On May 20, 1498, Girolamo Savonarola, the friar whose visions of tribulation and transformation had galvanized the citizens of Florence for almost a decade, faced torture for the second time in his life. For years, he had been telling the Florentines that the end of the world was near. An adroit combination of threats and promises had brought him political, as well as spiritual, authority. But now he stood exposed as a charlatan who had only pretended to receive instruction through visions sent by God. In April of that year, a government commission had already interrogated him. Attendants bound his hands behind his back with a rope that went over a pulley. Then they hoisted him into the air—a procedure that dislocated his arms and eventually broke one of them—and either dropped him to the floor or left him suspended just above it. Savonarola gave in, as most suspects did, and confessed in writing that he had only pretended to be a prophet whose revelations came from God. When the new set of inquisitors sent by Pope Alexander VI confronted him in May, he fell on his knees and insisted that his confession had been false: “I confess I have denied Christ. I lied.” But as soon as Savonarola was raised into the air again, he confirmed his confession. When the commissioners demanded to know why he had lied, he admitted, “I’m more susceptible than other people. Just looking at [the instruments of torture] is for me like getting ten turns of the rope.” Three days later he would die on the Piazza della Signoria, where he was defrocked and hanged. His body was burned and the ashes thrown in the river Arno, to prevent his followers from collecting any relics.
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Torturing the Prophet
From a review in Lapham's Quarterly of Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet
by Donald Weinstein (Yale University Press):
I take your point that the tale shows the unreliability of torture-induced evidence. But I confess I'm always somewhat bemused by arguments from effectiveness in the case of fundamentally moral debates. Such arguments presume that if someone could somehow prove that torture in one instance or another was the key factor in getting at truth, then torture would ipso facto become acceptable--whereas I presume that you, like me, oppose torture regardless of whether it is ever effective at eliciting the truth or not.
ReplyDeleteOne could say the same about war. Pacifists who try to argue from the practical effectiveness of their preferred policies seem to be implying that they think it is conceivable (however remotely in their eyes) that someone could offer a proof that violence would be more effective than pacifism in some specific case or other. I would say to the contrary that arguments about the best tactics, and arguments are about morality, are fundamentally different. Note that I support in principle Obama's current policy toward al-Qaida, even as I admit that I cannot predict whether it will turn out to have been for us tactically the best, or not.
I also reject torture whether it "works" or not. To me the point of this story is not just that the testimony it produced was unreliable, it is that he whole event was a horror. Once torture is introduced into anything -- a judicial system, a war, a government -- the result is horror.
ReplyDelete