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!

I see that for a novice of Saint Benedict you have done some odd reading, William remarked. I blushed, because I knew a novice should not read romances, but they circulated among us young people in the monastery of Melk and we read them at night by candlelight. But that doesn’t matter, 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.

But you were speaking of other outcasts; it isn’t lepers who form heretical movements.

The flock is like a series of concentric circles, from the broadest range of the flock to its immediate surroundings. The lepers are a sign of exclusion in general. Saint Francis understood that. He didn’t want only to help the lepers; if he had, his act would have been reduced to quite a poor and impotent act of charity. He wanted to signify something else. Have you been told about his preaching to the birds?

Oh, yes, I’ve heard that beautiful story, and I admired the saint who enjoyed the company of those tender creatures of God, I said with great fervor.

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 fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together at the supper of the great God; that ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great!’

So Francis wanted to incite the outcasts to revolt?

No, that was what Fra Dolcino and his followers wanted, if anybody did. Francis wanted to call the outcast, ready to revolt, to be part of the people of God. If the flock was to be gathered again, the outcasts had to be found again. Francis didn’t succeed, and I say it with great bitterness. To recover the outcasts he had to act within the church, to act within the church he had to obtain the recognition of his rule, from which an order would emerge, and this order, as it emerged, would recompose the image of a circle, at whose margin the outcasts remain. So now do you understand why there are bands of Fraticelli and Joachimites who again gather the outcasts around themselves?

But we weren’t talking about Francis; we were talking about how heresy is produced by the simple and the outcast.

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.’ But we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign. Excluded as they were from the flock, all of them were ready to hear, or to produce, every sermon that, harking back to the word of Christ, would condemn the behavior of the dogs and shepherds and would promise their punishment one day. The powerful always realized this. The recovery of the outcasts demanded reduction of the privileges of the powerful, so the excluded who became aware of their exclusion had to be branded as heretics, whatever their doctrine. And for their part, blinded by their exclusion, they were not really interested in any doctrine. This is the illusion of heresy. Everyone is heretical, everyone is orthodox. The faith a movement proclaims doesn’t count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is. As for the lepers, what can you ask of them? That they distinguish in the Trinitarian dogma or in the definition of the Eucharist how much is correct and how much is wrong? Come, Adso, these games are for us men of learning. The simple have other problems. And mind you, they solve them all in the wrong way. This is why they become heretics.

But why do some people support them?

Because it serves their purposes, which concern the faith rarely, and more often the conquest of power.

Is that why the church of Rome accuses all its adversaries of heresy?

That is why, and that is also why it recognizes as orthodoxy any heresy it can bring back under its own control or must accept because the heresy has become too strong. But there is no precise rule: it depends on the individuals, on the circumstances. This holds true also for the secular lords. Sometimes the city magistrates encourage the heretics to translate the Gospel into the vernacular: the vernacular by now is the language of the cities, Latin the language of Rome and the monasteries. And sometimes the magistrates support the Waldensians, because they declare that all, men and women, lowly and mighty, can teach and preach, and the worker who is a disciple after ten days hunts for another whose teacher he can become….

And so they eliminate the distinction that makes clerics irreplaceable! But, then, why does it happen that the same city magistrates rebel against the heretics and lend the church a hand in having them burned?

Because they realize the heretics’ growth could jeopardize also the privileges of the laity who speak in the vernacular. In the Lateran Council of 1179 (you see, these questions date back a hundred fifty years), Walter Map warned against what would happen if credence were given to those foolish and illiterate men the Waldensians. He said, if I recall properly, that they have no fixed dwelling, they go about barefoot and possess nothing, holding everything as common property, following naked the naked Christ; they begin in this very humble way because they are outcasts, but if you give them too much room they will drive out everyone else. This is why the cities favored the mendicant orders, and 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; they were channeled within the bounds of an order recognized by the Pope. But what circulated underneath was not channeled. It flowed, on the one hand, into the movements of the flagellants, who endanger no one, or into the armed bands like Fra Dolcino’s, or into the witchcraft rituals of the monks of Montefalco that Ubertino was talking about….

But who was right, who is right, who was wrong? I asked, bewildered.

They were all right in their way, and all were mistaken.

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?

William remained silent for a while, holding the lens he was working on up to the light. Then he lowered it to the table and showed me, through the lens, a tool. Look, he said to me. What do you see?

The tool, a bit larger.

There: the most we can do is look more closely.

But the tool remains always the same!

The manuscript of Venantius, too, will remain the same when, thanks to this lens, I’ve been able to read it. But perhaps when I’ve read the manuscript I’ll know a part of the truth better. And perhaps we’ll be able to make the life of the abbey better.

But that isn’t enough!

I’m saying more than I seem to be, Adso. This isn’t the first time I’ve spoken to you of Roger Bacon. Perhaps he was not the wisest man of all time, but I’ve always been fascinated by the hope that inspired his love of learning. Bacon believed in the strength, the needs, the spiritual inventions of the simple. He wouldn’t have been a good Franciscan if he hadn’t thought that the poor, the outcast, idiots and illiterate, often speak with the mouth of our Lord. The simple have something more than do learned doctors, who often become lost in their search for broad, general laws. The simple have a sense of the individual, but this sense, by itself, is not enough. The simple grasp a truth of their own, perhaps truer than that of the doctors of the church, but then they destroy it in unthinking actions. What must be done? Give learning to the simple? Too easy, or too difficult. The Franciscan teachers considered this problem. The great Bonaventure said that the wise must enhance conceptual clarity with the truth implicit in the actions of the simple….

Like the chapter of Perugia and the learned memories of Ubertino, which transform into theological decisions the summons of the simple to poverty, I said.

Yes, but as you have seen, this happens too late, and when it happens, the truth of the simple has already been transformed into the truth of the powerful, more useful for the Emperor Louis than for a Friar of the Poor Life. 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,’ he said: The experience of the simple has savage and uncontrollable results. ‘Sed opera sapientiae certa lege vallantur et in finem debitum efficaciter diriguntur.’ Which is to say that even in the handling of practical things, be they agriculture, mechanics, or the governing of a city, a kind of theology is required. He thought that the new natural science should be the great new enterprise of the learned: to coordinate, through a different knowledge of natural processes, the elementary needs that represented also the heap of expectations, disordered but in its way true and right, of the simple. The new science, the new natural magic. According to Bacon, this enterprise was to be directed by the church, but I believe he said this because in his time the community of clerics was identified with the community of the learned. Today that is no longer the case: learned men grow up outside the monasteries and the cathedrals, even outside the universities. So 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.

A splendid enterprise, I said, but is it possible?

Bacon thought so.

And you?

I think so, too. 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?

Yes, I said, how can it?

I no longer know. I have had arguments at Oxford with my friend William of Occam, who is now in Avignon. He has sown doubts in my mind. 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?

But you know that a certain thickness of glass corresponds to a certain power of vision, and it is because you know this that now you can make lenses like the ones you have lost: otherwise how could you?

An acute reply, Adso. In fact, I have worked out this proposition: equal thickness corresponds necessarily to equal power of vision. I have posited it because on other occasions I have had individual insights of the same type. 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. 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.

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 gave me a look of admiration. Perhaps that’s it. In any case, this tells you why I feel so uncertain of my truth, even if I believe in it.

You are more mystical than Ubertino! I said spitefully.

Perhaps. But as you see, 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.

Yours is a difficult life, I said.

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.

At this point Nicholas came back with an almost finished fork, holding it up victoriously.

And when this fork is on my poor nose, William said, perhaps my poor head will be even more orderly.

A novice came to say the abbot wished to see William, and was waiting for him in the garden. As we started off, William slapped his forehead, as if remembering only at this point something he had forgotten.

By the way, he said, I’ve deciphered Venantius’s cabalistic signs.

All of them? When?

While you were asleep. And it depends on what you mean by ‘all.’ I’ve deciphered the signs that the flame caused to appear, the ones you copied out. The notes in Greek must wait till I have new lenses.

Well? Was it the secret of the finis Africae?

Yes, and the key was fairly easy. At his disposal Venantius had the twelve signs of the zodiac and eight other signs: for the five planets, the two luminaries, and the earth. Twenty signs in all. Enough to associate with them the letters of the Latin alphabet, since you can use the same letter to express the sound of the two initials of ‘unum’ and ‘velut.’ The order of the letters, we know. What could be the order of the signs, then? I thought of the order of the heavens, placing the zodiacal quadrant at the far edge. So, then: Earth, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, etc., and, afterward, the signs of the zodiac in their traditional sequence, as Isidore of Seville classifies them, beginning with Aries and the vernal equinox, ending with Pisces. Now, if you try this key, Venantius’s message takes on a meaning.

He showed me the parchment, on which he had transcribed the message in big Latin letters: Secretum finis Africae manus supra idolum age primum et septimum de quatuor.

Is that clear? he asked.

The hand over the idol works on the first and the seventh of the four… I repeated, shaking my head. It isn’t clear at all!

I know. First of all we have to know what Venantius meant by ‘idolum.’ An image, a ghost, a figure? And then what can this ‘four’ be that has a ‘first’ and a ‘seventh’? And what is to be done with them? Move them, push them, pull them?

So we know nothing and we are still where we started, I said, with great dismay.

William stopped and looked at me with an expression not entirely benevolent. My boy, he said, you have before you a poor Franciscan who, with his modest learning and what little skill he owes to the infinite power of the Lord, has succeeded in a few hours in deciphering a secret code whose author was sure would prove sealed to all save himself … and you, wretched illiterate rogue, dare say we are still where we started?

I apologized very clumsily. I had wounded my master’s vanity, and yet I knew how proud he was of the speed and accuracy of his deductions. William truly had performed a job worthy of admiration, and it was not his fault if the crafty Venantius not only had concealed his discovery behind an obscure zodiacal alphabet, but had further devised an undecipherable riddle.

No matter, no matter, don’t apologize, William interrupted me. After all, you’re right. We still know too little. Come along.