The Sword of God

THE LIFE OF GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA (325 pp.)--Roberto Ridolfi, translated by Cecil Grayson--Knopf ($7.50).

From the monastery he had entered a few days before, the youth wrote a letter: "For what do you weep, blind fools, why do you lament . . . ? What can I say of you if you grieve at this, if not that you are my chief enemies, and even the enemies of virtue?" Thus in 1474 did 21-year-old Girolamo Savonarola console his parents, whom he had left without warning and without a word of goodbye, to become a Dominican novice. With the courage and cold zeal of a saintly fanatic, Savonarola continued to rage against virtue's enemies until 1498, when the exasperated city fathers of Florence, urged on by Pope Alexander VI, hanged and burned him in the Piazza della Signoria.

The best, and the worst, that can be said of the tempestuous friar is that he loved God so passionately that he had very little love left for man. Biographer Ridolfi--a Florentine descended from both Lorenzo de' Medici, an early antagonist of the Dominican, and Giovambat-tista Ridolfi, one of the priest's loyal supporters--is clearly an admirer of Savonarola. He feuds pompously with previous biographers, argues expertly and with almost contemporary urgency in defense of the contentious martyr. The reader may reflect that the excesses of body and spirit against which Savonarola thundered were the underside of the same secular Renaissance that produced Michelangelo and Leonardo. It was an age of triumphant humanism, within and without the church, and Savonarola, as Ridolfi relates approvingly, set himself against his era's dominant faith. His well-to-do family had hoped that he would become a physician, but the ills--or the glories--of the body concerned him not at all.

The Hailstorm. In 1482, after eight years of training, the young friar was appointed lecturer to the Dominican Convent of San Marco in Florence. The pulpit orator whose thundering was to keep a city in terror, and who seldom spoke to fewer than 15,000 people in his great years, wrote of his beginnings: "I had neither voice, vigour, nor talent for preaching; indeed, my sermons bored everyone."

But in 1484 a mystical revelation reinforced Savonarola's conviction that the church must be reformed. The following year he began the first of his jeremiads on the iniquity of the church, and this time no one was bored. For five years, he developed his somber theme in preaching missions throughout northern Italy. In 1490 he was back in Florence, and the words rang out: "I am the hailstorm that shall break the heads of those who do not take shelter."

Savonarola added withering philippics on the tyranny of Lorenzo the Magnificent to his repertory of complaints against the church. Sensation-hungry Florentines packed in to hear his denunciations, and when friends warned him not to anger the powerful Lorenzo, Savonarola replied grimly: "Though I am here a stranger and he the highest citizen, yet I shall remain and he shall depart." In 1492 Lorenzo was dead. Echoing in the ears of the impressed Florentines was the preacher's reiterated warning: "Ecce gladius Domini super terram, cito et velociter [Behold the sword of the Lord, swift and sure, over the earth]."

Though he held no official post except that of Prior of St. Mark's, Savonarola, in effect, became the city's ruler. In a series of sermons, he laid down the form for the new Florentine government--a council modeled on the Venetian system. He also revolutionized the behavior of easy-living Florentines. Sodomy and public gambling and drinking were prohibited, and harsh punishments were set for infractions. In the manner of other theocrats, he thundered that "any who fight against this government fight against Christ," and proposed a 50-ducat fine for speaking against the state. In 1497 he set a troop of boys to scouting out iniquity, lit a great bonfire of false hair, obscene books, lutes, playing cards and dice tables. His followers roamed Italy, so the story goes, removing the penis from any nude statue they could get at.

There was a limit to the Florentines' patience; they balked at outlawing low-cut dresses and curled hair, and a group of libertines spitefully planted nails in the edge of the pulpit upon which the friar habitually pounded. In Rome there was more serious opposition: the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, a sybarite who bought his post with cash and occupied it with cynicism (he might have said, in the words of Leo X: "Let us enjoy the Papacy, now that God has given it to us"). At first, in his easygoing way, Alexander ignored the denunciations from Savonarola's pulpit, then tried to bribe the preacher with a cardinal's hat. But Savonarola contemptuously refused, and the ranting continued; detailing the scandals and debaucheries of the Vatican like a visionary gossipmonger, Savonarola pointed to Alexander's openly acknowledged children (Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, among others). Cried the friar: "You, harlot Church, you used to be ashamed of pride and lasciviousness. Now you are ashamed no longer. See how once the priests called their children 'nephews'; now they are called sons, not nephews: sons everywhere."

The Gentle Wind. Savonarola kept predicting his own martyrdom, and the prophecy finally came true. A series of papal briefs failed to silence him, but a threat of interdict against Florence alarmed the city's governors. The Florentine mob, which had listened with awe to the friar's prophecies, besieged him in the Convent of San Marco. The next day he was arrested. After 40 days of torture and interrogation--some of it conducted by a papal emissary--Savonarola and two of his monks were executed. "Savonarola, now is the time to do miracles!" jeered the mob that crowded around the stake. But no miracles attended his death, except perhaps for the fact that the Church and the society he castigated for more than a decade had let him be for so long.

His ashes were "dispersed in the gentle winds of a Florentine May"; the city might have donned sackcloth to go with them, but instead, it quickly reverted to its old ways. Today, a simple plaque marks the place where Savonarola was burned; few tourists ever notice it in the pavement, are drawn instead to a spot only a short distance away, where an array of nude marble statues seem to look ironically down at the inconspicuous marker. Dominicans have made several attempts--the last only five years ago--to have their hero canonized. But sainthood is unlikely, say Vatican spokesmen, because the man Savonarola defied was a Pope, even though he was a Borgia. To the historian, perhaps the most fascinating question is what would have happened if the Roman Catholic Church had been reformed at the time the angry friar demanded it. When Savonarola died, Martin Luther was 14 years old.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.