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The Enigma of Savonarola

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2024

Kenelm Foster O.P.
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For my part, I am not sure my mind is not made up one way or the other . . . but to conclude, I say this: if he was good we have seen in our day a great prophet; if bad, a very great man. . . .’

So wrote Francesco Guicciardini, the Florentine who, as a boy of fifteen, may have seen Savonarola hanged in the Piazza della Signoria. Guicciardini was one of the cleverest Italians of his time and one of the most coolheaded of all time, and his mind was never cooler than when he penned his judgment on Savonarola. The dilemma it expresses can hardly be avoided unless one entirely disbelieves in ‘prophecy’. Certainly Guicciardini, for all his cool detachment, believed that God could still send prophets into the world; he used the term seriously; which may not have been the case with his near-contemporary and fellow-citizen Machiavelli who wrote off the ‘unnamed prophet’ as a failure. But even Machiavelli said ‘of such a man one should speak with reverence’; which, coming from such an observer, is a notable, if perhaps ironical, compliment to Savonarola, and is also valuable evidence of his reputation, in undevout circles, with the generation which followed his own.

A great prophet or a very great man: the Church has so far not resolved this dilemma by allowing or disallowing, finally, and officially, the first alternative. Certainly the name of Savonarola has been largely restored to favour. Nobody now calls him a heretic. His works are not on the Index. He has had public and recent praise from high authorities in the Church, for example from the Cardinal Archbishop of Turin and from the late Master General of the Dominican Order.

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 33 , Issue 393 , December 1952 , pp. 491 - 495
Copyright
Copyright © 1952 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Though his name is; but that is Tommaseo's fault; cf. the Index, in loco.

2 Cardinal Fossati's tribute, to which I refer, takes the form of a Preface to the Atti della Settimano per Cristo Re e Savonarola, ed. by Serfino Dezani, S. Domenico, Turin, 1950. This Preface is printed at the end of the Accademia d'Oropa's publication, Alessandro VI e Savonarola, Turin, 1950: cf. note (3) below. For Archbishop Gillet's tribute see ibid, p. 204, or Analecta Ord. Pred., S. Sabina, Rome, 1934, pp. 418–20.

3 Vita di Girolamo Savonarola,, 2 vols., Rome (A. Belardetti), 1952.

4 It is true that after the Brief of October 16, 1495, forbidding him to preach, until the Lent of the following year, Savonarola did keep silence; and before he began again, in the Duomo on Ash Wednesday 1496, he had declared that he had the Pope's leave. But the opening passages of that Ash Wednesday sermon are clear evidence that he had not considered himself bound in conscience to keep silent because of the order from Rome; he had his own, quite distinct, reason.