came to the sexual excesses of women, real or imagined. “Big flabby hunks of fat you are with your dyed hair, your high-rouged cheeks and eyelids smeared with charcoal,” he railed. “Your perfumes poison the air of our streets and parks. Not content with being the concubines of laymen and debauching young boys, you are running after priests and monks in order to catch them in your nets and involve them in your filthy intrigues.”107 And he laid the same charge against the pope and the clergy: “Come here, you blasphemy of a church!” he sermonized, making good use of the catchphrases of Revelation. “Your lust has made of you a brazenfaced whore. Worse than beasts are you, who have made yourself into an unspeakable monster!”108
The most remarkable and enduring moment in Savonarola’s war on the humanism and high art of the Renaissance was the so-called Bonfire of the Vanities, a pyre on which he urged the penitent men and women of Florence to toss their finery and frippery, wigs and gowns, perfumes and face powders, mirrors and rouge pots, dice and playing cards, and “certain musical instruments whose tone was deemed to be of an excitant nature.”109 Some of the fuel for the bonfire can be described as pornography or worse—“marble statues of lewd posture, mechanized dolls of impure gesturing, as well as all articles apt or calculated to excite lust”110—but paintings by Botticelli and books by Petrarch and Boccaccio were also pitched into the flames.111 The reward for the self-sacrifice of the Florentines, he promised, would be the elevation of the city of Florence to the stature of the New Jerusalem, a model of Christian purity and the capital of the millennial kingdom.
Like so many other apocalyptic preachers, Savonarola saw no meaningful distinction between religion and politics. Indeed, his vision of the end-times was deeply rooted in the soil of realpolitik. Thus, for example, he condemned the papacy in Rome on moral grounds: “They have turned their churches into stalls for prostitutes,” he declared, “I shall turn them into stalls for hogs and horses because these would be less offensive to God.”112 And his moral revulsion prompted him to side with the French king, Charles VIII, who was contesting with the pope for political sovereignty over Italy. Nor was Savonarola troubled by the bloodshed and chaos that he invited and even instigated. When Pope Alexander reportedly tried to make a separate peace with Savonarola by offering to raise him to the rank of cardinal, whose badge of office was a scarlet miter, the pope badly misjudged the temper of the true believer.
“I want nothing but what you, O Lord, have given to your saints, namely death,” Savonarola retorted. “A red hat, yes, but red with blood—that’s what I wish for.”113
Savonarola may have won over the guilt-ridden and panic-stricken souls who rallied to his potent sermons, but he also managed to alienate those among the wealthy and powerful of Florence who sided with the pope and who, not incidentally, were offended and embarrassed by Savonarola’s denunciation of their riches and privileges. “Fra Girolamo either sees spooks,” cracked one of his adversaries, referring to him by his title and first name, “or he drinks too much.”114 Savonarola’s enemies in Florence, acting in concert with the pope in Rome, arranged for his arrest, torture, and trial, and he was condemned on charges of heresy and schism.
“I separate you from the Church Militant and Triumphant,” said the bishop who conducted the formal ritual of excommunication. “From the Church Militant, not from the Church Triumphant,” retorted the defiant Savonarola. “That is not within your competence.”115
The “proto-messianic republic” that Savonarola founded in Florence lasted only three years.116 On May 24, 1498, Savonarola was stripped of his monk’s robe, his head was shaved to destroy his tonsure, and he was hanged by the neck from a gibbet. Then his broken body was put to the flames in the same crowded and clamorous public square where he had once kindled his own dangerous fires.
“Prophet,” taunted an ironist in the noisy mob, “now is the time for a miracle!”117
Still, the apocalyptic idea is not always or only a matter of gloom and doom. For readers who are so inclined, the book of Revelation—and all of the apocalyptic writings in both Judaism and Christian traditions—can be understood as a story with the happiest of endings. To be sure, John warns that our benighted world will end in fire and brimstone, but he also promises a new heaven and a new earth. “Behold,” says God at the end of Revelation, “I make all things new.”118 That is why the apocalyptic tradition has been aptly described as “bipolar”: the bad news is that the earth will be destroyed and humankind will be exterminated, but the good news is that the saints will live forever in paradise.119
At the very moment when Savonarola’s apocalyptic visions (and Savonarola himself) were going up in flames, for example, another celebrated reader of Revelation was looking forward to a much happier fate for himself and all of humankind. Of course, Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) is remembered for his historic voyages of discovery rather than for his apocalyptic speculation. Long before Columbus embarked on the first of his momentous voyages, however, the Admiral of the Ocean Seas had already found his way to the ancient mystical texts, all of which he read with the greatest curiosity and credulity. Between his second and third sailings to America, Columbus compiled his own collection of apocalyptic and prophetic passages that he had extracted from the Bible, the writings of the church fathers, and various medieval commentaries, a work that he titled
His goal was to make the case for royal sponsorship of a very different but no less ambitious enterprise. The Holy Land remained under Islamic sovereignty, but Columbus was encouraged by what he had read in the apocalyptic texts to see a role for himself in achieving what the crusaders had repeatedly failed to accomplish—the defeat of the Muslim overlords of Jerusalem. Indeed, he was convinced that God bestowed the gold and silver of the Americas on Christendom in order to finance the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, “the apocalyptic city
Columbus himself witnessed a fresh upwelling of apocalyptic frenzy. His royal patron, Ferdinand of Aragon, was seen as a worthy candidate for the title of Last World Emperor, and the victory of the Spanish crown over the last Islamic kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula was regarded as a sign of the approaching millennial kingdom. And, since the New Jerusalem was a crucial element of the end-times as they were predicted in the book of Revelation, Columbus was inspired to offer his ser vices in bringing it into existence.
Among the texts that he consulted were the writings of Joachim of Fiore, and he recognized himself in the prophesies that he found there. “Jerusalem and Mount Zion are to be rebuilt by the hand of a Christian, [and] Abbot Joachim said that he was to come from Spain,” writes Columbus in an account of his final voyage to America in the opening years of the sixteenth century. “Who will offer himself for this work? If our Lord brings me back to Spain, I pledge myself, in the name of God, to bring him there in safety.”121
Columbus, like Savonarola, lived in a state of “psychological imminence”—that is, “the conviction that the final events of history are already under way even though we cannot determine how near or far off the last judgment may actually be.”122 Both men, of course, died without seeing the fulfillment of their apocalyptic visions, but it turns out that Columbus had a far better sense of “future history.” Fatefully, the next generation of visionaries took it upon themselves to create the millennial kingdom that is promised in the book of Revelation, not in the Holy Land but on the new continent that Columbus had found when he sailed westward in search of a faster route to India. And when Revelation took its next quantum leap, from the benighted shores of Europe to the raw wilderness of North America, the apocalyptic idea was fully and fatefully transformed.
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth,” writes the author of Revelation at the climax of his apocalyptic visions. “God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St. John,” affirms Columbus, “and he showed me the spot where to find it.”123
Notably, the phrase that is rendered as “the new earth” in most English translations of the Bible—and as “the new land” in the writings of Columbus—appears in the Vulgate as
6. To Begin the World Over Again
We are the pioneers of the world, the advance guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the new World that is ours.
