BOOK: Girolamo Savonarola, "Apologetic Writings"

Girolamo Savonarola: Apologetic Writings. Edited and translated by M. Michèle Mulchahey. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 68. Harvard University Press, 2015. 9780674054981. xliv + 413 pp.

Savonarola was a Dominican friar who was active in Florence towards the end of the 15th century. I had heard of him before reading this book, but had only a very vague idea of his activities. I thought of him as one of those annoying religious zealots who are terribly afraid that someone, someone is having fun. This book didn't really change my opinion about him in this regard, but it does make him come across as a somewhat more sympathetic character than what I previously thought of him as.

My favourite part of the book was the translator's introduction, which is a bit longer than is usually the case in the I Tatti Renaissance Library. It contains an interesting overview of Savonarola's career, the political circumstances in Florence and the rest of Italy, and the events that led to his excommunication and execution. He first gained renown and influence as a preacher, and got into the habit of making prophecies; he then used this influence over the public to make recommendations regarding both internal affairs of Florence (e.g. the conflicts between the pro-Medici faction and their opponents, who now succeeded in reforming the constitution on a more democratic basis) and foreign affairs (much of Italy was at war, and the French also intervened in it). But to a considerable extent his preoccupations seemed to be basically religious, telling people to repent and abandon their worldly ways, their luxuries and their decadence.

What kind of asshole rolls into Renaissance Florence and starts telling people something that esentially amounts to ‘never mind all this beauty and splendour that you're surrounded by, you should seek to be more miserable’? And more importantly, what kind of idiots fall for this sort of message? But I guess I shouldn't be surprised; there's always a large segment of the population that responds well to authoritarian figures telling them to endure something unpleasant. (As an equally perplexing recent example, there's all the people who seem to enjoy hearing Jordan Peterson tell them to clean up their rooms...)

Anyway, whatever the reasons, it is clear that Savonarola had plenty of supporters. The monks in his convent elected him as their head, he made various changes to their rules to make them stricter and the monks' life less pleasant, and it was probably not despite this but because of this, that a number of new members joined their community under his leadership. The Florentine laity listened to his sermons and followed his advice, and throngs of zealous little boys went from door to door at his behest, pestering people to abandon their vanities (p. xiii).

Eventually it was his meddling in politics that was the cause of his downfall, especially when he became too inconvenient to the pope (p. xiv); and it probably didn't help that the pope at the time was Rodrigo Borgia, who is surely the very archetype of a corrupt and decadent Renaissance pope. And this sets the stage for the last few years of Savonarola's life, from which all the writings in this book are taken. We can see him get increasingly desperate in his efforts to defend himself in view of the the increasingly serious steps that the pope was taking against him. A minor downside is that we have only Savonarola's writings from this period, but not those he was replying to; but the translator's introduction is very good at providing the context and summarizing the parts of the story that cannot be seen directly from Savonarola's writings.

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The book starts with a letter replying to the pope's invitation that Savonarola should come to Rome to talk to him. Savonarola tries to politely refuse this without appearing too openly disobedient, and makes excuses of ill health, political instability in Florence, and fear that he might get killed en route to Rome.

The pope reacted by forbidding Savonarola from preaching until the situation is investigated and cleared up. Savonarola replied with a longer letter protesting his innocence of the various errors and heresies that he had been accused of.

Another way that Savonarola's enemies tried to weaken him was through organizational changes affecting his monastery. The main result of these would be to scatter Savonarola's monks amongst other Dominican communities in Tuscany, ostensibly so they could help reform those as well but in practice to dilute their influence and prevent them from accomplishing any meaningful reform. Savonarola argues against these changes in one of the letters (pp. 31–3) and a short treatise (pp. 39–83). I didn't care too much about the organizatonal details behind his arguments, but I could easily agree with his main idea, namely that this is an effort to defang his reforms rather than help them spread further. Another interesting argument he had was to point out that under canon law, a monk cannot be forced to switch from a stricter rule to a laxer one (which is what the proposed reform would force him and his confraternity to do; p. 31).

Eventually the pope excommunicated Savonarola, but the Florentine authorities supported him and it took a few more months and angry letters from the pope to get them to arrest and execute him (p. xxviii). Meanwhile he wrote a few last desperate letters arguing that his excommunication is unjustified and thus void, and that nobody should be paying any attention to the pope's briefs on this matter. He points out that not every command from the pope should automatically be obeyed, since some of them could be unjust and this would be open to abuse (p. 95). He wrote a short, touching letter to the pope in the tone of a repentant sinner seeking forgiveness (p. 101), but after the pope ordered his arrest, Savonarola responded with a more strongly worded letter in which he suggests that god will punish the pope for his injustice towards Savonarola: “Most Blessed Father, do not delay to take thought for your own salvation.” (P. 107.)

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In this last period of his life he also wrote a Dialogue on the Truth of Prophecy, which is by far the longest work in this book (probably taking up some two-thirds of the volume). Savonarola's interlocutors in the dialogue are the “seven gifts of the holy spirit”, which appear as a group of travellers with suitably bizarre Old-Testament-style names.

This dialogue was not an uninteresting read, but I didn't find Savonarola's arguments in favour of prophecy to be very convincing. When asked why he thinks his prophecies are true, he explains it by an analogy (pp. 123, 127): when you see a lily and you see that it is white, you couldn't really say how or why you see this [nowadays with our modern knowledge of medicine and physics we could say a little bit more], but it is clear to you that it is indeed white. Similarly, to him and his interlocutors as devout christians, it is clear that their religion is true, even though they couldn't exactly say why (p. 137). And it is the same with his prophecies; he sees them clearly in his mind, so to speak. I'm perfectly willing to believe that he really experienced his prophecies this way, but he was obviously underestimating the mind's ability to deceive itself...

Savonarola also points out that prophecies are in a sense nothing terribly unusual — there's plenty of them in the bible, for example — and that his prophecies didn't lead him to predict or advocate anything that would be contrary to reason or to the teachings of the church (pp. 131, 307), that they had a good influence upon other people (pp. 217, 333–9), that his visions strengthened his own faith and understanding of religion (p. 195) and even of unrelated fields such as economics and politics (p. 193), and that his preaching has improved in that period (p. 243–5), so it's unlikely that all this is coming from the devil trying to deceive him or anything like that.

He speaks a little about the subject of his prophecies; these seem to be mostly of the traditional ‘repent, sinners, the end is nigh’ type. He argues that the corruption and immorality that are so pervasive everywhere in his time are good evidence that this end is coming sooner rather than later (pp. 237–5). He even takes the opportunity to throw some barbs at the pope (after describing the church hiearachy, he says: “whenever God is angered, and prepares to punish the peoples' crimes in the near future, He takes away the good leaders, and allows evil leaders to rule them”; p. 269). He has a fine rant against the churchmen of his day: “Do these men not sin more gravely than those who perished in the inundation of the Flood for their fornication? Do they not exceed the unbridled lust of the Sodomites, and also the perfidy of the Jews and the Greeks, all of whom have already been swallowed up and destroyed?” (P. 285.) :)))

Replying to those who doubted the truth of his prophecies, he says that god will sooner or later prove whether his predictions were true or not, as the events unfold, and thus passing judgment before that is reckless and premature (p. 307). This strikes me as the typical excuse of every self-proclaimed prophet, no doubt to be followed in due course by the usual prevarications when his predictions inevitably fail to come to pass. (He does say elsewhere that his predictions are falsifiable, unambigous and have all been committed to writing (p. 241), so at least we have to admit that he did not lack self-confidence.)

He also includes a section on why his sentence of excommunication and the demands to break up his monastic community should be ignored (pp. 311—19), similar to what he said in the earlier letters on this subject.

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I didn't find anything in this book terribly remarkable, but it was a relatively interesting read anyway. I still don't like Savonarola's zealotry, but at least he seems to have been sincere in it, and paid a terrible price for it, for which I sympathize with him. The publisher's text on the front flap of the dust jacked puts it well where it says that the book provides “a fascinating window on to the mind of a religious fanatic”.