THE LONDON QUARTERLY REVIEW. No. CXCVII. FOR JULY, 1856. ART. I.-1. The Life and Martyrdom of Christian men, acting on the highest Savonarola. By R. R. Madden, M.R.I.A. Christian principles? Was he-a subordiSecond edition. In 2 vols. London, nate question, yet not without interest-a 1854. 2. Jérome Savonarola; sa Vie, ses Prédications, ses Ecrits. Par F. T. Perrens. Paris. Turin. 2 tomes. 1853. 3. Hieronymus Savonarola und seine Zeit. Von A. G. Rudelbach. Hamburg, 1835. 4. Girolamo Savonarola aus grossen theils 5. The Life and Times of Girolamo Savo- rude Iconoclast, or one who would have purified and elevated art to the height of its holy mission? Had he more of S. Bernard, of Arnold of Brescia, of Gerson, or of Wycliffe? Was he the forerunner of Luther or of Loyola, of Knox or of S. Philippo Neri, even of John of Leyden, or our fifth-monarchy men? Since his own day, and even in his own days, these questions have been agitated in his own Church, and among the Reformed Churches, with singular contrariety, so as to form almost a solitary exception to the usual resolute partizanship. He who was burned under Papal excommunication, in direct obedience, or at least submission, to a Papal mandate, has been the object of passionate vindication by very zealous Roman Catholics; his beatification has been demanded, it might seem almost granted; a legend has gathered around his life, laying claim to, and obtaining implicit belief, and, considering the late period of his life, SAVONAROLA!-Was he hypocritical im- almost as prolific in miracle as that of postor? self-deluded fanatic? holy, single- Becket or of Bernard. Though hailed by minded Christian preacher? heaven-com the earlier reformers, with zeal almost missioned prophet? wonder-working saint? equally blind to his real character, as one martyr, only wanting the canonization of themselves; as the disciple of Huss which was his due? Was he the turbu- and Jerome of Prague; as the harbinger lent, priestly demagogue, who desecrated of Luther; yet the colder, later age of his holy office by plunging into the intrigue Protestantism cast him aside almost as a and strife of civic politics, or a courageous poor impostor. Such was the verdict of and enlightened lover of liberty; one who Bayle; such that of a writer far more had conceived, and had almost achieved, serious than Bayle, Buddeus. To others, the splendid notion of an equal republic of as to Roscoe, he is a wild fanatic. The 1850. VOL. XCIX. Municipi 1 enemy of the enlightened and magnificent, | name. His grandfather, Michael Savonaand all but perfect Lorenzo de' Medici, rola, a physician of great fame, had been must be an enemy to all true wisdom, as well as to the real interests of Florence, which, at its height of glory and prosperity during Lorenzo's life, at his death began to darken towards its decline. This historical and religious mystery, if we may judge by the list of works at the head of our article, has neither lost its interest nor found its acknowledged solution. It is not from the want of biographers that the Life of Savonarola has not appeared in its clear and full light. We might, without difficulty, have enlarged the copious catalogue. Of all these lives the 'Jérome Savonarola' of M. Perrens, in our judgment, approaches much the nearest to a just appreciation as well as to a clear and vivid life of the famous Dominican. The Padre Marchese, to whom we are indebted for the letters and other documents published, with valuable observations, in the Archivio Storico Italiano,' had contemplated a Life of the Florentine preacher. The failure of his eyesight compelled him to abandon his design. M. Perrens has had the advantage of his valuable advice, in a work which he only undertook when thus given up by Padre Marchese. He visited Florence, to make himself master of his subject, and especially of the works of Savonarola. He professes to have read the whole of his sermons-no light taskand, to a considerable extent, we can avouch that he has read them well and carefully; and certainly from no other source but his own writings can the character, the influence, or the fate of this singular man be judged with historic truth or justice. Savonarola must be his own biographer. The preacher, the prophet, the politician, even the martyr, must speak for himself, and he does speak, in his own still stirring words; words which, however strange and wearisome from their perpetual iteration, reveal the man in all his living lineaments, his powers, his objects, his passions, the secret of his authority, even the causes of his fatal end. Savonarola appears not only the prophet and preacher, but, what must never be lost sight of, the Man, the Italian, the Monk. M. Perrens has paid especial attention to the corresponding dates of his works, and the events of his life: we can thus follow the Preacher, step by step, day by day, up through the rapid path of his ascent to fame and power, down the still more rapid and abrupt precipice of his fall. The family of Savonarola came from Padua, and a gate in that city bore their invited to Ferrara by Nicholas, Prince of Estè. His father, Michael, had five sons, of whom Girolamo was the third, and two daughters. His mother's name was Helena Buonaccorsi. Girolamo, as was also his brother Albert, was destined for his grandfather's profession. They were seemingly a religious family. Michael, the grandfa ther, had exercised that blessed privilege of the Christian physician, the gratuitous care of the poor. Girolamo was born September 21st, 1452. Even in his boyhood he was reserved and serious: he loved solitude; he sought lonely walks, avoiding the gardens of the ducal palace, where the youth of Ferrara held their joyous meetings. There was a depth of religious passion in his soul which required only to be stirred to decide his future life. His protestation (cited by M. Perrens) that in early youth he had determined not to be a monk ouly shows that the thought was already brooding in his heart. As the world opened upon him, its religious and moral darkness appalled, repelled, drove him to seek any sanctuary where he might dwell alone with himself and with God. Nor was this the act of a timid, over-scrupulous, superstitious mind. Perhaps in no period of the civilized world, since Christ, was the moral condition of mankind, in some respects, in a lower and more degraded state; never were the two great enemies of human happinessferocity and sensuality-so dominant over all classes; and in those vices Italy, in one sense the model and teacher of the world, enjoyed and almost boasted, a fatal preeminence. Some who read history with but purblind sight, attribute much of this dreary state to the revival of letters. The paganism of the more cultivated minds is denounced as the dire enemy, which violently or insidiously put an end to the ages of faith. But classical learning did not thrust religion from her throne; she came into the vacant seat, and offered all she could offer to the desolate and yearning mind of man. Men believed in Plato, because those who ought to have taught Christ gave no signs of their belief in Christ. In the highest places of the Church was the most flagrant apostacy from the vital principles of the Founder of the Church. This subject will force itself upon us too frequently during our survey of the life of Savonarola. His favourite studies too were guided and stimulated by this intuitive predilection. He turned from the great authorities of the profession, Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna. He stole away to Aris totle, to his ethics and metaphysics, his knowledge of which betrays itself even in his most impassioned sermons; but still more to Thomas Aquinas. He may at first only have sought in the cloister, as he declared in one of his later sermons, his two dearest objects-liberty and rest, freedom from domestic cares, the perfection, or, at least, the security, of his own moral and religious being. But his letter to his father, written at the time of his flight to Bologna, is far better evidence of his motives at that time than sentences scattered about his later sermons. It was on the 24th of April, 1475 (he was then twenty-two years and a half old), that Savonarola deserted for ever his father's house, and knocked for admittance at the door of the Dominican convent in Bologna. The Dominican order boasted among its disciples St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the Schoolmen, the object of the young man's ardent study; and if profound religion-the religion which, while it trained the intellect by the scholastic learning, left free scope to zealous passion and even to excursive imagination within the bounds of Church theology-it was in the cloisters of the order of Preachers. Two days after, the young man sent to his father his memorable letter, in which the calm, deliberate determination of the youthful ascetic is exquisitely touched with the tenderness of a loving son : "You who know so well how to appreciate the perishable things of earth, judge not with the passionate judgment of a woman; but, looking to truth, judge according to reason, whether I am not right in abandoning the world. The motive which determines me to enter into a religious life is this: the great misery of the world, the misery of man; the rapes, the adulteries, the robberies, the pride, the idolatry, the monstrous blasphemies by which the world is polluted, for there is none that doeth good, no not one. Many times a-day have I uttered this verse with tears, "Heu fuge crudeles terras! fuge littus avarum." I could not support the enormous wickedness of most of the people of Italy. Everywhere I saw virtue despised, vice in honour. When God, in answer to my prayer, condescended to show me the right way, could I decline it? Oh, gentle Jesus, may I suffer a thousand deaths rather than oppose thy will and show myself ungrateful for thy goodness. Think not that I have not endured the deepest affliction in separating my .... There is a vague story, resting on but slight authority, that Savonarola was the victim of a tender but honourable passion for a beautiful female. self from you. Never, since I was born, have I suffered such bitter mental torment as at the moment when I abandoned my own father to make the sacrifice of my body to Jesus Christ, and to surrender I had never seen. You complain of the secrecy will into the hands of those whom my of my departure, I should rather say, my flight. In truth, I suffered such grief and agony of heart when I left you, that, if I had betrayed myself, I verily believe that my heart would have broken, and I should have changed my purpose. In and add not to my pain and sorrow. To be Camercy, then, most loving father, dry your tears, sar, I would not return to the world; but, like you, I am of flesh and blood; the senses wage a cruel war with the reason, and I would not give vantage to the devil. The first days, the bitter days, will soon be over. As a man of strong mind, I beseech you, comfort my mother, and both of send me, I entreat you, your bless ing.* you Savonarola, like all men, especially Italian men, of his temperament, sought expression for his passionate feelings in poetry. The able editor of his few poems, M. de Rians,t assigns his earliest ode, 'De Ruinâ Mundi,' to some period a year or two before his flight to Bologna. It breathes the same sensitive horror of the awful moral spectacle around him, and already Rome is the centre and source of all wickedness:— 'La terra è si oppressa da ogni vizio If this first poem revealed the stern aversion of his heart to the sins of the world, his second, On the Ruin of the Church,' showed no less his vivid imagination, already revelling in that allegorical significance which he assigned to every word of the Scripture, and in the boundless symbolism of the Church. The Ode is a string of brilliant material images, each of which has its latent spiritual meaning: jewels, diamonds, lamps, sapphires, white robes, golden zones, white horses. But Italy lost no poet by the elevation of Savonarola to be her greatest preacher. Girolamo's verses are hard and harsh; all his higher odes are utterly deficient in the exquisite music, the crystalline purity of Petrarch; his more lowly and familiar stanzas, if they have the rudeness, want the simple fervour of St. The letter may be read in Latin in the Epistole Spirituales, published by P. Quetif; in Italian, in Burlamacchi; in French, in M. Perrens; in our own tongue, in both the English Lives. Poesie di Savonarola. Firenze, 1847. Francis, still more the vigour of Jacopone | da Todi. We fear his poetry itself would hardly have disenchanted the popular ear from the profane and pagan, but light and festive, carnival songs of Lorenzo de' Medici. Savonarola's poetry is to be sought in his sermons and even in some of his treatises. There could be no doubt that Savonarola would equal the austerest sons of St. Dominic in the congenial virtues of the cloister. Yet though sternly submissive to the rigorous rules of his Order as to fastings and mortifications, there does not always appear that extravagance of asceticism in which some of the older anchorites and the more famous monks luxuriated and gloried. He has no special aspirations after peculiar filth and misery; and throughout his teaching the advice to others on these subjects, though in harmony with the rules of his Church, has a tone of moderation and good sense; bodily austerities are but subordinate, of low esteem, in comparison with the graces and virtues of the heart and soul. No breath of calumny ever attainted the personal purity of Savonarola. When he was the spiritual lord of Florence, if he condescended now and then to notice imputations of interested motives, of covetousness, or spiritual extortion, it was to reject them with a defiant scorn, with an appeal to his own lofty disdain of wealth, to his known and lavish charities to the poor. He might have been, but disdained to be, wealthy. He was even above that more fatal and common avarice of his Church; he sternly condemned the prodigal expenditure of wealth on magnificent buildings, on church ornaments, the golden censers, the jewelled pixes, the rich embroidered vestments: he would still be the simple, self-denying monk, not the splendid church man. In his obedience he was a mild brother of his Order; as yet a humble disciple, he was in all respects strictly subordinate to his rule, and to the authority of his superiors. In his studies alone he struggled with gentle pertinacity for some freedom, which he at length obtained. He submitted to the common discipline of the Order, the study of the Fathers, of scholastic theology with all its subtle perplexities and all its arid dialectics: but his heart rebelled; and dwelt with still increasing interest and exclusiveness on the Holy Scriptures. But it was not his heart alone which found its rest and consolation in the simple truths and peaceful promises of the Gospel. It was the bold and startling imagery, the living figures, the terrible denunciatory lan guage, the authoritative rebukes of sin in the name of a terrible and avenging God, the awful words of God himself, as uttered and avouched by the ancient prophets, which clave to his memory, kindled his soul, and became at length his own, as he supposed, not less inspired language. His was not anxious searching of the Scriptures, in order to find out the way for the salvation of his own soul. As to that way he had implicit faith in the doctrines and in the authority of the church. He had the simple conviction that this was by faith and holiness of life, faith inspired by grace, of which holiness was the necessary manifestation. But the Bible, he felt by the terrific power of its language, by the deep meaning of its phrases and imagery, and by its direct application to the state of existing things, could alone shake the perishing world around him, and beat up the universal wickedness which comprehended the people, the clergy, the Pope himself. At first indeed his mind was in the fetters of his earlier and colder studies. According to the usage of his Order he was commissioned to visit many of the cities of Lombardy, to administer spiritual instruction, to exhort, to hear confession, and in every ordinary way to promote religion. In 1482, six years after his admission into the Dominican order, he was at Ferrara, his native city. He went there with reluctance, for no man is a prophet in his own country, and he compares himself with unsuspected irreverence to the Carpenter's son, to whom his native Nazareth paid but slight respect-a singular illustration of his prescience of his own high powers and destiny, as well as of his simplicity.t Ferrara was threatened with war by the Venetians. Most of the Dominicans were ordered by their superior to retire from their convent in Ferrara, S. Maria dei Angeli. Among those who were sent to Florence was Fra Girolamo. He was received in the magnificent convent of the order, San Marco, hereafter to be the scene of his glory, and his fate. The name of Fra * There are four copies of the Scriptures in dif ferent libraries at Florence, annotated by the hand of Savonarola. The notes themselves are in a kind of shorthand, but there is an interpretation in the MSS. The passage extracted by M. Perrens is genuine Savonarola-a record of the wild dreams which crossed his slumbering or his waking imagination, in the prophetic significance of which he seemed to have implicit faith.-Appendix, tom. i. p. 458. In his beautiful letter to his mother, published by F. Marchese, Archivio Storico, p. 112; no one who reads this, and no more than this, can doubt the perfect sincerity of Savonarola. Girolamo was already not without celebrity, but it was for his learning and for his sanctity. Many stories were abroad of conversions which he had wrought, hardly less than preternatural; the number of his disciples in latter days threw back the halo of miracle around many of his earlier acts. On a voyage from Ferrara to Mantua he had been shocked by the blasphemies and obscenities of the rude boatmen. After half an hour of his earnest catechising, eleven of them threw themselves at his feet, in profound contrition, confessing their sins, and imploring absolution. Florence witnessed the first recorded instance of his public preaching. By the admission, it may almost be said by the boast, of his admiring biographers, this first attempt was a total, it might seem a hopeless, failure, such as might have crushed a less ardent man. He was appointed to preach the Carême (the course of Lent sermons) in the great church of San Lorenzo. The expectation was high; his countenance was known to be fine and expressive; his form, though slight, was full of grace and strength. But his voice was thin and harsh; his delivery unimpressive; his gestures rude and awkward; his language, not yet disembarrassed of dry scholastic form, heavy and dull. His audience dwindled down to a still diminishing few; not twenty-five persons lingered in the vacant nave. His superiors, whether in kindness, or suspecting his slumbering powers, sent him during two consecutive years (1484-5) to preach at San Gemignano. Still all was cold and ineffective; a scanty and listless audience, or vacant aisles. He retired to Florence and re-assumed the humble office of reader; it might seem that his career of fame and of usefulness was closed for ever. C 非 cerning the 23 (24) elders, did he declare that one of the elders had been commissioned to reveal to him the terrible doom which awaited Italy, and especially the city of Brescia; not only did he summon Brescia to repentance, for fathers would see their children massacred and dragged through the streets'- -a scourge which would fall upon the city during the life-time of many there present; but besides this, it was averred by Fra Angelo of Brescia, that on the night of the Nativity, in the convent of Brescia, (the sermon had been preached on St. Andrew's day) Fra Girolamo had stood in an ecstacy for five hours, entirely motionless, with his face shining so as to illuminate the whole church. From this time Savonarola was no longer a preacher, he was a prophet.f Already, by his own account, he had struck this chord at San Gemignano, but with a feeble hand, and it had not vibrated to the hearts of his hearers: he had preached the scourging, the renewal of the Church, and that quickly; but he had preached it not by divine revelation, but as an inference from the Scriptures. This more sober statement might seem to comprehend his preaching at Brescia, and all the period of four years (1486-1490) which elapsed before his return to Florence. But the study of the Apocalypse, and the congenial study of the Prophets of the Old Testament, neither found Savonarola mad, nor drove him to madness, if we take madness in its ordinary and vulgar sense. Yet if to be possessed by one great, noble, and holy aim, and in the exclusive and absorbing pursuit of that aim sometimes to pass over the imperceptible boundary of prudence and reason: if conscious of the undoubted mission of all good men, and especially of all in holy orders, or who wore the cowl of the monk, to denounce with peculiar authority the divine wrath against human. wickedness, and to summon the Church to Burlamacchi, apud Mansi, p. 533. A prophecy of such ruin to Brescia might have been hazarded at any time with no doubtful chance of its veracity. No city was so often besieged, few suffered such frequent desolation. It was said to have been fulfilled in the storming by the French some years after. On a sudden, at Brescia, he burst out; appalling, entrancing, shaking the souls of men, piercing to their heart of hearts, and drawing them in awe-struck crowds before the foot of his pulpit. The secret was in the text-book of his sermons. It was the Apocalypse of St. John. Aut insanum inveniet aut faciet: such was the axiom of no less a person than Calvin on the study of this mysterious book; an axiom probably not much known to those who hold the peculiar doctrines of the French reformer among ourselves. If we receive, according to the letter, the account of this Brescian sermon, its causes and its consequences, as related in the life by Burlamacchi, it might be adduced as illustrating bardia qualche vol the wisdom of the great Genevese reformer. Not only in preaching on the chapter con E andando a San Gemignano a predicarsi, comincia a predicarne, e in due anni ch' io vi predicai, proponendo queste conclusioni che la chiesa aveva a essere flagellata, rinovata, e presto. E questo non avevo per rivelazione, ma per ragione delle Scritture. E così dicevo, e in questo modo predicai a Brescia, e in molte altri luoghi di Lomdi queste cose, dove stette anni circa a quattro. Processo. Baluz. Miscel. iv. 529. |