The Name of the Rose

by Umberto Eco

All cities will be shaken by earthquakes, there will be pestilence in every land, storm winds will uproot the earth, the fields will be contaminated, the sea will secrete black humors, new and strange wonders will take place upon the moon, the stars will abandon their courses, other stars—unknown—will furrow the sky, it will snow in summer, and in winter the heat will be intense. And the times of the end will have come, and the end of time. . . . On the first day at the third hour in the firmament a great and powerful voice will be raised, a purple cloud will advance from the north, thunder and lightning will follow it, and on the earth a rain of blood will fall.

Malachi felt a touch, a presence; he stared straight ahead, surely not seeing, certainly not recognizing who was before him. He raised a trembling hand, grasped William by the chest, drawing his face down until they almost touched, then faintly and hoarsely he uttered some words: “He told me . . . truly. . . . It had the power of a thousand scorpions. . . .” “Who told you?” William asked him. “Who?” Malachi tried again to speak. But he was seized by a great trembling and his head fell backward. His face lost all color, all semblance of life. He was dead.

William bent over the corpse for another moment. He grasped the wrists, turned the palms of the hands toward the light. The pads of the first three fingers of the right hand were darkened.

In which a new cellarer is chosen, but not a new librarian.

We were in the crypt where the riches of the abbey were stored, a place of which the abbot was very jealous and which he allowed to be opened only under exceptional circumstances and for very important visitors. On every side were cases of different dimensions; in them, objects of wondrous beauty shone in the glow of the torches (lighted by two of Nicholas’s trusted assistants). Gold vestments, golden crowns studded with gems, coffers of various metals engraved with figures, works in niello and ivory.

There have always been whispers that Malachi protected the library like a guard dog, but with no knowledge of what he was guarding. For that matter, there was also whispering against Berengar, when Malachi chose him as assistant. They said that the young man was no cleverer than his master, that he was only an intriguer. They also said—but you must have heard these rumors yourself by now—that there was a strange relationship between him and Malachi. . . . Old gossip.

Well, they said that in spite of this, the librarian conferred too often with Jorge, as if the abbot directed Malachi’s soul but Jorge ruled his body, his actions, his work. Indeed, as you know yourself and have probably seen, if anyone wanted to know the location of an ancient, forgotten book, he did not ask Malachi, but Jorge. Malachi kept the catalogue and went up into the library, but Jorge knew what each title meant. . . .” “Why did Jorge know so many things about the library?” “He is the oldest, after Alinardo; he has been here since his youth.

“Now that Malachi and Berengar are dead, who is left who possesses the secrets of the library?” “The abbot, and the abbot must now hand them on to Benno . . . if he chooses. . . .” “Why do you say ‘if he chooses’?” “Because Benno is young, and he was named assistant while Malachi was still alive; being assistant librarian is different from being librarian. By tradition, the librarian later becomes abbot. . . .” “Ah, so that is it. . . . That is why the post of librarian is so coveted.

The monks grumble that for the past half century or more the abbey has been forsaking its traditions. . . . This is why, over fifty years ago, perhaps earlier, Alinardo aspired to the position of librarian. The librarian had always been Italian—there is no scarcity of great minds in this land. And besides, you see . . .” Here Nicholas hesitated, as if reluctant to say what he was about to say. “ . . . you see, Malachi and Berengar died, perhaps so that they would not become abbot.”

You see, in this country shameful things have been happening for many years, even in the monasteries, in the papal court, in the churches. . . . Conflicts to gain power, accusations of heresy to take a prebend from someone . . . How ugly! I am losing faith in the human race; I see plots and palace conspiracies on every side. That our abbey should come to this, a nest of vipers risen through occult magic in what had been a triumph of sainted members.

Then the choir began to chant the “Dies irae.” . . . The chanting affected me like a narcotic. I went completely to sleep. Or perhaps, rather than slumber, I fell into an exhausted, agitated doze, bent double, like an infant still in its mother’s womb. And in that fog of the soul, finding myself as if in a region not of this world, I had a vision, or dream, if you prefer to call it that.

In which William explains Adso’s dream to him.

In which the succession of librarians is reconstructed, and there is further information about the mysterious book.

In which the abbot refuses to listen to William, discourses on the language of gems, and expresses a wish that there be no further investigation of the recent unhappy events.

He raised one hand and allowed the daylight to illuminate a splendid ring he wore on his fourth finger, the emblem of his power. The ring sparkled with all the brilliance of its stones. “You recognize it, do you not?” he said to me. “The symbol of my authority, but also of my burden. It is not an ornament: it is a splendid syllogy of the divine word whose guardian I am.”

“This is amethyst,” he said, “which is the mirror of humility and reminds us of the ingenuousness and sweetness of Saint Matthew; this is chalcedony, mark of charity, symbol of the piety of Joseph and Saint James the Greater; this is jasper, which bespeaks faith and is associated with Saint Peter; and sardonyx, sign of martyrdom, which recalls Saint Bartholomew; this is sapphire, hope and contemplation, the stone of Saint Andrew and Saint Paul; and beryl, sound doctrine, learning, and longanimity, the virtues of Saint Thomas. . . .

William was now becoming infuriated. “That bastard of a feudal lord, that peacock who gained fame for having been the Aquinas’s gravedigger, that inflated wineskin who exists only because he wears a ring as big as the bottom of a glass! Proud, proud, all of you Cluniacs, worse than princes, more baronial than barons!” “Master . . .” I ventured, hurt, in a reproachful tone. “You be quiet, you are made of the same stuff. Your band are not simple men, or sons of the simple.

If a peasant comes along you may receive him, but as I saw yesterday, you do not hesitate to hand him over to the secular arm. But not one of your own, no; he must be shielded.

“You have not considered a third possibility, master,” I said. “We had noticed these past days, and this morning it seemed quite clear to us after Nicholas’s confidences and the rumors we heard in church, that there is a group of Italian monks reluctant to tolerate the succession of foreign librarians; they accuse the abbot of not respecting tradition, and, as I understand it, they hide behind old Alinardo, thrusting him forward like a standard, to ask for a different government of the abbey. So perhaps the abbot fears our revelations could give his enemies a weapon, and he wants to settle the question with great prudence. . . .”

There are many other books that speak of comedy, many others that praise laughter. Why did this one fill you with such fear?” “Because it was by the Philosopher. Every book by that man has destroyed a part of the learning that Christianity had accumulated over the centuries.

The book of Genesis says what has to be known about the composition of the cosmos, but it sufficed to rediscover the Physics of the Philosopher to have the universe reconceived in terms of dull and slimy matter, and the Arab Averroës almost convinced everyone of the eternity of the world.

Before, we used to look to heaven, deigning only a frowning glance at the mire of matter; now we look at the earth, and we believe in the heavens because of earthly testimony. Every word of the Philosopher, by whom now even saints and prophets swear, has overturned the image of the world. But he had not succeeded in overturning the image of God. If this book were to become an object for open interpretation, we would have crossed the last boundary.”

But here, here”—now Jorge struck the table with his finger, near the book William was holding open—“here the function of laughter is reversed, it is elevated to art, the doors of the world of the learned are opened to it, it becomes the object of philosophy, and of perfidious theology. . . .

Laughter frees the villein from fear of the Devil, because in the feast of fools the Devil also appears poor and foolish, and therefore controllable. But this book could teach that freeing oneself of the fear of the Devil is wisdom.

This book could strike the Luciferine spark that would set a new fire to the whole world, and laughter would be defined as the new art, unknown even to Prometheus, for canceling fear.

For centuries the doctors and the fathers have spread perfumed essences of holy learning to redeem, through the thought of that which is lofty, the wretchedness and temptation of that which is base. And this book—considering comedy a wondrous medicine, with its satire and mime, which would produce the purification of the passions through the enactment of defect, fault, weakness—would induce false scholars to try to redeem the lofty with a diabolical reversal: through the acceptance of the base.

But if one day—and no longer as plebeian exception, but as ascesis of the learned, devoted to the indestructible testimony of Scripture—the art of mockery were to be made acceptable, and to seem noble and liberal and no longer mechanical; if one day someone could say (and be heard), ‘I laugh at the Incarnation,’ then we would have no weapons to combat that blasphemy, because it would summon the dark powers of corporal matter, those that are affirmed in the fart and the belch, and the fart and the belch would claim the right that is only of the spirit, to breathe where they list!”

This book would have justified the idea that the tongue of the simple is the vehicle of wisdom. This had to be prevented, which I have done. You say I am the Devil, but it is not true: I have been the hand of God.” “The hand of God creates; it does not conceal.” “There are boundaries beyond which it is not permitted to go. God decreed that certain papers should bear the words ‘hic sunt leones.’”

"hic sunt leones" translates to "here there are lions." Written on uncharted territories of old maps.

“God created the monsters, too. And you. And He wants everything to be spoken of.”

“Then why,” he said, “did He allow this text to be lost over the course of the centuries, and only one copy to be saved, and the copy of that copy, which had ended up God knows where, to remain buried for years in the hands of an infidel who knew no Greek, and then to lie abandoned in the secrecy of an old library, where I, not you, was called by Providence to find it and to hide it for more years still?

I know that this was the will of the Lord, and I acted, interpreting it. In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”

“Now,” he added, “the Antichrist is truly at hand, because no learning will hinder him any more. For that matter, we have seen his face tonight.” “Whose face?” I asked, dazed.

In that face, deformed by hatred of philosophy, I saw for the first time the portrait of the Antichrist, who does not come from the tribe of Judas, as his heralds have it, or from a far country. The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.

Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.”

“I have never doubted the truth of signs, Adso; they are the only things man has with which to orient himself in the world.

I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.”

The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.

It’s hard to accept the idea that there cannot be an order in the universe because it would offend the free will of God and His omnipotence. So the freedom of God is our condemnation, or at least the condemnation of our pride.”

What difference is there, then, between God and primigenial chaos? Isn’t affirming God’s absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to His own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist?”

“Do you mean,” I asked, “that there would be no possible and communicable learning any more if the very criterion of truth were lacking, or do you mean you could no longer communicate what you know because others would not allow you to?”

“There is too much confusion here,” William said.

I pray always that God received his soul and forgave him the many acts of pride that his intellectual vanity had made him commit.

Where are the snows of yesteryear? The earth is dancing the dance of Macabré; at times it seems to me that the Danube is crowded with ships loaded with fools going toward a dark place.

I shall soon enter this broad desert, perfectly level and boundless, where the truly pious heart succumbs in bliss. I shall sink into the divine shadow, in a dumb silence and an ineffable union, and in this sinking all equality and all inequality shall be lost, and in that abyss my spirit will lose itself, and will not know the equal or the unequal, or anything else: and all differences will be forgotten. I shall be in the simple foundation, in the silent desert where diversity is never seen, in the privacy where no one finds himself in his proper place. I shall fall into the silent and uninhabited divinity where there is no work and no image.

I leave this manuscript, I do not know for whom; I no longer know what it is about: stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.

Rosa que al prado, encarnada, te ostentas presuntüosa de grana y carmín bañada: campa lozana y gustosa; pero no, que siendo hermosa tambien serás desdichada. —JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ3

3. Mexican lyric poet (1651-1695). The lines read: "Red rose growing in the meadow, you vaunt yourself bravely, bathed in crimson and carmine: a rich and fragrant show. But no: Being fair, you will be unhappy soon."

I remember that Abelard used the example of the sentence Nulla rosa est to demonstrate how language can speak of both the nonexistent and the destroyed.

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would not have written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations. But one of the chief obstacles to his maintaining this virtuous principle is the fact that a novel must have a title. A title, unfortunately, is in itself a key to interpretation.

My novel had another, working, title, which was The Abbey of the Crime. I rejected it because it concentrates the reader’s attention entirely on the mystery story and might wrongly lure and mislead purchasers looking for an action-packed yarn.

The idea of calling my book The Name of the Rose came to me virtually by chance, and I liked it because the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning left: Dante’s mystic rose, and go lovely rose, the Wars of the Roses, rose thou art sick, too many rings around Rosie, a rose by any other name,5 a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, the Rosicrucians.

5. It is curious that in America and the United Kingdom, the Latin verse reminded many reviewers of Romeo and Juliet. It is curi-ous, because it seems to me that the sense of Juliet's words is exactly the opposite of that of Bernard's. Shakespeare suggests that names do not matter and do not affect the substance of the thing-in-itself. Bernard might have agreed with Shakespeare that names are only arbitrary labels, but for the Benedictine what remains of the real (?) rose (if any) is precisely this evanescent, powerful, fascinating, magical name.