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They were dominated by the library, by its promises and by its prohibitions.
They lived with it, for it, and perhaps against it, sinfully hoping one day to violate all its secrets.
without asking myself further questions, while around me the world was sinking deeper and deeper into a storm of blood and madness.
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.
I saw more and more often roaming about Europe: false monks, charlatans, swindlers, cheats, tramps and tatterdemalions, lepers and cripples, jugglers, invalid mercenaries, wandering Jews escaped from the infidels with their spirit broken, lunatics, fugitives under banishment, malefactors with an ear cut off, sodomites, and along with them ambulant artisans, weavers, tinkers, chair-menders, knife-grinders, basket-weavers, masons, and also rogues of every stripe, forgers, scoundrels, cardsharps, rascals, bullies, reprobates, recreants, frauds, hooligans, simoniacal and embezzling canons and
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for money; they let it be believed that in their hospital every day up to a hundred Masses were said, for which they collected donations, and they said that with their income they supplied dowries for two hundred poor maidens.
From there he took refuge in the Toulouse region and a strange adventure befell him, for he was inflamed by hearing the story of the crusaders’ great enterprises.
crusades
At this point they would no longer heed reason or justice, but only power and their own caprice.
“Why the Jews?” I asked Salvatore. He answered, “And why not?” He explained to me that all his life and from all the pulpits they had been told that the Jews were the enemies of Christianity and accumulated those possessions that they had been denied. I asked him, however, whether it was not also true that lords and bishops accumulated possessions through tithes, so that the Shepherds were not fighting their true enemies. 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 unusual thing is that Salvatore told me this story as if describing the most virtuous enterprise. And in fact he remained convinced that the horde of so-called Shepherds had aimed to conquer the sepulcher of Christ and free it from the infidels.
I saw that it is one thing for a crowd, in an almost ecstatic frenzy, mistaking the laws of the Devil for those of the Lord, to commit a massacre, but it is another thing for an individual to commit a crime in cold blood, with calculation, in silence.
The abbey really is a microcosm, and when we have Pope John’s envoys and Brother Michael here, we’ll be complete.”
“And so every movement inherits the offspring of others?”
“I told you: what makes them live is also what makes them die. 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.
Political phikosophy; hegelian/foucaulti an
Fra Dolcino’s Apostles preached the physical destruction of clerics and lords, and committed many acts of violence;
technique: it shows the heretics as one jumble of diabolical contradictions which offend common sense.”
“But false. The shepherds fight with the dogs, because each covets the rights of the other.” “True, and this is exactly what makes the nature of the flock unsure. Concerned as they are with tearing each other apart reciprocally, dogs and shepherds no longer tend the flock. A part of it is left outside.”
Power hungryn factions of plato's republic
The outcast lepers would like to drag everything down in their ruin. And they become all the more evil, the more you cast them out; and the more you depict them as a court of lemures who want your ruin, the more they will be outcast.
The people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body.”
“Well, what they told you was mistaken, or, rather, it’s a story the order has revised today. When Francis spoke to the people of the city and its magistrates and saw they didn’t understand him, he went out to the cemetery and began preaching to ravens and magpies, to hawks, to raptors feeding on corpses.” “What a horrible thing!” I said. “Then they were not good birds!” “They were birds of prey, outcast birds, like the lepers. 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
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“Yes. We were talking about those excluded from the flock of sheep. For centuries, as pope and emperor tore each other apart in their quarrels over power, the excluded went on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true lepers are only the illustration ordained by God to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying ‘lepers’ we would understand ‘outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities.’
The faith a movement proclaims doesn’t count: what counts is the hope it offers. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only to keep the leper as he
us Franciscans in particular: we fostered a harmonious balance between the need for penance and the life of the city, between the church and the burghers, concerned for their trade. . . .” “Was harmony achieved, then, between love of God and love of trade?” “No, the movements of spiritual renewal were blocked;
“And you,” I cried, in an access almost of rebellion, “why don’t you take a position, why won’t you tell me where the truth is?”
Post modern william
And perhaps we’ll be able to make the life of the abbey better.” “But that isn’t enough!”
Im only a humble tool adso
How are we to remain close to the experience of the simple, maintaining, so to speak, their operative virtue, the capacity of working toward the transformation and betterment of their world? This was the problem for Bacon. Quod enim laicali ruditate turgescit non habet effectum nisi fortuito, the experience of the simple has savage and uncontrollable results. Sed opera sapientiae certa lege vallantur et in finem debitum efficaciter diriguntur: he thought that the new natural science should be the great new enterprise of the learned: to coordinate the elementary needs that represented also the
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Ssee meade
must believe that my proposition works, because I learned it by experience; but to believe it I must assume there are universal laws. Yet I cannot speak of them, because the very concept that universal laws and an established order exist would imply that God is their prisoner, whereas God is something absolutely free, so
“And so, if I understand you correctly, you act, and you know why you act, but you don’t know why you know that you know what you do?” I must say with pride that William
Kantian
one thing cannot be proved to be the cause of another thing. Even if one must always try, as I am doing.”
“Mathematical notions are propositions constructed by our intellect in such a way that they function always as truths, either because they are innate or because mathematics was invented before the other sciences.
library was built by a human mind that thought in a mathematical fashion, because without mathematics you cannot build labyrinths.
The library is constructed according to a celestial harmony to which various and wonderful meanings can be attributed. . . .” “A splendid discovery,” I said, “but why is it so difficult to get our bearings?” “Because what does not correspond to any mathematical law is the arrangement of the openings.
Oh, by the beard of Merlin!” “Of whom?” “Pay no attention. A magician of my country
“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.”
has an encounter with a maiden, beautiful and terrible as an army arrayed for battle.
tare
poverty! But that is not the point,” he added promptly. “The point is that to resemble the apostles, who had still been Jews, Gherardo Segarelli had himself circumcised, which is contrary to the words of Paul to the Galatians—and you know that many holy persons proclaim that the future Antichrist will come from the race of the circumcised. . . . But Gherardo did still worse: he went about collecting the simple people and saying, ‘Come with me into the vineyard,’ and those who did not know him went with him into another’s vineyard, believing it his, and they ate another’s grapes. . . .”
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. But that evening I was in the grip of contradictory thoughts.
There is she in whom femininity is sublimated. This is why you may call her beautiful, like the beloved in the Song of Songs.
Oh, love has various properties: first the soul grows tender, then it sickens . . .
Plato's symposium
I wandered about Tuscany, to learn better the vulgar Italian tongue,
this seemed to be a weakness of the Fraticelli, this failure to take propriety into due consideration,
Christ was poor and that Saint Francis and Saint Dominic had said so as well, and that if for professing this upright opinion he had to be condemned to the stake, so much the better, because in a short time he would be able to see what the Scriptures describe, the twenty-four elders of the Apocalypse and Jesus Christ and Saint Francis and the glorious martyrs.
“I am no heretic; a sinner, yes, but Catholic,” and when the text named “the most venerable and holy Pope John XXII” Michael answered, “No, a heretic.”
gonfalonier
the Fraticelli are Tuscans but behind them are the Emperor’s agents.”
they make these monks read too many lives of the saints, it would be better for them to take a wife!” And
Saint Hildegard: “The flame consists of a splendid clarity, of an unusual vigor, and of an igneous ardor, but possesses the splendid clarity that it may illuminate and the igneous ardor that it may burn.”
Hibernia, land of monstrous creatures,
