It must be frankly confessed that he never judged his own premonitions and visions critically, as he did those of others.In the funeral oration on Pico della Mirandola, he deals somewhat harshly with his dead friend.Since Pico, notwithstanding an inner voice which came from God, would not enter the Order, he had himself prayed to God to chasten him for his disobedience.He certainly had not desired his death, and alms and prayers had obtained the favour that Pico's soul was safe in Purgatory.With regard to a comforting vision which Pico had upon his sickbed, in which the Virgin appeared and promised him that he should not die, Savonarola confessed that he had long regarded it as a deceit of the I)evil, till it was revealed to him that the Madonna meant the second and eternal death.If these things and the like are proofs of presumption, it must be admitted that this great soul at all events paid a bitter penalty for his fault.In his last days Savonarola seems to have recognized the vanity of his visions and prophecies.And yet enough inward peace was left to him to enable him to meet death like a Christian.His partisans held to his doctrine and predictions for thirty years longer.
He only undertook the reorganization of the State for the reason that otherwise his enemies would have got the government into their own hands.It is unfair to judge him by the semi-democratic constitution of the beginning of the year 1495, which was neither better nor worse than other Florentine constitutions.
He was at bottom the most unsuitable man who could be found for such a work.His idea was a theocracy, in which all men were to bow in blessed humility before the Unseen, and all conflicts of passion wert not even to be able to arise.His whole mind is written in that inscription on the Palazzo della Signoria, the substance of which was his maxim as early as 1495, and which was solemnly renewed by his partisans in 1527:
'Jesus Christus Rex populi Florentini S.P.Q.decreto creatus.' He stood in no more relation to mundane affairs and their actual conditions than any other inhabitant of a monastery.Man, according to him, has only to attend to those things which make directly for his salvation.
This temper comes out clearly in his opinions on ancient literature:
'The only good thing which we owe to Plato and Aristotle, is that they brought forward many arguments which we can use against the heretics.
Yet they and other philosophers are now in Hell.An old woman knows more about the Faith than Plato.It would be good for religion if many books that seem useful were destroyed.When there were not so many books and not so many arguments ("ragioni naturali") and disputes, religion grew more quickly than it has done since.' He wished to limit the classical instruction of the schools to Homer, Virgil and Cicero, and to supply the rest from Jerome and Augustine.Not only Ovid and Catullus, but Terence and Tibullus, were to be banished.This may be no more than the expressions of a nervous morality, but elsewhere in a special work he admits that science as a whole is harmful.He holds that only a few people should have to do with it, in order that the tradition of human knowledge may not perish, and particularly that there may be no want of intellectual athletes to confute the sophisms of the heretics.For all others, grammar, morals, and religious teaching ('litterae sacrae') suffice.Culture and education would thus return wholly into the charge of the monks, and as, in his opinion, the 'most learned and the most pious' are to rule over the States and empires, these rulers would also be monks.Whether he really foresaw this conclusion, we need not inquire.
A more childish method of reasoning cannot be imagined.The simple reflection that the newborn antiquity and the boundless enlargement of human thought and knowledge which was due to it, might give splendid confirmation to a religion able to adapt itself thereto, seems never even to have occurred to the good man.He wanted to forbid what he could not deal with by any other means.In fact, he was anything but liberal, and was ready, for example, to send the astrologers to the same stake at which he afterwards himself died.
How mighty must have been the soul which dwelt side by side with this narrow intellect! And what a flame must have glowed within him before he could constrain the Florentines, possessed as they were by the passion for knowledge and culture, to surrender themselves to a man who could thus reason!
How much of their heart and their worldliness they were ready to sacrifice for his sake is shown by those famous bonfires by the side of which all the 'talami' of Bernardino da Siena and others were certainly of small account.
All this could not, however, be effected without the agency of a tyrannical police.He did not shrink from the most vexatious interferences with the much-prized freedom of Italian private life, using the espionage of servants on their masters as a means of carrying out his moral reforms.That transformation of public and private life which the Iron Calvin was but just able to effect at Geneva with the aid of a permanent state of siege necessarily proved impossible at Florence, and the attempt only served to drive the enemies of Savonarola into a more implacable hostility.Among his most unpopular measures may be mentioned those organized parties of boys, who forced their way into the houses and laid violent hands on any objects which seemed suitable for the bonfire.As it happened that they were sometimes sent away with a beating, they were afterwards attended, in order to keep up the figment of a pious 'rising generation,' by a bodyguard of grown-up persons.
