Savonarola Was Once New, Weinstein Explains In A Prologue

Briefly, and to the point, Donald Weinstein makes a bold but, for this reader, a clear-thinking appraisal of the times of Friar Girolamo Savonarola, in the prologue to his bio of this famous Florentine preacher. It was the Renaissance in Italy and humanism had been spreading, exciting imaginations and actions, for something near a hundred years. There was going to be pushback and reactions.

"Religious conservatives worried that the rising tide of classical culture was drowning Christian morals and values in a sea of "paganism" and blamed it for everything from the clergy's fixation on money and power to the spread of sexual license. With little comprehension of such historical realities as the rise of an entrepreneurial economy, the demographic catastrophe of the Black Death, and the spread of secular culture, they applied simplistic moral dichotomies -- greed vs. charity, ambition vs. humility, luxury vs. austerity, piety vs. worldliness -- and called for a return to a "primitive Christianity" every bit as idealized as the classical antiquity of the humanists."

At an early peak of criticism in the intellectual crisis brought on by such self-reflection, a Dominican Giovanni Dominici, publicly attacked such 'classicism'. As Weinstein tells us, Dominici charged,

"... they were perverting Christian youth by replacing the authority of the saints with that of the ancients. Dominici was no obscurantist but a sophisticated Thomist theologian, and he made his argument on a philosophical level, challenging humanist assumptions about the primacy of will over reason and questioning the rhetoricians' faith in the correspondence between words and things." [p. 5]

The humanists, like Coluccio Salutati, Weinstein tells us, gave an answer that placed primacy on language, on communication as central to all the faiths, religion, and spirituality. Weinstein again says it very clearly.

"All knowledge, including studia divinitatis, begins with communication, Salutati memorably declared, and his thesis was elaborated by his successors into a humanist credo: language is the link to reality, the basis of human community and the connection between past and present. Through language, therefore, we draw both upon our own knowledge of the world and upon the experience of all mankind and gain the information we need to make decisions and to act. Thus the study of language is central to all of human life, to religion as well as to government." [pp. 5-6]

Moralists and much of the clergy at the time, though, considered this notion as contradictory to the church and its teachings. If this were the only thing Savonarola were busying himself with, he would be forgotten with the rest of those at the time. But instead, by the mid 1490's, the 'little friar' had "... fused spiritual and moral renewal with social justice and political liberty..." and somehow persuaded worldly Florence "... to embrace him as its prophet...". The ways a Dominican friar could accomplish this is what Weinstein says are the 'key questions' of his biography. [p.6]
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quotes and pagination in Donald Weinstein: Savonarola: the rise and fall of a renaissance prophet , Yale University Press, New Haven, 2011