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For what I was to see at the abbey would make me think that it is often inquisitors who create heretics.
It would seem strange that a pope should consider perverse the idea that Christ was poor, but advocating the poverty of Christ was clearly a very short step from advocating the poverty of his church, and a poor church would have become weak in comparison to the Emperor.
In the Italian city, on the contrary, you must have noticed that goods serve to procure money. And even priests, bishops, even religious orders have to take money into account. This is why, naturally, rebellion against power takes the form of a call to poverty. The rebels against power are those denied any connection with money, and so every call to poverty provokes great tension and argument, and the whole city, from bishop to magistrate, considers a personal enemy the one who preaches poverty too much.
I had often heard repeated the motto according to which the people of God were divided into shepherds (namely, the clerics), dogs (that is, warriors), and sheep (the populace).
The simple are meat for slaughter, to be used when they are useful in causing trouble for the opposing power, and to be sacrificed when they are no longer of use.”
He replied that when your true enemies are too strong, you have to choose weaker enemies. I reflected that this is why the simple are so called. Only the powerful always know with great clarity who their true enemies are.
“And so every movement inherits the offspring of others?” “Of course, because the majority of those who flock after reformers are the simple, who have no subtlety of doctrine. And yet moral reform movements originate in different places and ways and with different doctrines.
The movements grow, gathering simple people who have been aroused by other movements and who believe all have the same impulse of revolt and hope; and they are destroyed by the inquisitors, who attribute to one the errors of the other, and if the sectarians of one movement commit a crime, this crime will be attributed to each sectarian of each movement.
The simple cannot choose their personal heresy, Adso; they cling to the man preaching in their land, who passes through their village or stops in their square.
Excluded as they were from the flock, all of them were ready to hear every sermon that, harking back to the word of Christ, would in effect condemn the behavior of the dogs and shepherds and would promise their punishment one day. The powerful always knew this. Acknowledging the outcasts meant reducing their own privileges, so the outcasts who were acknowledged as outcasts had to be branded as heretics, whatever their doctrine. And for their part, maddened by their exclusion, they were not interested in any doctrine. This is the illusion of heresy.
the wise must enhance conceptual clarity with the truth implicit in the actions of the simple. . . .”
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.
What was similar in Michael’s desire for death, in the transport I felt at the sight of the flame consuming him, in the desire for carnal union I felt with the girl, in the mystic shame with which I translated it allegorically, and in the desire for joyous annihilation that moved the saint to die in his own love in order to live longer and eternally? Is it possible that things so equivocal can be said in such a univocal way?
“Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means, a precept that the commentators of the holy books had very clearly in mind.
