Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 347 - Bonfire of the Vanities - Savonarola.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Bonfire of the Vanities, sabbon arola. As the people who have the dubious pleasure of living or working with me can attest, my favourite philosopher is usually whichever one I'm currently reading and writing about for this podcast. Over the last months I have seized on the smallest excuse to wax enthusiastic about Ficino and Pico, or before that the contributions of women to Italian humanism. But I have to admit that I'm having trouble warming to the protagonist of this episode, Girolamo Savonarola. Remember from a few episodes back the various measures taken to persecute Jews in Renaissance Italy? Savonarola was a devout anti-Semite, and would certainly have supported such measures except insofar as he found them too lenient. He would surely have disapproved of those women humanists. His remarks about women are typically in the mode of patronizing spiritual guidance offered to the weaker sex, and he was scornful of women who reported having the sort of prophetic visions he claimed for himself. Though it must be conceded that a good number of women rallied to his cause and stuck by it even after his death. Ironically, they included a number of mystical thinkers. Savonarola reserved special ire for homosexuality, demanding that it be punished with violent death. I'd like to see you build a nice fire of these sodomites in the piazza, two or three, male and female, because there are also women who practice that damnable vice. I say offer them as a sacrifice to God. When Florence was faced by a famine, he told the people they deserved it because they were so sinful. And famously, he oversaw the bonfire of the vanities, in which the tools of gambling and other frivolous pastimes, women's wigs and clothing, musical instruments, artworks, and books went up in flames. Then again he did also put an end to the tradition of youngsters throwing rocks at people to celebrate carnival, which led to several deaths each year. Even a stopped clock is right once a day. So why am I devoting an episode to this horrible man? Well, he was a central figure in a pivotal period of Florentine history, and his story is bound up with those of leading philosophers. Notably, he received both admiration and material support from Pico della Mirandola. Gerolamo Beniviani, author of that poem on love that received a commentary from Pico, was also devoted to Savonarola. Ficino too intended his sermons in what I imagine to be horrified fascination. Ficino held his tongue until Savonarola had been condemned to death, then offered further post-mortem condemnation by accusing him of hypocrisy. The preacher's vanity had led him to his own bonfire, on which his corpse was thrown after hanging. All this would give us plenty of reason to at least mention Savonarola. More important though is the fact that, while Savonarola may have had a mean streak, he was no mean thinker. His savage and brilliant sermons and treatises set out ideas that are important for the history of theology, philosophy, and political thought. I'll be focusing on his theory of knowledge, which involved both criticizing pagan philosophy and justifying his own pretensions to prophetic inspiration, and on his rejection of tyrannical rule and support of a republican government for Florence. By tyrannical rule, Savonarola meant what Florence had experienced under the Medici. In sharp contrast to Ficino, who saw Medici rule as exemplifying the dominance of an enlightened elite just as proposed in Plato's Republic, Savonarola initiated a popular movement for moral and religious reform. As prior of the Dominican order at San Marco, he used his bully pulpit to issue prophetic warnings of upheaval and apocalypse. He was disturbed by the wealth and worldliness of the Church, and took up the argument in favor of voluntary poverty, which we looked at back in our series on philosophy in the Medieval period. But his ideas of religious reform went further than that, to the point that Martin Luther would later be struck at the extent to which his own movement had been anticipated by Savonarola. Things came to a head when the French king Charles VIII invaded Italy, and Lorenzo de Medici died in 1492. His son Piero made military and economic concessions to the French, which so angered patricians of the city that Piero was exiled. Savonarola was sent as an emissary to King Charles, and pinned his hopes on this invader, seeing in him the catalyst for the renewal of faith and unity in his city and all of Italy. Many Florentines were convinced that the apocalyptic predictions Savonarola had been making were coming true. At least among them was Savonarola himself, who remarked of his prophetic gift, I was fairly certain, then I was certain, now I am more than certain. The Pope was not impressed, seeing in Savonarola a dangerous man in both political and theological terms. He excommunicated the preacher, yet many in Florence still supported him. Savonarola had enemies there too though, who found their chance after a rather farcical sequence of events in 1498. There was to be a literal trial by fire, in which representatives of his opponents and adherents, but not Savonarola himself, would walk into flames to see who had the support of God. After a heavy rain and squabbling over the ground rules, the event fizzled out before this bonfire was even lit. Amidst the ensuing disappointment and disillusionment, Savonarola was arrested, charged with heresy, tortured into disavowing his prophetic gift, and finally executed. Afterwards it would be made a crime even to own a copy of his books, but he would remain a divisive figure. Two leading historians and intellectuals, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, took opposed views on him. Especially early in his career, Machiavelli tended to agree with Ficino's critical assessment. He also took time in his famous work The Prince to explain why Savonarola had failed. Characteristically, Machiavelli thought that leadership based on belief needs to be backed up with physical force, which Savonarola did not have at his disposal. Guicciardini, on the other hand, saw him as a worthy man who had supported the popular government against tyrants. And though he spent much of his career railing against the hypocrisy and turpitude of the pope, there was a serious attempt to have Savonarola recognized as a saint about a century after his death. Something else that divides opinion is how exactly he wished to position himself relative to the intellectual currents we've been discussing over the last episodes. At first glance, the answer seems obvious. He knew just enough philosophy to decide that he really, really didn't like it. It's easy to find quotes in his sermons where he attacks philosophers or pagan literature in general. For instance, speaking from his pulpit, These days up here no one says anything but Plato that divine man. I tell you, one should sooner be in the house of the devil. Furthermore, let Plato be Plato and Aristotle Aristotle and not Christians, because they are not. He also remarked that any old woman Christian would know more about the most important truths of faith than Plato. It's been observed that some of his remarks border on pleas for irrationalism, but the diatribes against philosophy obscure a more complicated story. We need to remember that in Florence, philosophy and especially Platonism were politically charged. Medici had supported Ficino's project of reviving its study, and as just mentioned, the ideas of Plato were pressed into the service of Medici ideology. In fact, Savonarolo's crusade against philosophy really got going right around 1494, in the wake of Lorenzo's death and Piero's exile when anti-Medici polemic became central to Savonarolo's public persona. Furthermore, even this superficially anti-elitist reformer needed support from the aristocracy of the city. He received that support from, among others, the Valori family, which makes sense, since Francesco Valori had been one of the patricians who helped push Piero de' Medici out of the city. But the Valori were also on good terms with Marsilio Ficino. Another member of the family, Filippo, had sponsored Ficino's scholarly activities, and Ficino had praised yet another, Nicolo Valori, as a precocious philosophical spirit. So it may be that with his attacks on philosophy in general, and Platonism in particular, Savonarolo was on the one hand venting his hostility to the Medici, and on the other hand, competing with Ficino for patronage. It must also be said that Savonarolo's reputation as an anti-philosopher is hard to square with the things he actually wrote. Once you look past the sarcastic condemnations of pagan thought, you see that he is constantly making use of Aristotelian ideas, often via the intermediary of his fellow Dominican, Thomas Aquinas, who looms large as an influence on Savonarola. As a young man, Savonarola had planned on a medical career, and towards this end had studied at the university in Ferrara, so he knew his liberal arts, and continued to work in this vein once becoming a friar in 1475. He taught scholastic texts, and even wrote epitomizing textbooks on logic, moral, and natural philosophy. Later on, when he became an almost literally fire-breathing moralist and reformer, he sprinkled that learning into his sermons. To take a more or less random example, there is a sermon where he explicitly mentions how Aristotle said that we cannot think without using our imagination. This in the eminently Savonarolan context of explaining why we should meditate on death while contemplating images like a picture of heaven and hell, to remind ourselves to avoid sin. Then there's another sermon, where he refers to the same teaching, but with no mention of Aristotle, as if it's something he thought of himself. Thanks to his education in the secular sciences, he was able to use the intellectuals' weapons against them, as with his attacks on astrology. On this point he was in agreement with Pico, who wrote a treatise against the astrological art, and in disagreement with Ficino, who got in trouble with the pope for his own dablings in the occult sciences. We'll get into all that in more detail in a later episode, for now I just want to mention the way Savonarola argues that astrology is impossible. Either Aristotelian natural philosophy is valid or not. If it is, then astrology is falsified, because in Aristotelianism, future events are assumed to be contingent, not predetermined as the astrologers would claim. But if natural philosophy is nonsense, then astrology is falsified again, because it is built on other Aristotelian principles which supposedly explain how the heavens influence the earthly realm. To which you might say, that's a bit rich coming from a guy who claimed to predict the future. But Savonarola would have a good answer for you. The future is not determined by the stars or anything else which safeguards our free will. Yet God does know what will happen through his divine foreknowledge, so he can miraculously reveal future events to us. Or not to us, actually, but to a select few like Savonarola. How can he be so certain that God is talking to him or showing him true visions? He's glad you asked, because he's prepared a treatise to answer just this question. In the dialogue on prophetic truth, he imagines himself meeting seven characters who represent the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The first initials of their names spell out the Latin word veritas, meaning truth, and speaking with each one in turn. The dialogue is intended to justify Savonarola's own claims of prophecy, but along the way Savonarola provides us with a more general theory of how the validity of prophecy can be established. Again drawing on his scholastic training, he alludes to the Aristotelian claim that our psychological powers cannot be deceived concerning their special objects. Vision always grasps colour correctly, even if we sometimes make higher level mistakes about what we are seeing, as when you look up at the heavens and they don't seem to be moving, or you think that red thing in the distance is a bonfire, but actually it's a cardinal visiting from Rome to investigate a charge of heresy. Likewise, the intellect grasps the first principles of the sciences directly and cannot be mistaken about these, hardly a point that would be made by a defender of irrationalism. But his real point is that the power of prophecy too has a special object, namely of revelatory illumination from God. So someone with this gift need have no doubt in what is shown to him, nor indeed does Savonarola have any hesitation in his own case. As he says, These things so stand in the light of prophecy that, to one who possesses such a light, they can give rise to no doubt whatsoever. He admits, on the other hand, that the grounds of his conviction would not be available for other people. There are false prophets too, after all. Indeed Savonarola thought that Muslims were following one, namely Muhammad, though he graciously distances himself from the notion that Muhammad was actually the Antichrist. So other people have to decide on other grounds whether to believe in a self-proclaimed prophet, as well they should. He makes much of the good effects he has had on public morality in Florence, the accuracy of his predictions, and the sudden improvement of his oratorical skills once the sacred gift was given to him. Though I'm not necessarily convinced that Savonarola was a prophet, I am impressed with his argument philosophically speaking. He has here drawn a nice distinction between the grounds that we might have for subjective certainty and the grounds that are needed to be certain about what someone else has experienced. Take a very different case. A cranky child says she has a stomachache. Is the child just inventing something to complain about or is she really in pain? As the child's parent, you have to guess, but the child herself knows for sure. In general, as philosophers now put it, we have privileged access to our subjective states, the things we are experiencing. If prophecy is like this, then the genuine prophet could indeed have certainty that is unavailable for other people. In one of his sermons, Savonarola makes a similar point about the saints of the Church, whose knowledge was not acquired by sensation or rational demonstration, yet was still more certain and firm than the scientific knowledge achieved by philosophers. So the saints' knowledge and the philosophers' knowledge have different strengths. The special insight of the blessed may have the highest possible level of subjective certainty, one that arguably no scientist can possess. There might always be an unnoticed mistake in their proof. But scientific knowledge is publicly accessible. Anyone who understands a demonstrative proof can check it and have grounds for belief just as good as those of the scientist who came up with it. In that passage on the saints, Savonarola also says that these holy persons are drawn to God's light as to their ultimate purpose or end. This is another bit of scholastic lore. Drawing on Aristotle, philosophers like Aquinas had emphasized that God is our final end, an idea that Savonarola repeats with the distinctive twist of emphasizing that it is Christ on the cross to whom we are all drawn. The intended end of man which moves everyone as the thing he loves and desires. Which brings us, by a roundabout route, back to his political theory. Because Savonarola, unsurprisingly, thinks that a political structure is admirable insofar as it imitates God's providential and benevolent rule over all things. That idea is pretty familiar from the medieval period, as is his suggestion that the angelic hierarchy, with its ranks arranged under God, is a perfect society that we should be striving to imitate. In his Treatise on the Government of Florence, Savonarola duly argues that the most perfect constitution for a city would be a monarchy, with a single wise and malevolent king ruling as a human image of God. The perverted mirror image of this constitution is tyranny, where a single power or group rules for its own benefit rather than that of the people, and yes Medici family, Savonarola is looking at you. Ficino would be nodding along in agreement so far, since these points can all be found in Plato's Republic. Here too though, there's a twist. While monarchy might be the most perfect form for a state in general, it's not one that is suitable for Florence. The Florentines are, for starters, too intelligent and independent-minded to suffer tyranny, which is why there was always resistance to the Medici, but for the same reason they're not apt to take guidance from even a good monarch. Instead, they find it most natural to follow their long-standing traditions of republican government. Even if a virtuous monarchy would be a more perfect imitation of divine rule, a civil regime can also be justified in theological terms. In effect, God himself would be the King of Florence, with the pious people of the city as his representatives. This Savonarola writes, Alongside this religious justification, Savonarola has concrete recommendations for the Republic. He stipulates that important offices be distributed by election, smaller ones by random lot, with a council that is big enough to represent the people and avoid being corrupted through bribery. With this final point, we have another reason to see Savonarola as a man of his time, however extraordinary his personality and his role in Florentine life. He was certainly not the only Renaissance thinker who argued in favour of republican government. Indeed, he shared this, though arguably not much else, in common with a contemporary political philosopher whose name I have already mentioned in this episode, Niccolò Machiavelli. Soon we'll be giving him the lavish attention he deserves, but next time we'll be looking more generally at the whole phenomenon of republicanism in the Italian Renaissance and the related and much debated idea of civic humanism. I know you're burning to hear all about it, but you'll just have to wait until the next episode of The History of Philosophy without any gaps.