In which Benno of Uppsala confides certain things, others are confided by Berengar of Arundel, and Adso learns the meaning of true penitence.
The horrible event had upset the life of the community. The confusion caused by the discovery of the corpse had interrupted the holy office. The abbot promptly sent the monks back to the choir, to pray for the soul of their brother.
The monks’ voices were broken. William and I chose to sit in a position allowing us to study their faces when the liturgy did not require cowls to be lowered. Immediately we saw Berengar’s face. Pale, drawn, glistening with sweat.
Next to him we noticed Malachi. Dark, frowning, impassive. Beside Malachi, equally impassive, was the face of the blind Jorge. We observed, on the other hand, the nervous movements of Benno of Uppsala, the rhetoric scholar we had met the previous day in the scriptorium; and we caught his rapid glance at Malachi. “Benno is nervous, Berengar is frightened,” William remarked. “They must be questioned right away.”
“Why?” I asked ingenuously.
“Ours is a hard task,” William said. “A hard task, that of the inquisitor, who must strike the weakest, and at their moment of greatest weakness.”
In fact, as soon as the office was over, we caught up with Benno, who was heading for the library. The young man seemed vexed at hearing William call him, and he muttered some faint pretext about work to be done. He seemed in a hurry to get to the scriptorium. But my master reminded him that he was carrying out an inquiry at the abbot’s behest, and led Benno into the cloister. We sat on the inner wall, between two columns. Looking from time to time toward the Aedificium, Benno waited for William to speak.
“Well, then,” William asked, “what was said that day when you were discussing Adelmo’s marginalia with Berengar, Venantius, Malachi, and Jorge?”
“You heard it yesterday. Jorge was saying that it is not licit to use ridiculous images to decorate books that contain the truth. And Venantius observed that Aristotle himself had spoken of witticisms and plays on words as instruments better to reveal the truth, and hence laughter could not be such a bad thing if it could become a vehicle of the truth. Jorge said that, as far as he could recall, Aristotle had spoken of these things in his Poetics, when discussing metaphor. And these were in themselves two disturbing circumstances, first because the book of the Poetics, unknown to the Christian world for such a long time, which was perhaps by divine decree, had come to us through the infidel Moors….”
“But it was translated into Latin by a friend of the angelic doctor of Aquino,” William said.
“That’s what I said to him,” Benno replied, immediately heartened. “I read Greek badly and I could study that great book only, in fact, through the translation of William of Moerbeke. Yes, that’s what I said. But Jorge added that the second cause for uneasiness is that in the book the Stagirite was speaking of poetry, which is infima doctrina and which exists on figments. And Venantius said that the psalms, too, are works of poetry and use metaphors; and Jorge became enraged because he said the psalms are works of divine inspiration and use metaphors to convey the truth, while the works of the pagan poets use metaphors to convey falsehood and for purposes of mere pleasure, a remark that greatly offended me….”
“Why?”
“Because I am a student of rhetoric, and I read many pagan poets, and I know … or I believe that their words have conveyed also truths naturaliter Christian…. In short, at that point, if I recall correctly, Venantius spoke of other books and Jorge became very angry.”
“Which books?”
Benno hesitated. “I don’t remember. What does it matter which books were spoken of?”
“It matters a great deal, because here we are trying to understand what has happened among men who live among books, with books, from books, and so their words on books are also important.”
“It’s true,” Benno said, smiling for the first time, his face growing almost radiant. “We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay. Perhaps, then, you will understand what happened on that occasion. Venantius, who knows … who knew Greek very well, said that Aristotle had dedicated the second book of the Poetics specifically to laughter, and that if a philosopher of such greatness had devoted a whole book to laughter, then laughter must be important. Jorge said that many fathers had devoted entire books to sin, which is an important thing, but evil; and Venantius said that as far as he knew, Aristotle had spoken of laughter as something good and an instrument of truth; and then Jorge asked him contemptuously whether by any chance he had read this book of Aristotle; and Venantius said that no one could have read it, because it has never been found and is perhaps lost forever. And, in fact, William of Moerbeke never had it in his hands. Then Jorge said that if it had not been found, this was because it had never been written, because Providence did not want futile things glorified. I wanted to calm everyone’s spirit, because Jorge is easily angered and Venantius was speaking deliberately to provoke him, and so I said that in the part of the Poetics that we do know, and in the Rhetoric, there are to be found many wise observations on witty riddles, and Venantius agreed with me. Now, with us was Pacificus of Tivoli, who knows the pagan poets very well, and he said that when it comes to these witty riddles, no one surpasses the African poets. He quoted, in fact, the riddle of the fish, of Symphosius:
Est domus in terris, clara quae voce resultat.
Ipsa domus resonat, tacitus sed non sonat hospes.
Ambo tamen currunt, hospes simul et domus una.
“At this point Jorge said that Jesus had urged our speech to be yes or no, for anything further came from the Evil One; and that to mention fish it was enough to say ‘fish,’ without concealing the notion under lying sounds. And he added that it did not seem to him wise to take the Africans as models…. And then…”
“Then?”
“Then something happened that I didn’t understand. Berengar began to laugh. Jorge reproached him, and he said he was laughing because it had occurred to him that if one sought carefully among the Africans, quite different riddles would be found, and not so easy as the one about the fish. Malachi, who was present, became furious, took Berengar by the cowl, and sent him off to his tasks…. Berengar, you know, is his assistant….”
“And after that?”
“After that, Jorge put an end to the argument by going away. We all went off to our occupations, but as I was working, I saw first Venantius, then Adelmo approach Berengar and ask him something. From the distance I saw he was parrying their questions, but in the course of the day both went back to him. And then that evening I saw Berengar and Adelmo confabulating in the cloister before entering the refectory. There, that’s all I know.”
“You know, in fact, that the two persons who have recently died in mysterious circumstances had asked something of Berengar,” William said.
Benno answered uncomfortably, “I didn’t say that! I told you what happened that day, because you asked me….” He reflected a moment, then hastily added, “But if you want to know my opinion, Berengar spoke to them of something in the library, and that is where you should search.”
“Why do you think of the library? What did Berengar mean about seeking among the Africans? Didn’t he mean that the African poets should be more widely read?”
“Perhaps. So it seemed. But then why should Malachi have become furious? After all, he’s the one who decides whether or not a volume of African poets is given out to be read. But I know one thing: anyone leafing through the catalogue of books will often find, among the collocations that only the librarian understands, one that says ‘Africa,’ and I have even found one that said ‘finis Africae,’ the end of Africa. Once I asked for a book that bore that indication, I can’t recall which book, though the title had aroused my curiosity; and Malachi told me the books with that indication had been lost. This is what I know. And this is why I say you’re right, check on Berengar, and check when he goes up into the library. You never can tell.”
“You never can tell,” William concluded, dismissing him. Then he began strolling with me in the cloister and remarked that, first of all, Berengar had once again been the subject of his brothers’ murmuring; second, Benno seemed eager to direct us to the library. I observed that perhaps he wanted us to discover there things he, too, wanted to know; and William said this was probably the case, but it was also possible that in directing us toward the library he wanted to keep us away from some other place. Which? I asked. And William said he did not know, perhaps the scriptorium, perhaps the kitchen, or the choir, or the dormitory, or the infirmary. I remarked that the previous day it was he, William, who had been fascinated by the library, and his answer was that he wanted to be fascinated by the things he chose and not as others advised him. But the library should be kept under observation, he went on, and at this point it would not be a bad idea to try to get into it somehow. Circumstances now authorized his curiosity, within the bounds of politeness and respect for the customs and laws of the abbey.
We left the cloister. Servants and novices were coming from the church after Mass. And as we walked along the west side of the church, we glimpsed Berengar coming out of the transept door and crossing the cemetery toward the Aedificium. William called him, he stopped, and we overtook him. He was even more distraught than when we had seen him in choir, and William obviously decided to exploit, as he had with Benno, this state of his spirit.
“So it seems that you were the last to see Adelmo alive,” he said.
Berengar staggered, as if he were about to fall in a faint. “I?” he asked in a weak voice. William had dropped his question as if by chance, perhaps because Benno had told him of seeing the two conferring in the cloister after vespers. But it must have struck home, and clearly Berengar was thinking of another, really final meeting, because he began to speak in a halting voice.
“How can you say that? I saw him before going off to bed, like everyone else!”
Then William decided it might be worthwhile to press him without respite. “No, you saw him again, and you know more things than you wish to admit. But there are two deaths involved here, and you can no longer be silent. You know very well there are many ways to make a person speak!”
William had often said to me that, even when he had been an inquisitor, he had always avoided torture; but Berengar misunderstood him (or William wanted to be misunderstood). In any case, the move was effective.
“Yes, yes,” Berengar said, bursting into a flood of tears, “I saw Adelmo that evening, but I saw him already dead!”
“How?” William asked. “At the foot of the hill?”
“No, no, I saw him here in the cemetery, he was moving among the graves, a ghost among ghosts. I met him and realized at once that I did not have a living man before me: his face was a corpse’s, his eyes already beheld the eternal punishment. Naturally, it was only the next morning, when I learned of his death, that I understood I had encountered his ghost, but even at that moment I realized I was having a vision and that there was a damned soul before me, one of the lemures…. Oh, Lord, what a gravelike voice he had as he spoke to me!”
“And what did he say?”
“‘I am damned!’ That is what he said to me. ‘As you see me here, you see one returned from hell, and to hell I must go back.’ So he said to me. And I cried to him, ‘Adelmo, have you really come from hell? What are the pains of hell like?’ And I was trembling, because I had just left the office of compline where I had heard read the terrible pages on the wrath of the Lord. And he said to me, ‘The pains of hell are infinitely greater than our tongue can say. You see,’ he said, ‘this cape of sophisms in which I have been dressed till today? It oppresses me and weighs on me as if I had the highest tower of Paris or the mountain of the world on my back, and nevermore shall I be able to set it down. And this pain was given me by divine justice for my vainglory, for having believed my body a place of pleasures, and for having thought to know more than others, and for having enjoyed monstrous things, which, cherished in my imagination, have produced far more monstrous things within my soul—and now I must live with them in eternity. You see the lining of this cloak? It is as if it were all coals and ardent fire, and it is the fire that burns my body, and this punishment is given me for the dishonest sin of the flesh, whose vice I knew and cultivated, and this fire now unceasingly blazes and burns me! Give me your hand, my beautiful master,’ he said to me further, ‘that my meeting with you may be a useful lesson, in exchange for many of the lessons you gave me. Your hand, my beautiful master!’ And he shook the finger of his burning hand, and on my hand there fell a little drop of his sweat and it seemed to pierce my hand. For many days I bore the sign, only I hid it from all. Then he disappeared among the graves, and the next morning I learned that his body, which had so terrified me, was now dead at the foot of the cliff.”
Berengar was breathless, weeping. William asked him, “And why did he call you his beautiful master? You were the same age. Had you perhaps taught him something?”
Berengar hid his head, pulling his cowl over his face, and sank to his knees, embracing William’s legs. “I don’t know why he addressed me like that. I never taught him anything!” And he burst into sobs. “I am afraid, Father. I want to confess myself to you. Have mercy, a devil is devouring my bowels!”
William thrust him away and held out a hand to draw him to his feet. “No, Berengar,” he said to him, “do not ask me to confess you. Do not seal my lips by opening yours. What I want to know from you, you will tell me in another way. And if you will not tell me, I will discover it on my own. Ask me for mercy, if you like, but do not ask silence of me. Too many are silent in this abbey. Tell me, rather, how you saw his pale face if it was darkest night, how he could burn your hand if it was a night of rain and hail and snow, and what you were doing in the cemetery. Come”—and he shook him brutally by the shoulders—”tell me this at least!”
Berengar was trembling in every limb. “I don’t know what I was doing in the cemetery, I don’t remember, I don’t know how I saw his face, perhaps I had a light, no … he had a light, he was carrying a light, perhaps I saw his face in the light of the flame….”
“How could he carry a light if it was raining and snowing?”
“It was after compline, immediately after compline, it was not snowing yet, the snow began later…. I remember that the first flurries began as I was fleeing toward the dormitory. I was fleeing toward the dormitory as the ghost went in the opposite direction…. And after that I know nothing more; please, question me no further, if you will not confess me.”
“Very well,” William said, “go now, go into the choir, go to speak with the Lord, since you will not speak with men, or go and find a monk who will hear your confession, because if you have not confessed your sins since then, you have approached the sacraments sacrilegiously. Go. We shall see each other again.”
Berengar ran off and vanished. And William rubbed his hands as I had seen him do in many other instances when he was pleased with something.
“Good,” he said. “Now many things become clear.”
“Clear, master?” I asked him. “Clear now that we also have Adelmo’s ghost?”
“My dear Adso,” William said, “that ghost does not seem very ghostly to me, and in any case he was reciting a page I have already read in some book conceived for the use of preachers. These monks read perhaps too much, and when they are excited they relive visions they learned from books. I don’t know whether Adelmo really said those things or whether Berengar simply heard them because he needed to hear them. The fact remains that this story confirms a series of my suppositions. For example: Adelmo died a suicide, and Berengar’s story tells us that, before dying, he went around in the grip of a great agitation, and in remorse for some act he had committed. He was agitated and frightened about his sin because someone had frightened him, and perhaps had told him the very episode of the infernal apparition that he recited to Berengar with such hallucinated mastery. And he was going through the cemetery because he was leaving the choir, where he had confided (or confessed) to someone who had filled him with terror and remorse. And from the cemetery he was heading, as Berengar informed us, in the opposite direction from the dormitory. Toward the Aedificium, then, but also (it is possible) toward the outside wall behind the stables, from where I have deduced he must have thrown himself into the chasm. And he threw himself down before the storm came, he died at the foot of the wall, and only later did the landslide carry his corpse between the north tower and the eastern one.”
“But what about the drop of burning sweat?”
“It was already part of the story he heard and repeated, or that Berengar imagined, in his agitation and his remorse. Because there is, as antistrophe to Adelmo’s remorse, a remorse of Berengar’s: you heard it. And if Adelmo came from the choir, he was perhaps carrying a taper, and the drop on his friend’s hand was only a drop of wax. But Berengar felt it burn much deeper because Adelmo surely called him his master. A sign, then, that Adelmo was reproaching him for having taught him something that now caused him to despair unto death. And Berengar knows it, he suffers because he knows he drove Adelmo to death by making him do something he should not have done. And it is not difficult to imagine what, my poor Adso, after what we have heard about our assistant librarian.”
“I believe I understand what happened between the two,” I said, embarrassed by my own wisdom, “but don’t all of us believe in a God of mercy? Adelmo, you say, had probably confessed; why did he seek to punish his first sin with a sin surely greater still, or at least of equal gravity?”
“Because someone said words of desperation to him. As I said, a page of a modern preacher must have prompted someone to repeat the words that frightened Adelmo and with which Adelmo frightened Berengar. In these last few years, as never before, to stimulate piety and terror and fervor in the populace, and obedience to human and divine law, preachers have used distressing words, macabre threats. Never before, as in our days, amid processions of flagellants, were sacred lauds heard inspired by the sorrows of Christ and of the Virgin, never has there been such insistence as there is today on strengthening the faith of the simple through the depiction of infernal torments.”
“Perhaps it is the need for penitence,” I said.
“Adso, I have never heard so many calls to penitence as today, in a period when, by now, neither preachers nor bishops nor even my brothers the Spirituals are any longer capable of inspiring true repentance….”
“But the third age, the Angelic Pope, the chapter of Perugia …” I said, bewildered.
“Nostalgia. The great age of penitence is over, and for this reason even the general chapter of the order can speak of penitence. There was, one hundred, two hundred years ago, a great wind of renewal. There was a time when those who spoke of it were burned, saint or heretic as they may have been. Now all speak of it. In a certain sense even the Pope discusses it. Don’t trust renewals of the human race when curias and courts speak of them.”
“But Fra Dolcino,” I ventured, curious to know more about that name I had heard uttered several times the day before.
“He died, and died dreadfully, as he lived, because he also came too late. And, anyway, what do YOU know of him?”
“Nothing. That is why I ask you….”
“I would prefer never to speak of him. I have had to deal with some of the so-called Apostles, and I have observed them closely. A sad story. It would upset you. In any case, it upset me, and you would be all the more upset by my inability to judge. It’s the story of a man who did insane things because he put into practice what many saints had preached. At a certain point I could no longer understand whose fault it was, I was as if … as if dazed by an air of kinship that wafted over the two opposing camps, of saints who preached penitence and sinners who put it into practice, often at the expense of others…. But I was speaking of something else. Or perhaps not. I was speaking really of this: when the epoch of penitence was over, for penitents the need for penance became a need for death. And they who killed the crazed penitents, repaying death with death, to defeat true penitence, which produced death, replaced the penitence of the soul with a penitence of the imagination, a summons to supernatural visions of suffering and blood, calling them the ‘mirror’ of true penitence. A mirror that brings to life, for the imagination of the simple and sometimes even of the learned, the torments of hell. So that—it is said—no one shall sin. They hope to keep souls from sin through fear, and trust to replace rebellion with fear.”
“But won’t they truly sin then?” I asked anxiously.
“It depends on what you mean by sinning, Adso,” my master said. “I would not like to be unjust toward the people of this country where I have been living for some years, but it seems to me typical of the scant virtue of the Italian peoples to abstain from sin out of their fear of some idol, though they may give it the name of a saint. They are more afraid of Saint Sebastian or Saint Anthony than of Christ. If you wish to keep a place clean here, to prevent anyone from pissing on it, which the Italians do as freely as dogs do, you paint on it an image of Saint Anthony with a wooden tip, and this will drive away those about to piss. So the Italians, thanks to their preachers, risk returning to the ancient superstitions; and they no longer believe in the resurrection of the flesh, but have only a great fear of bodily injuries and misfortunes, and therefore they are more afraid of Saint Anthony than of Christ.”
“But Berengar isn’t Italian,” I pointed out.
“It makes no difference. I am speaking of the atmosphere that the church and the preaching orders have spread over this peninsula, and which from here spreads everywhere. And it reaches even a venerable abbey of learned monks, like these.”
“But if only they didn’t sin,” I insisted, because I was prepared to be satisfied with this alone.
“If this abbey were a speculum mundi, you would already have the answer.”
“But is it?” I asked.
“In order for there to be a mirror of the world, it is necessary that the world have a form,” concluded William, who was too much of a philosopher for my adolescent mind.