quoted as saying, after his execution, Praise be to God, now we can practise sodomy.' It is not difficult,' the Marchese comments, `to imagine what deeds followed such words.') We are told that Savonarola's sermons 'proposed many wise pro- visions to give greater perfection to the new government,' but are not told what these wise provisions were. We are assured that 'the boys of Florence . . were more vicious and badly behaved than those of any other -city in Italy,' but are not given the statistics on which this intriguing generalisation is based. The Marchese appears to regard some of Savona- rola's prophecies as due to 'supernatural revelation.' And at least one object of this book seems to be to urge Savonarola as a candidate for canonisation by the Roman church. The Marchese is therefore naturally very cross with protestant historians who commit `a stupid and gratuitous outrage to the memory of Savonarola' when they emphasise points of similarity with later protestant reformers. He is hardly less angry with 'the republican and
Jacobin portrait of the friar,' which maligns 'the great servant of God that Savonarola truly was.' Despite its erudition, then, this book does not answer, or even ask,' the important questions about Savonarola. What are we to make of him? First, pace the Marchese, we must note the at
* Ton LIFE. OF GIIIOLAMO SAVONAROI.A. By Roberto Ridolti. Translated by Cecil Grayson. (Routledge and Kcgan Paul, 35s.) least superficial similarity between his rise to power and that of Zwingli in Zurich or Calvin in Geneva. Savonarola was supported mainly by smaller merchants and artisans, those who were later to be the driving force of popular proteS- tantism. His ascendancy saw a 'revival of the silk and woollen industries in Florence, and of trade. His plain style of preaching, in contrast with the fashionable style of elaborate and artificial elo- quence, was designed to appeal to the lower middle class. So was his use of the printing press in a hitherto unprecedented way, which anticipates Luther. Savonarola's `burning of the vanities' also anticipates much of the popular element in later Puritanism. The objects of luxury burned belonged to the rich, and they were collected, amid jolly scenes, by those boys of the lower orders who until recently had been the wickedest in Italy. Savonarola's sermons attacked, and his supporters overthrew, the sixty-year-old tyranny of the Medici, tempor- arily driving them from the city, and established a more democratic regime. But not too democra- tic: there were safeguards against the danger of the lower classes getting out of hand, of which the Marchese heartily approves, and which I fear Calvin would have approved equally.
Secondly, there is Machiavelli's shrewd point. Savonarola was undoubtedly a sincere reformer,. nobody's stooge; but he was borne to power by the French invasion, and held it so long as a return of French armies seemed likely. His fall occurred the day after the death of Charles VIII. The Reformation later succeeded only in those countries where (for whatever reason) it won the support of the secular power; or where, as in Switzerland, exceptional geographical cir- cumstances allowed small units to survive in independence. Savonarola was a very adroit politician; but Florence could not brave the Pope without a protector.
Thirdly, Marchese Ridolfi is right to emphasise that Savonarola did not want to be a heretic. Neither did Luther. Luther was forced into more extreme positions in the course of controversy with the Papacy, a controversy made possible only by the political backing which he enjoyed. Savonarola went pretty far in saying that he would always obey the Roman Church 'except when its commands are against God or against charity.' When the Pope errs, he is no longer Pope, and is not to be obeyed. 'If St. Peter him- self came on earth now and wished to reform the Church, he could not do so nay he would he put to death. Savonarola, like Luther, wanted to appeal against the Pope to a General Council called by the lay princes. Many of the friar's works were published in protestant Germany, one with an introduction by Luther,. who regarded Savonarola as a precursor. Pope Paul IV thought he was 'another Martin Luther.'
Finally, we may concur with the Marchese in rejecting the legend that Savonarola was merely a gloomy killjoy, a reputation he shares, equally undeservedly, with the English Puritans. The man who wrote passionate canzoni in his youth; who preserved the Medici library from pillage; who was admired by Botticelli and Michelan- gelo, by Pico della Mirandola and Machiavelli, was hardly a mere barbarian. But we still need a biography which will tell us what he was. •
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