The Name of the Rose

by Umberto Eco

The Catharists are something else. That is an Oriental heresy, outside the doctrine of the church. I don’t know whether they really commit or have committed the crimes attributed to them. I know they reject matrimony, they deny hell. I wonder whether many acts they have not committed have been attributed to them only because of the ideas (surely unspeakable) they have upheld.”

William lowered his eyes and remained silent for a while. Then he said, “The city of Béziers was captured and our forces had no regard for dignity of sex or age, and almost twenty thousand people were put to the sword. When the massacre was complete, the city was sacked and burned.” “A holy war is nevertheless a war.” “For this reason perhaps there should not be holy wars. But what am I saying? I am here to defend the rights of Louis, who is also putting Italy to the sword.

I felt dull and somnolent, for 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.

the just will reign for a thousand years,” William said. “Or else they reigned from the death of Christ to the end of the first millennium, and so the Antichrist should have come then; or else the just have not yet reigned, and the Antichrist is still far off.”

“But why doesn’t the Gospel ever say that Christ laughed?” I asked, for no good reason. “Is Jorge right?” “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.”

“But who can he have been, the man who was here ahead of us? Benno?”

“Berengar seems to me to have the courage to do such things. And, after all, he shares responsibility for the library. He is consumed by remorse at having betrayed some secret of it; he thought Venantius had taken that book, and perhaps he wanted to return it to the place from which it comes. He wasn’t able to go upstairs, and now he is hiding the volume somewhere.”

And if you think carefully, we have no reason to think Malachi knows Venantius had entered the library and removed something. Berengar and Benno know this, and you and I know it. After Adelmo’s confession, Jorge may know it, but he was surely not the man who was rushing so furiously down the circular staircase. . . .”

the center of the room I saw Berengar staring at me with a hateful smile, oozing lust. I covered my face with my hands and my hands seemed the claws of a toad, slimy and webbed. I cried out, I believe; there was an acid taste in my mouth; I plunged into infinite darkness, which seemed to yawn wider and wider beneath me; and then I knew nothing further.

“To find the way out of a labyrinth,” William recited, “there is only one means. At every new junction, never seen before, the path we have taken will be marked with three signs. If, because of previous signs on some of the paths of the junction, you see that the junction has already been visited, you will make only one mark on the path you have taken. If all the apertures have already been marked, then you must retrace your steps. But if one or two apertures of the junction are still without signs, you will choose any one, making two signs on it. Proceeding through an aperture that bears only one sign, you will make two more, so that now the aperture bears three. All the parts of the labyrinth must have been visited if, arriving at a junction, you never take a passage with three signs, unless none of the other passages is now without signs.”

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.

Even the overlords had white faces like the poor, although, Salvatore remarked, the poor died in greater numbers than the gentry did, perhaps (he smiled) because there were more of them. . . .

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.

From the story he told me, I pictured him among those bands of vagrants that in the years that followed 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 priests, people who lived on the credulity of others, counterfeiters of bulls and papal seals, peddlers of indulgences, false paralytics who lay at church doors, vagrants fleeing from convents, relic-sellers, soothsayers and fortunetellers, necromancers, healers, bogus alms-seekers, fornicators of every sort, corruptors of nuns and maidens by deception and violence, simulators of dropsy, epilepsy, hemorrhoids, gout, and sores, as well as melancholy madness.

Then they lined up in battle in the meadow of Saint-Germain, but no one had the courage to face them. So they moved on toward Aquitaine, and pillaged and slaughtered all the Jews in the ghettoes they passed.

“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 ca...

Anyway, they laid siege to a high and massive tower of the King of France, where the frightened Jews had run in a body to take refuge. And the Jews sallying forth below the walls of the tower defended themselves courageously, hurling wood and stones. But the Shepherds set fire to the gate of the tower, and the Jews, finding themselves barricaded with smoke and flames, and preferring to kill themselves rather than die at the hand of the uncircumcised, asked one of their number, who seemed the most courageous, to put them all to the sword. And he killed almost five hundred of them. Then he came out of the tower with the children of the Jews, and asked the Shepherds to baptize him. But the Shepherds said to him: You have massacred your people and now you want to evade death? And they tore him to pieces; but they spared the children, whom they then baptized.

Further, he was moved to tenderness for the Jews, both because the Jews were useful to the trade of the kingdom, and because now it was necessary to destroy the Shepherds, and all good Christians had to have a good reason to weep over their crimes.

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.

Now I am tormented by the problem of difference itself. When you were speaking with Ubertino, I had the impression you were trying to prove to him that all are the same, saints and heretics. But then, speaking with the abbot, you were doing your best to explain to him the difference between one heretic and another, and between the heretical and the orthodox. In other words, you reproached Ubertino for considering different those who were basically the same, and the abbot for considering the same those who were basically different.”

“My good Adso,” he said, “we will try now to make some distinctions, and we may as well use the terms of the school of Paris for our distinguishing. So: they say all men have the same substantial form, am I right?” “Of course,” I said, proud of my knowledge, “men are animals but rational, and the property of man is the capacity for laughing.”

“Then this means there is identity in different men as to their substantial form, and diversity as to the accidents, or as to their superficial shape.”

“When I say to Ubertino that human nature itself, in the complexity of its operations, governs both the love of good and the love of evil, I am trying to convince Ubertino of the identity of human nature. When I say to the abbot, however, that there is a difference between a Catharist and a Waldensian, I am insisting on the variety of their accidents. And I insist on it because a Waldensian may be burned after the accidents of a Catharist have been attributed to him, and vice versa. And when you burn a man you burn his individual substance and reduce to pure nothing that which was a concrete act of existing, hence in itself good, at least in the eyes of God, who kept him in existence.

Imagine a river, wide and majestic, which flows for miles and miles between strong embankments, where the land is firm. At a certain point, the river, out of weariness, because its flow has taken up too much time and too much space, because it is approaching the sea, which annihilates all rivers in itself, no longer knows what it is, loses its identity. It becomes its own delta. A major branch may remain, but many break off from it in every direction, and some flow together again, into one another, and you can’t tell what begets what, and sometimes you can’t tell what is still river and what is already sea. . . .”

“That isn’t exactly what I was thinking. I was trying to explain to you how the body of the church, which for centuries was also the body of all society, the people of God, has become too rich, and wide, and it carries along the dross of all the countries it has passed through, and it has lost its own purity. The branches of the delta are, if you like, so many attempts of the river to flow as quickly as possible to the sea, that is, to the moment of purification.

The Catharists thought the world was divided between the opposing forces of good and evil, and they had built a church in which the perfect were distinguished from simple believers, and they had their sacraments and their rites; they had built a very rigid hierarchy, almost like that of our own Holy Mother, and they didn’t for a moment think of destroying every form of power. Which explains to you why men in command, landowners, feudal lords, also joined the Catharists.

The Waldensians, on the contrary (and along with them the Arnoldists, or Poor Lombards), wanted to construct a different world on an ideal of poverty, and this is why they received the outcasts and lived in community with the labor of their hands.”

“Yes, I recall a story about King Mark, who had to condemn Isolda the beautiful and was about to have her ascend the stake when the lepers came and said to the King that the stake was a mild punishment and that there was a worse one. And they cried to him: Give us Isolda that she may belong to all of us, our illness enflames our desires, give her to your lepers. Look at our rags, glued to our groaning wounds. She, who at your side enjoyed rich stuffs lined with squirrel fur and jewels, when she sees the courtyard of the lepers, when she has to enter our hovels and lie with us, then she will truly recognize her sin and regret this fine pyre of brambles!”

William continued, “you have understood what I meant. 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. Saint Francis realized this, and his first decision was to go and live among the lepers. The people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body.”

Because if only the sense of the individual is just, the proposition that identical causes have identical effects is difficult to prove. A single body can be cold or hot, sweet or bitter, wet or dry, in one place—and not in another place. 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?”

The science Bacon spoke of rests unquestionably on these propositions. You understand, Adso, I 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 that if He wanted, with a single act of His will He could make the world different.”

“But I found Brunellus,” William cried, recalling the horse episode of two days before. “Then there is an order in the world!” I cried, triumphant. “Then there is a bit of order in this poor head of mine,” William answered.

The stone can be used to produce many wonders, including a machine that moves perpetually without any external power,

“But why does the needle always point north? The stone attracts iron, I saw that, and I imagine that an immense quantity of iron attracts the stone. But then . . . then in the direction of the polestar, at the extreme confines of the globe, there exist great iron mines!”

“Someone, in fact, has suggested such is the case. Except that the needle doesn’t point precisely in the direction of the daystar, but toward the intersection of the celestial meridians. A sign that, as has been said, ‘hic lapis gerit in se similitudinem coeli,’ and the poles of the magnet receive their inclination from the poles of the sky, not from those of the earth. Which is a fine example of movement provoked at a distance, not by direct material causality: a problem that my friend John of Jandun is studying, when the Emperor does not ask him to make Avignon sink into the bowels of the earth. . . .”

“I do not know why, but I have never seen a machine that, however perfect in the philosophers’ description, is perfect in its mechanical functioning. Whereas a peasant’s billhook, which no philosopher has ever described, always functions as it should. . . .

“We will use the mathematical sciences. Only in the mathematical sciences, as Averroës says, are things known to us identified with those known absolutely.” “Then you do admit universal notions, you see.” “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. And the library was built by a human mind that thought in a mathematical fashion, because without mathematics you cannot build labyrinths. And therefore we must compare our mathematical propositions with the propositions of the builder, and from this comparison science can be produced, because it is a science of terms upon terms. And, in any case, stop dragging me into discussions of metaphysics. What the Devil has got into you today?

I tried drawing the plan that my master suggested, and I let out a cry of triumph. “But now we know everything! Let me count. . . . The library has fifty-six rooms, four of them heptagonal and fifty-two more or less square, and of these, there are eight without windows, while twenty-eight look to the outside and sixteen to the interior!”

“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. . . .

“The Minorites ask to be poor, but they have never asked others to be poor. You cannot attack the property of good Christians with impunity; the good Christians will label you a bandit.

They said of him finally that to test his strength of will and his continence he slept with women without having carnal knowledge of them; but when his disciples tried to imitate him, the results were quite different. . . . 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!

And he identified four ages in the life of the people of God: The first was that of the Old Testament, the patriarchs and prophets, before the coming of Christ, when marriage was good because God’s people had to multiply. The second was the age of Christ and the apostles, and this was the epoch of saintliness and chastity. Then came the third, when the popes had first to accept earthly riches in order to govern the people; but when mankind began to stray from the love of God, Benedict came, and spoke against all temporal possessions. When the monks of Benedict also then went back to accumulating wealth, the monks of Saint Francis and Saint Dominic came, even more stern than Benedict in preaching against earthly power and riches. But finally now, when again the lives of so many prelates were contradicting all those good precepts, we had reached the end of the third age, and it was necessary to follow the teachings of the Apostles.”

“Ah, yes, but he derived a perfidious syllogism from them! He said that to bring to an end this third age of corruption, all the clergy, monks, and friars had to die a very cruel death; he said that all prelates of the church, all clerics, religious male and female, Dominicans, Franciscans, hermits, and even Boniface the Pope had to be exterminated by the Emperor he, Dolcino, had chosen, and this was to be Frederick of Sicily.” “But didn’t that same Frederick receive with favor in Sicily the Spirituals expelled from Umbria, and isn’t it the Minorites who ask that the Emperor destroy the temporal power of the Pope and the cardinals?”

The Minorites have never asked the Emperor to kill other priests.” He was mistaken, I know now. Because, a few months later, when the Bavarian established his own order in Rome, Marsilius and other Minorites did to religious who were faithful to the Pope exactly what Dolcino had asked to have done. By this I don’t mean that Dolcino was right; if anything, Marsilius was equally wrong.

“You see? As the doctors have said: Beautiful also are the breasts, which protrude slightly, only faintly tumescent, and do not swell licentiously, suppressed but not depressed. . . .

I say this also, and with great fear, of the good love between God and man, between man and his neighbor. It often happens that two or three people, men or women, love one another quite cordially and harbor reciprocal, special fondness, and desire to live always close, and what one party wishes, the other desires. And I confess that I felt something of the kind for most virtuous women, like Angela and Clare. Well, that, too, is blameworthy, even though it is spiritual and conceived in God’s name. . . . Because even the love felt by the soul, if it is not forearmed, if it is felt warmly, then falls, or proceeds in disorder.

and he had indeed been seized by the bishop’s men in the house of those same women, a fact that amazed me, because a man of the church should never go to administer the sacraments in such unsuitable places; but this seemed to be a weakness of the Fraticelli, this failure to take propriety into due consideration, and perhaps there was some truth in the popular belief that held them to be of dubious morals (as it was always said of the Catharists that they were Bulgars and sodomites).

The lion I saw had a mouth bristling with teeth, and a finely armored head like a serpent’s; the immense body was supported by four paws with sharp, fierce claws, and its coat resembled one of those rugs that later I saw brought from the Orient, with red and emerald scales on which were drawn, yellow as the plague, horrible and sturdy armatures of bone. Also yellow was the tail, which twisted from the rump to the head, ending in a final scroll of black and white tufts.