Justified True Belief

(●) The Dominican preacher who talked Florence into a republic, and was hanged and burned in the square where the crowds had come to hear him. + A visitor standing in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence can find a round marble plaque set into the pavement a little way in front of the great fountain. It marks the place where, on the morning of 23 May 1498, a friar of the Order of Preachers and two of his brethren were hanged from a gibbet and their bodies burned. A friar is a man under religious vows who lives and works out among ordinary people in the towns instead of withdrawing behind a monastery wall, and the Order of Preachers is the order everyone calls the Dominicans, after its founder Dominic. On the same stones, fifteen months earlier, that same friar’s followers had built a bonfire out of the city’s mirrors, wigs, playing cards and indecent pictures. Girolamo Savonarola is remembered for that bonfire and usually for nothing else, which is a little like remembering a surgeon for one bad scar. For four years he was the most listened-to preacher in Italy, and his sermons were read all over Europe. He talked a frightened city out of the hands of the Medici and into a broad republican constitution, he had the sermons of a Dominican friar taken down in shorthand and rushed to the printers within days, and he did all of it while telling Florence, week after week, that God was about to scourge the church, to take a whip to it, and then raise it new. What makes him matter to the defence of the Christian faith is a book rather than a bonfire. In 1497 he was excommunicated, formally cut off by the pope from the sacraments of the church and from the fellowship of the faithful, which is the gravest penalty the church has to give. Under that sentence he finished the Triumph of the Cross, and opened it by promising to prove the Christian faith without leaning on a single authority: no popes, no councils, no Scripture cited as proof, nothing but argument a pagan could be asked to follow. Here is the fact about him a reader is least likely to guess. In the weeks between his arrest and his execution he was tortured in a cell in the tower of the city palace, and his torturers went easy on the right hand, as the law required, so that a prisoner could write out his own confession. He used that hand instead to write a meditation on Psalm 51, and it became one of the most reprinted devotional works of the sixteenth century: printed by Martin Luther at Wittenberg, and bound up with the English primers that Henry VIII’s subjects prayed from.

(●) 1452 AD: Born in Ferrara into a family that had picked out his profession for him. + Girolamo Savonarola was born on 21 September 1452 in Ferrara, a northern Italian city ruled by the Este family, whose court was one of the most brilliant and most expensive in Europe. His grandfather Michele Savonarola was the court physician, a scholar of real distinction who had written medical treatises and who took charge of the boy’s early schooling himself. The family assumed Girolamo would follow him into medicine, and for a while he did, studying the liberal arts and starting on the training a physician needed. Two things went wrong with the plan. The first was the court itself. Ferrara under Duke Ercole I ran on pageantry, on display a student walked past on his way to his books, and the young Savonarola watched the money spent on it with a disgust he never lost. The second was private, and he said very little about it: an early love that came to nothing, apparently for a daughter of the Strozzi family who lived next door. Around 1472 he wrote a poem called De ruina mundi, "On the ruin of the world," which is the work of a very young man convinced that virtue has been driven out of Italy and vice crowned in its place. All that while he was praying, over and over, a prayer his biographers preserved: Lord, make known to me the path my soul should tread. In 1474 a sermon by an Augustinian friar at Faenza settled it. He never would say which sentence in that sermon did the work, not even to his closest friends.

(●) 1475 AD: He waited until the house was empty on a feast day, then walked to Bologna and asked to be a friar. + He kept the decision from his parents for a year, and said afterwards that telling them would have broken his heart and his resolve together. On 23 April 1475, his early biographers report, he sat with his lute and played something so mournful that his mother turned and said, "Oh, my son, this is a token of separation!" He went on playing and did not look up. The next day was the feast of Saint George, and all Ferrara went to the celebration. Savonarola stayed behind, and the moment the house was empty he left it and walked to Bologna, to the Dominican priory of San Domenico. A priory is simply a house of friars: a church, cells to sleep in, a common table, and at the head of it a prior whom the brethren themselves elect. Savonarola asked for the humblest work in the house. He had come, he said, to do penance for his sins, not to exchange being an Aristotle in the world for being an Aristotle in the cloister. On 25 April, from his cell, he wrote his father a letter of apology and explanation that survives, found centuries later among the papers of the Gondi family in Florence. He could no longer bear the corruption of the world, he wrote, and the decision was not a boy’s impulse but the end of long suffering. Then: "Dearest father, my sorrow is already so great, do not, I pray you, add to it by yours! Be strong, seek to comfort my mother, and join with her in granting me your blessing." He added that he had left some papers on the windowsill explaining his state of mind, and his father went and found them: a short treatise on contempt of the world, which says among other things that there is not one righteous man left in Italy.

(●) 1482 AD: Sent to Florence, and soon preaching a whole Lent to a congregation that shrank to twenty-five people. + The Dominicans sent him to San Marco, their priory in Florence, to teach the young friars, and teaching he could do. Preaching was another matter. A year or two later he was invited to give the Lenten sermons at San Lorenzo, which was no small thing: Lent is the forty days of fasting before Easter, and an Italian city expected its best preaching in those weeks, the way a modern town expects its best music at Christmas. He met an audience raised on the polished Latin-flavoured oratory Florence liked, and he had none of it. His voice was harsh, his gestures awkward, his Italian marked by the north. The congregation thinned week by week until, by the end of Lent, it was down to about twenty-five people, women and children included. What rescued him was a smaller town. In 1484 and 1485 he was sent up into the Sienese hills to preach the Lenten sermons at San Gimignano, a walled place of towers where the people had not been taught to listen for elegant syntax. There, for the first time, he said out loud the three propositions that became the spine of everything he preached afterwards: that the church would be scourged, that it would then be renewed, and that both would happen soon. In 1486 he preached at Brescia on the book of Revelation and made his name across northern Italy. A reputation built in provincial pulpits is a slow thing, and Savonarola’s took the better part of a decade. He was nearly forty before Florence had any reason to remember him.

(●) 1490 AD: He came back to Florence, and this time the crowds outgrew every church in the city but the cathedral. + Lorenzo de’ Medici, who ran Florence without holding any office that said so, brought him back. The suggestion is usually credited to the young philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who had heard him argue and wanted him in the city. It is one of history’s better ironies that Lorenzo asked for the man who would spend the rest of the decade dismantling his family’s hold on Florence. This time the preaching worked. He started in the garden of San Marco, under the trees, and moved into the church when the garden would not do; by 1491 the church would not hold the people either, and he was preaching in Santa Maria del Fiore, the cathedral under Brunelleschi’s dome. In July 1491 his brethren elected him prior, the head of their house. Now, a new prior was expected to pay a courtesy call on Lorenzo, whose family had paid for much of the convent. Savonarola did not go, on the ground that he owed his election to God and not to the Medici. Lorenzo died on 8 April 1492. A famous story, told by Savonarola’s devoted early biographers and repeated for centuries, has the friar at the bedside refusing absolution until the dying man would restore liberty to Florence, and Lorenzo turning his face to the wall. Absolution is the priest’s pronouncement of God’s forgiveness over a penitent, and a fifteenth-century Italian did not expect to die without it, so the story is one of a man being held over a drop. Most historians now doubt it. Angelo Poliziano, who was in the room and wrote his account of those last hours within weeks, describes Savonarola urging the dying man to hold fast the faith and then giving him his blessing. It is a story worth knowing precisely because it is the sort of thing people wanted to be true about him, on both sides.

(●) 1494 AD: A French army came over the Alps, the Medici fell, and a friar found himself writing a constitution. + In September 1494 Charles VIII of France crossed into Italy with an army to press a claim on Naples, and the peninsula’s tidy balance of power fell apart in a season. Savonarola had been preaching for years that a scourge was coming from the north, and now here it was, with artillery. Lorenzo’s son Piero rode out to the French king and gave away Florentine fortresses on his own authority; the city threw him out in November. More than once Florence sent Savonarola himself as its envoy to Charles, because no other Florentine had the standing to be listened to. Then came the strangest phase of his life. A friar with no office and no vote spent the Advent of 1494, the four weeks of preparation that run up to Christmas, preaching through the prophet Haggai to a city that had to invent a government from nothing. And he told it how. He argued from the pulpit for a broad council of every citizen qualified under the old statutes, on the model of the Great Council of Venice and adapted to Florentine temper. He argued for an amnesty covering everyone who had served the old regime, which is not the usual advice from a preacher with the crowd behind him. He argued for the reform of a tax system that crushed the poor and still left the treasury empty. Florence did very nearly all of it, and the Great Council it created was the widest participation the city had known. He pushed for something else too, and it says as much about him as the constitution. A Monte di Pietà is a public pawnshop: it lends small sums to poor people against a pledge, at a low fixed charge, so that a family needing money for a funeral or a bad harvest is not left to a moneylender charging whatever the desperate will pay. Savonarola preached for one from the cathedral pulpit, told the wealthy women of Florence to give ducats and not farthings, and Florence founded its Monte in 1496.

(●) 1497 AD: The carnival bonfire in February, and the pope’s sentence of excommunication in May. + Florentine carnival had traditionally ended in street fights and worse, and Savonarola’s followers replaced it. Bands of boys went door to door asking households to surrender what the friars called vanities: carnival masks and costumes, indecent books and pictures, cosmetics, mirrors, gaming boards. On 7 February 1497, the last day of carnival, the city processed into the Piazza della Signoria behind a carved figure of the infant Christ by Donatello, one hand raised in blessing and the other pointing at a crown of thorns. Waiting in the square was an eight-sided wooden pyramid, about sixty feet high and two hundred and forty feet around at the base, which is the height of a five-storey house and some ninety paces to walk around. It rose in seven tiers, one for each of the seven deadly sins, as the poet Girolamo Benivieni counted them and wrote them down afterwards. Inside it was packed with kindling. The collected vanities were arranged on the stages, and a figure of King Carnival stood on top. At a signal four men lit it at four corners, the trumpeters of the Signoria sounded, and the bells of the palace rang. The Signoria was the city’s governing council, the men who held executive power in Florence in short rotating terms, and their trumpets said plainly that this was not a riot but an act of state. Rome had been losing patience for two years. Pope Alexander VI, the Borgia pope, had summoned Savonarola in 1495, then forbidden him to preach; he had obeyed for a time and then gone back into the pulpit. On 13 May 1497 the brief of excommunication was issued. A brief is a letter from the pope, shorter and less ceremonious than a bull and just as binding. It is worth being exact about what it charged him with, because the usual assumption is wrong: not heresy, and not his prophecies, but disobedience on two counts, that he had refused to come to Rome when summoned and had refused to merge San Marco into a new Tusco-Roman congregation of Dominican houses, which would have put him under a superior who could silence him. The brief travelled slowly, in the unusual form of a circular letter, and only reached Florence at the end of the month; the clergy who had it hesitated over its odd form, and it was not read out until 18 June, in five churches at once. He preached on. That same year, in a convent under sentence, he finished the Triumph of the Cross. On Christmas Day 1497 he celebrated Mass and gave communion with his own hands, and in Lent 1498 he was back in the pulpit of the cathedral, where by the plain meaning of the sentence he had no right to stand.

(●) 1498 AD: An ordeal by fire that never took place, and a scaffold six weeks later. + In late March a Franciscan preacher, Francesco da Puglia, challenged Savonarola from a rival pulpit to walk through fire and prove his preaching true. Savonarola had ignored such dares before. This time his devoted disciple Fra Domenico da Pescia took the challenge as aimed at him and accepted it before his prior could stop him, and the thing ran away from everybody. Volunteers on both sides queued to enter the flames. The government, which had every reason to want the friar destroyed and none to want a riot, set the date. On 7 April 1498 two pyres were built in the Piazza della Signoria and the city packed in around them since dawn. Then nothing happened. The Franciscan champion stayed in the palace. His party raised objection after objection: Fra Domenico must not carry a crucifix; he put it down; he said he would carry the consecrated host instead, and they protested that he meant to destroy the sacrament. The host is the wafer of bread blessed at Mass, which the church held, and holds, to be the body of Christ himself, so what they were accusing him of was proposing to walk Christ into a fire. The arguing went on for hours, a thunderstorm broke over the square and passed, and the crowd, fasting since morning, turned ugly. At last the ordeal was called off. The people who had come to see a miracle went home certain they had been cheated, and the certainty attached itself to Savonarola. The next morning, Palm Sunday, a mob stormed San Marco. Savonarola was arrested with Fra Domenico and Fra Silvestro Maruffi and taken to a cell in the tower of the palace. There he was tortured on the rope: the prisoner’s wrists are tied behind him and he is hoisted by them until the shoulders come out of their sockets. Confessions were extracted that way, and then rewritten by a notary named Ceccone. Between sessions, using the right hand the torturers had spared so that a prisoner could write out his own confession, he wrote his meditations on Psalm 51 and Psalm 31. On 23 May 1498 the three friars were stripped of their habits, the robes that marked them as friars, degraded from the priesthood, handed to the city, hanged and burned. The Signoria had the ashes carted to the Ponte Vecchio and thrown into the Arno, so that nobody could keep them as relics. People kept them anyway.

What He Taught

(T1) The Christian faith can be argued to a man who grants no authority at all. + Imagine trying to settle an argument about a company’s accounts with someone who will not accept the company’s own books, the auditor’s report, or anything the finance director says. You are left with what you can work out from the outside: what the firm buys, what it ships, who keeps dealing with it. That is roughly the position Savonarola put himself in when he sat down to write the Triumph of the Cross. He was writing for men who, as he put it, grope in darkness at noon. So he set the ordinary tools aside. He would not quote a pope, a council, a theologian, or a verse of Scripture as a proof. He would proceed, he says, as though he believed no one in the world however learned, and reason from what anyone can see. The first of his four books climbs from visible things up to God, to his providence over the world, and to a soul that outlasts the body. The second book is the one he is remembered for, and its move is worth slowing down over. Think of a plant growing where nothing should grow, in poor ground, in the wrong climate, and not merely surviving but seeding and spreading there century after century. You would want to know what was feeding it. Savonarola points at the Christian life as it is actually lived, says that such a life exists at all and keeps reproducing itself in one nation after another, and asks what would have to be true of the world for that to be so. Only in the third book does he turn to the doctrines that go beyond reason, arguing that while they surpass understanding not one of them is absurd, and the fourth sets Christianity beside the other religions and the philosophers. He is careful about what this does and does not do. Nobody, he says, believes because of these arguments; faith is the gift of God and not of works. The arguments are for confirming the wavering, for preparing an unbeliever to receive light, and for equipping ordinary Christians to answer irreligious men and show up their folly. The instruction he cites for the whole project is Peter’s: always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you (1 Peter 3:15).

(Q) "In this book we intend to be guided by reason only. We shall not, then, appeal to any authority, but shall proceed as if we had no belief in any one in the world, no matter how learned he may be. We shall rely solely on reason." + Source: The Triumph of the Cross, Prologue (Procter translation, 1901). The last lines of the prologue, immediately after he has quoted 1 Peter 3:15 and explained why reasoning about the faith takes nothing away from it. Everything in the four books that follow is written under this restriction.

(T2) Christ rides through the world in triumph, and the conqueror wears a crown of thorns. + A Roman triumph was the parade a victorious general was awarded: the man riding in a chariot through the city, the spoils carried behind him, the captured kings walking in chains. Everyone Savonarola was writing for knew the image, and Petrarch had already made a poem out of it. So he borrows it, and says plainly why: he cannot get all of Christ’s works in front of a reader at once, and a picture will hold what a list will not. The car in his description has four wheels, and on it sits Christ as the conqueror, crowned with thorns and still showing his wounds, which is Savonarola’s way of saying that the victory was won by the dying and not in spite of it. Above his head a light like a triple sun stands for the Trinity. In one hand he holds the cross and the instruments of his passion, in the other the two Testaments. The apostles and preachers walk in front, drawing the car; the patriarchs and prophets go ahead of them; martyrs ring it like a crown, then the teachers of the church with their books open. Behind the car comes a crowd of every kind of person, Jew and Greek and Latin and barbarian, rich and poor, learned and simple, all praising him. Around the edge stand the enemies: emperors, kings, philosophers, heretics, with the idols lying broken on the ground. Look at what this does as an argument rather than as a picture. Every figure in it is a claim that can be checked. The prophets who went before, the apostles who pulled, the martyrs who died, the scholars who wrote, the ordinary people of every nation who ended up in the procession: Savonarola is saying that all of this actually happened, in public, and that a crucified provincial is the only available explanation for it. The four wheels, he says, stand for the four quarters of the world, which this one man lit up and brought under him.

(Q) "Let us, then, represent to our minds a four-wheeled chariot on which is seated Christ, as Conqueror, crowned with thorns, and bearing the marks of His wounds, thus showing that it is through His Passion and death that He has overcome the world." + Source: The Triumph of the Cross, Book I, chapter 2 (Procter translation, 1901). The sentence that opens the description, offered as "a similitude easy of comprehension to the feeblest intellect." The book takes its title from it, and so did the woodcut of the triumphal car on the front of the early printed editions.

(T3) Florence’s rightful head is Christ, and a city is reformed when its citizens are. + In the Advent of 1494 Florence had just expelled the family that had run it for sixty years and had to decide, quickly, what to be instead. Savonarola preached through the prophet Haggai, who had told a returned and demoralised people to rebuild the temple, and by the end of the course he was down in the detail of councils and taxes and appointments. Then, in the last sermon, he told the congregation that the Lord meant to give the city a new head, kept them waiting, and said: this new head is Jesus Christ. He meant it constitutionally, not only devotionally. The point of saying that Christ is king of Florence was that no Florentine was, and that the city’s laws should be written accordingly, by all the citizens rather than by one family. The Trattato circa il reggimento e governo della città di Firenze, the treatise on the government of Florence he wrote in the last months of his life, argues the case in the sober style of the schools: that tyranny is the worst of governments, and that for a people of Florence’s temper a broad civic government is the best one available. The second half of the claim is the half that got him killed, and it is the half a modern reader tends to skip. Savonarola did not believe a constitution could save anybody. A city gets good government the way a man gets a healthy body, from the inside, and so the political preaching and the preaching on repentance, confession and the care of the poor are the same project. He was quite capable of telling the new republic to its face that a free constitution in the hands of unchanged men would be worth nothing.

(Q) "This new head is Jesus Christ; He seeks to become your King!" + Source: Sermons on Haggai, sermon 22, the last of the Advent 1494 course (Linda Villari’s translation of Pasquale Villari, Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola, 1888). The close of the Advent course, after he had spent weeks on the mechanics of the new constitution. He went on to promise the city that with such a king it would be rich in spiritual and temporal goods and would carry reform to Rome and to all countries, which was exactly the kind of promise he could not keep.

(T4) The church will be scourged and then raised again, and the rot begins at the top. + From the hill town of San Gimignano in 1484 to the end, Savonarola preached three propositions in that order: the church will be scourged, the church will be renewed, and it will happen soon. He believed he had these by revelation, in visions of a sword held over the earth, and he said so from the pulpit. What made them land was not the visions but the evidence. The pope hearing him described was Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia, who had bought the papacy in 1492 and who acknowledged his children openly. In the Lenten sermons on Ezekiel in 1497, Savonarola put it in a line as sharp as a scalpel: priests once called their sons their nephews, and now they do not bother. Two things kept this from being ordinary anticlericalism, the standing grumble against priests as a class that any Italian market square could supply for free. The first is that his target was the clergy and not the church. The corruption he attacks is priests who traffic in the sacraments, charging for what was given them to give away, who sell church offices, and who, he charges, do not themselves believe that Christ is present in the sacrament. He is scolding them for not believing Catholic doctrine, not for believing it. The second is that the renewal he expects is God’s work and not a programme. The image he reaches for is not reform but resurrection: a church shut in a tomb of ceremony, and Christ calling it out as he called Lazarus. He also knew what was coming to him for saying it, and said that too. Preaching in that same Lent on the excommunication everyone could see approaching, he told the congregation to bear it aloft on a lance and open the gates to it.

(Q) "O priests and friars, ye, whose evil example hath entombed this people in the sepulchre of ceremonial, I tell ye this sepulchre shall be burst asunder, for Christ will revive His Church in His spirit." + Source: Sermons on Ezekiel, sermon 22, Lent 1497 (Linda Villari’s translation of Pasquale Villari, Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola, 1888). From the sermon the Congregation of the Index later suppressed, the most ferocious he ever preached against the clergy of Rome. In the same breath he tells his hearers to write to France and to Germany and tell the faithful there to pray for the church’s renewal, because he is certain that the people who want it are not only in Florence.

(T5) The abyss of mercy is deeper than the abyss of misery. + Everything else he wrote came from a man with a pulpit. This came from a man with nothing. In the tower cell in May 1498, shoulders wrecked by the rope, his signature on confessions he had not composed, Savonarola took up Psalm 51, the psalm David prayed after Bathsheba and Uriah, and wrote a meditation on it that runs to some fifty pages. It opens where he actually was. He has offended heaven and earth, so where is he to go? He cannot look up, because he has sinned against heaven; he cannot look around, because he has been an offence to the earth. Then the turn: shall he despair? God forbid. God is merciful, and is therefore his only refuge, and will not despise his own work or reject his own image. The argument of the whole piece is a single move made over and over, and it is a theologian’s move made by a man in agony. If God is mercy, and I am misery, then what is in front of God right now is exactly the thing mercy exists to act on, and mercy cannot go back on its own nature. Savonarola borrows the psalmist’s line, deep calls to deep (Psalm 42:7), and turns it: the abyss of sin calling to the abyss of grace, and the second one is bigger. There is no self-defence anywhere in these pages, no complaint about his judges, no word about his enemies, and nothing about visions or prophecies. It is the one thing he wrote that anybody could use, and it is the reason his name survived the collapse of everything else.

(Q) "Alas! wretch that I am, destitute of all help, who have offended heaven and earth, whither shall I go? whither shall I betake me? to whom shall I flee for succour? who will have compassion on me? To heaven I dare not lift up mine eyes, for I have grievously sinned against it. On earth I find no place of refuge, for I have been an offence unto it. What therefore shall I do? Shall I despair? God forbid. God is merciful; my Saviour is pitiful. God alone therefore is my refuge." + Source: Meditation on Psalm 51, opening (E. H. Perowne’s translation, 1900). The first words of the meditation, known from its Latin opening as Infelix ego. The heading over the Latin text reads: an exposition upon the fiftieth Psalm, by the Reverend Father, Brother Girolamo Savonarola of Ferrara, of the Order of Preachers, while he was in prison. The Latin psalm numbering of his day counted it as the fiftieth; English Bibles call it the fifty-first.

(Q) "Militant, not triumphant; that one is not yours." + Source: his answer at the degradation, 23 May 1498, reported by the early biographers and printed in Latin by Villari, Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola (1888): "Militante, non triumphante: hoc enim tuum non est." On the scaffold the Bishop of Vasona, Benedetto Pagagnotti, a Dominican who had once called him master, had to perform the degradation that strips a man of the priesthood. Losing his composure, he fumbled the formula and said, "I separate thee from the church militant and triumphant." Savonarola corrected him. The church militant is the church on earth, still fighting; the church triumphant is the church in heaven, and no bishop has jurisdiction there. It comes to us through friendly witnesses, but they had no motive to invent a line so exactly in character.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The city that burned him began venerating him almost at once. + The Signoria threw his ashes in the river to stop exactly what happened next. His followers, the piagnoni or weepers, had already snatched what they could from the scaffold, and for generations afterwards flowers appeared on the spot in the Piazza della Signoria on the anniversary of his death, left by people who took care not to be seen leaving them. The names are more striking than the flowers. Fra Bartolomeo, one of the finest painters in Florence, is said to have burned his own drawings in the bonfire of 1497 and entered the Dominican order in 1500. Ascanio Condivi, who wrote Michelangelo’s life largely from the old man’s own dictation, says the artist went on reading Savonarola and still carried the memory of the friar’s living voice. In the next century Philip Neri, the priest whose cheerful street ministry converted much of Rome, was a Florentine trained by the Dominicans of San Marco, and he defended Savonarola’s memory all his life. The Dominican mystic Catherine de’ Ricci did the same. Rome never reversed the condemnation, and it is worth seeing exactly what there was to reverse. The brief of 1497 had charged disobedience and nothing more. The heresy and schism his judges pronounced in 1498 were far graver charges, heresy being the teaching of what the church has ruled false and schism the tearing of its unity, and both rested on confessions taken under torture and rewritten before he signed them. Later in the century the Congregation of the Index, the Roman board that drew up the list of books Catholics were forbidden to read, suppressed a handful of his sermons against the clergy of Rome. Not the substance of what he taught: those sermons. So the question sat, unresolved, for five centuries. Then, on 30 May 1997, the archdiocese of Florence formally opened a cause for his beatification, which is the long investigation of a life that can end in the church declaring the person blessed, the step before being named a saint. It has not concluded. For a man condemned as a heretic and a schismatic by a papal commission, getting that far is itself a verdict of a kind.

(†) Luther printed his prison meditation, and so did the English prayer books of Henry VIII’s reign. + The meditation on Psalm 51 moved faster than anything else he wrote. Fifteen editions came off Italian presses by 1500, within two years of his death, and translations followed into English, French, German and Spanish before the middle of the century. In 1523 Martin Luther brought out the Latin text at Wittenberg with a preface of his own, under a title that told the reader exactly where he stood: a devout and learned meditation by Jerome Savonarola, burned by the pope. Here is the part that is easy to miss. The same work went into English books that had no interest whatever in Luther. An English version was printed by John Byddell for William Marshall and bound up with Marshall’s Primer, the layman’s prayer book of the day, with Savonarola’s name nowhere on it, and in 1535 Robert Redman put out a volume carrying both prison meditations, on Psalm 51 and on Psalm 31, this time named on the title page. Between 1534 and 1578 the English editions alone number twenty-one, more than in any other language. Composers set it: Willaert, Cipriano de Rore, Lassus, and in England William Byrd. A Dominican friar executed by a pope, whose prison prayers were printed by the arch-heretic of Wittenberg and bound into the prayer books English families used under a king who had broken with Rome, and read as ordinary devotion by all of them. Savonarola was not a Protestant and would have been appalled to be called one; his attack on the clergy of Rome was that they had stopped believing what the church taught. But when a man writes down what it is to have nothing left but mercy, the people who need that page do not check his party first.

(†) His book of arguments outlived his politics by four centuries. + The republic he helped build lasted until 1512, and the prophecies did not survive him at all. The Triumph of the Cross did. It was printed in Latin and in his own Italian version, went through edition after edition across the sixteenth century, and was still being freshly translated into English at the end of the nineteenth, when the Dominican John Procter made the version that carries his own words in (T1) and (T2). Its method is why. Savonarola’s rule of arguing without appeal to authority puts him at the end of one tradition and near the beginning of another. Behind him stands Thomas Aquinas, whom he had admired since boyhood and whose Summa contra Gentiles had set out to argue with people who accept neither Scripture nor the church. Ahead of him lie the natural theologians of the next three hundred years, working the same way and often without knowing whose track they were in. Natural theology is reasoning to God from the world itself, from things anybody can look at, rather than from a sacred book or a church’s authority: a man who finds a watch lying on a heath and concludes there was a watchmaker is doing natural theology. His four books argue from what the church visibly does and has done, which is an argument from evidence available to anyone, and then face the objection that the doctrines are incredible by working through them one at a time. For the defence of the faith he is a genuinely useful figure precisely because of how he died. A man who has staked his life on political predictions that failed, and who is writing his best book while excommunicated, has no pulpit left to lean on. His argument has to stand by itself, and he had already decided it should.

(†) He staked the gospel on predictions, then on city ordinances, and at last on a fire that was never lit. + He was condemned on charges his judges manufactured, and he is still open to three criticisms his own record supplies. - He staked the gospel on predictions. He preached the scourging of Italy as revelation, and much of it happened; then he went further, and promised Florence a coming glory, a reformation carried from this city to Rome and to all countries. Scripture gives a plain test for that kind of speech: "when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken" (Deuteronomy 18:22). When the promises did not arrive, the people who had believed them did not just abandon a forecast, they abandoned the preacher, and everything he had taught them went with him into the Arno. A man is free to be wrong about the future. He is not free to attach his hearers’ faith to it. - He let the pulpit borrow the magistrate’s arm. The reform of Florentine manners was real and much of it was good, but it ran on legislation and on bands of boys empowered to knock on doors and collect what a household owned. Paul draws the line elsewhere: "the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds" (2 Corinthians 10:4). A conscience that has been converted by a city ordinance has not been converted, and Savonarola, who taught better than that (T3), of all people should have seen it coming. - He let the ordeal go forward. He did not propose the trial by fire and he did not want it, but he allowed his disciple to enter it in his name and let his whole cause ride on a miracle performed to order. The refusal Christ made in the wilderness is the relevant text: "Jesus said to him, Again it is written, You shall not put the Lord your God to the test" (Matthew 4:7). When the fire was not lit, Florence concluded that God had declined to appear for him, and within twenty-four hours it had him in a cell. None of that touches what he said about mercy from that cell, and the honest ledger has both columns. He was braver than almost anyone in his century and more certain of his own hearing than any man has warrant to be.