Like not a few religious reformers, Savonarola worked the citizens of a city (in his case, Florence) into wild paroxysms of faith by predicting the end of the world and the coming of Christ. When the end failed to arrive as scheduled, his power weakened. The civil authorities reasserted themselves and tortured Savonarola into “confessing” that he was a fraud. He briefly recanted his confession but then confirmed it when confronted with the prospect of further torture. Our unnamed reviewer sums up his career this way:
Savonarola admitted that he had not had visions—but he never admitted, and never accepted, that his understanding of the present and future had been false. He also fought—sometimes against his own followers—to convince the Florentines to live at peace with one another, even when that meant sparing his enemies. In his books on confession and meditative prayer, he laid out forms of religious counsel and experience that would become central to the renewal of the Catholic Church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After reading this exemplary work of historical analysis, it’s easy to understand why so many of Savonarola’s followers retained their faith in him even though he failed to stand up to torture or to save himself by a miracle. Some of them showed the paradoxical tenacity that can be characteristic of followers of millennial cults “when prophecy fails”—to quote the title of a classic study.
One such prophetic failure was “The Great Disappointment,” which occurred on October 22, 1844, when Christ did not show up as expected, leading to, among other things, the founding of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, and, ultimately, both the Post and Kellogg cereal companies, products of the Battle Creek, Michigan-based Church’s dietary concerns.
But what of the first “great disappointment”—perhaps the greatest disappointment of all—the failure of the prophecies of Christ himself? Talk about your “paradoxical tenacity”!
Afterwords
Why do so many people, both Christians and Marxists alike, predict the end of the world? Because life as it is is so shitty?
