FRA GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA
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[Excerpted from the Encyclopædia Britannica]
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Once the Medici had been driven out, Florence had no other master than Savonarola's terrible voice. He instituted a democratic government, the best the city ever had. He has been accused, but unjustly, of interfering in politics. He was not ambitious or an intriguer. He wanted to found his city of God in Florence, the heart of Italy, as a well-organized Christian republic that might initiate the reform of Italy and of the Church. This was the object of all his actions. The results he obtained were amazing: the splendid but corrupt Renaissance capital, thus miraculously transformed, seemed to a contemporary to be a foretaste of paradise.
Savonarola's triumph was too great and too sudden not to give rise to jealousy and suspicion. A Florentine party called the Arrabbati was formed in opposition to him. These internal enemies formed an alliance with powerful foreign forces, foremost of which were the Duke of Milan and the Pope, who had joined in the Holy League against the King of France and saw in Savonarola the main obstacle to Florence's joining them. It was then, after a firm rejection of the League by Florence, that the Pope sent to Savonarola the brief of 21 July 1495, in which he praised the miraculous fruits of Savonarola's work and called him to Rome to pronounce his prophecies from his own lips. As that pope was the corrupt Alexander VI, the trap was too obvious. Savonarola asked to be allowed to put off his journey, offering illness as an excuse.
The Pope appeared to be satisfied, but on 8 September, under pressure from his political friends and Savonarola's enemies, he sent him a second brief in which praises turned to vituperation. He ordered him to go to Bologna under pain of excommunication. Savonarola replied to this strange document with respectful firmness, pointing out no fewer than 18 mistakes in it. The brief was replaced by another of 16 October, in which he was forbidden to preach. As the Pope himself frankly confessed, it was the Holy League that insisted. After a few months, as Lent 1496 drew near, Alexander VI, while refusing the Florentine ambassadors a formal revocation of the ban, conceded this verbally. Thus Savonarola was able to give his sermons on Amos, among his finest and most forceful, in which he attacked the Roman Court with renewed vigour. He also appeared to refer to the Pope's scandalous private life, and the latter took offense at this. A college of theologians found nothing to criticize in what the friar had said, so that after Lent he was able to begin, without further remonstrances from Rome, the sermons on Ruth and Micah.
At that time, as Savonarola's authority grew, the Pope tried to win him over by offering him a cardinal's hat. He replied: A red hat? I want a hat of blood. Then Alexander VI, pressed by the League and Arrabbati, mounted a fresh attack. In a brief of 7 November 1496, he incorporated the Congregation of San Marco, of which Savonarola was vicar, with another in which he would have lost all his authority. If he obeyed, his reforms would be lost. If he disobeyed, he would be excommunicated. Savonarola, however, while protesting vigorously, did not disobey, because no one came to put the brief into force. He therefore went on unperturbed in Advent 1496 and Lent 1497 with his series of sermons of Ezekiel. During the carnival season that year his authority received a symbolic tribute in the burning of the vanities, when personal ornaments, lewd pictures, cards, and gaming tables were burned. Destruction of books and works of art was negligible.
Events in Italy now turned against Savonarola, however, and even in Florence his power was lessened by unfavourable political and economic developments. A government of Arrabbati forced him to stop preaching and incited sacrilegious riots against him on Ascension Day. The Arrabbati obtained from the Roman Court, for a financial consideration, the desired bull of excommunication against their enemy. In effect the excommunication, besides being surreptitious, was full of such obvious errors of form and substance as to render it null and void, and the Pope himself had to disown it. The Florentine government, however, sought in vain to obtain its formal withdrawal; wider political issues were involved. Absorbed in study and prayer, Savonarola was silent. Only when Rome proposed an unworthy arrangement, which made withdrawal of the censure dependent on Florence's entry into the League, did he again go to the pulpit to give those sermons on Exodus that marked his own departure from the pulpit and from life. He was soon silenced by the interdict with which the city was threatened. He had no other way out but a church council, and he began a move in this direction but then burned the letters to the princes that he had already written, in order not to cause dissention within the Church. Once this road was closed, the only remaining one led to martyrdom....
The rabble led by the Arrabbati rioted, marched to San Marco, and overcame the defenders. Savonarola was taken like a common criminal together with Fra Domenico and another follower. After examination by a commission of his worst enemies and after savage torture, it was yet necessary to falsify the record of the inquiry if he was to be charged with any crimes. But his fate was settled. The papal commissioners came from Rome with the verdict in their bosom, as one of them said. After the ecclesiastical trial, which was even more perfunctory, he was handed over to the secular arm, with his two companions, to be hanged and burned. The account of his last hours is like a page from the lives of the Church Fathers. Before mounting the scaffold he piously received the Pope's absolution and plenary indulgence.
In fact Savonarola's quarrel was with the corruption of the clergy of whom Alexander VI was merely the most scandalous example, not with the Roman pontiff, for whom he had always professed obedience and respect. He was a reformer, but Catholic and Thomist to the marrow... He found unbearable the humanistic paganism that corrupted manners, art, poetry, and religion itself.
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The following is the first paragraph of the gloss on psalm 50 written by Girolamo Savonarola while awaiting his execution. The gloss continues for all 19 verses of the psalm.
Infelix ego omnium auxilio destitutus, qui coelum terramque offendi. Quo ibo? quo me vertam? ad quem confugiam? quis mei miserebitur? Ad coelum oculos levare non audeo, quia ei graviter peccavi; in terra refugium non invenio, quia ei scandalum fui. Quid igitur faciam? Desperabo? Absit. Misericors est deus, pius es salvator meus. Solus igitur deus refugium meum; ipse non despiciet opus suum, non repellet imaginem suam. Ad te igitur piisime deus tristis ac moerens venio, quoniam tu solus spes mea, tu solus refugium meum. Quid autem dicam tibi, cum oculos elevare non audeam? Verba doloris effundam, misericordiam tuam implorabo, dicam: Miserere mei deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.
The following is the first paragraph of the gloss on psalm 30 written by Girolamo Savonarola while awaiting his execution. He never completed this gloss, finishing only to the third verse.
Tristitia obsedit me, magno et forti exercitu vallavit me, occupavit cor meum, clamoribus et armis die noctuque contra me pugnare non cessat. Amici mei sunt in castris eius et facti sunt mihi inimici. Quaecumque video, quaecumque audio, vexilla tristitiae deferunt. Memoria amicorum me contristat, recordatio filiorum me affligit, consideratio claustri et cellae me angit, meditatio studiorum meorum dolore me afficit, cogitatio peccatorum vehementer me premit. Sicut enim febre laborantibus omnia dulcia amara videntur, ita mihi omnia in moerorem et tristitiam convertuntur. Magnum profecto onus super cor tristitia haec. Venenum aspidum, pestis pernitiosa, murmurat contra deum, blasphemare non cessat; ad desperationem hortatur. Infelix ego homo! Quis me de manibus eius sacrilegis liberabit? Si omnia quae video et audio vexilla sequuntur et fortiter contra me pugnant, quis erit protector meus? Quis auxiliabitur mihi? Quo vadam? Quo pacto effugiam? Scio quid faciam. Ad invisibilia me convertam et adducam ea contra visibilia. Et quis erit dux tam excelsi tamque terribilis exercitus? Spes, quae de invisibilibus est. Spes, inquam, contra tristitiam veniet et expugnabit eam. Quis stare poterit contra spem? Audi quid dicit Propheta: Tu es, domine, spes mea; altissimum posuisti refugium tuum. Quis stabit contra deum? Quis expugnare poterit refugium eius quod est altissimum? Vocabo itaque eam: veniet profecto, nec me confundet. Ecce iam venit, gaudia attulit, pugnare me docuit, dixitque mihi: Clama, ne cesses. Et aio: Quid clamabo? Dic, inquit, confidenter et ex toto corde: In te, domine, speravi; non confundar in aeternum. In iustitia tua libera me.