Great Men as Prophets of a New Era

by Newell Dwight Hillis

In the very year that Constantinople fell, and the scholars fled, carrying their manuscripts—as sparks fly from the hammer falling upon an anvil—Savonarola entered into being in the beautiful little city of Ferrara. His grandfather was a physician, a teacher of the youth of his town, and a member of the council. He had achieved some honour as a scholar, and won much gold and favour as a skillful surgeon. To his father's house came a few leading men of the villages round about to read the pages of Dante and to talk about the manuscripts that had thrown all Italy into a fever of excitement. The boy had a hungry mind, and rose early and sat up late to read the copies of the few books that his father had in the little library. His native town was the capital of the little state, and the Duke of Este was his father's friend. When the boy was six years of age, Pope Pius II passed through Ferrara on his way to a celebration in Venice, and in preparation for his coming a crimson canopy was stretched above the street, while in the public square a throne was erected, and when the Pope had taken his seat therein a procession of children passed by, strewing flowers at the feet of the Pope. Young men and women sang songs in his honour, and chanted hymns of his praise, midst clouds of golden incense filling all the air. On the outskirts of the crowd stood the miserable poor, the half-starved peasants, the ragged children, the miserable lepers. Their faces were gaunt, their eyes hollow, their bread, crusts, their garments, rags, and the spectacle of gluttony, drunkenness and luxury, in contrast with the vast multitude of starving poor, created such a revulsion in the mind of the boy that from that hour all should have known that it was only a question of time when this gifted youth would become an ascetic and a reformer.

The revulsion in the heart of Savonarola was inevitably deepened by the lust and cruelty laid to the door of the Church itself. That was a dark hour for the Papacy and Italy. Paul II was a Venetian merchant, greedy, ambitious, who, in middle age, saw that the Pope was incidentally an ecclesiastic, but essentially an emperor, a statesman and a banker. Everything he touched in business turned to gold. He had agents out in all the world buying diamonds, pearls, rubies and emeralds. He hired architects, sculptors and painters, and made the church an art gallery. "Once the church had wooden cups and plates for the communion, but golden priests. Now," wrote Savonarola, "the church has golden cups and plates, but wooden-headed priests." The Rome of that time was a Rome of art and vice, gold and blood, cathedrals and mud huts. The least shocking page in the papal history of the time describes Alexander VI, and his son Cæsare and his daughter Lucretia, standing in the open window of the papal palace, looking down into the courtyard, filled with unlucky criminals. These prisoners, sentenced to death, ran round and round the court, while Cæsare let fly his arrows, and the Pope and Lucretia applauded each lucky hit. The scene is one of many, and the knowledge of such scenes inevitably brought about rebellion in the soul of Savonarola.

At the beginning of his career, the young reformer attracted but little attention. He entered a monastery and became a monk, and his novitiate was chiefly marked by a fervour of humilities. He sought the most menial offices, and did penance for his sins by the severest austerities. He was soon worn to a shadow, but his gaunt features were beautified by an expression of singular force and benevolence. Luminous dark eyes sparkled and flamed beneath his thick brows and his large mouth was as capable of gentle sweetness as of power and set resolve. But the spectacle of the sensualism, drunkenness, cruelty, theft, ignorance and wretchedness of Florence, that had a handful of aristocrats at one extreme and thousands of paupers at the other, gradually filled his soul with burning indignation. He began to see visions and to make prophecies which afterward were mysteriously fulfilled. His first success as a preacher came when he was thirty-one and the following year at Brescia, in a sermon on the Apocalypse, he shook men's souls by his terrible picture of the wrath to come. A halo of light was reported to have been seen about his head, and when, six years later, he returned to Florence, to preach in the cathedral, his fame as an orator had gone before him and the cloister gardens were too small to contain the crowds that flocked to hear him.

The occasion of his first sermon in the cathedral was one long remembered in the city. The vast multitudes saw a gaunt figure whose thick hood covered the whole head and shoulders. From deeply sunken eye-sockets there looked out two eyes that blazed as with lightning. The nose was strong and prominent, with wide nostrils, capable of terrible distention under the stress of emotion. The mouth was full, with compressed, projecting lips, and large, as if made for a torrent of eloquence. The speaker was a visionary, and a seer. At one moment he melted his audience to tears, at another he stirred them to horror, again quickening their souls with prayer and pleadings, that had in them the sweetness of the very spirit of Christ. Soon the walls of the church reëchoed with sobs and wailings, dominated by one ringing voice. One scribe explains fragments of the sermon with these words: "Here I was so overcome with weeping that I could not go on." The poet, Mirandola, tells us that Savonarola's voice was like a clap of doom: a cold shiver ran through the marrow of his bones, and the hair of his head stood on end as he listened. The theme that morning was this: "Repent! A judgment of God is at hand. A sword is suspended over you. Italy is doomed for her iniquity." The speaker prophesied coming bloodshed, the ruin of cities, the trampling down of provinces, the passage of armies, and the devastating wars that were about to fall on Italy.

The great man of Florence at this moment was Lorenzo the Magnificent. Lorenzo was the most powerful figure in Italy, the most widely-travelled, and the richest man of his time. Tiring of luxury and flattery, he was ambitious to be called the patron of art and literature. He had fitted up a great banqueting-room in his palace, in which he could assemble painters, sculptors, architects, actors, poets, philosophers. His seat at the head of the table was after the fashion of a throne, and he had made himself a kind of dictator in the realm of learning. Always open to flattery, he was surrounded by a group of citizens who never ceased burning incense at the altar of his egotism. He was at once a politician, a poet, an amateur actor, dramatist, and singer. At his table sat Ficino, who translated Plato's works into Latin, and Pico della Mirandola, who was the idol of Florentine society. It was the latter's boast that a single reading fixed in his memory any language, any essay or poem, and made it his forever. Other guests were Leo Alberti and Leonardo, the two men of comprehensive genius in all the group that lived in the palace of the Prince. Constant adulation made Lorenzo arrogant and vain to the last degree. In disguise he led a group of dissipated young men in the carnival fêtes. He wrote licentious carnival songs and so degraded were his followers that they went everywhither shouting his praises as a poet superior to Dante. And when, in July of the following year, Savonarola was elected Prior of St. Mark's, Lorenzo sent messengers to him, bidding him to show more respect to the head of the State.

Savonarola refused to do so. One day the Prince was seen walking in the garden of the monastery. An attendant came in to Savonarola, and announced that Lorenzo the Magnificent was in the garden. "Does he ask for me?" "No," replied the young monk. "Then let him walk." Shortly afterward the Prince sent a deputation to wait on the new Prior, telling him that it was not good form to preach against the Prince, who was the patron of St. Mark's, to which Savonarola replied, "Did I receive my position from Lorenzo, or from Almighty God?" Savonarola's eyes blazed, and he spake in tones of thunder and the answer was, "From Almighty God." "Then," went on the Prior, "to Almighty God will I render homage."

Lorenzo, as it chanced, was drawing near to the end of his life. One day a messenger came from the palace announcing his dangerous illness. Because Lorenzo had usurped the liberties of his country, had robbed and oppressed his own people, Savonarola would not go. Then a second messenger came, saying that the Prince was dying and asked absolution. The Prior found the Prince propped up upon velvet pillows, and lying in a great silken chamber. All his life long, Lorenzo had been accustomed to soft words and pliant service. Now this stern prophet of duty towered above his couch like a messenger of God. The Prior told him absolution could not be granted except upon certain conditions. "Three things are required of you; you must have a full and lively faith in God's mercy; you must restore your ill-gotten gains; you must restore liberty to Florence." Twice the Prince assented, but the third time his face went white. He shivered, as if in fear, and at length, in silence, he turned his face toward the wall. Savonarola turned his back. He would not grant absolution. Lorenzo died. The news was spread through the city by the relatives and servants standing about the bedside of the dead Prince. The event heaved the soul of Florence as the tides heave the sea.

The Prior was now the most influential man in Italy. His sermons took on a new boldness, and his denunciation of vices filled the city with excitement. Ever increasing his power as a preacher, he now added certain addresses as a patriot. He hated the tyranny of the Medici with an undying hatred. Taking upon himself full responsibility, he sent a letter of welcome to Charles VIII and his French army, believing that if Florence opened her gates to the French, the Florentines might recover their own liberty. Having expelled the family of the Medici, he found it necessary to write a constitution for Florence, and his influence in shaping that constitution was the most powerful influence exerted in that critical time. Leaving to others the task of writing the code, he told the people plainly that, of necessity, a government by one man strengthened the single ruler toward despotism and autocracy, while self-government, through the choice of representatives, worked for the diffusion of strength and responsibility. He proposed a grand council of 3,000 citizens appointed by the city judges, a body that answers to our House of Representatives, and another superior council of eighty citizens, all over forty years of age, who, in turn, were to share with the magistrates the task of appointing the higher officers of the State. Then he brought about a reform of taxation, full amnesty for political offenders, made usury a treasonable act, founded a bank that loaned money to the poor on their character and to the rich on their collateral. He organized a movement against licentious plays, against luxury, extravagance, ostentatious dress and houses. And when the exiled princes made an alliance with the Pope, he denounced the crimes of the Papacy.

Little by little, a great moral revival swept over Florence and Italy, a revival that culminated in the coming together of the Florentines in the public square, where the people threw upon a blazing fire their vanities, with all the implements of gambling, fraud, and trickery, of vice and drunkenness. Without being himself an ascetic, without making any sweeping attack upon pleasure through music or the drama, Savonarola was an opponent of every form of sensuality, and the gilded vices that undermine sound morals. He was first of all a preacher, changing men's lives and, incidentally, stating the reasons for their personal reformation. Luther changed men's thinking first, and showed men why this was wrong, and that was right, and therefore wrought fundamental changes. But Savonarola was less of a thinker and more of an evangelist. He had all the action of Demosthenes, all the earnestness of Peter the Hermit, all the voice, the gestures and the manner of Whitefield. He believed that the inevitable end of sin was the Inferno of Dante, and therefore his language was full of fire, his voice full of tears, and he plead with men to flee from Vanity Fair as Lot fled from Sodom.

His uncompromising spirit had long since aroused the hatred of political adversaries as well as of the degraded court of Rome. Even now, when his authority was at its height, when his fame filled the land, and the vast cathedral and its precincts lacked space for the crowds flocking to hear him, his enemies were secretly preparing his downfall. From the beginning it was plain that Socrates was fighting a losing battle against the wicked judges of Athens. From the beginning it must have been plain to Dante that his cunning and insidious foes, who felt that he alone stood between them and their own enrichment, would drive him an exile from Florence. And when Savonarola came into collision with Pope Alexander VI, it was like a bird of paradise going up against some Gibraltar of granite and steel.