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“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
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Aymaro wants the whole fabric of the abbey, and the library itself, to become a workshop, a factory for making money.”
As an ancient proverb says, three fingers hold the pen, but the whole body works. And aches.
“The library is testimony to truth and to error,” a voice then said behind us. It was Jorge.
He was, in other words, the library’s memory and the soul of the scriptorium.
the man transformed into an ass refers to the metamorphosis of the soul that falls into sin.”
Pinnochio
“Monkeys do not laugh; laughter is proper to man, it is a sign of his rationality,” William said. “Speech is also a sign of human rationality, and with speech a man can blaspheme against God.
Laughter foments doubt.” “But sometimes it is right to doubt.”
When you are in doubt, you must turn to an authority, to the words of a father or of a doctor; then all reason for doubt ceases.
such questions should have been subdued, rather than raised.”
“I do not agree, venerable Jorge. Of us God demands that we apply our reason to many obscure things about which Scripture has left us free to decide.
“I beg your pardon, venerable Jorge,” he said. “My mouth has betrayed my thoughts. I did not want to show you a lack of respect. Perhaps what you say is correct, and I was mistaken.” Jorge, faced by this act of exquisite humility, emitted a grunt that could express either satisfaction or forgiveness; and he could only go back to his seat, while the monks who had gradually collected during the argument scattered to their places.
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?
weapon of extortion to obtain from others what virtue and decorum should have advised them against giving.
because it is profoundly right and fitting that we serve our Saviour in all things, totally. He who has not refused to provide for us, totally and without reservation.”
Once Saint Andrew addressed the cross of Golgotha, saying it was adorned with the limbs of Christ as with pearls. And pearls must adorn this humble simulacrum of that great wonder.
Still, I have found it proper to set, here, over the very head of the Saviour, the most beautiful diamond you will ever see.”
they exist according to their own rules of proportion,
the more groans he uttered before his declaration, the surer he was of the soundness of the proposition he was expressing.
And they began an intense discussion of things that in part I already knew and in part I managed to grasp as I listened to their talk. As I said at the beginning of this faithful chronicle, it concerned the double quarrel that had set, on the one hand, the Emperor against the Pope, and, on the other, the Pope against the Franciscans, who in the Perugia chapter, though only after many years, had espoused the Spirituals’ theories about the poverty of Christ; and it concerned the jumble that had been created as the Franciscans sided with the empire, a triangle of oppositions and alliances that
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Useful summary
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).
Plato's republic; phil king, warrior, workers
the monks being in direct contact with the source of all earthly power, the empire, just as they were with the source of all heavenly power.
This, I believe, is why many Benedictine abbots, to restore dignity to the empire against the government of the cities (bishops and merchants united), agreed to protect the Spiritual Franciscans, whose ideas they did not share but whose presence was useful to them, since it offered the empire good syllogisms against the overweening power of the Pope.
(and the following day the abbot’s worries were to increase, because the crimes would increase to three),
Wonderful plolt
sanguinary,
Fun word
“The Pseudo Apostles,” the abbot corrected him. And once more I heard Fra Dolcino and the Pseudo Apostles mentioned, and once more in a circumspect tone, with almost a hint of terror.
The Fraticelli derive from that doctrine a practical syllogism: they infer a right to revolution, to looting, to the perversion of behavior.”
“All, in general. You know they are stained with unmentionable crimes, they do not recognize matrimony, they deny hell, they commit sodomy, they embrace the Bogomil heresy of the ordo Bulgariae and the ordo Drygonthie. . . .”
heretics of Dragovitsa, were all the same thing!” “They are,” the abbot said sharply, “they are because they are heretics, and they are because they jeopardize the very order of the civilized world, as well as the order of the empire you seem to me to favor.
“Abo,” William said, “you live in the isolation of this splendid and holy abbey, far from the wickedness of the world. Life in the cities is far more complex than you believe, and there are degrees, you know, also in error and in evil.
The life of the simple, Abo, is not illuminated by learning and by the lively sense of distinctions that makes us wise. And it is haunted by illness and poverty, tongue-tied by ignorance. Joining a heretical group, for many of them, is often only another way of shouting their own despair.
Will you tell me, William, you who know so much about heretics that you seem one of them, where the truth lies?” “Nowhere, at times,” William said, sadly. “You see? You yourself can no longer distinguish between one heretic and another.
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.” William lowered his eyes and remained silent for a while. Then he said, “The city of Béziers was
“Give me the kiss of peace, Brother William. With a man of your knowledge I could argue endlessly about fine points of theology and morals. We must not give way, however, to the pleasure of disputation, as the masters of Paris do.
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.
“Ah, the dead boy. The beast is roaming about the abbey. . . .” “What beast?” “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.”
The library is a great labyrinth, sign of the labyrinth of the world. You enter and you do not know whether you will come out. You must not transgress the pillars of Hercules. . . .”
“The Antichrist does not come after a thousand years have passed. When the thousand years have passed, the reign of the just begins; then comes the Antichrist, to confound the just, and then there will be the final battle. . . .”
“The millennium is not calculated from the death of Christ but from the donation of Constantine, three centuries later. Now it is a thousand years. . . .”
Fun to know
The world all around the abbey is rank with heresy; they tell me that on the throne of Rome there is a perverse pope who uses hosts for practices of necromancy, and feeds them to his morays. . . .
He feeds children to eels
“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.”
Bacon was right in saying that the conquest of learning is achieved through the knowledge of languages.
Jorge may know it, but he was surely not the man who was rushing so furiously down the circular staircase. . . .”
The source of the phrases on the scrolls was obvious—they were verses from the Apocalypse of John—but
On the table beside the thurible, a brightly colored book was lying open. I approached and saw four strips of different colors on the page: yellow, cinnabar, turquoise, and burnt sienna. A beast was set there, horrible to see, a great dragon with ten heads, dragging after him the stars of the sky and with his tail making them fall to earth. And suddenly I saw the dragon multiply, and the scales of his hide become a kind of forest of glittering shards that came off the page and took to circling around my head. I flung my head back and I saw the ceiling of the room bend and press down toward me,
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Infinite jest video
Arab stuff, perhaps the same that the Old Man of the Mountain gave his assassins to breathe before sending them off on their missions.
Assassin grpuo from west wing episode?
Herbs, mirrors . . . This place of forbidden knowledge is guarded by many and most cunning devices. Knowledge is used to conceal, rather than to enlighten. I don’t like it.
perverse mind presides over the holy defense of the library. But this has been a toilsome night; we must leave here for the present. You’re distraught and you need water and fresh air. It’s useless to try to open these windows: too high, and perhaps closed for decades. How could they think Adelmo had thrown himself down from here?”
“How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths,” my master replied.
A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.
