Girolamo Savonarola spent his life in the pulpit of Florence’s Duomo, not at a writing desk, and the four books gathered here began as a defense pressed on him by controversy. Accused of heresy and schism by critics at a distance, he answered in Latin with a systematic account of what he actually believed, styling the work a defense of the glorious Triumph of the Cross over the babble of worldly-wise philosophers. Written in the 1490s and translated into Italian by Savonarola himself so ordinary readers could have it, the treatise reached English only in the edition presented here—the first complete rendering, as its editor notes, since an imperfect version of 1661.
“The work … on The Triumph of the Cross is a witness to my faith”
The Case Built Book by Book
The Preacher Who Wrote Under Compulsion
Father John Procter opens his introduction by insisting that Savonarola was a speaker before he was a writer. The living word belonged to the pulpit of the Duomo; the writing table in his cell at San Marco saw him only under moral compulsion—when distant accusers charged him with error, or when distant seekers begged his counsel, defense and advice had to be committed to paper. Procter inventories the treatises that resulted: on the simplicity of the Christian life, on humility, expositions of the Our Father and Hail Mary, psalm commentaries, explanations of the Mass, prison rules, letters. Among them the four books of The Triumph of the Cross stand out as perhaps the most notable and useful, which Savonarola himself styles a defense of the glorious triumph of the Cross over the profane and foolish babble of the worldly-wise philosophers.
The book’s pedigree is then traced. St. Philip Neri, the Apostle of Rome, remained staunchly loyal to Savonarola’s memory, read his writings often—especially this one—and used them to instruct his spiritual children; five of Savonarola’s works survive at the Vallicella. From Echard, Procter takes the work’s history and purpose: an accurate book approved by all learned men, undertaken to show Savonarola’s real feelings toward the Catholic Faith and the Apostolic See, and to refute the calumnies of heresy and schism. It opens with the declaration of the Cross’s triumph over the worldly wise and wordy sophists, and runs through four books—God’s existence, nature, and providence with the soul’s immortality; the accord of the faith with reason; the reasonableness of the chief mysteries; and the confutation of philosophers, astrologers, idolaters, Jews, Mahometans, and heretics.
From Florence to the Propaganda Press
Procter follows the Latin text through its printings: Florence in 1497, reprinted there in 1524, then Paris at the Ascension Press the same year, Basle in 1540, a more accurate Lyons edition of 1633, an undated Roman printing by Cardinal Barberini at the Propaganda Press, and Grenoble in 1666. Because many adherents could neither obtain the Latin nor read it, Savonarola himself rendered it into the Etruscan tongue—not word for word but giving the sense and pith of each chapter, sometimes omitting and adding advisedly, lest another maliciously mistranslate him. Domenico Benevieni, a Florentine noble and canon theologian of St. Laurence’s, prefaced the 1497 Florence edition and defended the author ably; Venice reprinted it in 1531 and 1547. The seventh chapter of the Fourth Book was lifted from its place by Theodore Bibliandrus for his collection against Mahometan errors in the Basle folios of 1543 and 1550. Père Bayonne adds that Cardinal Barberini, a Capuchin, left five hundred gold crowns by will in 1646 to reprint the Triumph and the commentary on the Miserere, and the heirs gave the commission to the Propaganda Press—two works sufficient to dispel the illusions of those still suspecting the author of heresy. The most recent edition, Latin and Italian on facing pages, appeared at Siena in 1899 under P. Lodovico Ferretti.
The Case Against the Expurgators
This, Procter states, is the first complete English appearance of the work so far as he can ascertain. Two paragraphs in the eighth chapter of the Third Book are omitted, marked with asterisks, because the author treats a physical question of some delicacy on which scientific views have changed; the argument loses nothing. An imperfect English edition of 1661, printed by John Field at Cambridge and dedicated to Francis S. John, Esq., is noted. Then Procter turns on the purported translation of O’Dell Travers Hill, published in London in 1868—not a translation at all, he says, but only the portions palatable to its intended readers, whole chapters dropped without explanation, lengthy passages cut away: Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. He hopes the present faithful rendering, by an anonymous but graceful pen, will reveal the Savonarola of fact and history rather than of fiction and romance, mirrored in his own words rather than misrepresented by prejudiced enthusiasts and unscrupulous translators who belittled him while professing to extol him.
Villari’s Verdict and the Shape of the Four Books
A postscript transcribes Edmund G. Gardner’s citation of Professor Villari: Savonarola’s attacks were never aimed at the dogmas of the Church of Rome but solely at those who corrupted them, and the Triumph of the Cross was meant to do for the Renaissance what Aquinas did for the Middle Ages in the Summa Contra Gentiles. Since the book is the fullest expression of his creed, Gardner regrets that more than one English translator omitted characteristic passages on Catholic practice and doctrine without flagging the expurgation. The table of contents then lays out the whole: Book I on rising from visible to invisible things, the Triumph of Christ, first principles, objections, method, God’s existence and attributes, providence, man’s end, the soul’s immortality; Book II on religion, the Christian life, and the proofs of Christianity; Book III on the mysteries, from Trinity and Creation through Incarnation, Passion, law, Sacraments, Eucharist, and ceremonies; Book IV against heathen philosophers, astrology, idolatry, Judaism, heretics, and the Mahometan religion.
The Triumphal Car
Book I opens with a prologue: Savonarola undertakes to unfold the triumph of the Cross, trusting only in the Lord’s help, to rouse men bound to vice who grope in darkness. Faith cannot be demonstrated from natural principles—it is God’s gift—yet Church history affords convincing arguments to confirm waverers, prepare unbelievers, and confute the irreligious; he will be guided by reason alone, appealing to no authority. The senses grasp corporeal accidents; the understanding rises to invisible substance and the Divine Majesty, and as philosophers rose from the universe to invisible things, so Christ’s works in the Church prove His Divinity—proofs that confirm faith but do not cause it. He figures Christ’s works as a triumphal car. Since God’s infinite power, wisdom, and goodness cannot be shown in one creature, Christ’s works must be taken together: Christ seated as Conqueror, crowned with thorns, bearing wounds; a triple sun above His head signifying the Trinity; the Cross and Passion instruments in His left hand, the Old and New Testaments in His right; at His feet the Host, chalice, balsam, and oil. The Virgin sits beneath her Son amid vessels of gold and silver filled with ashes and bones.
The Sacraments as Proof of Divine Origin
Savonarola gathers all the Church’s ceremonies under the Eucharist, the chief and most venerable sacrament, and turns to experience as his witness. Those who approach the sacraments devoutly grow holier by the day; those who handle them with irreverent familiarity harden in sin. The same cause produces contrary effects, and he insists philosophy need not stumble at this: the sun’s rays harden earth and melt ice, flower one tree and wither another whose roots are shallow. If the externals of religion were human inventions or the devil’s deceits, they could not give birth to a life wholly spiritual and Divine. Why do men who practise virtue without the sacraments never reach the holiness of good priests? Were the rites false, those who despised them would be the best of men—yet daily experience shows the opposite. God is Supreme Truth, and the closer a man draws to Him the more he partakes of His light; those who frequent the sacraments devoutly become so united to God that signs of Divine light appear in their faces, many are rapt in ecstasy, their countenances transfigured. Whence these ecstasies, this fervour and these tears, if the ceremonies are not ordained by God? Churches, altars, vestments, psalmody would then typify falsehoods, and good men would take no such delight in them. The minute symbolism of her rites, wherein nothing is trivial, proves the Church’s worship the outcome of a Divine Spirit, not a human one.
Peace and Joy as Effects of the Faith
Having argued from the causes of the Christian life, he turns to its effects, chief among them peace and joy of spirit and liberty of soul. The saints of former times, when fervour ran higher, kept a serenity that left them unshaken in affliction and even glad at martyrdom. Such joy in tribulation grows in proportion to nearness to Christ, and peace of soul can be found only in union with God, the last end and sole satisfaction of the human heart. Those closely united to Him hold so firm a hope of future happiness that they count worldly goods for nothing and look on death as the passage to bliss. God dwells specially in such souls by grace and the gift of contemplation, delivering them from fear and giving them a liberty that neither adversity casts down nor prosperity lifts up. This cannot come from weakened human nature; it must be a supernatural gift.
The Incomparable Wisdom of Christ
Only great wisdom can grasp sublime matters, and Christ taught and defended subtle doctrine with an ease no one has matched. His teaching withstood argument and cruel persecution alike, under which philosophers would have surrendered their first principles; their philosophy came from natural reason and lacked strength, whereas His is supernatural and therefore invincible. Grant Christianity false, and Christ must still be reckoned the wisest of men, since He persuaded people to accept difficult doctrines and hold them so firmly that no human power could uproot them. Nothing He taught is repugnant to philosophy; Christianity culls truth from every system, even paganism. The greatest power of a wise man shows in the short time he needs to bring pupils to perfection, and no one has done this as Christ did—in rational science, in moral and practical science, and in the speculative knowledge of Divine things, where all human wisdom is stultified beside His. The pleasures of the mind exceed those of the senses, and the greatest intellectual joy is contemplation of Supreme Truth; never has that contemplation been so ardently loved as in these days, when men abandon earthly joy for its sake—proof that Christ is the very Wisdom of the Eternal God.
Christ as the Last End of Human Life
Having shown Jesus surpasses all men and heathen deities in wisdom and power, Savonarola turns to His goodness. All human operations proceed from free will toward some end, and since all men share one nature they must tend to the same end, happiness, though they differ in where they place it. To learn wherein beatitude consists we must look not at those living like beasts but at those living according to reason—as, to see whether heavy things move downward, we must not choose birds but something wholly heavy. No life is so pure and reasonable as the Christian life. Christians unite in intense longing for Christ Crucified as the Last End; nothing makes man so perfect as He, and those least resembling Him are worst. True Christians desire Him so steadfastly that they would rather die than lose His love. All things of one species incline to the same end, as heavy things tend to their centre; therefore Christ must be the Last End, since nothing has been pursued with such ardour and constancy. This is why Christians of every race and country love one another so closely in Him.
The Trinity, Creation, and the Last Things
Christian doctrine, though surpassing reason, is never contrary to it. The intellectual word and love in man are changeable and not the soul’s substance, unlike the Divine Word and Love, eternal and consubstantial with the Father; yet the likeness in nobler creatures proves the doctrine accords with reason. Every creature’s perfection consists in beginning, middle, and end, and in substance, power, and operation; Aristotle says all things appear made up of threes, and Pythagoras held all things determined and perfected in three. Hence belief in the Trinity is most credible, exceeding but not opposing natural philosophy. God created all things in time out of nothing, acting by free will rather than necessity, so the world was made at the time His Wisdom chose; the doctors of the Church have pulverised the philosophers’ arguments for its eternity. Grace leads man to a supernatural end, the vision of the Divine essence; resurrection, though not natural, is most easy to infinite power, and the soul’s unnatural separation from the body cannot be permanent, since happiness is due to the whole man who acts. Eternal punishment for temporal guilt is not unjust—human law avenges certain crimes by death or lifelong exile—and the fire torments the damned without consuming them.
The Incarnation and the Virginal Birth
God is one Person subsisting in two natures, Divine and Human, so perfectly united that the Person who is God is likewise Man. No parallel exists in nature, since no perfect created substance can so unite with another; even the soul-body union cannot be compared, for the soul is the body’s form and form is imperfect, while God is Perfection. The union surpasses understanding but is not impossible. Countless blessings follow: it is a powerful means whereby man attains happiness, giving hope of glory and greater ardour; it shows God is man’s sole End and teaches the excellence of human nature; men abandoned idol worship and despised earthly wealth; it assures man of future blessedness and raises him from earthly affections to love of eternal things, entering friendship with God and His saints. If God could become Man, He could be born of a virgin; He might have formed Christ’s body from earth, but did not, because it was more fitting He be born of a woman, so that the sight of the Father of all things deigning to have an earthly mother and to suffer human infirmities for love of us should excite deeper humility.
The Eucharistic Presence and the Limits of Nature
Savonarola turns to the hardest objection against the faith: how can the whole Body of Christ be contained in a morsel of bread and all His Blood in a sip of wine while Christ sits whole in Heaven? He weighs the two conceivable explanations and finds both wanting on nature’s terms. If the bread were simply changed into the Body, that Body would be newly made, not the Body already in Heaven—Aaron’s rod became a serpent that had no prior existence, and the same logic would produce a different Christ. If instead the Body came down by local motion, it would either have to abandon Heaven or occupy two places at once, and no body can terminate in many places at the same moment, yet countless Hosts are consecrated simultaneously. He piles on the further puzzles: how a grown man fits in a small wafer, how accidents can survive without a subject when the consecrated species still nourish, warm, intoxicate, burn, and rot, and how Christ is present in every fragment when the Host is broken.
The resolution rests on God’s infinite power, which exceeds anything we can conceive. The change is by conversion, not by local movement—impossible to nature, possible to God, who made all things from nothing and can therefore turn one substance into another. In Heaven Christ’s Body occupies space and is extended; in the Sacrament He is present without extension, indivisibly, whole in every particle. By natural concomitance, since Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity never separate, the whole Christ is present under either species and in every drop and crumb. He is not in many places but in many Sacraments, as the soul is whole in every part of the body without being said to be in different places. God can likewise sustain accidents without substance, so that the appearances do and suffer what bread and wine would, while the Body of Christ remains untouched by the fracture of the Host. The Catholic Faith, he concludes, proposes nothing impossible to God.
The Reasonableness of Church Ceremonies
Having defended the Sacraments, he argues that the Church’s other ceremonies are equally rational, and singles out a few of the most important. Honouring the Cross and images looks irrational only if one stops at the material—gold, silver, wood, stone. Christians regard the image as representing someone, and honour passes to what is represented, as subjects honour a sovereign in honouring his portrait. The Crucifix receives the worship of latria due to God; the Virgin’s image a lesser honour, higher than that given to other Saints, who are honoured as God’s friends. Images are erected to recall the holy to memory, stir virtue by example, and lift hearts to prayer; for the unlettered they do the work of books.
The church building itself preaches. Its stones are Christians united in faith, the lime is charity binding hearts, the foundation-stone is Christ, the surrounding stones the Prophets and Apostles, the high walls the contemplative life, the roof the active life exposed to temptation. Its length shows the Church’s permanence, its height the ranks of merit, its breadth the multitude of the faithful. The narrower, holier sanctuary recalls consecrated virginity; the nave, the married state; the cemetery before the door, false Christians buried in sin. The altar is Christ, through whom every prayer is offered; the belfry is Holy Scripture, from which we spy the enemy’s snares; the bells are preachers summoning the Church militant and triumphant; the windows are the doctors pouring light into the Church; the white walls teach purity; the twelve candles at the consecration crosses are the Apostles who enlightened the world by preaching the Cross.
Against the Astrologers
He then dismantles the pretence of reading the future in the stars. Even if man could know things to come, he could not learn them from the heavens as universal cause, since knowledge of particular effects demands study of particular causes—physicians do not hunt the causes of sickness in the stars nor cure by astrolabe, but examine the patient’s temperament and the special causes of disease. It is folly to seek by the stars events that spring from free will. The greatest philosophers never found the virtues astrologers claim in the firmament; and even granting such forces, they could only be universal causes, whose effects are endlessly blocked by soil, weather, and a hundred accidents, so that no sure knowledge of a vine’s crop is possible, let alone of matters depending on free choice. Human affairs do not depend on the stars, and any religion invented to worship them is empty superstition. He cites Pico della Mirandola’s disputations against the astrologers, and his own treatise in the vulgar tongue.
The Vanity of Idolatry
Idolatry, he argues, is the vainest of all religions—more contemptible than the philosophers’ teaching or the astrologers’ lore. Some excuse themselves by saying they honour the gods dwelling in the images, as Christians honour the Saints; he means to show the worship impious. God moves the will two ways: by showing it good, or by applying His power to it directly—the shepherd may draw the sheep by pasturage or by his hand. No creature can move another’s will in that second way; the will proceeds immediately from God, who never destroys its liberty. Latria belongs to God alone; the Saints and Angels are honoured as God’s friends, not as gods, whereas idolaters burned incense and begged favours of idols they believed divine. The heathen masses could not make fine distinctions and were misled. The idols were not gods but evil spirits: good spirits would have drawn men to true religion and virtue, yet the pagan deities’ stories teem with war, sacrilege, and incest, their oracles deceived questioners with ambiguous lies, and truth and virtue were better taught in the schools of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle than in the temples. Knowledge of the future is God’s prerogative, and the pagan gods never spoke as God’s messengers.
Against Jews, Heretics, and Mahometans
To the Jews he presses providence: God foretold through the Prophets the small affairs of Edom, Moab, and Ammon, and warned His people of Nabuchodonosor; He would not have been silent about Christ and His Church. Scripture teems with prophecies that fit no one but the Messiah, and since Christ’s coming God has worked no wonders among the Jews—proof they are forsaken, their blindness visible in their forced expositions of Scripture. To the heretics he urges that the Church must have one head: monarchy is the best government because it best secures unity and peace, the Church militant mirrors the Church triumphant ruled by God alone, the hive has one queen, the body one heart. Osee and St. John foretell one head and one fold; Christ’s words to Peter alone—feed My sheep, I have prayed for thee, the keys—make him His vicar, and that dignity passes to his successors, so the Bishop of Rome holds Peter’s place and all must be united with him.
A Faith That Reason Can Defend
The wager of the whole work is that Christian doctrine, though it surpasses reason, never contradicts it. Savonarola argues as a schoolman, not a mystic, in these pages: he agrees on first principles with his opponents, then reasons upward from visible things to invisible ones, insisting throughout that faith is God’s gift and that argument only confirms waverers and confutes the irreligious. His proofs are often arguments from fitness—why God should act by understanding and will rather than necessity, why a virgin birth suits the dignity of the Incarnation, why seven sacraments answer to the needs of bodily life. The method has a cumulative effect: each mystery is shown to be congruous with philosophy, and the whole edifice stands or falls together.
The Chariot and the World It Conquers
The image that organizes Book I is a triumphal car. Christ sits as conqueror, crowned with thorns and bearing his wounds; a triple sun above his head signifies the Trinity; the Virgin sits beneath her Son among vessels filled with ashes and bones; apostles and preachers draw the car, patriarchs and prophets go before, martyrs encircle it, doctors follow with open books, virgins with lilies. Around this procession lie the ranks of the Church’s enemies—emperors, philosophers, heretics—with idols prone and heretical books burnt. The chariot, Savonarola says, figures a new world and a new philosophy, and the four wheels are the four quarters of the earth. It is a preacher’s image rather than a schoolman’s, and it reveals what the arguments are for: not speculation but the visible, historical fact of a crucified man now adored across the world.
What the Defense Is Really Defending
Read against the accusations that prompted it, the treatise is less a summa than a self-portrait. Savonarola attacks the corruption of the Church’s ministers while defending her dogmas, sacraments, and ceremonies to the last detail—the candles, the bells, the very whiteness of the walls. His editor, drawing on Villari, observes that the attacks were never aimed at the Church of Rome but at those who corrupted it, and that the book was meant to do for the Renaissance what Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles had done for the Middle Ages. The long refutations of astrologers, idolaters, Jews, heretics, and Mahometans belong to that same project: a rational universe in which one ordered faith, one head, and one fold answer to the order of nature itself. Whether or not the reader shares its premises, the book shows a mind attempting to leave nothing outside the reach of argument.
A Prisoner’s Book That Outlived Its Author
The work’s fortunes say something about its author’s. Printed at Florence in 1497, the year of his excommunication and death at the stake, it was reprinted at Paris, Basle, Lyons, Rome, and Grenoble across the next century and a half; a Capuchin cardinal left five hundred gold crowns in his will to bring out a new edition and so vindicate Savonarola’s orthodoxy. St. Philip Neri read the book constantly and used it to instruct his spiritual children. Its later history is less edifying: an 1868 English version dropped whole chapters and passages without a word of explanation, prompting the present translator’s complaint about a Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. The book survives, in other words, as evidence in a long quarrel about who Savonarola really was—and the fairest answer remains the one he gave himself, in his own words, on the page.
