The Name of the Rose

by Umberto Eco

I came upon the Castilian version of a little work by Milo Temesvar, On the Use of Mirrors in the Game of Chess.

clearly referring to the book of secrets attributed to Albertus Magnus, which underwent countless revisions over the centuries.

Two years later, in Avignon, the new Pope was elected, Jacques of Cahors, an old man of seventy-two who took, as I have said, the name of John XXII, and heaven grant that no pontiff take again a name now so distasteful to the righteous. A Frenchman, devoted to the King of France (the men of that corrupt land are always inclined to foster the interests of their own people, and are unable to look upon the whole world as their spiritual home), he had supported Philip the Fair against the Knights Templars, whom the King accused (I believe unjustly) of the most shameful crimes so that he could seize their possessions with the complicity of that renegade ecclesiastic.

And he answered that the beauty of the cosmos derives not only from unity in variety, but also from variety in unity.

“My good Adso,” my master said, “during our whole journey I have been teaching you to recognize the evidence through which the world speaks to us like a great book. Alanus de Insulis said that omnis mundi creatura quasi liber et pictura nobis est in speculum and he was thinking of the endless array of symbols with which God, through His creatures, speaks to us of the eternal life. But the universe is even more talkative than Alanus thought, and it speaks not only of the ultimate things (which it does always in an obscure fashion) but also of closer things, and then it speaks quite clearly. I am almost embarrassed to repeat to you what you should know.

“All right,” I said, “but why Brunellus?” “May the Holy Ghost sharpen your mind, son!” my master exclaimed. “What other name could he possibly have? Why, even the great Buridan, who is about to become rector in Paris, when he wants to use a horse in one of his logical examples, always calls it Brunellus.”

Such is the power of the truth that, like good, it is its own propagator.

But resume your course, O my story, for this aging monk is lingering too long over marginalia.

It was the firm and holy conviction of those who founded the abbey and sustained it over the centuries that even in books of falsehood, to the eyes of the sage reader, a pale reflection of the divine wisdom can shine.

Before the throne, beneath the feet of the Seated One, a sea of crystal flowed, and around the Seated One, beside and above the throne, I saw four awful creatures—awful for me, as I looked at them, transported, but docile and dear for the Seated One, whose praises they sang without cease.

they were creatures not of hell, but of heaven, and if they seemed fearsome it was because they were roaring in adoration of One Who Is to Come and who would judge the quick and the dead.

I saw a miser, stiff in the stiffness of death on his sumptuously columned bed, now helpless prey of a cohort of demons, one of whom tore from the dying man’s mouth his soul in the form of an infant

Dante Alighieri of Florence, dead only a few years, had composed a poem (which I could not read, since it was written in vulgar Tuscan) of which many verses were nothing but a paraphrase of passages written by Ubertino in his Arbor vitae crucifixae.

Many of them rediscovered then a book written at the beginning of the twelfth century of our era, by a Cistercian monk named Joachim, to whom the spirit of prophecy was attributed.

Among these freed prisoners there was one, Angelus Clarenus, who then met a monk from Provence, Pierre Olieu, who preached the prophecies of Joachim, and then he met Ubertino of Casale, and in this way the movement of the Spirituals originated.

Night sleep

bizochi, vagabond mendicants who roamed about at the far edge of the Franciscan order, and the Spirituals themselves, who had left the life of the order and retired to a hermitage.

John XXII robbed them of all hope. When he was elected in 1316, he had Angelus Clarenus and the Spirituals of Provence put in chains, and many of those who insisted on conducting a free life were burned at the stake.

What I meant is that there is little difference between the ardor of the seraphim and the ardor of Lucifer, because they are always born from an extreme igniting of the will.”

The days of the Antichrist are finally at hand, and I am afraid, William!” He looked around, staring wide-eyed among the dark naves, as if the Antichrist were going to appear any moment, and I actually expected to glimpse him. “His lieutenants are already here, dispatched as Christ dispatched the apostles into the world! They are trampling on the City of God, seducing through deceit, hypocrisy, violence. It will be then that God will have to send His servants, Elijah and Enoch, whom He maintained alive in the earthly paradise so that one day they may confound the Antichrist, and they will come to prophesy clad in sackcloth, and they will preach penance by word and by example. . . .”

Last

“You think too much. Boy,” he said, addressing me, “don’t learn too many bad examples from your master. The only thing that must be pondered—and I realize this at the end of my life—is death. Mors est quies viatoris—finis est omnis laboris. Let me pray now.”

“He is, or has been, in many ways a great man. But for this very reason he is odd. It is only petty men who seem normal. Ubertino could have become one of the heretics he helped burn, or a cardinal of the holy Roman church. He came very close to both perversions. When I talk with Ubertino I have the impression that hell is heaven seen from the other side.”

Severinus smiled and said that work, for the Benedictine monk, is prayer.

“But as the Areopagite teaches,” William said humbly, “God can be named only through the most distorted things. And Hugh of St. Victor reminded us that the more the simile becomes dissimilar, the more the truth is revealed to us under the guise of horrible and indecorous figures, the less the imagination is sated in carnal enjoyment, and is thus obliged to perceive the mysteries hidden under the turpitude of the images. . . .”

“We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.

I gathered, assumed the aspect of the land of Cockaigne, where wheels of cheese and aromatic sausages grow on the trees that ooze honey.

How can I discover the universal bond that orders all things if I cannot lift a finger without creating an infinity of new entities? For with such a movement all the relations of position between my finger and all other objects change. The relations are the ways in which my mind perceives the connections between single entities, but what is the guarantee that this is universal and stable?”

There is a mysterious wisdom by which phenomena among themselves disparate can be called by analogous names, just as divine things can be designated by terrestrial terms, and through equivocal symbols God can be called lion or leopard; and death can be called sword; joy, flame; flame, death; death, abyss; abyss, perdition; perdition, raving; and raving, passion.

Why did I, as a youth, depict the ecstasy of death that had impressed me in the martyr Michael in the words the saint had used for the ecstasy of (divine) life, and yet I could not refrain from depicting in the same words the ecstasy (culpable and fleeting) of earthly pleasure, which immediately afterward had spontaneously appeared to me as a sensation of death and annihilation?

What is happening, O Lord, in my spirit, now that I allow myself to be gripped by the vortex of memories and I conflagrate different times at once, as if I were to manipulate the order of the stars and the sequence of their celestial movements?

As if one no longer existed, not feeling one’s identity at all, or feeling lowered, almost annihilated: if some mortal (I said to myself) could for a single moment and most rapidly enjoy what I have enjoyed, he would immediately look with a baleful eye at this perverse world, would be upset by the bane of daily life, would feel the weight of the body of death. . . . Was this not what I had been taught? That invitation of my whole spirit to lose all memory in bliss was surely (now I understood it) the radiance of the eternal sun; and the joy that it produces opens, extends, enlarges man, and the gaping chasm man bears within himself is no longer sealed so easily, for it is the wound cut by the blow of love’s sword, nor is there anything else here below more sweet and terrible.