CHAPTER VI.OPPOSITION TENDENCIES. FRA GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA.TheMedici had always counted on the clergy for support. It would be unjust to attribute this entirely to selfish motives; they had other and nobler aims than merely that of more easily ruling the multitude in union with its spiritual directors. Other motives besides scruples of conscience actuated them in the building of churches and convents. The clergy, especially the regular clergy, were, with a portion of the nobility, still the chief representatives of the higher scientific and literary culture. Cosimo’s grandson as well as himself found instruction, entertainment, and intellectual animation in the society of Camaldulensians, Dominicans, Augustinians, and Servites. But as Lorenzo endeavoured to keep under his own control the bishoprics of the district, he made use of the monastic orders in the same way. He employed them privately to discover and direct the stream of popular opinion and popular inclination. Owing to their constitution, their varied composition, their connection with all classes, and their comparative independence, they were at once more trustworthy and abler instruments than the lay communities of various kinds which he ruled by means of his confidants, high and low. These latter societies might prove dangerous to him through party-spirit and secret machinations; a danger which indeed afterwards became apparent, and was vigorously opposed by the rulers of Tuscany. The religious orders, when they devoted themselves to furthering the aims of the Medici, hadanother advantage over the companies. The many little jealousies and enmities which divided them from each other gave better security for secresy; and the fact that very much depended upon this may afford an explanation of the great liberality of the Medici towards the convents. In the annals of the Monastery of the Angeli, where Cosimo was wont to visit Ambrogio Traversari, and where Lorenzo’s sons went to hear philosophical lectures and to be present at sacred representations, it is recorded that besides the usual yearly gifts of money, Lorenzo used on certain festivals to send to the monks, who were by no means rich, fish, cheese, and fruit; and also that he procured for them the bounty of the Signoria. ‘We owe everything to God, through Lorenzo His instrument.’ Don Guido, formerly a Cistercian monk, who became prior of the Angeli in 1484, was Lorenzo’s confessor.[540]But it would be a mistake to suppose that even when his relations with the Papacy were most intimate, Lorenzo could reckon unconditionally upon the clergy. Those same disputes between the religious orders came in the way, as well as the democratic spirit prevalent among the monks, which saw through the tendencies of the existing government even when it seemed to be favouring popular objects. This internal opposition naturally developed more strongly as a more serious way of thinking gained ground; such a temper as had been fostered by the pious chief pastors Antonine and Orlando Bonarli, though their successors, under whom the diocese of Florence was chiefly administered by vicars, did nothing to maintain it. About the year 1490 it became apparent that the general life of pleasure and worldliness was about to take a turn in an opposite direction. No one could then foresee the ultimate scope and results of this opposition; but it showed itself in a manner which necessarily attractedthe attention of him who was accustomed to direct all things, and who had too much tact and too much practice in judging of moral and intellectual tendencies not to recognise the first symptoms of a turn of the tide. Its importance was the more apparent to him because it showed itself in a field, of which, as of those of politics and literature, he thought himself the ruler; but which was withdrawn from his influence as soon as the prevalent materialistic tendencies were combated by inward moral impulses and views. This resistance was in the highest degree dangerous to the Medici, because its chief strength lay in the moral consciousness of the people, hitherto artificially suppressed or put to sleep, but now awakened to new life; and it was this which enabled it to hold out so firmly long after it appeared to be conquered. It was the fate of the Medici that opposition sprang from ground which they had long been accustomed to regard as their own, and to treat in the light of an heirloom.In 1482, there entered the convent of San Marco a brother of the order, who had been driven from his native city of Ferrara by the storms of war raging around it, in order to seek a more peaceful sphere of activity beyond the Apennines, little suspecting what other storms he would have to encounter there. The Porta Savonarola at Padua recalls to mind the neighbouring residence of that noble family; and in the Prato della Valle stands a statue of Antonio Savonarola, who manfully defended his native city in the middle of the thirteenth century. In 1440 Michele Savonarola was called to Ferrara, where he was presented with the rights of citizenship by the Marquis Lionello d’Este, and acquired a great reputation as physician in ordinary to the Marquis, as professor at the university, and also as an author.[541]His sonNiccolò married Elena Bonacossi, and her masculine spirit was inherited by her son Girolamo, who has made the name of his race famous throughout the world. At the age of three-and-twenty this son, without consulting the wishes of his parents, entered the Predicant order at Bologna in the spring of 1475. In a letter to his father he pleaded, in explanation and justification of the step, his soul’s cry of anguish against the worldliness to which he beheld Italy fallen a prey. ‘I could no longer look upon the deep corruption of the blinded people, the oppression of virtue, the exaltation of vice; it was an unspeakable torment to me, and I prayed daily to God that He might take me out of this pit of destruction. Now, in His infinite goodness, He has vouchsafed this grace to me, notwithstanding my unworthiness.’ But it was not the worldliness of the laity alone that shocked him; the corruption in the Church stood before the eyes of his soul in yet more glaring colours. He lamented it in his poems—highly imaginative and lofty outpourings of a soul brightened with the fire of love, penetrated with the consciousness of the need for a higher development, tortured by a foreboding of approaching judgment.[542]His first intention was to devote himself to teaching rather than to preaching; but in the seventh year after his entrance into the order, he was sent to his native city, where he lived as a stranger, rarely saw even his nearest relatives, and was not much appreciated as a speaker. Yet he cannot have been lacking in eloquence; for one day when he was travelling from Ferrara to Mantua his reproofs made such an impression on the soldiers who were in the boat playing and swearing, that they penitently fell upon their knees before him.Fra Girolamo’s reception in Florence was not encouraging.The man and the city could not be attractive to each other; the one was leaning more and more towards asceticism, and the other towards immoderate pleasure. The one cared for nothing but Holy Scripture, and developed its doctrines in lofty, unvarnished speech, whose rough careless form was not softened by his Lombard accent, his hoarse voice, and vehement delivery; the other, sharing the common plight, knew little of the Bible, and was accustomed to preachers whose artistic phraseology recalled the elegant tone of the literary palæstra. In his own convent the stranger found little sympathy. A philosophising tone prevailed in conversation; and the adoption of classical learning might well raise some scruples in the mind of the Ferrarese, whose early education had also been of a philosophical kind. This double discord left decided marks in its train. At Savonarola’s Lenten sermons in San Lorenzo in 1483, the number of listeners was extremely small. He himself was perfectly aware of the defects of his delivery: ‘Those who knew me in those days,’ he said ten years later, ‘know that I had neither voice nor lungs, nor understood anything about preaching, so that I was a bore to everybody.’ He needed a longer apprenticeship. For two years he preached during Lent at San Gemignano. Then he was summoned to Brescia, where in 1486 he preached the sermons on the Apocalypse which first extended his reputation, the prophecies in which of divine judgment and the exhortations to repentance recurred vividly to the souls of the people six-and-twenty years later, when the French army was committing that plunder whose horrors have rarely been equalled in Christian times. A chapter of the order held at Reggio brought Savonarola in contact with Giovanni Pico, who took such an interest in the bold and enthusiastic preacher that he got him sent back to Florence, through the intervention of Lorenzo de’ Medici. In 1490 Savonarola returned to San Marco, there to begin the work which left deep and broad traces on the ecclesiastical and political history ofItaly; which led to hard fighting, not without fault on his side, but which at last led him to martyrdom, and encircled his brow with a glory that no contradiction and no change of times and views have been able to deprive of its radiance.Savonarola found in Florence a rival who was his exact opposite in delivery and in opinions. Fra Mariano of Genazzano came from a place situated on the slope of the Aequian and Hernican mountains, and made important by the great palace of the Colonna. He belonged to the order of the Augustinian Hermits, and dwelt in the convent of Sto. Spirito, until Lorenzo, with whom he had managed to get into favour, built a grand convent at the gate of San Gallo, where there was an old church with a decayed hospital and a foundling establishment. This building was razed to the ground in 1524, when the Emperor and a Medicean Pope were sending their troops against Florence; not a trace of it is left, and its place is occupied by the rows of trees and groves of the walk called the Parterre, and the little church of the Madonna della Tosse, which looks like a shrine left standing amid the general destruction.[543]The convent must have been finished about 1488. Lorenzo provided it with a choice library, visited it frequently with intimate friends, and was fond of discussing philosophical and theological questions with Fra Mariano. Naturally, the Augustinian was wont to say that among men of such high position he had never known one so God-fearing as Lorenzo. As a preacher Fra Mariano was just the man for the people, as well as for scholars. He was little of stature, but his voice was full and melodious, and his utterance agreeable; he terrified and comforted, and made his hearers weep and laugh. Poliziano describes the impression made on him by Mariano’s bearing, manner, gestures, and whole appearance, his sonorous voice, his well-chosen expressions, his majestic sentences, the artistic construction of his phrases, the harmoniousnessof his cadences, the richness of his imagery, the clearness and force of his contrasts, the grace of his narrations, and his easy changes of subject, preventing all monotony. The picture Poliziano gives of the mode of life and conversation of this spiritual orator, in whom he celebrates only the qualities desirable in a temporal one, shows that Mariano was just the man to sail round the rocks which threatened to wreck Girolamo. ‘I have met him repeatedly at the villa and entered into confidential talk with him. I never knew a man at once more attractive and more cautious. He neither repels by immoderate severity nor deceives and leads astray by exaggerated indulgence. Many preachers think themselves masters of men’s life and death. While they abuse their power, they always look gloomy, and weary men by constantly setting up for judges of morals. But here is a man of moderation. In the pulpit he is a severe censor; but when he descends, he indulges in winning, friendly discourse. Therefore, I and my excellent friend Pico have much intercourse with him, and nothing refreshes us after our literary labours so much as his conversation. Lorenzo de’ Medici, who understands men so well, shows how highly he esteems him, not only in that he has built him a splendid convent, but also in that he often visits him, preferring a conversation with him while walking to any other recreation.’[544]Savonarola’s biographer Fra Pacifico Burlamacchi is no doubt quite right in praising Fra Mariano’s eloquence rather than his doctrine, in his account of the orator’s little artifice to impress the people. But this man’s mastery of his art must have been considerable, to make Girolamo Benivieni once say to the Ferrarese preacher, ‘Father, no one can deny the truth, the usefulness, and needfulness of yourteaching. But your delivery lacks attraction, especially when one is daily led to make a comparison with Fra Mariano.’ To which the other answered that elegance of expression must give way to the simple preaching of sound doctrine.[545]But it was long before Savonarola made his way. His reputation, indeed, increased rapidly, but admirers still flocked round Fra Mariano; princes and commonwealth applied to Lorenzo, begging him to give the Augustinian, who seemed to be regarded as belonging to his household, leave to come and preach to them. Lodovico il Moro begged for this not merely as a personal favour, but because the city and all the people longed for the fulfilment of Lorenzo’s promise; and the consuls of the Sabine town of Norcia—the home of S. Benedict—called Fra Mariano in their letter ‘God’s angel upon earth.’It seems that Fra Girolamo was discouraged by his former failures in this field, and the growing success of the Augustinian, and thought at first of limiting his efforts to the philosophical and theological instruction of the novices. His short philosophic compendia are only valuable in the present day for their display of a spirit of justice and sense of the need of investigation in human knowledge, and of analytical progress from the known to the unknown, instead of belief by authority; these, as well as his smaller ascetic and moral treatises, mostly date from the first years after his return to Florence. In them may be seen the mystic enthusiasm which soon became more and more prominent in his sermons, expositions of the Bible, his poems, and other important works. Combined with this mysticism was a striving to clothe his views and prophecies of the future with the authority of Holy Scripture, with which he was perhaps better acquainted than anyone else at the time; buthe interpreted it with a freedom, perfectly honest on his part, which necessarily aroused scruples, for it opened out a boundless field, where an excited fancy or secondary objects might easily lead him astray; and this danger was the greater when he turned his attention especially to the Apocalypse. In the summer of 1490 divers citizens sought admission to the lectures for the novices. The convent-rooms being too small, Savonarola continued his lectures at first in the court; then, as the number of hearers rapidly increased, he transferred them on August 1 to the church. A rosebush still marks the spot where Fra Girolamo taught in the courtyard of the convent; and in these latter days it has been resolved to raise a statue to him there, and a bust has been placed in what was once his cell. He needs no such monuments where all around recalls his memory; but they are tokens of the veneration paid to him by posterity in spite of all his weaknesses and mistakes.The direction Savonarola had taken soon led him further than he calculated upon or perhaps intended. The effect produced by his discourses is quite intelligible when one compares their character with that of the ordinary preaching of the day, and takes the prevailing temper into consideration. In both cases one meets with strange contrasts. Artificial, wordy discourses, that people were accustomed to hear in the sermons of the followers of Bernardino of Siena; besides the simple, often impressive moral, there was a mixture of abstruse scholasticism, asceticism, and anecdotes intended for the multitude, on whom, however, part of their meaning was lost, and who laughed and cried by turns, and were confirmed in their views of devotional practices and works, in which too much stress was apt to be laid on externals. Still the supremacy gained over the people by the moral and political tendencies favoured by the Medici was by no means so complete as to leave no room for opposing views, whose inward strength was only increased by the outward resistance they encountered. The Dominican’ssubject-matter, his mode of demonstration, his whole manner, were such as to make an impression upon opponents. To most preachers as well as hearers, the Bible was a sealed book. When it was opened its word became a living well springing up into a mighty fertilising stream, and disclosing that wondrous power which has never failed wherever it has been heard. Savonarola well knew that power. If he failed it was from a defect exactly contrary to those of the others. They lacked the true perception and feeling for that which alone could give their teachings a meaning true, deep, and sound for all time. He lacked moderation and the power to control his perceptions, his acquirements, and himself. This was the rock on which he was ultimately wrecked. Guicciardini, who was ten years old at Lorenzo’s death, whose youth was passed in the midst of Fra Girolamo’s most strenuous activity, and whose eyes were early open to all that went on around him, speaks of the natural unstudied elegance of the sermons he heard and read, and remarks that never had there been seen a man so versed in Holy Scripture, never had such abundant discourse been united with such a lasting impression.[546]In after years, when Savonarola’s attacks on the corruption in the Church sought and found a personal object in that Church’s unworthy head, he encountered in the enmity of other religious societies a stumbling-block which contributed not a little to his fall. But even in these earlier days he had long ago roused opposition, some of which, proceeding from purely inward grounds, was unavoidable; but a nature less rugged in its enthusiasm might have broken the force of some of it.Fra Girolamo’s great day was yet far distant. But this activity and the effects produced on moral life by his preaching, by his instructions in the convent, and by his and his pupils’ influence on all classes, were already beginning to strike root that year when he gathered around him themore serious-minded men and youths in San Marco, and set himself to counteract the dominant pursuit of sensual enjoyment which threatened to paralyse the energies of the people. This activity and influence, when its chief source and originator had personally succumbed, though his work was only apparently destroyed, was described in glowing words by the great historian, though he is not quite consistent in his views of Savonarola’s character. ‘What he did for the amendment of morals was wonderful and holy. Never did such order and such fear of God reign in Florence as in his time; and the deterioration which set in after his death proves how entirely everything was his work and the fruit of his labours. There was no more gaming in public, people only played with trepidation and in private; the taverns, the accustomed scenes of the wild doings of degenerate youth, were closed; the worst vices were suppressed in consequence of the abhorrence excited against them. Most women laid aside their objectionable garments; the young people were rescued from their wild ways and led back to a moral life, and visited the churches in companies. Gamesters, blasphemers, and dissolute women were in danger of being pursued and stoned. At the Carnaval, playing-cards, dice, indecent pictures and books were collected and burnt on the square of the Signoria; and on the day formerly given up to all kinds of excesses, a great church procession took place. The elder people took up a religious life, went diligently to mass, vespers, and sermons, received the sacraments and distinguished themselves by doing good. Many youths of the first families and some men of riper years entered the Predicant Order. In all Italy was never seen a convent like that of San Marco, where the excellent instruction given in the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew languages and literature promised to furnish fresh ornaments to the Order.’This activity, which produced such a change and passed sentence of condemnation on a system that had been carried out for years with equal skill and perseverance, was onlybeginning in the last years of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s life; but its very beginnings could not fail to furnish matter for reflection to that keen thinker. Even before 1490 similar symptoms had shown themselves, whether connected with Savonarola’s earliest labours is not certain, but it is highly probable. Poliziano’s prologue to the Menæchmi of Plautus, written in May 1488, contains a vehement diatribe against the opponents of these scenic representations—those who protested against the employment of young people in reciting the too often objectionable verses of classical plays.[547]Monks are the objects of the poet’s attack; monks who were not like his friend Mariano.Sed qui nos damnant, histriones sunt maxumi,Nam Curios simulant, vivunt bacchanalia.Hi sunt præcipuè, quidam clamosi, leves,Cucullati, lignipedes, cincti funibus,Superciliosum, in curvi cervicum pecus.Qui quòd ab aliis et habitu et cultu dissentiunt,Tristesque vultu vendunt sanctimonias,Censuram sibi quandam et tyrranidem occupant.Pavidamque plebem territant minaciis.These lines, recited in Lorenzo’s presence, are witnesses to the existence of the opposition which increased in strength every year, and from whose influence many, even of those who sided with the ruling party, seem not to have been free. In Lent 1491 Fra Girolamo began to preach in Sta. Maria del Fiore, the crowd having now become too great for the conventual church; the number of hearers increased daily, the impression made by his predictions of the punishment and evil to come became more vivid, till Lorenzo thought it advisable to try to stem the tide of growing excitement which threatened to endanger his work and his influence. For these prophecies of approaching judgment contained something more than indirect attacks on the present state of affairs, and the serious turn of mind encouraged by thepreacher most necessarily deprive of their force many of the means which served to maintain that state of affairs.Five chief citizens of the dominant party—men who all, with one exception, later on personally fell under the mighty influence of Savonarola—Domenico Bonsi, Guid’Antonio Vespucci, Paol’Antonio Soderini, Bernardo Rucellai, and Francesco Valori, went to San Marco to exhort the preacher to moderation. He answered that they had better exhort Lorenzo, who had sent them, to repent of his sins: God would spare no one. To the warning that he might be exiled, he replied that Lorenzo was a Florentine citizen and he a stranger; but the former would go and he would remain. He predicted the speedy death of Lorenzo, the Pope, and King Ferrante. The increasing and very intelligible discontent among the Medicean partisans, of which he could not but be aware, led him, however, to try and moderate his too frequent and exciting prophecies and confine himself more to moral and theological lectures. But his restless spirit carried him away. It would have been well for him could he have known moderation. But as his imagery, at once brilliant and irregular, is confusing and bewildering rather than elevating; as the terrors of his curse are weakened by repetition; as his precepts for Christian life rise to a pitch of asceticism, whose very exaggeration contains its own contradiction; as his teaching, so truly that of the Gospel in its principles and right application, loses its impressive force by straying to unsuitable ground; even so was it with his conduct in life. He irritated needlessly and aimlessly. The benefactions of the Medici to the convent and to the whole order had founded a relation of clientship, in which there was nothing offensive so long as both parties observed the moderation which had once been guaranteed by Cosimo’s cautiousness and was continued by Lorenzo’s tact and discretion. It was customary that when a new prior was appointed he should make a visit to the head of the family. Fra Girolamo, on being chosen prior in July 1491, refusedto do this. ‘I hold my election from God alone,’ said he; ‘to Him alone I owe obedience.’ It may easily be conceived that Lorenzo took this amiss, and, in his turn, spoke out freely. ‘A stranger has come into my house, and does not deign to visit me.’ However, he made no change in his conduct towards the convent; he sent gifts and money as before. Once some gold florins were found in the alms-box of the church. Fra Girolamo, who had previously made some personal remarks from the pulpit, caused the money to be given to the Buonuomini of San Martino, saying that silver and copper was enough for the convent. When Lorenzo came to walk in the convent garden, according to his custom, the prior never showed himself. His admirers praise his conduct towards a man from whom he was separated by a deep inward gulf. If, instead of trying to work upon that man and so introduce a different state of things, he intended to cause a violent conflict, he acted rightly.Lorenzo’s own conduct towards Savonarola was always prudent. The Dominican’s biographers relate that the great man, being repulsed by him, incited Fra Mariano to attack him from the pulpit; but such incitement was probably not needed. The breach between the two preachers was older than themselves; the antagonism of the two orders was but personified in these men, so radically different from each other. In a sermon preached on Ascension-Day, on the text: ‘It is not for you to know the times or the seasons,’ the Augustinian accused the prior of San Marco of being a false prophet, an instigator of sedition among the people, a stirrer-up of strife and disorder. It is said that his vehemence and exaggerated personalities gave offence to his numerous hearers, and ruined his fame as an orator. Seven years later, when the Roman court was in the greatest excitement on account of events in Florence, when Savonarola lay under the ban of the Church, when his safety and his very life depended only on the momentary preponderance of one party or another in the excited city, already stained with the bloodof noble citizens—then this same Fra Mariano preached in Sant’Agostino at Rome in such immoderate terms, and applied to his hated rival such coarse expressions, that even to unlearned hearers his gifts of eloquence seemed to have been swallowed up by party-spirit; and the cardinals who were present turned their backs upon him. They had expected a refutation of the Dominican’s teaching, and they heard nothing but raging accusations accompanied by vulgar gestures.[548]‘If you want to understand a monk, ask a monk about him,’ so said the Augustinian. After his personal attack at Florence, it is said that Fra Mariano, apparently regardless of his discomfiture, invited his rival to San Gallo, where they celebrated a solemn mass together and exchanged civilities; but the story does not agree with Savonarola’s character and the frankness so much praised by his biographers in his relations with Lorenzo.
CHAPTER VI.OPPOSITION TENDENCIES. FRA GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA.TheMedici had always counted on the clergy for support. It would be unjust to attribute this entirely to selfish motives; they had other and nobler aims than merely that of more easily ruling the multitude in union with its spiritual directors. Other motives besides scruples of conscience actuated them in the building of churches and convents. The clergy, especially the regular clergy, were, with a portion of the nobility, still the chief representatives of the higher scientific and literary culture. Cosimo’s grandson as well as himself found instruction, entertainment, and intellectual animation in the society of Camaldulensians, Dominicans, Augustinians, and Servites. But as Lorenzo endeavoured to keep under his own control the bishoprics of the district, he made use of the monastic orders in the same way. He employed them privately to discover and direct the stream of popular opinion and popular inclination. Owing to their constitution, their varied composition, their connection with all classes, and their comparative independence, they were at once more trustworthy and abler instruments than the lay communities of various kinds which he ruled by means of his confidants, high and low. These latter societies might prove dangerous to him through party-spirit and secret machinations; a danger which indeed afterwards became apparent, and was vigorously opposed by the rulers of Tuscany. The religious orders, when they devoted themselves to furthering the aims of the Medici, hadanother advantage over the companies. The many little jealousies and enmities which divided them from each other gave better security for secresy; and the fact that very much depended upon this may afford an explanation of the great liberality of the Medici towards the convents. In the annals of the Monastery of the Angeli, where Cosimo was wont to visit Ambrogio Traversari, and where Lorenzo’s sons went to hear philosophical lectures and to be present at sacred representations, it is recorded that besides the usual yearly gifts of money, Lorenzo used on certain festivals to send to the monks, who were by no means rich, fish, cheese, and fruit; and also that he procured for them the bounty of the Signoria. ‘We owe everything to God, through Lorenzo His instrument.’ Don Guido, formerly a Cistercian monk, who became prior of the Angeli in 1484, was Lorenzo’s confessor.[540]But it would be a mistake to suppose that even when his relations with the Papacy were most intimate, Lorenzo could reckon unconditionally upon the clergy. Those same disputes between the religious orders came in the way, as well as the democratic spirit prevalent among the monks, which saw through the tendencies of the existing government even when it seemed to be favouring popular objects. This internal opposition naturally developed more strongly as a more serious way of thinking gained ground; such a temper as had been fostered by the pious chief pastors Antonine and Orlando Bonarli, though their successors, under whom the diocese of Florence was chiefly administered by vicars, did nothing to maintain it. About the year 1490 it became apparent that the general life of pleasure and worldliness was about to take a turn in an opposite direction. No one could then foresee the ultimate scope and results of this opposition; but it showed itself in a manner which necessarily attractedthe attention of him who was accustomed to direct all things, and who had too much tact and too much practice in judging of moral and intellectual tendencies not to recognise the first symptoms of a turn of the tide. Its importance was the more apparent to him because it showed itself in a field, of which, as of those of politics and literature, he thought himself the ruler; but which was withdrawn from his influence as soon as the prevalent materialistic tendencies were combated by inward moral impulses and views. This resistance was in the highest degree dangerous to the Medici, because its chief strength lay in the moral consciousness of the people, hitherto artificially suppressed or put to sleep, but now awakened to new life; and it was this which enabled it to hold out so firmly long after it appeared to be conquered. It was the fate of the Medici that opposition sprang from ground which they had long been accustomed to regard as their own, and to treat in the light of an heirloom.In 1482, there entered the convent of San Marco a brother of the order, who had been driven from his native city of Ferrara by the storms of war raging around it, in order to seek a more peaceful sphere of activity beyond the Apennines, little suspecting what other storms he would have to encounter there. The Porta Savonarola at Padua recalls to mind the neighbouring residence of that noble family; and in the Prato della Valle stands a statue of Antonio Savonarola, who manfully defended his native city in the middle of the thirteenth century. In 1440 Michele Savonarola was called to Ferrara, where he was presented with the rights of citizenship by the Marquis Lionello d’Este, and acquired a great reputation as physician in ordinary to the Marquis, as professor at the university, and also as an author.[541]His sonNiccolò married Elena Bonacossi, and her masculine spirit was inherited by her son Girolamo, who has made the name of his race famous throughout the world. At the age of three-and-twenty this son, without consulting the wishes of his parents, entered the Predicant order at Bologna in the spring of 1475. In a letter to his father he pleaded, in explanation and justification of the step, his soul’s cry of anguish against the worldliness to which he beheld Italy fallen a prey. ‘I could no longer look upon the deep corruption of the blinded people, the oppression of virtue, the exaltation of vice; it was an unspeakable torment to me, and I prayed daily to God that He might take me out of this pit of destruction. Now, in His infinite goodness, He has vouchsafed this grace to me, notwithstanding my unworthiness.’ But it was not the worldliness of the laity alone that shocked him; the corruption in the Church stood before the eyes of his soul in yet more glaring colours. He lamented it in his poems—highly imaginative and lofty outpourings of a soul brightened with the fire of love, penetrated with the consciousness of the need for a higher development, tortured by a foreboding of approaching judgment.[542]His first intention was to devote himself to teaching rather than to preaching; but in the seventh year after his entrance into the order, he was sent to his native city, where he lived as a stranger, rarely saw even his nearest relatives, and was not much appreciated as a speaker. Yet he cannot have been lacking in eloquence; for one day when he was travelling from Ferrara to Mantua his reproofs made such an impression on the soldiers who were in the boat playing and swearing, that they penitently fell upon their knees before him.Fra Girolamo’s reception in Florence was not encouraging.The man and the city could not be attractive to each other; the one was leaning more and more towards asceticism, and the other towards immoderate pleasure. The one cared for nothing but Holy Scripture, and developed its doctrines in lofty, unvarnished speech, whose rough careless form was not softened by his Lombard accent, his hoarse voice, and vehement delivery; the other, sharing the common plight, knew little of the Bible, and was accustomed to preachers whose artistic phraseology recalled the elegant tone of the literary palæstra. In his own convent the stranger found little sympathy. A philosophising tone prevailed in conversation; and the adoption of classical learning might well raise some scruples in the mind of the Ferrarese, whose early education had also been of a philosophical kind. This double discord left decided marks in its train. At Savonarola’s Lenten sermons in San Lorenzo in 1483, the number of listeners was extremely small. He himself was perfectly aware of the defects of his delivery: ‘Those who knew me in those days,’ he said ten years later, ‘know that I had neither voice nor lungs, nor understood anything about preaching, so that I was a bore to everybody.’ He needed a longer apprenticeship. For two years he preached during Lent at San Gemignano. Then he was summoned to Brescia, where in 1486 he preached the sermons on the Apocalypse which first extended his reputation, the prophecies in which of divine judgment and the exhortations to repentance recurred vividly to the souls of the people six-and-twenty years later, when the French army was committing that plunder whose horrors have rarely been equalled in Christian times. A chapter of the order held at Reggio brought Savonarola in contact with Giovanni Pico, who took such an interest in the bold and enthusiastic preacher that he got him sent back to Florence, through the intervention of Lorenzo de’ Medici. In 1490 Savonarola returned to San Marco, there to begin the work which left deep and broad traces on the ecclesiastical and political history ofItaly; which led to hard fighting, not without fault on his side, but which at last led him to martyrdom, and encircled his brow with a glory that no contradiction and no change of times and views have been able to deprive of its radiance.Savonarola found in Florence a rival who was his exact opposite in delivery and in opinions. Fra Mariano of Genazzano came from a place situated on the slope of the Aequian and Hernican mountains, and made important by the great palace of the Colonna. He belonged to the order of the Augustinian Hermits, and dwelt in the convent of Sto. Spirito, until Lorenzo, with whom he had managed to get into favour, built a grand convent at the gate of San Gallo, where there was an old church with a decayed hospital and a foundling establishment. This building was razed to the ground in 1524, when the Emperor and a Medicean Pope were sending their troops against Florence; not a trace of it is left, and its place is occupied by the rows of trees and groves of the walk called the Parterre, and the little church of the Madonna della Tosse, which looks like a shrine left standing amid the general destruction.[543]The convent must have been finished about 1488. Lorenzo provided it with a choice library, visited it frequently with intimate friends, and was fond of discussing philosophical and theological questions with Fra Mariano. Naturally, the Augustinian was wont to say that among men of such high position he had never known one so God-fearing as Lorenzo. As a preacher Fra Mariano was just the man for the people, as well as for scholars. He was little of stature, but his voice was full and melodious, and his utterance agreeable; he terrified and comforted, and made his hearers weep and laugh. Poliziano describes the impression made on him by Mariano’s bearing, manner, gestures, and whole appearance, his sonorous voice, his well-chosen expressions, his majestic sentences, the artistic construction of his phrases, the harmoniousnessof his cadences, the richness of his imagery, the clearness and force of his contrasts, the grace of his narrations, and his easy changes of subject, preventing all monotony. The picture Poliziano gives of the mode of life and conversation of this spiritual orator, in whom he celebrates only the qualities desirable in a temporal one, shows that Mariano was just the man to sail round the rocks which threatened to wreck Girolamo. ‘I have met him repeatedly at the villa and entered into confidential talk with him. I never knew a man at once more attractive and more cautious. He neither repels by immoderate severity nor deceives and leads astray by exaggerated indulgence. Many preachers think themselves masters of men’s life and death. While they abuse their power, they always look gloomy, and weary men by constantly setting up for judges of morals. But here is a man of moderation. In the pulpit he is a severe censor; but when he descends, he indulges in winning, friendly discourse. Therefore, I and my excellent friend Pico have much intercourse with him, and nothing refreshes us after our literary labours so much as his conversation. Lorenzo de’ Medici, who understands men so well, shows how highly he esteems him, not only in that he has built him a splendid convent, but also in that he often visits him, preferring a conversation with him while walking to any other recreation.’[544]Savonarola’s biographer Fra Pacifico Burlamacchi is no doubt quite right in praising Fra Mariano’s eloquence rather than his doctrine, in his account of the orator’s little artifice to impress the people. But this man’s mastery of his art must have been considerable, to make Girolamo Benivieni once say to the Ferrarese preacher, ‘Father, no one can deny the truth, the usefulness, and needfulness of yourteaching. But your delivery lacks attraction, especially when one is daily led to make a comparison with Fra Mariano.’ To which the other answered that elegance of expression must give way to the simple preaching of sound doctrine.[545]But it was long before Savonarola made his way. His reputation, indeed, increased rapidly, but admirers still flocked round Fra Mariano; princes and commonwealth applied to Lorenzo, begging him to give the Augustinian, who seemed to be regarded as belonging to his household, leave to come and preach to them. Lodovico il Moro begged for this not merely as a personal favour, but because the city and all the people longed for the fulfilment of Lorenzo’s promise; and the consuls of the Sabine town of Norcia—the home of S. Benedict—called Fra Mariano in their letter ‘God’s angel upon earth.’It seems that Fra Girolamo was discouraged by his former failures in this field, and the growing success of the Augustinian, and thought at first of limiting his efforts to the philosophical and theological instruction of the novices. His short philosophic compendia are only valuable in the present day for their display of a spirit of justice and sense of the need of investigation in human knowledge, and of analytical progress from the known to the unknown, instead of belief by authority; these, as well as his smaller ascetic and moral treatises, mostly date from the first years after his return to Florence. In them may be seen the mystic enthusiasm which soon became more and more prominent in his sermons, expositions of the Bible, his poems, and other important works. Combined with this mysticism was a striving to clothe his views and prophecies of the future with the authority of Holy Scripture, with which he was perhaps better acquainted than anyone else at the time; buthe interpreted it with a freedom, perfectly honest on his part, which necessarily aroused scruples, for it opened out a boundless field, where an excited fancy or secondary objects might easily lead him astray; and this danger was the greater when he turned his attention especially to the Apocalypse. In the summer of 1490 divers citizens sought admission to the lectures for the novices. The convent-rooms being too small, Savonarola continued his lectures at first in the court; then, as the number of hearers rapidly increased, he transferred them on August 1 to the church. A rosebush still marks the spot where Fra Girolamo taught in the courtyard of the convent; and in these latter days it has been resolved to raise a statue to him there, and a bust has been placed in what was once his cell. He needs no such monuments where all around recalls his memory; but they are tokens of the veneration paid to him by posterity in spite of all his weaknesses and mistakes.The direction Savonarola had taken soon led him further than he calculated upon or perhaps intended. The effect produced by his discourses is quite intelligible when one compares their character with that of the ordinary preaching of the day, and takes the prevailing temper into consideration. In both cases one meets with strange contrasts. Artificial, wordy discourses, that people were accustomed to hear in the sermons of the followers of Bernardino of Siena; besides the simple, often impressive moral, there was a mixture of abstruse scholasticism, asceticism, and anecdotes intended for the multitude, on whom, however, part of their meaning was lost, and who laughed and cried by turns, and were confirmed in their views of devotional practices and works, in which too much stress was apt to be laid on externals. Still the supremacy gained over the people by the moral and political tendencies favoured by the Medici was by no means so complete as to leave no room for opposing views, whose inward strength was only increased by the outward resistance they encountered. The Dominican’ssubject-matter, his mode of demonstration, his whole manner, were such as to make an impression upon opponents. To most preachers as well as hearers, the Bible was a sealed book. When it was opened its word became a living well springing up into a mighty fertilising stream, and disclosing that wondrous power which has never failed wherever it has been heard. Savonarola well knew that power. If he failed it was from a defect exactly contrary to those of the others. They lacked the true perception and feeling for that which alone could give their teachings a meaning true, deep, and sound for all time. He lacked moderation and the power to control his perceptions, his acquirements, and himself. This was the rock on which he was ultimately wrecked. Guicciardini, who was ten years old at Lorenzo’s death, whose youth was passed in the midst of Fra Girolamo’s most strenuous activity, and whose eyes were early open to all that went on around him, speaks of the natural unstudied elegance of the sermons he heard and read, and remarks that never had there been seen a man so versed in Holy Scripture, never had such abundant discourse been united with such a lasting impression.[546]In after years, when Savonarola’s attacks on the corruption in the Church sought and found a personal object in that Church’s unworthy head, he encountered in the enmity of other religious societies a stumbling-block which contributed not a little to his fall. But even in these earlier days he had long ago roused opposition, some of which, proceeding from purely inward grounds, was unavoidable; but a nature less rugged in its enthusiasm might have broken the force of some of it.Fra Girolamo’s great day was yet far distant. But this activity and the effects produced on moral life by his preaching, by his instructions in the convent, and by his and his pupils’ influence on all classes, were already beginning to strike root that year when he gathered around him themore serious-minded men and youths in San Marco, and set himself to counteract the dominant pursuit of sensual enjoyment which threatened to paralyse the energies of the people. This activity and influence, when its chief source and originator had personally succumbed, though his work was only apparently destroyed, was described in glowing words by the great historian, though he is not quite consistent in his views of Savonarola’s character. ‘What he did for the amendment of morals was wonderful and holy. Never did such order and such fear of God reign in Florence as in his time; and the deterioration which set in after his death proves how entirely everything was his work and the fruit of his labours. There was no more gaming in public, people only played with trepidation and in private; the taverns, the accustomed scenes of the wild doings of degenerate youth, were closed; the worst vices were suppressed in consequence of the abhorrence excited against them. Most women laid aside their objectionable garments; the young people were rescued from their wild ways and led back to a moral life, and visited the churches in companies. Gamesters, blasphemers, and dissolute women were in danger of being pursued and stoned. At the Carnaval, playing-cards, dice, indecent pictures and books were collected and burnt on the square of the Signoria; and on the day formerly given up to all kinds of excesses, a great church procession took place. The elder people took up a religious life, went diligently to mass, vespers, and sermons, received the sacraments and distinguished themselves by doing good. Many youths of the first families and some men of riper years entered the Predicant Order. In all Italy was never seen a convent like that of San Marco, where the excellent instruction given in the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew languages and literature promised to furnish fresh ornaments to the Order.’This activity, which produced such a change and passed sentence of condemnation on a system that had been carried out for years with equal skill and perseverance, was onlybeginning in the last years of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s life; but its very beginnings could not fail to furnish matter for reflection to that keen thinker. Even before 1490 similar symptoms had shown themselves, whether connected with Savonarola’s earliest labours is not certain, but it is highly probable. Poliziano’s prologue to the Menæchmi of Plautus, written in May 1488, contains a vehement diatribe against the opponents of these scenic representations—those who protested against the employment of young people in reciting the too often objectionable verses of classical plays.[547]Monks are the objects of the poet’s attack; monks who were not like his friend Mariano.Sed qui nos damnant, histriones sunt maxumi,Nam Curios simulant, vivunt bacchanalia.Hi sunt præcipuè, quidam clamosi, leves,Cucullati, lignipedes, cincti funibus,Superciliosum, in curvi cervicum pecus.Qui quòd ab aliis et habitu et cultu dissentiunt,Tristesque vultu vendunt sanctimonias,Censuram sibi quandam et tyrranidem occupant.Pavidamque plebem territant minaciis.These lines, recited in Lorenzo’s presence, are witnesses to the existence of the opposition which increased in strength every year, and from whose influence many, even of those who sided with the ruling party, seem not to have been free. In Lent 1491 Fra Girolamo began to preach in Sta. Maria del Fiore, the crowd having now become too great for the conventual church; the number of hearers increased daily, the impression made by his predictions of the punishment and evil to come became more vivid, till Lorenzo thought it advisable to try to stem the tide of growing excitement which threatened to endanger his work and his influence. For these prophecies of approaching judgment contained something more than indirect attacks on the present state of affairs, and the serious turn of mind encouraged by thepreacher most necessarily deprive of their force many of the means which served to maintain that state of affairs.Five chief citizens of the dominant party—men who all, with one exception, later on personally fell under the mighty influence of Savonarola—Domenico Bonsi, Guid’Antonio Vespucci, Paol’Antonio Soderini, Bernardo Rucellai, and Francesco Valori, went to San Marco to exhort the preacher to moderation. He answered that they had better exhort Lorenzo, who had sent them, to repent of his sins: God would spare no one. To the warning that he might be exiled, he replied that Lorenzo was a Florentine citizen and he a stranger; but the former would go and he would remain. He predicted the speedy death of Lorenzo, the Pope, and King Ferrante. The increasing and very intelligible discontent among the Medicean partisans, of which he could not but be aware, led him, however, to try and moderate his too frequent and exciting prophecies and confine himself more to moral and theological lectures. But his restless spirit carried him away. It would have been well for him could he have known moderation. But as his imagery, at once brilliant and irregular, is confusing and bewildering rather than elevating; as the terrors of his curse are weakened by repetition; as his precepts for Christian life rise to a pitch of asceticism, whose very exaggeration contains its own contradiction; as his teaching, so truly that of the Gospel in its principles and right application, loses its impressive force by straying to unsuitable ground; even so was it with his conduct in life. He irritated needlessly and aimlessly. The benefactions of the Medici to the convent and to the whole order had founded a relation of clientship, in which there was nothing offensive so long as both parties observed the moderation which had once been guaranteed by Cosimo’s cautiousness and was continued by Lorenzo’s tact and discretion. It was customary that when a new prior was appointed he should make a visit to the head of the family. Fra Girolamo, on being chosen prior in July 1491, refusedto do this. ‘I hold my election from God alone,’ said he; ‘to Him alone I owe obedience.’ It may easily be conceived that Lorenzo took this amiss, and, in his turn, spoke out freely. ‘A stranger has come into my house, and does not deign to visit me.’ However, he made no change in his conduct towards the convent; he sent gifts and money as before. Once some gold florins were found in the alms-box of the church. Fra Girolamo, who had previously made some personal remarks from the pulpit, caused the money to be given to the Buonuomini of San Martino, saying that silver and copper was enough for the convent. When Lorenzo came to walk in the convent garden, according to his custom, the prior never showed himself. His admirers praise his conduct towards a man from whom he was separated by a deep inward gulf. If, instead of trying to work upon that man and so introduce a different state of things, he intended to cause a violent conflict, he acted rightly.Lorenzo’s own conduct towards Savonarola was always prudent. The Dominican’s biographers relate that the great man, being repulsed by him, incited Fra Mariano to attack him from the pulpit; but such incitement was probably not needed. The breach between the two preachers was older than themselves; the antagonism of the two orders was but personified in these men, so radically different from each other. In a sermon preached on Ascension-Day, on the text: ‘It is not for you to know the times or the seasons,’ the Augustinian accused the prior of San Marco of being a false prophet, an instigator of sedition among the people, a stirrer-up of strife and disorder. It is said that his vehemence and exaggerated personalities gave offence to his numerous hearers, and ruined his fame as an orator. Seven years later, when the Roman court was in the greatest excitement on account of events in Florence, when Savonarola lay under the ban of the Church, when his safety and his very life depended only on the momentary preponderance of one party or another in the excited city, already stained with the bloodof noble citizens—then this same Fra Mariano preached in Sant’Agostino at Rome in such immoderate terms, and applied to his hated rival such coarse expressions, that even to unlearned hearers his gifts of eloquence seemed to have been swallowed up by party-spirit; and the cardinals who were present turned their backs upon him. They had expected a refutation of the Dominican’s teaching, and they heard nothing but raging accusations accompanied by vulgar gestures.[548]‘If you want to understand a monk, ask a monk about him,’ so said the Augustinian. After his personal attack at Florence, it is said that Fra Mariano, apparently regardless of his discomfiture, invited his rival to San Gallo, where they celebrated a solemn mass together and exchanged civilities; but the story does not agree with Savonarola’s character and the frankness so much praised by his biographers in his relations with Lorenzo.
OPPOSITION TENDENCIES. FRA GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA.
TheMedici had always counted on the clergy for support. It would be unjust to attribute this entirely to selfish motives; they had other and nobler aims than merely that of more easily ruling the multitude in union with its spiritual directors. Other motives besides scruples of conscience actuated them in the building of churches and convents. The clergy, especially the regular clergy, were, with a portion of the nobility, still the chief representatives of the higher scientific and literary culture. Cosimo’s grandson as well as himself found instruction, entertainment, and intellectual animation in the society of Camaldulensians, Dominicans, Augustinians, and Servites. But as Lorenzo endeavoured to keep under his own control the bishoprics of the district, he made use of the monastic orders in the same way. He employed them privately to discover and direct the stream of popular opinion and popular inclination. Owing to their constitution, their varied composition, their connection with all classes, and their comparative independence, they were at once more trustworthy and abler instruments than the lay communities of various kinds which he ruled by means of his confidants, high and low. These latter societies might prove dangerous to him through party-spirit and secret machinations; a danger which indeed afterwards became apparent, and was vigorously opposed by the rulers of Tuscany. The religious orders, when they devoted themselves to furthering the aims of the Medici, hadanother advantage over the companies. The many little jealousies and enmities which divided them from each other gave better security for secresy; and the fact that very much depended upon this may afford an explanation of the great liberality of the Medici towards the convents. In the annals of the Monastery of the Angeli, where Cosimo was wont to visit Ambrogio Traversari, and where Lorenzo’s sons went to hear philosophical lectures and to be present at sacred representations, it is recorded that besides the usual yearly gifts of money, Lorenzo used on certain festivals to send to the monks, who were by no means rich, fish, cheese, and fruit; and also that he procured for them the bounty of the Signoria. ‘We owe everything to God, through Lorenzo His instrument.’ Don Guido, formerly a Cistercian monk, who became prior of the Angeli in 1484, was Lorenzo’s confessor.[540]
But it would be a mistake to suppose that even when his relations with the Papacy were most intimate, Lorenzo could reckon unconditionally upon the clergy. Those same disputes between the religious orders came in the way, as well as the democratic spirit prevalent among the monks, which saw through the tendencies of the existing government even when it seemed to be favouring popular objects. This internal opposition naturally developed more strongly as a more serious way of thinking gained ground; such a temper as had been fostered by the pious chief pastors Antonine and Orlando Bonarli, though their successors, under whom the diocese of Florence was chiefly administered by vicars, did nothing to maintain it. About the year 1490 it became apparent that the general life of pleasure and worldliness was about to take a turn in an opposite direction. No one could then foresee the ultimate scope and results of this opposition; but it showed itself in a manner which necessarily attractedthe attention of him who was accustomed to direct all things, and who had too much tact and too much practice in judging of moral and intellectual tendencies not to recognise the first symptoms of a turn of the tide. Its importance was the more apparent to him because it showed itself in a field, of which, as of those of politics and literature, he thought himself the ruler; but which was withdrawn from his influence as soon as the prevalent materialistic tendencies were combated by inward moral impulses and views. This resistance was in the highest degree dangerous to the Medici, because its chief strength lay in the moral consciousness of the people, hitherto artificially suppressed or put to sleep, but now awakened to new life; and it was this which enabled it to hold out so firmly long after it appeared to be conquered. It was the fate of the Medici that opposition sprang from ground which they had long been accustomed to regard as their own, and to treat in the light of an heirloom.
In 1482, there entered the convent of San Marco a brother of the order, who had been driven from his native city of Ferrara by the storms of war raging around it, in order to seek a more peaceful sphere of activity beyond the Apennines, little suspecting what other storms he would have to encounter there. The Porta Savonarola at Padua recalls to mind the neighbouring residence of that noble family; and in the Prato della Valle stands a statue of Antonio Savonarola, who manfully defended his native city in the middle of the thirteenth century. In 1440 Michele Savonarola was called to Ferrara, where he was presented with the rights of citizenship by the Marquis Lionello d’Este, and acquired a great reputation as physician in ordinary to the Marquis, as professor at the university, and also as an author.[541]His sonNiccolò married Elena Bonacossi, and her masculine spirit was inherited by her son Girolamo, who has made the name of his race famous throughout the world. At the age of three-and-twenty this son, without consulting the wishes of his parents, entered the Predicant order at Bologna in the spring of 1475. In a letter to his father he pleaded, in explanation and justification of the step, his soul’s cry of anguish against the worldliness to which he beheld Italy fallen a prey. ‘I could no longer look upon the deep corruption of the blinded people, the oppression of virtue, the exaltation of vice; it was an unspeakable torment to me, and I prayed daily to God that He might take me out of this pit of destruction. Now, in His infinite goodness, He has vouchsafed this grace to me, notwithstanding my unworthiness.’ But it was not the worldliness of the laity alone that shocked him; the corruption in the Church stood before the eyes of his soul in yet more glaring colours. He lamented it in his poems—highly imaginative and lofty outpourings of a soul brightened with the fire of love, penetrated with the consciousness of the need for a higher development, tortured by a foreboding of approaching judgment.[542]His first intention was to devote himself to teaching rather than to preaching; but in the seventh year after his entrance into the order, he was sent to his native city, where he lived as a stranger, rarely saw even his nearest relatives, and was not much appreciated as a speaker. Yet he cannot have been lacking in eloquence; for one day when he was travelling from Ferrara to Mantua his reproofs made such an impression on the soldiers who were in the boat playing and swearing, that they penitently fell upon their knees before him.
Fra Girolamo’s reception in Florence was not encouraging.The man and the city could not be attractive to each other; the one was leaning more and more towards asceticism, and the other towards immoderate pleasure. The one cared for nothing but Holy Scripture, and developed its doctrines in lofty, unvarnished speech, whose rough careless form was not softened by his Lombard accent, his hoarse voice, and vehement delivery; the other, sharing the common plight, knew little of the Bible, and was accustomed to preachers whose artistic phraseology recalled the elegant tone of the literary palæstra. In his own convent the stranger found little sympathy. A philosophising tone prevailed in conversation; and the adoption of classical learning might well raise some scruples in the mind of the Ferrarese, whose early education had also been of a philosophical kind. This double discord left decided marks in its train. At Savonarola’s Lenten sermons in San Lorenzo in 1483, the number of listeners was extremely small. He himself was perfectly aware of the defects of his delivery: ‘Those who knew me in those days,’ he said ten years later, ‘know that I had neither voice nor lungs, nor understood anything about preaching, so that I was a bore to everybody.’ He needed a longer apprenticeship. For two years he preached during Lent at San Gemignano. Then he was summoned to Brescia, where in 1486 he preached the sermons on the Apocalypse which first extended his reputation, the prophecies in which of divine judgment and the exhortations to repentance recurred vividly to the souls of the people six-and-twenty years later, when the French army was committing that plunder whose horrors have rarely been equalled in Christian times. A chapter of the order held at Reggio brought Savonarola in contact with Giovanni Pico, who took such an interest in the bold and enthusiastic preacher that he got him sent back to Florence, through the intervention of Lorenzo de’ Medici. In 1490 Savonarola returned to San Marco, there to begin the work which left deep and broad traces on the ecclesiastical and political history ofItaly; which led to hard fighting, not without fault on his side, but which at last led him to martyrdom, and encircled his brow with a glory that no contradiction and no change of times and views have been able to deprive of its radiance.
Savonarola found in Florence a rival who was his exact opposite in delivery and in opinions. Fra Mariano of Genazzano came from a place situated on the slope of the Aequian and Hernican mountains, and made important by the great palace of the Colonna. He belonged to the order of the Augustinian Hermits, and dwelt in the convent of Sto. Spirito, until Lorenzo, with whom he had managed to get into favour, built a grand convent at the gate of San Gallo, where there was an old church with a decayed hospital and a foundling establishment. This building was razed to the ground in 1524, when the Emperor and a Medicean Pope were sending their troops against Florence; not a trace of it is left, and its place is occupied by the rows of trees and groves of the walk called the Parterre, and the little church of the Madonna della Tosse, which looks like a shrine left standing amid the general destruction.[543]The convent must have been finished about 1488. Lorenzo provided it with a choice library, visited it frequently with intimate friends, and was fond of discussing philosophical and theological questions with Fra Mariano. Naturally, the Augustinian was wont to say that among men of such high position he had never known one so God-fearing as Lorenzo. As a preacher Fra Mariano was just the man for the people, as well as for scholars. He was little of stature, but his voice was full and melodious, and his utterance agreeable; he terrified and comforted, and made his hearers weep and laugh. Poliziano describes the impression made on him by Mariano’s bearing, manner, gestures, and whole appearance, his sonorous voice, his well-chosen expressions, his majestic sentences, the artistic construction of his phrases, the harmoniousnessof his cadences, the richness of his imagery, the clearness and force of his contrasts, the grace of his narrations, and his easy changes of subject, preventing all monotony. The picture Poliziano gives of the mode of life and conversation of this spiritual orator, in whom he celebrates only the qualities desirable in a temporal one, shows that Mariano was just the man to sail round the rocks which threatened to wreck Girolamo. ‘I have met him repeatedly at the villa and entered into confidential talk with him. I never knew a man at once more attractive and more cautious. He neither repels by immoderate severity nor deceives and leads astray by exaggerated indulgence. Many preachers think themselves masters of men’s life and death. While they abuse their power, they always look gloomy, and weary men by constantly setting up for judges of morals. But here is a man of moderation. In the pulpit he is a severe censor; but when he descends, he indulges in winning, friendly discourse. Therefore, I and my excellent friend Pico have much intercourse with him, and nothing refreshes us after our literary labours so much as his conversation. Lorenzo de’ Medici, who understands men so well, shows how highly he esteems him, not only in that he has built him a splendid convent, but also in that he often visits him, preferring a conversation with him while walking to any other recreation.’[544]
Savonarola’s biographer Fra Pacifico Burlamacchi is no doubt quite right in praising Fra Mariano’s eloquence rather than his doctrine, in his account of the orator’s little artifice to impress the people. But this man’s mastery of his art must have been considerable, to make Girolamo Benivieni once say to the Ferrarese preacher, ‘Father, no one can deny the truth, the usefulness, and needfulness of yourteaching. But your delivery lacks attraction, especially when one is daily led to make a comparison with Fra Mariano.’ To which the other answered that elegance of expression must give way to the simple preaching of sound doctrine.[545]But it was long before Savonarola made his way. His reputation, indeed, increased rapidly, but admirers still flocked round Fra Mariano; princes and commonwealth applied to Lorenzo, begging him to give the Augustinian, who seemed to be regarded as belonging to his household, leave to come and preach to them. Lodovico il Moro begged for this not merely as a personal favour, but because the city and all the people longed for the fulfilment of Lorenzo’s promise; and the consuls of the Sabine town of Norcia—the home of S. Benedict—called Fra Mariano in their letter ‘God’s angel upon earth.’
It seems that Fra Girolamo was discouraged by his former failures in this field, and the growing success of the Augustinian, and thought at first of limiting his efforts to the philosophical and theological instruction of the novices. His short philosophic compendia are only valuable in the present day for their display of a spirit of justice and sense of the need of investigation in human knowledge, and of analytical progress from the known to the unknown, instead of belief by authority; these, as well as his smaller ascetic and moral treatises, mostly date from the first years after his return to Florence. In them may be seen the mystic enthusiasm which soon became more and more prominent in his sermons, expositions of the Bible, his poems, and other important works. Combined with this mysticism was a striving to clothe his views and prophecies of the future with the authority of Holy Scripture, with which he was perhaps better acquainted than anyone else at the time; buthe interpreted it with a freedom, perfectly honest on his part, which necessarily aroused scruples, for it opened out a boundless field, where an excited fancy or secondary objects might easily lead him astray; and this danger was the greater when he turned his attention especially to the Apocalypse. In the summer of 1490 divers citizens sought admission to the lectures for the novices. The convent-rooms being too small, Savonarola continued his lectures at first in the court; then, as the number of hearers rapidly increased, he transferred them on August 1 to the church. A rosebush still marks the spot where Fra Girolamo taught in the courtyard of the convent; and in these latter days it has been resolved to raise a statue to him there, and a bust has been placed in what was once his cell. He needs no such monuments where all around recalls his memory; but they are tokens of the veneration paid to him by posterity in spite of all his weaknesses and mistakes.
The direction Savonarola had taken soon led him further than he calculated upon or perhaps intended. The effect produced by his discourses is quite intelligible when one compares their character with that of the ordinary preaching of the day, and takes the prevailing temper into consideration. In both cases one meets with strange contrasts. Artificial, wordy discourses, that people were accustomed to hear in the sermons of the followers of Bernardino of Siena; besides the simple, often impressive moral, there was a mixture of abstruse scholasticism, asceticism, and anecdotes intended for the multitude, on whom, however, part of their meaning was lost, and who laughed and cried by turns, and were confirmed in their views of devotional practices and works, in which too much stress was apt to be laid on externals. Still the supremacy gained over the people by the moral and political tendencies favoured by the Medici was by no means so complete as to leave no room for opposing views, whose inward strength was only increased by the outward resistance they encountered. The Dominican’ssubject-matter, his mode of demonstration, his whole manner, were such as to make an impression upon opponents. To most preachers as well as hearers, the Bible was a sealed book. When it was opened its word became a living well springing up into a mighty fertilising stream, and disclosing that wondrous power which has never failed wherever it has been heard. Savonarola well knew that power. If he failed it was from a defect exactly contrary to those of the others. They lacked the true perception and feeling for that which alone could give their teachings a meaning true, deep, and sound for all time. He lacked moderation and the power to control his perceptions, his acquirements, and himself. This was the rock on which he was ultimately wrecked. Guicciardini, who was ten years old at Lorenzo’s death, whose youth was passed in the midst of Fra Girolamo’s most strenuous activity, and whose eyes were early open to all that went on around him, speaks of the natural unstudied elegance of the sermons he heard and read, and remarks that never had there been seen a man so versed in Holy Scripture, never had such abundant discourse been united with such a lasting impression.[546]In after years, when Savonarola’s attacks on the corruption in the Church sought and found a personal object in that Church’s unworthy head, he encountered in the enmity of other religious societies a stumbling-block which contributed not a little to his fall. But even in these earlier days he had long ago roused opposition, some of which, proceeding from purely inward grounds, was unavoidable; but a nature less rugged in its enthusiasm might have broken the force of some of it.
Fra Girolamo’s great day was yet far distant. But this activity and the effects produced on moral life by his preaching, by his instructions in the convent, and by his and his pupils’ influence on all classes, were already beginning to strike root that year when he gathered around him themore serious-minded men and youths in San Marco, and set himself to counteract the dominant pursuit of sensual enjoyment which threatened to paralyse the energies of the people. This activity and influence, when its chief source and originator had personally succumbed, though his work was only apparently destroyed, was described in glowing words by the great historian, though he is not quite consistent in his views of Savonarola’s character. ‘What he did for the amendment of morals was wonderful and holy. Never did such order and such fear of God reign in Florence as in his time; and the deterioration which set in after his death proves how entirely everything was his work and the fruit of his labours. There was no more gaming in public, people only played with trepidation and in private; the taverns, the accustomed scenes of the wild doings of degenerate youth, were closed; the worst vices were suppressed in consequence of the abhorrence excited against them. Most women laid aside their objectionable garments; the young people were rescued from their wild ways and led back to a moral life, and visited the churches in companies. Gamesters, blasphemers, and dissolute women were in danger of being pursued and stoned. At the Carnaval, playing-cards, dice, indecent pictures and books were collected and burnt on the square of the Signoria; and on the day formerly given up to all kinds of excesses, a great church procession took place. The elder people took up a religious life, went diligently to mass, vespers, and sermons, received the sacraments and distinguished themselves by doing good. Many youths of the first families and some men of riper years entered the Predicant Order. In all Italy was never seen a convent like that of San Marco, where the excellent instruction given in the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew languages and literature promised to furnish fresh ornaments to the Order.’
This activity, which produced such a change and passed sentence of condemnation on a system that had been carried out for years with equal skill and perseverance, was onlybeginning in the last years of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s life; but its very beginnings could not fail to furnish matter for reflection to that keen thinker. Even before 1490 similar symptoms had shown themselves, whether connected with Savonarola’s earliest labours is not certain, but it is highly probable. Poliziano’s prologue to the Menæchmi of Plautus, written in May 1488, contains a vehement diatribe against the opponents of these scenic representations—those who protested against the employment of young people in reciting the too often objectionable verses of classical plays.[547]Monks are the objects of the poet’s attack; monks who were not like his friend Mariano.
Sed qui nos damnant, histriones sunt maxumi,Nam Curios simulant, vivunt bacchanalia.Hi sunt præcipuè, quidam clamosi, leves,Cucullati, lignipedes, cincti funibus,Superciliosum, in curvi cervicum pecus.Qui quòd ab aliis et habitu et cultu dissentiunt,Tristesque vultu vendunt sanctimonias,Censuram sibi quandam et tyrranidem occupant.Pavidamque plebem territant minaciis.
These lines, recited in Lorenzo’s presence, are witnesses to the existence of the opposition which increased in strength every year, and from whose influence many, even of those who sided with the ruling party, seem not to have been free. In Lent 1491 Fra Girolamo began to preach in Sta. Maria del Fiore, the crowd having now become too great for the conventual church; the number of hearers increased daily, the impression made by his predictions of the punishment and evil to come became more vivid, till Lorenzo thought it advisable to try to stem the tide of growing excitement which threatened to endanger his work and his influence. For these prophecies of approaching judgment contained something more than indirect attacks on the present state of affairs, and the serious turn of mind encouraged by thepreacher most necessarily deprive of their force many of the means which served to maintain that state of affairs.
Five chief citizens of the dominant party—men who all, with one exception, later on personally fell under the mighty influence of Savonarola—Domenico Bonsi, Guid’Antonio Vespucci, Paol’Antonio Soderini, Bernardo Rucellai, and Francesco Valori, went to San Marco to exhort the preacher to moderation. He answered that they had better exhort Lorenzo, who had sent them, to repent of his sins: God would spare no one. To the warning that he might be exiled, he replied that Lorenzo was a Florentine citizen and he a stranger; but the former would go and he would remain. He predicted the speedy death of Lorenzo, the Pope, and King Ferrante. The increasing and very intelligible discontent among the Medicean partisans, of which he could not but be aware, led him, however, to try and moderate his too frequent and exciting prophecies and confine himself more to moral and theological lectures. But his restless spirit carried him away. It would have been well for him could he have known moderation. But as his imagery, at once brilliant and irregular, is confusing and bewildering rather than elevating; as the terrors of his curse are weakened by repetition; as his precepts for Christian life rise to a pitch of asceticism, whose very exaggeration contains its own contradiction; as his teaching, so truly that of the Gospel in its principles and right application, loses its impressive force by straying to unsuitable ground; even so was it with his conduct in life. He irritated needlessly and aimlessly. The benefactions of the Medici to the convent and to the whole order had founded a relation of clientship, in which there was nothing offensive so long as both parties observed the moderation which had once been guaranteed by Cosimo’s cautiousness and was continued by Lorenzo’s tact and discretion. It was customary that when a new prior was appointed he should make a visit to the head of the family. Fra Girolamo, on being chosen prior in July 1491, refusedto do this. ‘I hold my election from God alone,’ said he; ‘to Him alone I owe obedience.’ It may easily be conceived that Lorenzo took this amiss, and, in his turn, spoke out freely. ‘A stranger has come into my house, and does not deign to visit me.’ However, he made no change in his conduct towards the convent; he sent gifts and money as before. Once some gold florins were found in the alms-box of the church. Fra Girolamo, who had previously made some personal remarks from the pulpit, caused the money to be given to the Buonuomini of San Martino, saying that silver and copper was enough for the convent. When Lorenzo came to walk in the convent garden, according to his custom, the prior never showed himself. His admirers praise his conduct towards a man from whom he was separated by a deep inward gulf. If, instead of trying to work upon that man and so introduce a different state of things, he intended to cause a violent conflict, he acted rightly.
Lorenzo’s own conduct towards Savonarola was always prudent. The Dominican’s biographers relate that the great man, being repulsed by him, incited Fra Mariano to attack him from the pulpit; but such incitement was probably not needed. The breach between the two preachers was older than themselves; the antagonism of the two orders was but personified in these men, so radically different from each other. In a sermon preached on Ascension-Day, on the text: ‘It is not for you to know the times or the seasons,’ the Augustinian accused the prior of San Marco of being a false prophet, an instigator of sedition among the people, a stirrer-up of strife and disorder. It is said that his vehemence and exaggerated personalities gave offence to his numerous hearers, and ruined his fame as an orator. Seven years later, when the Roman court was in the greatest excitement on account of events in Florence, when Savonarola lay under the ban of the Church, when his safety and his very life depended only on the momentary preponderance of one party or another in the excited city, already stained with the bloodof noble citizens—then this same Fra Mariano preached in Sant’Agostino at Rome in such immoderate terms, and applied to his hated rival such coarse expressions, that even to unlearned hearers his gifts of eloquence seemed to have been swallowed up by party-spirit; and the cardinals who were present turned their backs upon him. They had expected a refutation of the Dominican’s teaching, and they heard nothing but raging accusations accompanied by vulgar gestures.[548]‘If you want to understand a monk, ask a monk about him,’ so said the Augustinian. After his personal attack at Florence, it is said that Fra Mariano, apparently regardless of his discomfiture, invited his rival to San Gallo, where they celebrated a solemn mass together and exchanged civilities; but the story does not agree with Savonarola’s character and the frankness so much praised by his biographers in his relations with Lorenzo.