The Name of the Rose

by Umberto Eco

it seems to me typical of the scant virtue of the Italian peoples to abstain from sin out of their fear of some idol, though they may give it the name of a saint. They are more afraid of Saint Sebastian or Saint Anthony than of Christ.

Here someone does not want the monks to decide for themselves where to go, what to do, and what to read. And the powers of hell are employed, or the powers of the necromancers, friends of hell, to derange the minds of the curious. . . .”

“And the kings are the merchants. And their weapon is money. Money, in Italy, has a different function from what it has in your country, or in mine. Money circulates everywhere, but much of life elsewhere is still dominated and regulated by the bartering of goods, chickens or sheaves of wheat, or a scythe, or a wagon, and money serves only to procure these goods. 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.

Aymaro is thinking about. A Benedictine abbey, in the golden period of the order, was the place from which shepherds controlled the flock of the faithful. Aymaro wants a return to the tradition. Only the life of the flock has changed, and the abbey can return to the tradition (to its glory, to its former power) only if it accepts the new ways of the flock, becoming different itself.

Laughter foments doubt.” “But sometimes it is right to doubt.” “I cannot see any reason. When you are in doubt, you must turn to an authority,

Thus, you see, to undermine the false authority of an absurd proposition that offends reason, laughter can sometimes also be a suitable instrument.

Can I finally hide from myself the fact that even today my old age is still stirred by the noonday demon when my eyes, in choir, happen to linger on the beardless face of a novice, pure and fresh as a maiden’s?

Woah he went for it tgherd

Whereas, I am now convinced, the more groans he uttered before his declaration, the surer he was of the soundness of the proposition he was expressing.

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).

Will you tell me, William, you who know so much about heretics that you seem one of them, where the truth lies?”

And as for the heretics, I also have a rule, and it is summed up in the reply that Arnald Amalaricus, Bishop of Cîteaux, gave to those who asked him what to do with the citizens of Béziers: Kill them all, God will recognize His own.”

daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh: the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.

“The great beast that comes from the sea . . . Seven heads and ten horns and upon his horns ten crowns and upon his heads three names of blasphemy. The beast like unto a leopard, with the feet of a bear, and the mouth of a lion . . . I have seen him.” “Where have you seen him? In the library?”

“Did you not hear how the other boy died, the illuminator? The first angel sounded the first trumpet, and hail and fire fell mingled with blood. And the second angel sounded the second trumpet, and the third part of the sea became blood. . . . Did the second boy not die in the sea of blood? Watch out for the third trumpet! The third part of the creatures in the sea will die. God punishes us. The world all around the abbey is rank with heresy;

“Legions of scholars have wondered whether Christ laughed. The question doesn’t interest me much. I believe he never laughed, because, omniscient as the son of God had to be, he knew how we Christians would behave. But here we are.”

I tumbled down almost the whole stairway, tripping over the hem of my habit (that was the only moment of my life, I swear, when I regretted having entered a monastic order!);

Bacon was right in saying that the conquest of learning is achieved through the knowledge of languages.

It seems elementary to me.

“Yes, my bold warrior. You flung yourself so courageously on a real enemy a short while ago in the scriptorium, and now you are frightened by your own image. A mirror that reflects your image, enlarged and distorted.”

“No beast. I found you raving underneath a table with a beautiful Mozarabic apocalypse on it, opened to the page of the mulier amicta sole confronting the dragon. But I realized from the odor that you had inhaled something dangerous and I carried you away immediately. My head also aches.”

I recognized the smell: it is an Arab stuff, perhaps the same that the Old Man of the Mountain gave his assassins to breathe before sending them off on their missions. And so we have explained the mystery of the visions. Someone puts magic herbs there during the night to convince importunate visitors that the library is guarded by diabolical presences.

Knowledge is used to conceal, rather than to enlighten. I don’t like it. A perverse mind presides over the holy defense of the library.

And we ourselves for a moment thought ghosts were breathing on our faces. We’ve realized it only now because the wind has sprung up only now. So this mystery, too, is solved. But we still don’t know how to get out!”

“How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths,” my master replied.

“He was not in choir at compline,” the abbot repeated, “and has not come back to his cell. Matins are about to ring, and we will now see if he reappears. Otherwise I fear some new calamity.” At matins Berengar was absent.

I sat in church, near the central door, as the Masses were said. And so I fell devoutly asleep and slept a long time, because young people seem to need sleep more than the old, who have already slept so much and are preparing to sleep for all eternity.

Here, I said to myself, is the greatness of our order: for centuries and centuries men like these have seen the barbarian hordes burst in, sack their abbeys, plunge kingdoms into chasms of fire, and yet they have gone on cherishing parchments and inks, have continued to read, moving their lips over words that have been handed down through centuries and which they will hand down to the centuries to come. They went on reading and copying as the millennium approached; why should they not continue to do so now?

And they did not realize, as I sensed vaguely at that moment (and know clearly today, now aged in years and experience), that in doing so they sanctioned the destruction of their excellence. Because if this new learning they wanted to produce were to circulate freely outside those walls, then nothing would distinguish that sacred place any longer from a cathedral school or a city university. Remaining isolated, on the other hand, it maintained its prestige and its strength intact, it was not corrupted by disputation, by the quodlibetical conceit that would subject every mystery and every greatness to the scrutiny of the sic et non.

And in his story I recognized many men I had already known or encountered along the road, and I now recognize many more that I have met since, so that after all this time I may even attribute to him adventures and crimes that belonged to others, before him and after him, and which now, in my tired mind, flatten out to form a single image. This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain.

At times, however, the monk’s ferocious face brightened with a sweet glow as he told me how, when living among those bands, he listened to the word of the Franciscan preachers, as outcast as he was, and he understood that the poor and vagabond life he led should be taken, not as a grim necessity, but as a joyous act of dedication, and he joined penitential sects and groups whose names he could not pronounce properly and whose doctrine he defined in highly unlikely terms.

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. The

I looked at him with curiosity, not because of the singularity of his experience, but because what had happened to him seemed to me the splendid epitome of so many events and movements that made the Italy of that time fascinating and incomprehensible.

When you were speaking with Ubertino, I had the impression you were trying to prove to him that all are the same, saints and heretics. But then, speaking with the abbot, you were doing your best to explain to him the difference between one heretic and another, and between the heretical and the orthodox. In other words, you reproached Ubertino for considering different those who were basically the same, and the abbot for considering the same those who were basically different.”

“Of course,” I said, proud of my knowledge, “men are animals but rational, and the property of man is the capacity for laughing.”

because it is approaching the sea, which annihilates all rivers in itself, no longer knows what it is, loses its identity. It becomes its own delta. A major branch may remain, but many

“Yes, I recall a story about King Mark, who had to condemn Isolda the beautiful and was about to have her ascend the stake when the lepers came and said to the King that the stake was a mild punishment and that there was a worse one. And they cried to him: Give us Isolda that she may belong to all of us, our illness enflames our desires, give her to your lepers. Look at our rags, glued to our groaning wounds. She, who at your side enjoyed rich stuffs lined with squirrel fur and jewels, when she sees the courtyard of the lepers, when she has to enter our hovels and lie with us, then she will truly recognize her sin and regret this fine pyre of brambles!” “I see that for a novice of Saint

Francis was surely thinking of that verse of the Apocalypse that says: ‘I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together at the supper of the great God; that ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great!’”

This holds true also for kings and commoners. Some time ago, in Cremona, the Emperor’s followers helped the Cathars, but only to embarrass the church of Rome. Sometimes the city magistrates encourage the heretics only so that they translate the Gospel into the vernacular: the vernacular by now is the language of the cities, Latin the language of Rome and the monasteries. And sometimes the magistrates support the Waldensians, because they declare that all, men and women, lowly and mighty, can teach and preach, and so they eliminate the distinction that makes clerics irreplaceable!”

“The manuscript of Venantius, too, will remain the same when, thanks to this lens, I’ve been able to read it. But perhaps when I’ve read the manuscript I’ll know a part of the truth better. And perhaps we’ll be able to make the life of the abbey better.”

So I think that, since I and my friends today believe that for the management of human affairs it is not the church that should legislate but the assembly of the people, then in the future the community of the learned will have to propose this new and humane theology which is natural philosophy and positive magic.”

You understand, Adso, I must believe that my proposition works, because I learned it by experience; but to believe it I must assume there are universal laws.

Take a vessel filled with water and set afloat in it a cork into which you have stuck an iron needle. Then pass the stone over the surface of the water, until the needle has acquired the same properties as the stone. And at this point the needle—though the stone would also have done it if it had had the capacity to move around a pivot—will turn and point north, and if you move it with the vessel, it will always turn in the direction of the north wind. Obviously, if you bear north in mind and also mark on the edge of the vessel the positions of east, south, and west, you will always know which way to turn

“Thus God knows the world, because He conceived it in His mind, as if from the outside, before it was created, and we do not know its rule, because we live inside it, having found it already made.” “So one can know things by looking at them from the outside!”

“Are you perhaps your brother’s keeper?” William asked, with the words of Cain. But I saw he was joking and meant to say that God is great and merciful.

“Dearest son,” he said, “anything this poor sinner can do for your soul will be done joyfully. What is distressing you? Yearnings?” he asked, almost with yearning himself. “The yearnings of the flesh?” “No,” I replied, blushing, “if anything the yearnings of the mind, which wants to know too many things . . .”

Uberdtino is gay too

“But Francis also stripped himself of everything, and today from William I heard that he went to preach to ravens and hawks, as well as to the lepers—namely, to the dregs that the people who call themselves virtuous had cast out. . . .”

Oh, these are not things a boy should know: the female is a vessel of the Devil. . . .

Was he not perhaps putting into practice what presumably orthodox men had preached, in a purely mystical fashion? Or was that perhaps where the difference lay? Did holiness consist in waiting for God to give us what His saints had promised, without trying to obtain it through earthly means? Now I know this is the case and I know why Dolcino was in error: the order of things must not be transformed, even if we must fervently hope for its transformation.

Dolcino declared that the Roman church is a whore, that obedience is not due priests, that only the Apostles represented the new church, the Apostles could annul matrimony, no pope could absolve sin, tithes should not be paid, a more perfect life was lived without vows than with vows, and a consecrated church was worth less than a stable, and Christ could be worshiped both in the woods and in the churches.”

infected by the contagion, were killed that same day.”

Rubella?