The Name of the Rose

by Umberto Eco

Now I know that good is cause of love and that which is good is defined by knowledge, and you can only love what you have learned is good, whereas I had, indeed, learned that the girl was the good of the irascible appetite, but the evil of the will.

I saw the lamb, to which this name was given as if in recognition of its purity and goodness. In fact the noun “agnus” derives from the fact that this animal “agnoscit”; it recognizes its mother, and recognizes her voice in the midst of the flock while the mother, among many lambs of the same form, with the same bleating, recognizes always and only her offspring, and nourishes him.

“Can you tell me anything helpful about these criminal deeds?” “No, unfortunately,” William answered with civility. “I do not have your experience of criminal deeds.”

Ayyo

“Therefore you don’t have a single answer to your questions?” “Adso, if I did I would teach theology in Paris.” “In Paris do they always have the true answer?” “Never,” William said, “but they are very sure of their errors.” “And you,” I said with childish impertinence, “never commit errors?” “Often,” he answered. “But instead of conceiving only one, I imagine many, so I become the slave of none.”

“The men of my islands are all a bit mad,” William said proudly.

those were times when, to forget an evil world, grammarians took pleasure in abstruse questions. I was told that in that period, for fifteen days and fifteen nights, the rhetoricians Gabundus and Terentius argued on the vocative of ‘ego,’ and in the end they attacked each other, with weapons.”

“The Koran, the Bible of the infidels, a perverse book . . .” “A book containing a wisdom different from ours.

“But why have they also put a book with the unicorn among the falsehoods?” I asked. “Obviously the founders of the library had strange ideas. They must have believed that this book which speaks of fantastic animals and beasts living in distant lands was part of the catalogue of falsehoods spread by the infidels. . . .” “But is the unicorn a falsehood? It’s the sweetest of animals and a noble symbol. It stands for Christ, and for chastity; it can be captured only by setting a virgin in the forest, so that the animal, catching her most chaste odor, will go and lay its head in her lap, offering itself as prey to the hunters’ snares.” “So it is said, Adso. But many tend to believe that it’s a fable, an invention of the pagans.” “What a disappointment,” I said. “I would have liked to encounter one, crossing a wood. Otherwise what’s the pleasure of crossing a wood?”

“If you look at her because she is beautiful, and you are upset by her (but I know you are upset, because the sin of which she is suspected makes her all the more fascinating to you), if you look at her and feel desire, that alone makes her a witch. Be on guard, my son. . . .

God brought all the animals unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And though surely the first man had been clever enough to call, in his Adamic language, every thing and animal according to its nature, nevertheless he was exercising a kind of sovereign right in imagining the name that in his opinion best corresponded to that nature. Because, in fact, it is now known that men impose different names to designate concepts, though only the concepts, signs of things, are the same for all.

And William said, “No, that’s Arabic, idiot! Bacon was right: the scholar’s first duty is to learn languages!”

Benno blushed violently. “I am not a murderer!” he protested. “No one is, until he commits his first crime,” William said philosophically.

we burned and looted because we had proclaimed poverty the universal law, and we had the right to appropriate the illegitimate riches of others, and we wanted to strike at the heart of the network of greed that extended from parish to parish, but we never looted in order to possess, or killed in order to loot; we killed to punish, to purify the impure through blood,

We had to kill the innocent as well, in order to kill all of you more quickly.

“We sought a confession from you, not a summons to massacre.

“But what remains that you cannot have done? Do you now say you are innocent? O lamb, O model of meekness! You have heard him: he once had his hands steeped in blood and now he is innocent! Perhaps we were mistaken, Remigio of Varagine is a paragon of virtue, a loyal son of the church, an enemy of the enemies of Christ, he has always respected the order that the hand of the church has toiled to impose on villages and cities, the peace of trade, the craftsmen’s shops, the treasures of the churches. He is innocent, he has committed nothing. Here, come to my arms, Brother Remigio, that I may console you for the accusations that evil men have brought against you!”

Damn, go off on Remigio

How wise we were, Brother Remigio, to act like sensible men, there is nothing nastier than torture! I would have foresworn a thousand religions that day.

No. You want a corpse, and to have it you need me to assume the guilt for other corpses. I will be a corpse soon in any case. And so I will give you what you want.

To kill someone it is not necessary to strike: the Devil does it for you, if you know how to command the Devil.”

Everything unhinged-Remigio says is fire

“You know you are risking your life?” “So be it,” Michael answered. “Better than risking my soul.”

“Madmen and children always speak the truth,

Bernard is interested, not in discovering the guilty, but in burning the accused.

“Our Malachi has accomplished many fine things today,” Aymaro said, with his usual sneer of contempt and indulgence. “If justice existed, the Devil would come and take him this very night.”

Just as it was necessary for someone to betray Jesus in order for the mystery of redemption to be accomplished, yet the Lord sanctioned damnation and vituperation for the one who betrayed him. Thus someone has sinned in these days, bringing death and ruination, but I say to you that this ruination was, if not desired, at least permitted by God for the humbling of our pride!”

This is the pride that lurked and is still lurking within these walls: and I say to him who has labored and labors to break the seals of the books that are not his to see, that it is this pride the Lord wanted to punish and will continue to punish if it is not brought down and does not humble itself, for the Lord has no difficulty in finding, always and still, thanks to our fragility, the instruments of His vengeance.”

Oh, you have all understood very well, and you fear to utter the name, for it is also yours and you are afraid of it, but though you have fear, I shall have none, and I will say this name in a loud voice so that your viscera may twist in fright and your teeth chatter and cut off your tongue, and the chill that forms in your blood make a dark veil descend over your eyes. . . . He is the foul beast, he is the Antichrist!”

Far from me, ye accursed, into the eternal fire that has been prepared for you by the Devil and his ministers! You yourselves have earned it, and now enjoy it! Go ye from me, descending into the eternal darkness and into the unquenchable fire!

This was the only earthly love of my life, and I could not, then or ever after, call that love by name.

:(

“He told me . . . truly. . . . It had the power of a thousand scorpions. . . .”

being assistant librarian is different from being librarian. By tradition, the librarian later becomes abbot. . . .”

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.

This crypt is a beautiful epitome of the debates on poverty you have been following these past few days. And now you know why your brothers make mincemeat of one another as they aspire to the position of abbot.”

I never understood when he was jesting. In my country, when you joke you say something and then you laugh very noisily, so everyone shares in the joke. But William laughed only when he said serious things, and remained very serious when he was presumably joking.

I had learned that he was perhaps a poor wretch, oppressed by unfulfilled passions, an earthenware vessel among vessels of iron, surly because bewildered, silent and evasive because conscious he had nothing to say.

I saw again all the guests of the supper, now restored to their original forms, singing and declaring that everything was beginning again, and among them was the maiden, whole and most beautiful, who said to me, “It is nothing, it is nothing, you will see: I shall be even more beautiful than before; just let me go for a moment and burn on the pyre, then we shall meet again here!”

Lacrimosa dies illa qua resurget ex favilla iudicandus homo reus: huic ergo parce deus! Pie Iesu domine dona eis requiem.

“We already have so many truths in our possession that if the day came when someone insisted on deriving a truth even from our dreams, then the day of the Antichrist would truly be at hand.

“But my dream made no sense, like all dreams!” “It had another sense like all dreams. It must be read as an allegory, or an analogy. . . .” “Like Scripture?” “A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.”

Murderer or next victim as he may be, he does not want defamatory news about this holy community to travel beyond these mountains. Kill his monks, but do not touch the honor of his abbey.

“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. Abo is capable of identifying the wretch, stabbing him in the treasure crypt, and passing out his kidneys among the reliquaries, provided the honor of the abbey is saved. . . . Have a Franciscan, a plebeian Minorite, discover the rat’s nest of this holy house? Ah, no, this is something Abo cannot allow at any price. Thank you, Brother William, the Emperor needs you, you see what a beautiful ring I have, good-bye.

I must know. I must.” “You must? Who obliges you now?” “No one ever obliges us to know, Adso. We must, that is all, even if we comprehend imperfectly.”

“And what if the abbot finds us?” “We will pretend to be a pair of ghosts.” To me this did not seem a practical solution, but I kept silent.

If something of the sort had happened the first night, I would immediately have thought of dead monks. But by now I tended to expect worse from living monks.

Two hours after compline, at the end of the sixth day, in the heart of the night that was giving birth to the seventh day, we entered the finis Africae.

“What a magnificent librarian you would have been, William,” Jorge said, with a tone at once admiring and regretful.

You are trying to convince yourself that this whole story proceeded according to a divine plan, in order to conceal from yourself the fact that you are a murderer.”

“I accept the risk of damnation. The Lord will absolve me, because He knows I acted for His glory. My duty was to protect the library.”

And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts?

“Illness is not exorcised. It is destroyed.” “With the body of the sick man.” “If necessary.” “You are the Devil,”

We could have taken him calmly, but we fell on him with violence;