He was also brutally hard on the morality of his day, having a particular obsession with preaching against ‘sodomy’ – in Renaissance Italy a term which covered all illicit sexual contact between males. Has anyone ever failed to grow a congregation by talking sex from the pulpit? The Frate certainly understood this. He built a congregation of over 2,000

Donald Weinstein’s Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet (Yale, 2011) is a fascinating study of Florentine politics in the late fifteenth century, significant, of course, as the intellectual and cultural nursery of perhaps the greatest political philosopher of that age or maybe any age, Niccolo Machiavelli. Yet the life and times of `the Frate’, Girolamo Savonarola, OP, are of interest to more than the typical early modern historian. He was, after all, arguably the first megachurch celebrity pastor.

Savonarola preached an apocalyptic message which interpreted the times and placed his chosen city, Florence, at the centre of the eschatological drama which he saw unfolding before him. He bolstered his status and power with direct revelations and visions from God. A direct line to the divine, unavailable to the rest of the great unwashed, is always a help when it comes to immunising oneself from criticism and accountability.

He was also brutally hard on the morality of his day, having a particular obsession with preaching against ‘sodomy’ – in Renaissance Italy a term which covered all illicit sexual contact between males. Has anyone ever failed to grow a congregation by talking sex from the pulpit? The Frate certainly understood this. He built a congregation of over 2,000 — again, numerical success has always been as good as a plenary indulgence in the world of the church.

And the people loved him, at least for a while. Indeed, he inspired such devotion among his followers that, on the very eve of his fall from power, even young children were volunteering to undergo trial by fire (yes, literally) on his behalf. Any of this sound at all familiar, given the obvious differences between today’s world and that of Renaissance Florence?

For all of his cult-like following, within days of his downfall, his movement had completely fallen apart; and in a few years a mere handful of scattered fanatical followers remained. Only once he had been safely dead for a long time could he be rehabilitated and then this took two mutually exclusive forms: he became a Roman Catholic hero of medieval devotion, still (I believe) under consideration for possible sainthood; and he became one of the great precursors of Luther. He was neither: his conciliarism and his defiance of the Bishop of Rome (okay, it was Alexander VI Borgia but he was still Pope) meant he was definitely not the former; and his devotion to Mary and the Mass makes the latter most unlikely. But once you are dead, you belong to anyone who cares to write your story, right?

Savonarola’s career is instructive. It is clear that his success was the result of a twofold negotiation of power: he was a talented preacher given a greatly expanded platform by those eager to capitalize on what we would now call his ‘media savvy and presence’ in order to harness these for their own causes; and he was careful always to give enough of the people just what they wanted in order to ensure an ever increasing popular power base.

Ultimately, he became too much of a liability to the former and was incapable of maintaining the latter, as maintaining the loyalty and interest his audience demanded of him more and more outlandish claims and ministerial pyrotechnics. His twofold powerbase thus fell apart, with lethal consequences for the man. Again, sound familiar given the etc etc?

The subsequent and stunningly rapid dissipation of his support indicates to what degree his followers were really held together by the one man. The movement may have used the idiom of dramatic biblical truth but the message was not enough in itself to sustain any kind of coherent unity. It looked like a movement of God; it seemed to rally around doctrine, not a personality; it seemed to be very successful; but when the time of reckoning arrived, it was just another personality cult.

At the end of his book, Weinstein includes a quotation from George Eliot’s novel, Romola, which was set in Savonarolan Florence. It is very insightful and has clear applications to today’s gospel ministers and leaders who seek to build movements around the big, media savvy personality:

In Savonarola’s preaching there were strains that appealed to the very finest susceptibilities of men’s natures, and there were elements that gratified low egoism, tickled gossiping curiosity, and fascinated timorous superstition. His need of personal predominance, his labyrinthine allegorical interpretations of the Scriptures, his enigmatic visions, and his false certitude about the Divine intentions, never ceased, in his own large soul, to be ennobled by that fervid piety, that passionate sense of the infinite, that active sympathy, that clear-sighted demand for the subjection of selfish interests to the general good, which he had in common with the greatest of mankind.

But for the mass of his audience all the pregnancy of his preaching lay in his strong assertion of supernatural claims, in his denunciatory visions, in the false certitude which gave his sermons the interest of a political bulletin; and having once held that audience in his mastery, it was necessary to his nature – it was necessary for their welfare – that he should keep the mastery. The effect was inevitable. No man ever struggled to retain power over a mixed multitude without suffering vitiation: his standard must be their lower needs, and not his best insight.

Carl R Trueman is Departmental Chair of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He has an MA in Classics from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in Church History from the University of Aberdeen. This article is reprinted from the Reformation 21 blog and is used with their permission.