The Name of the Rose

by Umberto Eco

In which a bloodstained cloth is found in the cell of Berengar, who has disappeared; and that is all.

Toward lauds, searching Berengar’s cell, a monk found under the pallet a white cloth stained with blood. He showed it to the abbot, who drew the direst omens from it. Jorge was present, and as soon as he was informed, he said, “Blood?” as if the thing seemed improbable to him. They told Alinardo, who shook his head and said, “No, no, at the third trumpet death comes by water. . . .” William examined the cloth, then said, “Now everything is clear.”

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.

In which Adso, in the scriptorium, reflects on the history of his order and on the destiny of books.

Oh, this was surely not the only degeneration of our order! It had become too powerful, its abbots competed with kings: in Abo did I not perhaps have the example of a monarch who, with monarch’s demeanor, tried to settle controversies between monarchs? The very knowledge that the abbeys had accumulated was now used as barter goods, cause for pride, motive for boasting and prestige; just as knights displayed armor and standards, our abbots displayed illuminated manuscripts. . . . And all the more so now (what madness!), when our monasteries had also lost the leadership in learning: cathedral schools, urban corporations, universities were copying books, perhaps more and better than we, and producing new ones, and this may have been the cause of many misfortunes.

In which Adso receives the confidences of Salvatore, which cannot be summarized in a few words, but which cause him long and concerned meditation.

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.

In which William speaks to Adso of the great river of heresy, of the function of the simple within the church, of his doubts concerning the possibility of knowing universal laws; and almost parenthetically he tells how he deciphered the necromantic signs left by Venantius.

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.

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.”

But to believe in it we must be sure that the simple are right in possessing the sense of the individual, which is the only good kind. However, if the sense of the individual is the only good, how will science succeed in recomposing the universal laws through which, and interpreting which, the good magic will become functional?”

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?”

To be sure, anyone who tests the curative property of herbs knows that individual herbs of the same species have equal effects of the same nature on the patient, and therefore the investigator formulates the proposition that every herb of a given type helps the feverish, or that every lens of such a type magnifies the eye’s vision to the same degree. The science Bacon spoke of rests unquestionably on these propositions.

God is something absolutely free, so that if He wanted, with a single act of His will He could make the world different.”

I work on things of nature. And in the investigation we are carrying out, I don’t want to know who is good or who is wicked, but who was in the scriptorium last night, who took the eyeglasses, who left traces of a body dragging another body in the snow, and where Berengar is. These are facts. Afterward I’ll try to connect them—if it’s possible, for it’s difficult to say what effect is produced by what cause. An angel’s intervention would suffice to change everything, so it isn’t surprising that one thing cannot be proved to be the cause of another thing. Even if one must always try, as I am doing.”

you know that many holy persons proclaim that the future Antichrist will come from the race of the circumcised. . . .

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

There he seduced a very beautiful maiden of noble family, Margaret, or she seduced him, as Héloïse seduced Abelard, because—never forget—it is through woman that the Devil penetrates men’s hearts!

Dolcino and his people were captured, and they rightly ended up on the pyre.” “The beautiful Margaret, too?” Ubertino looked at me. “So you remembered she was beautiful? She was beautiful, they say, and many local lords tried to make her their bride to save her from the stake. But she would not have it; she died impenitent with her impenitent lover. And let this be a lesson to you: beware of the whore of Babylon, even when she assumes the form of the most exquisite creature.”

“But you must learn to distinguish the fire of supernatural love from the raving of the senses. It is difficult even for the saints.” “But how can the good love be recognized?” I asked, trembling. “What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man nor Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing. Nothing exists that so fills and binds the heart as love does.

I believe that without Margaret’s seductions Dolcino would not have damned himself, and without the reckless and promiscuous life on Bald Mountain, fewer would have felt the lure of his rebellion.

Because even the love felt by the soul, if it is not forearmed, if it is felt warmly, then falls, or proceeds in disorder. Oh, love has various properties: first the soul grows tender, then it sickens . . . but then it feels the true warmth of divine love and cries out and moans and becomes as stone flung in the forge to melt into lime, and it crackles, licked by the flame. . . .” “And this is good love?” Ubertino stroked my head, and as I looked at him, I saw his eyes melt with tears. “Yes, this, finally, is good love.” He took his hand from my shoulder. “But how difficult it is,” he added, “how difficult it is to distinguish it from the other.

“I have told you what you wanted to know. On this side the choir of angels; on that, the gaping maw of hell. Go, and the Lord be praised.”

And of woman as source of temptation the Scriptures have already said enough. Ecclesiastes says of woman that her conversation is like burning fire, and the Proverbs say that she takes possession of man’s precious soul and the strongest men are ruined by her. And Ecclesiastes further says: ‘And I find more bitter than death the woman, whose heart is snares and nets, and her hands as bands.’ And others have said she is the vessel of the Devil.

In which William induces first Salvatore and then the cellarer to confess their past, Severinus finds the stolen lenses, Nicholas brings the new ones, and William, now with six eyes, goes to decipher the manuscript of Venantius.

I will say now that I was unquestionably seized by love, which is passion and is cosmic law, because the weight of bodies is actually natural love. And by this passion I was naturally seduced, and I understood why the angelic doctor said that amor est magis cognitivus quam cognitio, that we know things better through love than through knowledge. In fact, I now saw the girl better than I had seen her the previous night, and I understood her intus et in cute because in her I understood myself and in myself her.

I believe that the nighttime love had been concupiscent, for I wanted from the girl something I had never had; whereas that morning I wanted nothing from the girl, and I wanted only her good, and I wished her to be saved from the cruel necessity that drove her to barter herself for a bit of food, and I wished her to be happy; nor did I want to ask anything further of her, but only to think of her and see her in sheep, oxen, trees, in the serene light that bathed in happiness the grounds of the abbey.

I was in the grip of so many and such conflicting emotions, because what I felt was like the holiest love just as the doctors describe it: it produced in me that ecstasy in which lover and beloved want the same thing (and by mysterious enlightenment I, in that moment, knew that the girl, wherever she was, wanted the same things I myself wanted), and for her I felt jealousy, but not the evil kind, condemned by Paul in 1 Corinthians, but that which Dionysius speaks of in The Divine Names whereby God also is called jealous because of the great love He feels for all creation (and I loved the girl precisely because she existed, and I was happy, not envious, that she existed).

Today, an old man, I would know a thousand ways of evading such seductions. And I wonder how proud of them I should be, since it is true that I am free of the temptations of the noontime Devil; but not free from others, so that I ask myself whether what I am now doing is not a sinful succumbing to the terrestrial passion of recollection, a foolish attempt to elude the flow of time, and death.

How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by the often perverse wisdom of man!

In any case, this page is our only possible starting point in re-creating the nature of the mysterious book, and it’s only from the nature of that book that we will be able to infer the nature of the murderer. For in every crime committed to possess an object, the nature of the object should give us an idea, however faint, of the nature of the assassin. If someone kills for a handful of gold, he will be a greedy person; if for a book, he will be anxious to keep for himself the secrets of that book. So we must find out what is said in the book we do not have.”

“Dear Adso, these seem like the words of a holy text, whose meaning goes beyond the letter. Reading them this morning, after we had spoken with the cellarer, I was struck by the fact that here, too, there are references to the humble folk and to peasants as bearers of a truth different from that of the wise. The cellarer hinted that some strange complicity bound him to Malachi. Can Malachi have hidden a dangerous heretical text that Remigio had entrusted to him?

“Perhaps they are riddles with another meaning,” I ventured. “Or do you have another hypothesis?” “I have, but it is still vague. It seemed to me, as I read this page, that I had read some of these words before, and some phrases that are almost the same, which I have seen elsewhere, return to my mind. It seems to me, indeed, that this page speaks of something there has been talk about during these past days. . . . But I cannot recall what. I must think it over. Perhaps I’ll have to read other books.” “Why? To know what one book says you must read others?” “At times this can be so. Often books speak of other books.

Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors. “But then,” I said, “what is the use of hiding books, if from the books not hidden you can arrive at the concealed ones?” “Over the centuries it is no use at all. In a space of years or days it has some use.

“And is a library, then, an instrument not for distributing the truth but for delaying its appearance?” I asked, dumbfounded. “Not always and not necessarily. In this case it is.”

Adso goes hunting for truffles and sees the Minorites arriving, they confer at length with William and Ubertino, and very sad things are learned about John XXII.

The Minorites agreed on the stand to be taken the next day. They sized up their adversaries one by one. They commented with concern on the news, announced by William, of the arrival of Bernard Gui. And even more on the fact that such a scourge of heretics as Cardinal Bertrand del Poggetto would be presiding over the Avignon legation. Two inquisitors were too many: a sign they planned to use the argument of heresy against the Minorites. “So much the worse,” William said. “We will treat them as heretics.” “No, no,” Michael said, “let us proceed cautiously; we must not jeopardize any possible agreement.”

In which Cardinal del Poggetto arrives, with Bernard Gui and the other men of Avignon, and then each one does something different.

In which Alinardo seems to give valuable information, and William reveals his method of arriving at a probable truth through a series of unquestionable errors.

“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.

“What terrifies you most in purity?” I asked. “Haste,” William answered. “Enough, enough,” Bernard was saying now. “We sought a confession from you, not a summons to massacre. Very well, not only have you been a heretic: you are one still. Not only have you been a murderer: you have murdered again. Now tell us how you killed your brothers in this abbey, and why.”

If Bernard had been sent by the Pope to prevent a reconciliation between the two groups, he had succeeded.

In which Ubertino takes flight, Benno begins to observe the laws, and William makes some reflections on the various types of lust encountered that day.

Michael would have done better not to decide that day to go to the Pope: he could have led the Minorites’ resistance more closely, without wasting so many months in his enemy’s power, weakening his own position. . . . But perhaps divine omnipotence had so ordained things—nor do I know now who among them all was in the right. After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth.

The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God’s will, the less I value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do; and as the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently, without asking too many questions.

“Master,” I said, “today many things happened, grave things for Christianity, and our mission has failed. And yet you seem more interested in solving this mystery than in the conflict between the Pope and the Emperor.” “Madmen and children always speak the truth, Adso. It may be that, as imperial adviser, my friend Marsilius is better than I, but as inquisitor I am better. Even better than Bernard Gui, God forgive me. Because Bernard is interested, not in discovering the guilty, but in burning the accused. And I, on the contrary, find the most joyful delight in unraveling a nice, complicated knot.

Roger Bacon’s thirst for knowledge was not lust: he wanted to employ his learning to make God’s people happier, and so he did not seek knowledge for its own sake. Benno’s is merely insatiable curiosity, intellectual pride, another way for a monk to transform and allay the desires of his loins, or the ardor that makes another man a warrior of the faith or of heresy. There is lust not only of the flesh. Bernard Gui is lustful; his is a distorted lust for justice that becomes identified with a lust for power. Our holy and no longer Roman Pontiff lusts for riches.

“True love wants the good of the beloved.” “Can it be that Benno wants the good of his books (and now they are also his) and thinks their good lies in their being kept far from grasping hands?” I asked. “The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb. This library was perhaps born to save the books it houses, but now it lives to bury them. This is why it has become a sink of iniquity.

Antichrist will defeat the West and will destroy the trade routes; in his hand he will have sword and raging fire, and in violent fury the flame will burn: his strength will be blasphemy, his hand treachery, the right hand will be ruin, the left the bearer of darkness. These are the features that will mark him: his head will be of burning fire, his right eye will be bloodshot, his left eye a feline green with two pupils, and his eyebrows will be white, his lower lip swollen, his ankle weak, his feet big, his thumb crushed and elongated!”

“It is the moment,” Jorge was now saying, “when everything will fall into lawlessness, sons will raise their hands against fathers, wives will plot against husbands, husbands will bring wives to law, masters will be inhuman to servants and servants will disobey their masters, there will be no more respect for the old, the young will demand to rule, work will seem a useless chore to all, everywhere songs will rise praising license, vice, dissolute liberty of behavior.