Savonarola : a study in conscience

Part One

I. Youth - 3 II - The Conquest of Eloquence - 22

Part Two

Ill - Lorenzo de’ Medici - 49 IV - -AConastic Reform - 74 V . The French Invasion - tot VI - Political Reforms . 127 VII - eAoral Reforms - 157 VIII - The Excommunication - 186 IX - Disintegration - 214 X - The Ordeal by Fire - 267 XI - Trial and Death - 289 _ Bibliography - 307

TTlustrations

Savonarola » FRONTISPIECE Pico della Marandola . 40 Lorenzo de’ Medici. 58

Saint Peter Martyr in the Likeness of Savonarola . 76

Charles VIII of France - 96 Entrance of Charles VIII into Florence. 112 Medallions of Savonarola- 162 Piero de’ Medici - 190 Pope Alexander VI- 204 Savonarola (?) + 270

Execution of Savonarola+ 290

I

On April 26, 1475, a young man entered the Monastery of San Domenico in Bologna. His motive was clear in his own mind and he explained it carefully in his farewell letter to his father. ‘ The great misery of the world, the iniquity of men ’ — these, he said, were ‘ the greatest passion he could have in this world,’ and they had determined him to embrace religion. The age, he declared, had fallen so low that he could not find one man who did good, no, not one; and for his part he was resolved to ‘ live as a creature of reason and not as a beast among swine.’ For further enlightenment, he referred him to a tract he had composed on The Contempt of the World. On this tract the old man noted his bereavement and the date; and he added a laconic and eloquent comment — “ and he left me, Niccolo Savonarola, his father, the enclosed exhortations and consolations for my comfort.”

Niccolo Savonarola was a pious man but he found his son’s virtue trying. For twenty-two years all his hopes had rested on that boy, and now — ! He was not only hurt, he was bewildered. The world had been kind to his son, and his abhorrence of it baffled him. He knew of no personal motive for it, and he was too old to believe in impersonal ones. Too old, yes, he was too old to understand such high moral earnestness in a lad of twenty-two, or to accept his passionate indignation on purely disinterested grounds. The boy was young — just young enough to mistake his own motives. But it was idle to speculate. He had been born with a bilious and melancholy temperament, and misanthropy was no doubt his birthright. The old man realized, as he looked back over the years, that the symptoms had been many, but he had been blind to them, and now it was too late. He resigned himself to the loss, and his one comment on it was to record side by side, in an old book, the dates of his son’s birth and death to the world. On September 21, 1452, his wife gave birth to a boy who was named Girolamo, Maria, Francesco, and Matteo, and sponsored by the Chancellor of the Duke of Ferrara; on April 24, 1475, he left his home to become a monk. The melancholy contrast of those facts was an insoluble mystery; and closing the book, he bequeathed his perplexity to posterity.

II

To the son, however, it was clear. Ever since he could remember, he had been haunted by a vague memory of a ‘ far-distant country,’ which he had forfeited in the sordid and obtuse ordeal of birth. With instinctive consistency, he continued to seek it to the end of his days. Never could he reconcile himself to this alien and intolerably finite sensation of being; but he found relief at last in the faith that his soul — his anima transmigratoria, as he called it — was only migrating from one eternity to another, and turned for release to the living death of the cloister. “‘ Two things above all I loved,” he said later, “‘ freedom and peace; and they brought me to port.”

In retrospect the pattern lay clear, but it had taken him twenty-two years to see it, and by then human bondage was strong upon him. Filial affection, filial responsibility — he found their ties difficult to break. In him all the hopes of his family had been invested; at an early age, he had been chosen to carry on its traditions and illustrate its name — a name which his grandfather had made famous. The reputation of Michele Savonarola as a physician and a scholar had won him a chair in the University of Ferrara and an appointment as personal physician to Niccolo d’Este; and it was his example which the boy was brought up to emulate. His

- learning was varied; it ranged from religion and politics to agriculture, dentistry, metaphysics, and the mineral baths of Italy; and his labors on these subjects reflected on his patron the lustre for which he had been employed. After Niccolo’s death, he continued to enjoy the favor of his sons, Lionello and Borso, and was entrusted with the education of the heir to the Duchy. When he retired, he was granted a pension, a title of nobility, and a testimonial in which his patron congratulated himself on an association which he compared » to the most illustrious of classical antiquity — Alexander and Aristotle, Hiero and Archimedes, Augustus and Artorius. Life had been kind to Michele Savonarola; and in the evening of his days his one care was to preserve this sinecure in the family and to train his successor.

His son, Niccolo, suffered a natural handicap: he was eclipsed by his father’s fame. Of his grandsons, the eldest hankered for a soldier’s life, and the second showed no ambition at all; but in the third he detected an intelligence on which he fastened with the determination of a man who sees his lifework compromised by the mediocrity of his offspring. He took him in hand, and until he was sixteen, the boy was educated at home, by his grandfather. In young Girolamo his hopes seemed to be rewarded; he responded promptly to responsibility; the education he received coincided exactly with his tastes; and he matured rapidly. His predilection for philosophy, in particular, was remarkable. He mastered the intricacies of scholastic dialectics with the ease of a mind to which such problems were innately congenial, and it was almost possible to believe, from his assiduity in those studies, that first principles were already a matter of vital moment to him. His grandfather was gratified; he foresaw the development of an even more metaphysical physician than himself; but he was not satisfied. Encouraged by his success, he was tempted to improve upon it. Himself a very pious man, he poured his piety into the young mind; and here the response was even more profound. Piety seemed to satisfy an inward need; it sank deep in his impressionable nature, saturating it with other-worldly ardors, and deepening his mistrust of the world with scruples which the first shock would convert into a chronic obstruction. Long before he had learned to live, he had been taught to weigh and distrust life; and no untutored impulses tempted him to investigate it. Timid, studious, and selfsufficient, he grew up among books and matured with his elders. In the years when children rehearse reality in play, his toys were altars; later, his favorite book was the Bible; and at sixteen the model lad, whose propriety alarmed no one, was already scandalized by the frivolity of his generation and echoed his grandfather’s laments at its unholiness.

Grave and retiring, he shunned the pleasures and the companionship of his years. With the boys on the street he had no commerce. The vital discipline of promiscuous boyhood, the morality of Nature, the male code of the street — the only canons of conduct by which men are finally guided — touched him only to offend him. Yet his nature was warm, he had a capacity for friendship; and in later years he praised and lamented it eloquently. ‘What joy in virtue without friendship? ” he said then. But that was the wisdom of manhood; in childhood he reversed it, and as he found very little virtue in boys of his age, he avoided their society. Of such reversals is the painful wisdom of experience made. His grandfather had no patience with frivolous pastimes, with youths who ‘ran to hear sing of romance sooner than to chant Vespers in church,’ and he had an apt pupil. It was in church that he was most often to be found, in the solitude of some dim nave, where the raw rumors of the street reached him only as a vague echo, faint as the drone of flies about the fonts, where a tepid water lay stagnating. He loved the country and spent hours of communion with Nature and himself in long solitary rambles along the slow-flowing Po. The wide, flat, treeless landscape pleased him; his being expanded, in kindred immensity, in its infinite spaces. The vast, low, alluvial plain, under a moist sun; the murmuring river, roaming and grazing, a moving monotone of somnolent contentment, toward the sea; the towering clouds—everything filled his spirit with vague intimations of its ‘ far-distant country’; though sometimes he would forget; some- 8 times, lying under the hot laden vines, he would nod; sometimes, what with the heat and the glare and the insinuating scent of the grape, he would succumb to his senses and stretch out his lazy length, for an oblivious hour, in peace with the satisfied earth.

After his grandfather’s death, he was educated for two years by his father; then he was sent to the University. He was eighteen; it was his first contact with the world, and his impression was one of rebellion, confusion, and dismay. He was shocked by the methods of public instruction; the wrangling of rival professors reminded him, he said, of the tilt-yard. But, with his physical timidity, he was mentally alert, and the hollow formulas, the facile verbiage, the empirical reasoning, and the systematic contention of his mentors filled him with confusion and disgust. The great principles of life for which he was groping, the ripe wisdom of maturity — were they all to be reduced to a display of rhetorical virtuosity and a test of lung-power? Where could such methods lead—where but to the destruction of all ideal order, the discredit of authority, and the demoralization of youth? At once curious and conservative, civil and rebellious, he was torn between protest and distaste. But what irked him most was the blind and unreasoning obedience which the masters demanded of their pupils. Reason and experience, his grandfather had taught him, were the only tests of truth, and he refused to accept what his own intelligence did not approve. To develop the will before the mind, he said later, was to pervert the natural order instituted by God. His common sense was acute, and he was passionately in earnest in his search for truth. Mastering his distaste for the boisterous methods of debate of the classroom, he defended himself with an ability which impressed his opponents and with a civility which disarmed them. But he was one in a hundred; and he knew his superiority. He soon sickened of the schools. The strain of asserting himself and resisting his environment, the over-excitement of his faculties, told on his health, and he was forced to interrupt his studies. He came home, convinced that the world and its wisdom had little to teach him.

For relaxation he turned to his lute and cultivated music and poetry. But these recreations delighted him because he could pursue them in privacy. Nothing could wean him from his solitude. Once, he was persuaded to visit the Court — he could never be persuaded to return to it. The Court of Borso d’Este was the most pleasureloving in Italy, and he had never learned to play. With the dashing youths who frequented it he could not compete; their manly exercises and mannerly graces were too strenuous for his body and too frivolous for his spirit; and he knew how cruelly conventional is youth, how intolerant of timidity or deficiency. He was in the first flush of adolescence, and the uneasy stirrings of

IO physical vanity made him sensitive to his inferiority. What figure could be cut among those naked athletes, racing and wrestling in porticoed courts, vaingloriously airing their limbs under the eyes of loitering ladies, parading in rounded loggias? or in the vineyards, where singing horsemen mingled with the vintagers, groping for grapes? or in the love-courts of Belriguardo, in those long formal alleys of clipped cypress, gushing with the rhythmic loquacity of voluble waters, where groups of lovers nestled, masking sedately the insinuating hands that stole about waists and between knees? Those scenes — so vividly frescoed on the walls of Schifanoia — wooed him only to wound him: the pleasures, the prowess, the passion, the pomp of youth, swept by him, a confident and overbearing cortege. In that dazzling physical world he was lost, and he rebelled blindly against its ideals. He was under a double disadvantage — physical and social. His family occupied an uncertain position between the middle classes and the aristocracy of birth; and he dreaded condescension on that score as proudly as he shrank from ridicule as a man. Of all forms of privilege, the tyranny of birth, breeding, and beauty, was the most intolerable — there was no appeal against it; and he willingly confounded it with the political despotism it adorned. In that hour the future democrat was born. i

From the Court as from the Academy he returned, dissatisfied with the world. But he had no thought of

Il leaving it. On the contrary, he disclaimed the thought repeatedly. The profession to which he was destined — was it not also a ministry? His grandfather had practised it as such. The good doctor had tended the poor without stint and without pay, and had never wearied of exalting the charitable beauty of a calling which he ranked with teaching and preaching. Gradually, he accustomed himself to the world, and his early religious prepossessions passed away; life, but for its pleasures, grew quite comfortable. At last, even these lost their sting: he tasted, and suddenly the most profound of the passions engulfed him. The Casa Savonarola acquired, one day, a new neighbor in a Florentine exile of the illustrious Strozzi family. With him he brought a natural daughter. By what musk and rustle of silk the idle girl snared the homekeeping youth is a tale the dead need not tell: it is familiar. His window faced hers, over a narrow lane, and he failed to realize that anything further separated them. But the young lady knew very well who she was; she took an inordinate pride in her lineage; and it was only because the Strozzi and the Savonarola had nothing in common, that they met on friendly terms. But meet they did, and a change came over the unlimbered little scholar. It began to appear that he was not of mind all compact. His self-sufficiency deserted him, he was no longer his own master, and he began to expand. He found and lost his tongue with fitful rapidity, and his mother heaved a sigh of relief. I2

He nested in the window, and his sisters smiled. The thaw had been long in coming, but it had come at last: Nature had claimed her own. When he saw clearly into his heart, he lost no time in moping; his need was too new, his nature too prompt and direct for that. One day, from the window, he made his proposal of marriage. With a toss of the head, she dismissed it. Did he think — she put it to him — did he think that ‘ the blood and the great house of Strozzi would consider such an alliance? ’ He was not a boy to let a girl have the last word —her folly called for correction: Scripture categorically recommended that the fool be answered according to his folly, lest he deem himself wise. ‘“‘ Bastard blood,” he remarked; and slammed the window.

It

HE dismissed the incident and outgrew it. But the emotional shock arrested and transformed his development. Though he returned to his studies, he lost interest in them; the real bias of his nature was emotional, and it was only in activity henceforth that he could satisfy it. But what activity? The profession for which he was preparing no longer satisfied him; it was prosaic and unprofitable; duty kept his nose to the grindstone; but he grew restless — why or for what he knew not. His feelings, finding no outlet, wore themselves out in inward war; he was overwhelmed with a sense of confinement, 13 futility, and frustration; and it was no longer for activity that he longed but for refuge, rest, freedom, and peace. His mind began to revert to his childhood dreams of religion; but he brushed them aside. The cloister? —no— he shrank from it for his parents’ sake and also for his own; for while he longed, ardently longed, to surrender his will, he longed too to assert it. He was confused, he was lost; despondency grew upon him; choler and melancholy crept into his heart.

Meanwhile that malapert presence next door continued to remind him of a defeat he was determined to dismiss and despise. But his love, mortified and ingrowing, exasperated his self-esteem, and he could not but dwell — not on the girl but on her faults. Her faults — he was resolved to be impersonal— it was her faults he detested: vanity, cruelty, frivolity, pride; they were the faults of the world, and he saw them everywhere. Like a true Italian, he poured his commotion into poetry, and in a poem on The Ruin of the World he lamented its universal corruption. One thought, and one only, gave him some cheer:

In the next world full well will appear, Whose soul was noble and who rose on high, Winging in loftier style.

That was the only fitting, the only magnanimous rebuke. In the next world — ! But meanwhile there was this one, and in this one he was a misfit; daily he felt 14 it more deeply; for such as he there was but one asylum — the monastery. His virtues were his one superiority, and the world ridiculed and rode rough-shod over them. Every impulse of his nature, every precept he had been taught, were in contradiction to those of the world. “There all vices are lauded and all virtues derided. ... To be rated a man, you must defile your mouth with the most filthy and brutal and tremendous blasphemies, and set on your neighbor to slay him, and sow seditions and brawls. If you study philosophy and the edifying arts, you are considered a day-dreamer; if you live chastely and modestly, you are rated a fool; if you are pious, you are dishonest; if you put your faith in God, you are a simpleton; if you are charitable, you are effeminate.” Such were the complaints he poured onto paper in pages that accumulated and became a tract on The Contempt of the World. It was a world of boys, of full-grown boys, lusty, unruly, knowing no law but their instincts, their unfettered vitality; and he longed to rise and rebuke its unbridled insolence, to curb and crush it, to bury it under some cataclysm. He turned to the Bible and read and reread the chapters on Sodom and Gomorrah, on Egypt and Exodus; and in his day-dreams he saw fires and floods overwhelming his generation. But they were day-dreams; in reality he was impotent. He could but write — and rage. Rage turned to despair, and again his thoughts turned to flight. A verse of Virgil sang in his head: Heu! fuge crudeles 15 terras, fuge litus avarum! * For all his sincerity, his feeling was still literary; and the line expressed his melancholy so roundly and melodiously that he repeated it to himself daily, with tears in his eyes. He incorporated it, along with his reminiscences of Sodom and Gomorrah and Egypt and Exodus, in his tract; and in such exercises he worked off his pent-up feelings.

The days, the months, the years passed; and what was a normal crisis of adolescence, which might have worked itself out, developed, because of the morbid sensitiveness of his nature and the sheltered conditions of his life, into the settled conviction of manhood. His life was decided in the critical period of adjustment of youth; a greensick emotion determined his vocation. Gradually, a single thought obsessed him. His feelings were confused at the time, but in later years he remembered clearly how that thought took possession of his nature. “‘ I began to reflect in my heart how we strive incessantly for unnecessary ends and neglect needful and useful ones. And considering how continually and violently we rush toward death, I determined to leave all else, to keep the end of man before my eyes, and to prepare myself for it with all my strength. . . Through God’s grace, I began to despise all earthly things. An irresistible longing for my heavenly fatherland burned in my heart, and I resolved to serve my Lord Jesus Christ entirely.” On a visit to Faenza in 1474 he was

1 Flee the lands of the unfeeling, the shores of the grasping flee! 16 deeply moved by an Augustinian preacher, and made his decision. But it was a year before he acted on it. He was prudent, and he dreaded an irrevocable step; he was independent, and he dreaded the surrender of his will; he was affectionate, and he dreaded the blow to his family. Who would succeed him? Alberto, his youngest brother, was the most likely; but he was lazy, and it would be long before he could take his place. The fortunes of the family were declining; his father was in financial difficulties; his sisters were dowerless; his mother had a woman’s pride of position and sense of the intrinsic respectability of money. His struggle - was plain to his mother’s eyes, she saw what was coming and admitted her dread of it; he reassured her with a vague, painful smile. She watched him silently, in mingled sympathy and apprehension; the quiver of the dragging anchor woke an answering strain in her heart, and her intuitions were quick. One day, as he sat strumming his lute, something in the dull ache of a single note warned her, in the hushed room humming with so many vibrations, that it had come. No words were necessary, no words were possible: she knew. “ Son,’ she said, “‘ this is a sign of parting.” His finger continued to twitch the string; the aching note twanged monotonously; but he could not raise his eyes to hers, and in _ this speechless farewell they parted.

The next day was a holiday. The family left him among his books, while they went out to enjoy the bonfires, the rockets, the pealing bells, in the stirring streets, dense with crowds pressing in from the countryside and swollen by travellers to the Roman Jubilee. In that bustling, loquacious, good-natured throng, strolling, laughing, singing, chattering, he was forgotten. When they returned, he was gone. For two days there was no word; on the third, a letter reached them from Bologna. ‘‘ My honorable father,” he wrote, ‘ I know that you grieve greatly over my going, especially as I departed so secretly; but I want you to understand my purpose, so that you may be comforted and see that I have not been moved in this so childishly as some may suppose. First, as a man and one who despises perishable things, I expect you to be influenced more by truth than by feeling, as womenkind are, and to judge by the dictates of reason whether or no I should follow my purpose and flee the world. Ju primis: the reason which determined me to embrace religion is this: the great misery of the world, the iniquity of men, the lusts, adulteries, robberies, pride, idolatry, and cruel blasphemies, which have brought the age so low that not one man can be found more who does good; because of which many times a day I sang this verse, weeping: Heu fuge crudeles terras, fuge litus avarum! This is why I could no longer suffer the great evil-doing of the blind peoples of Italy; the more so, as I saw all virtue put down and all vice raised up. This is the greatest passion I could have in this world; and therefore I 18 prayed daily to Christ Jesus to raise me up from this mire and made continually my little petition to God with mighty devotion, saying: Make known to me, O Lord, the way in which I should walk, that I may raise my soul to You.

‘““ Now God, when He pleased in His infinite mercy, showed me my way; and I received my answer, though unworthy of so great a favor. Answer me then: is it not great merit in a man to flee the filths and iniquities of this vile world, to try to live as a creature of reason and not as a beast among swine? And would it not have been the greatest ingratitude on my part to have prayed God to show me the straight way in which I should walk, and when He deigned to show it, that I should not accept it? Ah, dear Jesus, sooner a thousand deaths than that I should be so ungrateful! So that, my very dear father, you have rather to thank Jesus than to weep: He gave you a son, and preserved him very well for twenty-two years; and not only that, He even deigned to make him His militant cavalier. Think! Is it not a great honor to have a son serving Christ Jesus? But to be brief: either you love me or not. I know you will not say you do not love me. If you love me, then, since I have two parts, body and soul, either you love the body or the soul more: you can not say the body, because you would not love me, loving my vilest part. If then you love the soul more, why not seek the good of the soul? Surely you should rejoice and celebrate this triumph! I know that the flesh must needs grieve somewhat; but it must be curbed by reason, especially by wise and high-minded men like yourself. Do you not think it cost me great sorrow to leave you? Surely; and you must believe me. Never since I was born have I had greater sorrow or affliction of mind, leaving my own blood and going among strangers, to sacrifice my body to Christ Jesus and to sell my will into the keeping of those I have never known; but at length, thinking how God calls me, and that He did not disdain to become a slave among us worms, I should never dare not to obey His most sweet and holy voice: Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest; take my yoke upon you, etc.

‘“‘T know that you are hurt because I left you so secretly and almost fled from you; but so great was my grief and the passion I felt in my heart at leaving you that if I had shown it, I truly believe, before I had left you, my heart would have burst, and prevented my purpose; so do not wonder that I said nothing. I did leave some writings behind the books leaning on the window, which will tell you about me. I beg you therefore, my dear father, to make an end of lamentation and not to give me more sorrow and pain than I already have: not that I regret what I have done, for I will not undo it, not though I thought to be greater than Caesar; but because I am flesh like yourself, and flesh rebels against reason, so that I must struggle cruelly, lest the Devil leap on my shoulders and down me; and the more so, as I feel your sorrow. These days in which the pain is yet fresh will soon pass, and afterward I hope you and I will be comforted in this world by grace, and in the next by glory. Nothing remains but to beg you, as a man, to comfort my mother; I beg her and you to both give me your blessing; and I shall always pray fervently for your souls.”

In a postscript he added: ‘“‘ I commend my brothers and sisters to you, but especially Alberto; make him study, because he will be a great burden and sorrow to you, if you let him waste his time.”

His advice was heeded.

II

I

Ti HE life of Savonarola was governed by a logic rarely discernible in the haphazard lives of men. Nor was it merely his own consistency which determined its design: a superior power seemed to be developing it, for its own purpose, to some predetermined conclusion. His fear of life found its fitting solution in his flight to the convent; and by all the rules it should have been final. But there was a sequel, and a sequel which was to demonstrate, with relentless logic, the futility of fleeing life.

Freedom and peace, he confessed later, were his quest. “To have freedom I would not take wife, and to find peace I fled the world and gained the port of religion.” But it was only after a long struggle that he found freedom from the flesh. No sooner had the convent closed on him than he realized that life was still strong in him. Despite his assurances to his father that his decision was irrevocable, he was yet unsure of himself,