PAGANISM IN LITERATURE.
The tide of classical enthusiasm was now swollen by the introduction of the Greek classics and the emigration to Italy of numerous distinguished Greek scholars. Historians vie with each other in describing the enthusiastic ardor of the Italians in the cultivation of these two great ancient literatures. It amounted to an intoxication that seized upon young and old, laity and clergy, women as well as men. The purely literary advantages to be obtained by so general a devotion to classic lore were of course enormous. But in this world, says a distinguished English Catholic divine[138] in referring to the period in question, “evil follows good as its shadow, human nature perverting and corrupting what is intrinsically innocent or praiseworthy. It was not Virgil, nor Cicero, nor Tacitus, nor Homer, nor Demosthenes that was most read and imitated, but Propertius, and Tibullus, and Apuleius. Pagan ideas colored men’s thoughts; pagan ethics supplanted Christian morals; pagan theogony was better understood than the Christian catechism; and their influences spread not only through the schools, but to the cloister. Men sought in those classics, not poetry, but pruriency; not finished style, but abandoned vice; not accountability in a hereafter, but nothingness in the future. The Fathers, many of whom wrote for the express purpose of denouncing the heathen immorality of these productions, must not be studied, because, forsooth, of the uncouthness of their style. Paganism impressed itself on everything, and men sought to ignore the road to Calvary that they might enter the flowery path of Olympus.”
Unfortunately, the period was most propitious for the introduction and spread of this moral poison. For long years, Italy had been demoralized by violent factions and bloody wars. Society was disorganized. The removal of the head of the church to Avignon had been fatal to ecclesiastical discipline. The effects of this laxity produced that most frightful of scourges—a corrupt clergy; and although scores of volumes have been written describing with great minuteness all the details of the rapid march and wide extent of this fatal influence, it would be difficult to present in any shorter space at this day any adequate idea of its depth or intensity. Alone and unaided, Savonarola dared to attack paganism in literature in its stronghold; for Florence was at that time the centre of the Hellenic and Roman revival, and filled with its most passionate devotees. He thus arrayed himself against Italy and the spirit of the age. He denounced pagan literature, and scouted as absurd the fanaticism for its study. Not the laity alone, but the clergy and the hierarchy, came in for a share of his strictures. “In the houses of the great prelates and great doctors,” he cries out, “nothing is thought of but poetry and rhetoric. Go and see for yourselves: you will find them with books of polite literature in their hands—pernicious writings—with Virgil, Horace, and Cicero, to prepare themselves for the cure of souls withal. Astrologers have the governance of the church. There is not a prelate, there is not a great doctor, but is intimate with some astrologer who predicts for him the hour and the moment for riding out or for whatever else he does. Our preachers have already given up Holy Scripture, and are given to philosophy, which they preach from the pulpit, and make it their queen. As to Holy Scripture, they treat it as the handmaid, because to preach philosophy looks learned, whereas it should simply be an aid in the interpretation of the divine Word.”
In another sermon, he says: “They tickle the ears with Aristotle, Plato, Virgil, and Petrarch, and take no concern in the salvation of souls. Why do they not, instead of books like these, teach that alone in which are the law and the spirit of life? The Gospel, my Christian brethren, must be your constant companion. I speak not of the book, but its spirit. If ye have not the spirit of grace, although you carry the whole volume about with you, it will be of no avail. And how much more foolish are those who go about loaded with briefs and tracts, and look as if they kept a stall at a fair? Charity does not consist of sheets of paper. The true books of Christ are the apostles and saints: the true reading of them is to imitate their lives.”
Because Savonarola thus denounced ancient classic literature, it must not be supposed that he was either ignorant of it or unable to recognize what was really valuable in it. On the contrary, he was as familiar with Greece and Rome as his adversaries, and denounced only such pagan authors as were dangerous to morality. He might as consistently have been charged with ignorance of Aristotle, the whole of whose philosophy and writings he had, as it were, at his fingers’ ends, because, after denouncing from the pulpit the blindness with which that philosopher was followed, he would ask: “Has your Aristotle succeeded in proving the immortality of the soul?”
Savonarola’s denunciation of the evil effects of pagan literature is too often represented as sweeping and indiscriminate, while in point of fact he falls short in both these respects of a writer of the XIXth century who counts a certain number of respectable adherents. We refer to the Abbé Gaume, who, in a remarkable work published in France in 18—, Le Ver Rongeur des Sociétés Modernes, maintains that very many of the evils of society that have their origin in the education of youth may be traced to the pagan ideas imbibed in the early study of the Greek and Roman classics.[139] Savonarola’s position on this subject, in fact, appears to have been substantially the same with that of Tertullian, S. Basil, and S. Jerome.
Partial justice has been done to Savonarola as a powerful logician and a learned theologian. His intimate knowledge of the Scriptures was something exceptional—not a mere rote knowledge, for it is said he knew them by heart, but a searching and thorough familiarity which showed a wonderful intellectual and spiritual grasp of their body and spirit.
HIS PHILOSOPHY.
As a philosopher, he has been credited by all writers with a familiarity with the systems of Plato and Aristotle, then dominant; but his latest Italian biographer, Villari, shows satisfactorily that, in his theological writings, he reasons with so much freedom and independence that he had practically freed himself from the dominion of Aristotle.[140] His early biographers made neither attempt nor pretence to do more than relate the material facts of his career. Later writers, with more attention to his published works, saw more clearly his intellectual power, although his philosophical productions were almost entirely neglected. M. Perrens does indeed direct attention to them, but merely as “des catéchismes sans prétention.” Rudelbach[141] is so engrossed with his sharp search for Protestant ideas that he takes no notice of his philosophical writings. Meier[142] perceives that in philosophy “he shows a judgment and critical power of his own”; while Poli, in his additions to Tennemann, remarks his order and clearness. “Not to acknowledge Savonarola as a powerful logician,” says Rio, in his remarkable work on Christian art, “an accomplished orator, a profound theologian, a genius comprehensive and bold, a universal philosopher, or rather, the competent judge of all philosophy, would be an injustice which history and his contemporaries would not tolerate.” The same author goes on to give him credit for the possession of faculties rarely found united with those which make the logician and the theologian. He says: “One might imagine without doubt that it would be more just to deny him the possession of that rare gift of an exquisitely acute and intuitive perception of the beautiful in the arts of imagination, which is not always the privilege of the greatest genius, and which supposes a sensibility of soul and a delicacy of organs too difficult to meet with, either the one or the other, in a monastic person devoted to the mortifications of the cloister; and yet it is no exaggeration to say that both are found united in a very high degree in Savonarola.” The historian Guicciardini, who had made special study of Savonarola’s works, says: “In philosophy, he was the most powerful man in Italy, and reasoned on it in so masterly a manner that it seemed as if he had himself created it.”
Although the mass of published works of Savonarola may be truly called enormous, very many of his productions never appeared, most of his manuscripts having been destroyed, or, in a few instances, but lately brought to light. Among these latter, Villari mentions a compendium of all the works of Plato and Aristotle, regularly catalogued as in the library of S. Mark. Some of his smaller treatises also survive, and the same author recognizes the writer’s originality and the bold hand (la mano ardita) of Savonarola in such passages as these: