Savonarola.—But the illustration in every respect most apposite (if it did not seem almost a national blasphemy to say so) is that offered us by Savonarola. Under the influence of a vision, he believed himself, even from his youth, sent by Christ to redeem the country from its corruption. One day, while speaking to a nun, it seemed to him that heaven suddenly opened; and he saw in a vision the calamities of the Church, and heard a voice commanding him to announce them to the people.
The visions of the Apocalypse and of the Old Testament prophets passed in review before him. In 1491 he wished to leave off treating of politics in his sermons. “I watched all Saturday, and the whole night, but at daybreak, while I was praying, I heard a voice say, ‘Fool, dost thou not see that God will have thee go on in the same way?’ ”
In 1492, while preaching during Advent, he had a vision of a sword, on which was written, “Gladius Domini super terram.” Suddenly, the sword turned towards the earth, the air was darkened, there was a rain of swords, arrows, and fire, and the earth became a prey to famine and pestilence. From this moment, he began to predict the pestilence which, in fact, afterwards came to pass.
In another vision, becoming ambassador to Christ, he makes a long journey to Paradise, and there holds discourse with many saints and with the Virgin, whose throne he describes, not forgetting the number of the precious stones with which it is adorned.[390]
We shall see how a similar scene was described by Lazzaretti. Savonarola was continually meditating on his dreams; and he tried to distinguish which among his visions were produced by angels, and which were the work of demons. Scarcely ever is he touched by a misgiving that he may possibly be in error. In one of his dialogues he declares that “to feign one’s self a prophet in order to persuade others, would be like making God Himself an impostor. Might it not be,” continues the objector, “that you were deceiving yourself? No,” is the reply, “I worship God—I seek to follow in His footsteps; it cannot be that God should deceive me.”[391]
Yet, with the contradiction peculiar to unhinged minds, he had written a short time before, “I am not a prophet, neither the son of a prophet; it is your sins that make me a prophet perforce.” Moreover, in one page he says that his prophetic illumination is independent of grace, whereas, a few pages back, he had declared that the two were one and the same thing.
Villari justly remarks that “this is the singularity of his character, that a man who had given to Florence the best form of republic, who dominated an entire people, who filled the world with his eloquence and had been the greatest of philosophers—should make it his boast that he heard voices in the air, and saw the sword of the Lord!”
“But,” as the same author well concludes, “the very puerility of his visions proves that he was the victim of hallucinations; and a still stronger proof is their uselessness, even hurtfulness, as far as he himself was concerned.
“What need was there, if he wished to cheat the masses, to write treatises on his visions, to speak of them to his mother, to write reflections on them on the margins of his Bible? Those things which his admirers would have been most eager to hide, those which the simplest intelligence would never have allowed to get into print, these very productions he continued to publish and republish. The truth is that, as he often confessed, he felt an inward fire burning in his bones, and forcing him to speak; and as he was himself swept away by the force of that ecstatic delirium, so he succeeded in carrying with him his audience, who were moved by his words in a way we find it hard to understand when we compare the impression produced with the text of the sermons themselves.”
This helps us to understand how—exactly in the same manner as Lazzaretti—he propagated his divine madness among the people, not only epidemically, by the contagion of ideas, but producing actual insanity in persons, who, being nearly or quite without education, preached and wrote extempore in consequence of their madness. Thus Domenico Cecchi[392] was the author of a work entitled Sacred Reform, which contains the very just suggestions of relieving the Great Council from minor business, taxing church property, imposing a single tax, and creating a militia, also that of fixing the amount of girls’ dowries. In his preface, he writes: “I set myself with my fancy to make such a work, and I can make no other, and by day and night methinks I have made such efforts that I might call them miraculous; but it has come to pass that I myself stand amazed thereat.”