Savonarola: Medieval Monk or Renaissance Man?

“If I am deceiving you, may a fire fall on this friar and kill me”

O you religious, O Rome, O Italy, I call on the whole world: come forward. What I tell you either is from God, or it is not. If it is from God, you cannot attack it, and if you do attack it, you will lose to your great harm. If it is not from God, it will soon fail by itself.
—Girolamo Savonarola, in a sermon on February 25th, 1498

We began on Sunday with Savonarola’s Bonfire of the Vanities in 1497. Twice did that zealous Dominican preacher convince the people of Florence to cast their morally imperfect possessions into the flames of his reforming zeal. The second conflagration, on February 27th of the year 1498, may have been even larger than the first. From a theatrical standpoint, the events were pure genius, and a surging semi-spiritual fervor must have seized the crowd when the flames reached the top of the tower and began to consume its pinnacle, which included a statue of Satan accompanied by symbols of the seven deadly sins. But how well did Savonarola understand, at this late stage of his tempestuous life, that sensational spectacle and enduring religion are two very different things, and that fervor—unlike virtue—tends to burn as hot and fast, and therefore to die out as quickly, as his bonfires did?

Actually, the idea of ritualistically incinerating un-Christian objects was not Savonarola’s invention. Saint Bernardine of Siena, a Franciscan, introduced the practice to Florence in 1422, and Bernardine of Feltre, also a Franciscan, revived it in 1483. But their bonfires were different: First, they were smaller and thus lacked the grandiose, even apocalyptic, ambience that Savonarola favored. Second, and this is more significant than it may initially appear, they occurred in front of churches, whereas Savonarola chose the Piazza della Signoria, a prominent public space associated with the city’s political, rather than ecclesiastical, authorities. Holding the bonfires in the Piazza sent a new sort of message, namely, that the distinction between spiritual and temporal power—a distinction that was essential to the feudal societies of medieval Christendom—had been discontinued.

One might even imagine that while the tower of vanities was burning down, the tower of a new political order, with Savonarola at the top, was rising even taller. Just three months later, when the ill-fated Dominican was hanged and then burned, that tower also went down in flames. Perhaps a few Florentines saw in his execution an unsettling allusion to the friar’s own words:¹

I want everyone then to pray fervently, that if this matter is from me and I am deceiving you, Christ may send a fire from Heaven upon me to swallow me then and there into Hell…. Tell even the lukewarm to come; tell them to pray on that morning that God may rescue you, and that if I am deceiving you, may a fire fall on this friar and kill me.