Introduction

ON AUGUST 16, 1968, I WAS HANDED A BOOK WRITTEN BY A CERTAIN Abbé Vallet, Le Manuscrit de Dom Adson de Melk, traduit en français d’après l’édition de Dom J. Mabillon (Aux Presses de l’Abbaye de la Source, Paris, 1842). Supplemented by historical information that was actually quite scant, the book claimed to reproduce faithfully a fourteenth-century manuscript that, in its turn, had been found in the monastery of Melk by the great eighteenth-century man of learning, to whom we owe so much information about the history of the Benedictine order. The scholarly discovery (I mean mine, the third in chronological order) entertained me while I was in Prague, waiting for a dear friend. Six days later Soviet troops invaded that unhappy city. I managed, not without adventure, to reach the Austrian border at Linz, and from there I journeyed to Vienna, where I met my beloved, and together we sailed up the Danube.

In a state of intellectual excitement, I read with fascination the terrible story of Adso of Melk, and I allowed myself to be so absorbed by it that, almost in a single burst of energy, I completed a translation, using some of those large notebooks from the Papeterie Joseph Gibert in which it is so pleasant to write if you use a felt-tip pen. And as I was writing, we reached the vicinity of Melk, where, perched over a bend in the river, the handsome Stift stands to this day, after several restorations during the course of the centuries. As the reader must have guessed, in the monastery library I found no trace of Adso’s manuscript.

Before we reached Salzburg, one tragic night in a little hotel on the shores of the Mondsee, my traveling-companionship was abruptly interrupted, and the person with whom I was traveling disappeared—taking Abbé Vallet’s book, not out of spite, but because of the abrupt and untidy way in which our relationship ended. And so I was left with a number of manuscript notebooks in my hand, and a great emptiness in my heart.

A few months later, in Paris, I decided to get to the bottom of my research. Among the few pieces of information I had derived from the French book, I still had the reference to its source, exceptionally detailed and precise:etera analecta, sive collectio veterum aliquot operum & opusculorum omnis generis, carminum, epistolarum, diplomaton, epitaphiorum, &, cum itinere germanico, adnotationibus & aliquot disquisitionibus R.P.D. Joannis Mabillon, Presbiteri ac Monachi Ord. Sancti Benedicti e Congregatione S. Mauri— Nova Editio cui accessere Mabilonii vita & aliquot opuscula, scilicet Dissertatio de Pane Eucharistico, Azymo et Fermentato ad Eminentiss. Cardinalem Bona. Subiungitur opusculum Eldefonsi Hispaniensis Episcopi de eodem argumento Et Eusebii Romani ad Theophilum Galium epistola, De cultu sanctorum ignotorum, Parisiis, apud Levesque, ad Pontem S. Michaelis, MDCCXXI, cum privilegio Regis.

I quickly found the Vetera analecta at the Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève, but to my great surprise the edition I came upon differed from the description in two details: first, the publisher, who was given here as “Montalant, ad Ripam P.P. Augustinianorum (prope Pontem S. Michaelis),” and also the date, which was two years later. I needn’t add that these analecta did not comprehend any manuscript of Adso or Adson of Melk; on the contrary, as anyone interested can check, they are a collection of brief or medium-length texts, whereas the story transcribed by Vallet ran to several hundred pages. At the same time, I consulted illustrious medievalists such as the dear and unforgettable Étienne Gilson, but it was evident that the only Vetera analecta were those I had seen at Sainte Geneviève. A quick trip to the Abbaye de la Source, in the vicinity of Passy, and a conversation with my friend Dom Arne Lahnestedt further convinced me that no Abbé Vallet had published books on the abbey’s presses (for that matter, nonexistent). French scholars are notoriously careless about furnishing reliable bibliographical information, but this case went beyond all reasonable pessimism. I began to think I had encountered a forgery. By now the Vallet volume itself could not be recovered (or at least I didn’t dare go and ask it back from the person who had taken it from me). I had only my notes left, and I was beginning to have doubts about them.

There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past (“en me retraçant ces détails, j’en suis à me demander s’ils sont réels, ou bien si je les ai rêvés”). As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.

If something new had not occurred, I would still be wondering where the story of Adso of Melk originated; but then, in 1970, in Buenos Aires, as I was browsing among the shelves of a little antiquarian bookseller on Corrientes, not far from the more illustrious Patio del Tango of that great street, I came upon the Castilian version of a little work by Milo Temesvar, On the Use of Mirrors in the Game of Chess. It was an Italian translation of the original, which, now impossible to find, was in Georgian (Tbilisi, 1934); and here, to my great surprise, I read copious quotations from Adso’s manuscript, though the source was neither Vallet nor Mabillon; it was Father Athanasius Kircher (but which work?). A scholar—whom I prefer not to name—later assured me that (and he quoted indexes from memory) the great Jesuit never mentioned Adso of Melk. But Temesvar’s pages were before my eyes, and the episodes he cited were the same as those of the Vallet manuscript (the description of the labyrinth in particular left no room for doubt).

I concluded that Adso’s memoirs appropriately share the nature of the events he narrates: shrouded in many, shadowy mysteries, beginning with the identity of the author and ending with the abbey’s location, about which Adso is stubbornly, scrupulously silent. Conjecture allows us to designate a vague area between Pomposa and Conques, with reasonable likelihood that the community was somewhere along the central ridge of the Apennines, between Piedmont, Liguria, and France. As for the period in which the events described take place, we are at the end of November 1327; the date of the author’s writing, on the other hand, is uncertain. Inasmuch as he describes himself as a novice in 1327 and says he is close to death as he writes his memoirs, we can calculate roughly that the manuscript was written in the last or next-to-last decade of the fourteenth century.

On sober reflection, I find few reasons for publishing my Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth-century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German monk toward the end of the fourteenth century.

First of all, what style should I employ? The temptation to follow Italian models of the period had to be rejected as totally unjustified: not only does Adso write in Latin, but it is also clear from the whole development of the text that his culture (or the culture of the abbey, which clearly influences him) dates back even further; it is manifestly a summation, over several centuries, of learning and stylistic quirks that can be linked with the late-medieval Latin tradition. Adso thinks and writes like a monk who has remained impervious to the revolution of the vernacular, still bound to the pages housed in the library he tells about, educated on patristic-scholastic texts; and his story (apart from the fourteenth-century references and events, which Adso reports with countless perplexities and always by hearsay) could have been written, as far as the language and the learned quotations go, in the twelfth or thirteenth century.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that, in translating Adso’s Latin into his own neo-Gothic French, Vallet took some liberties, and not only stylistic liberties. For example, the characters speak sometimes of the properties of herbs, clearly referring to the book of secrets attributed to Albertus Magnus, which underwent countless revisions over the centuries. It is certain that Adso knew the work, but the fact remains that passages he quotes from it echo too literally both formulas of Paracelsus and obvious interpolations from an edition of Albertus unquestionably dating from the Tudor period.¹ However, I discovered later that during the time when Vallet was transcribing (?) the manuscript of Adso, there was circulating in Paris an eighteenth-century edition of the Grand and the Petit Albert,² now irreparably corrupt. In any case, how could I be sure that the text known to Adso or the monks whose discussions he recorded did not also contain, among glosses, scholia, and various appendices, annotations that would go on to enrich subsequent scholarship?

Finally, was I to retain in Latin the passages that Abbé Vallet himself did not feel it opportune to translate, perhaps to preserve the ambience of the period? There were no particular reasons to do so, except a perhaps misplaced sense of fidelity to my source…. I have eliminated excesses, but I have retained a certain amount. And I fear that I have imitated those bad novelists who, introducing a French character, make him exclaim “Parbleu!” and “La femme, ah! la femme!”

In short, I am full of doubts. I really don’t know why I have decided to pluck up my courage and present, as if it were authentic, the manuscript of Adso of Melk. Let us say it is an act of love. Or, if you like, a way of ridding myself of numerous, persistent obsessions.

I transcribe my text with no concern for timeliness. In the years when I discovered the Abbé Vallet volume, there was a widespread conviction that one should write only out of a commitment to the present, in order to change the world. Now, after ten years or more, the man of letters (restored to his loftiest dignity) can happily write out of pure love of writing. And so I now feel free to tell, for sheer narrative pleasure, the story of Adso of Melk, and I am comforted and consoled in finding it immeasurably remote in time (now that the waking of reason has dispelled all the monsters that its sleep had generated), gloriously lacking in any relevance for our day, atemporally alien to our hopes and our certainties.

For it is a tale of books, not of everyday worries, and reading it can lead us to recite, with à Kempis, the great imitator: “In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.”

January 5, 1980

Note

ADSO’S MANUSCRIPT IS DIVIDED INTO SEVEN DAYS, AND EACH DAY INTO periods corresponding to the liturgical hours. The subtitles, in the third person, were probably added by Vallet. But since they are helpful in orienting the reader, and since this usage is also not unknown to much of the vernacular literature of the period, I did not feel it necessary to eliminate them.

Adso’s references to the canonical hours caused me some puzzlement, because their meaning varied according to the place and the season; moreover, it is entirely probable that in the fourteenth century the instructions given by Saint Benedict in the Rule were not observed with absolute precision.

Nevertheless, as a guide to the reader, the following schedule is, I believe, credible. It is partly deduced from the text and partly based on a comparison of the original Rule with the description of monastic life given by Edouard Schneider in Les Heures bénédictines (Paris, Grasset, 1925).

The calculation is based on the fact that in northern Italy at the end of November, the sun rises around 7:30 A.M. and sets around 4:40 P.M.

PROLOGUE

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. This was beginning with God and the duty of every faithful monk would be to repeat every day with chanting humility the one never-changing event whose incontrovertible truth can be asserted. But we see now through a glass darkly, and the truth, before it is revealed to all, face to face, we see in fragments (alas, how illegible) in the error of the world, so we must spell out its faithful signals even when they seem obscure to us and as if amalgamated with a will wholly bent on evil.

Having reached the end of my poor sinner’s life, my hair now white, I grow old as the world does, waiting to be lost in the bottomless pit of silent and deserted divinity, sharing in the light of angelic intelligences; confined now with my heavy, ailing body in this cell in the dear monastery of Melk, I prepare to leave on this parchment my testimony as to the wondrous and terrible events that I happened to observe in my youth, now repeating verbatim all I saw and heard, without venturing to seek a design, as if to leave to those who will come after (if the Antichrist has not come first) signs of signs, so that the prayer of deciphering may be exercised on them.

May the Lord grant me the grace to be the transparent witness of the happenings that took place in the abbey whose name it is only right and pious now to omit, toward the end of the year of our Lord 1327, when the Emperor Louis came down into Italy to restore the dignity of the Holy Roman Empire, in keeping with the designs of the Almighty and to the confusion of the wicked usurper, simoniac, and heresiarch who in Avignon brought shame on the holy name of the apostle (I refer to the sinful soul of Jacques of Cahors, whom the impious revered as John XXII).

Perhaps, to make more comprehensible the events in which I found myself involved, I should recall what was happening in those last years of the century, as I understood it then, living through it, and as I remember it now, complemented by other stories I heard afterward—if my memory still proves capable of connecting the threads of happenings so many and confused.

In the early years of that century Pope Clement V had moved the apostolic seat to Avignon, leaving Rome prey to the ambitions of the local overlords: and gradually the holy city of Christianity had been transformed into a circus, or into a brothel, riven by the struggles among its leaders; though called a republic, it was not one, and it was assailed by armed bands, subjected to violence and looting. Ecclesiastics, eluding secular jurisdiction, commanded groups of malefactors and robbed, sword in hand, transgressing and organizing evil commerce. How was it possible to prevent the Caput Mundi from becoming again, and rightly, the goal of the man who wanted to assume the crown of the Holy Roman Empire and restore the dignity of that temporal dominion that had belonged to the Caesars?

Thus in 1314 five German princes in Frankfurt elected Louis the Bavarian supreme ruler of the empire. But that same day, on the opposite shore of the Main, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, and the Archbishop of Cologne elected Frederick of Austria to the same high rank. Two emperors for a single throne and a single pope for two: a situation that, truly, fomented great disorder….

Two years later, in Avignon, the new Pope was elected, Jacques of Cahors, an old man of seventy-two who took, as I have said, the name of John XXII, and heaven grant that no pontiff take again a name now so distasteful to the righteous. A Frenchman, devoted to the King of France (the men of that corrupt land are always inclined to foster the interests of their own people, and are unable to look upon the whole world as their spiritual home), he had supported Philip the Fair against the Knights Templars, whom the King accused (I believe unjustly) of the most shameful crimes so that he could seize their possessions with the complicity of that renegade ecclesiastic.

In 1322 Louis the Bavarian defeated his rival Frederick. Fearing a single emperor even more than he had feared two, John excommunicated the victor, who in return denounced the Pope as a heretic. I must also recall how, that very year, the chapter of the Franciscans was convened in Perugia, and the minister general, Michael of Cesena, accepting the entreaties of the Spirituals (of whom I will have occasion to speak), proclaimed as a matter of faith and doctrine the poverty of Christ, who, if he owned something with his apostles, possessed it only as usus facti. A worthy resolution, meant to safeguard the virtue and purity of the order, it highly displeased the Pope, who perhaps discerned in it a principle that would jeopardize the very claims that he, as head of the church, had made, denying the empire the right to elect bishops, and asserting on the contrary that the papal throne had the right to invest the emperor. Moved by these or other reasons, John condemned the Franciscan propositions in 1323 with the decretal Cum inter nonnullos.

It was at this point, I imagine, that Louis saw the Franciscans, now the Pope’s enemies, as his potential allies. By affirming the poverty of Christ, they were somehow strengthening the ideas of the imperial theologians, namely Marsilius of Padua and John of Jandun. And finally, not many months before the events I am narrating, Louis came to an agreement with the defeated Frederick, descended into Italy, and was crowned in Milan.

This was the situation when I—a young Benedictine novice in the monastery of Melk—was removed from the peace of the cloister by my father, fighting in Louis’s train, not least among his barons. He thought it wise to take me with him so that I might know the wonders of Italy and be present when the Emperor was crowned in Rome. But the siege of Pisa then absorbed him in military concerns. Left to myself, I roamed among the cities of Tuscany, partly out of idleness and partly out of a desire to learn. But this undisciplined freedom, my parents thought, was not suitable for an adolescent devoted to a contemplative life. And on the advice of Marsilius, who had taken a liking to me, they decided to place me under the direction of a learned Franciscan, Brother William of Baskerville, about to undertake a mission that would lead him to famous cities and ancient abbeys. Thus I became William’s scribe and disciple at the same time, nor did I ever regret it, because with him I was witness to events worthy of being handed down, as I am now doing, to those who will come after us.

I did not then know what Brother William was seeking, and to tell the truth, I still do not know today, and I presume he himself did not know, moved as he was solely by the desire for truth, and by the suspicion—which I could see he always harbored—that the truth was not what was appearing to him at any given moment. And perhaps during those years he had been distracted from his beloved studies by secular duties. The mission with which William had been charged remained unknown to me while we were on our journey, or, rather, he never spoke to me about it. It was only by overhearing bits of his conversations with the abbots of the monasteries where we stopped along the way that I formed some idea of the nature of this assignment. But I did not understand it fully until we reached our destination, as I will tell presently. Our destination was to the north, but our journey did not follow a straight line, and we rested at various abbeys. Thus it happened that we turned westward when our final goal was to the east, almost following the line of mountains that from Pisa leads in the direction of the pilgrim’s way to Santiago, pausing in a place which the terrible events that took place there dissuade me from identifying more closely now, but whose lords were liege to the empire, and where the abbots of our order, all in agreement, opposed the heretical, corrupt Pope. Our journey lasted two weeks, amid various vicissitudes, and during that time I had the opportunity to know (never enough, I remain convinced) my new master.

In the pages to follow I shall not indulge in descriptions of persons—except when a facial expression, or a gesture, appears as a sign of a mute but eloquent language—because, as Boethius says, nothing is more fleeting than external form, which withers and alters like the flowers of the field at the appearance of autumn; and what would be the point of saying today that the abbot Abo had a stern eye and pale cheeks, when by now he and those around him are dust and their bodies have the mortal grayness of dust (only their souls, God grant, shining with a light that will never be extinguished)? But I would like to describe William at least once, because his singular features struck me, and it is characteristic of the young to become bound to an older and wiser man not only by the spell of his words and the sharpness of his mind, but also by the superficial form of his body, which proves very dear, like the figure of a father, whose gestures we study and whose frowns, whose smile we observe—without a shadow of lust to pollute this form (perhaps the only that is truly pure) of corporal love.

In the past men were handsome and great (now they are children and dwarfs), but this is merely one of the many facts that demonstrate the disaster of an aging world. The young no longer want to study anything, learning is in decline, the whole world walks on its head, blind men lead others equally blind and cause them to plunge into the abyss, birds leave the nest before they can fly, the jackass plays the lyre, oxen dance. Mary no longer loves the contemplative life and Martha no longer loves the active life, Leah is sterile, Rachel has a carnal eye, Cato visits brothels, Lucretius becomes a woman. Everything is on the wrong path. In those days, thank God, I acquired from my master the desire to learn and a sense of the straight way, which remains even when the path is tortuous.

Brother William’s physical appearance was at that time such as to attract the attention of the most inattentive observer. His height surpassed that of a normal man and he was so thin that he seemed still taller. His eyes were sharp and penetrating; his thin and slightly beaky nose gave his countenance the expression of a man on the lookout, save in certain moments of sluggishness of which I shall speak. His chin also denoted a firm will, though the long face covered with freckles—such as I often saw among those born between Hibernia and Northumbria—could occasionally express hesitation and puzzlement. In time I realized that what seemed a lack of confidence was only curiosity, but at the beginning I knew little of this virtue, which I thought, rather, a passion of the covetous spirit. I believed instead that the rational spirit should not indulge such passion, but feed only on the Truth, which (I thought) one knows from the outset.

Boy that I was, I was first, and most deeply, struck by some clumps of yellowish hair that protruded from his ears, and by his thick blond eyebrows. He had perhaps seen fifty springs and was therefore already very old, but his tireless body moved with an agility I myself often lacked. His energy seemed inexhaustible when a burst of activity overwhelmed him. But from time to time, as if his vital spirit had something of the crayfish, he moved backward in moments of inertia, and I watched him lie for hours on my pallet in my cell, uttering barely a few monosyllables, without contracting a single muscle of his face. On those occasions a vacant, absent expression appeared in his eyes, and I would have suspected he was in the power of some vegetal substance capable of producing visions if the obvious temperance of his life had not led me to reject this thought. I will not deny, however, that in the course of the journey, he sometimes stopped at the edge of a meadow, at the entrance to a forest, to gather some herb (always the same one, I believe): and he would then chew it with an absorbed look. He kept some of it with him, and ate it in the moments of greatest tension (and we had a number of them at the abbey!). Once, when I asked him what it was, he said laughing that a good Christian can sometimes learn also from the infidels, and when I asked him to let me taste it, he replied that herbs that are good for an old Franciscan are not good for a young Benedictine.

During our time together we did not have occasion to lead a very regular life: even at the abbey we remained up at night and collapsed wearily during the day, nor did we take part regularly in the holy offices. On our journey, however, he seldom stayed awake after compline, and his habits were frugal. Sometimes, also at the abbey, he would spend the whole day walking in the vegetable garden, examining the plants as if they were chrysoprases or emeralds; and I saw him roaming about the treasure crypt, looking at a coffer studded with emeralds and chrysoprases as if it were a clump of thorn apple. At other times he would pass an entire day in the great hall of the library, leafing through manuscripts as if seeking nothing but his own enjoyment (while, around us, the corpses of monks, horribly murdered, were multiplying). One day I found him strolling in the flower garden without any apparent aim, as if he did not have to account to God for his works. In my order they had taught me quite a different way of expending my time, and I said so to him. And he answered that the beauty of the cosmos derives not only from unity in variety, but also from variety in unity. This seemed to me an answer dictated by crude common sense, but I learned subsequently that the men of his land often define things in ways in which it seems that the enlightening power of reason has scant function.

During our period at the abbey his hands were always covered with the dust of books, the gold of still-fresh illumination, or with yellowish substances he touched in Severinus’s infirmary. He seemed unable to think save with his hands, an attribute I considered then worthier of a mechanic: but even when his hands touched the most fragile things, such as certain freshly illuminated codices, or pages worn by time and friable as unleavened bread, he possessed, it seemed to me, an extraordinarily delicate touch, the same that he used in handling his machines. I will tell, in fact, how this strange man carried with him, in his bag, instruments that I had never seen before then, which he called his wondrous machines. Machines, he said, are an effect of art, which is nature’s ape, and they reproduce not its forms but the operation itself. He explained to me thus the wonders of the clock, the astrolabe, and the magnet. But at the beginning I feared it was witchcraft, and I pretended to sleep on certain clear nights when he (with a strange triangle in his hand) stood watching the stars. The Franciscans I had known in Italy and in my own land were simple men, often illiterate, and I expressed to him my amazement at his learning. But he said to me, smiling, that the Franciscans of his island were cast in another mold: “Roger Bacon, whom I venerate as my master, teaches that the divine plan will one day encompass the science of machines, which is natural and healthy magic. And one day it will be possible, by exploiting the power of nature, to create instruments of navigation by which ships will proceed unico homine regente, and far more rapid than those propelled by sails or oars; and there will be self-propelled wagons ‘and flying apparatuses of such form that a man seated in them, by turning a device, can flap artificial wings, ad modum avis volantis.’ And tiny instruments will lift huge weights and vehicles will allow travel on the bottom of the sea.”

When I asked him where these machines were, he told me that they had already been made in ancient times, and some even in our own time: “Except the flying instrument, which I have never seen or known anyone who has seen, but I know of a learned man who has conceived it. And bridges can be built across rivers without columns or other support, and other unheard-of machines are possible. But you must not worry if they do not yet exist, because that does not mean they will not exist later. And I say to you that God wishes them to be, and certainly they already are in His mind, even if my friend from Occam denies that ideas exist in such a way; and I do not say this because we can determine the divine nature but precisely because we cannot set any limit to it.” Nor was this the only contradictory proposition I heard him utter; but even now, when I am old and wiser than I was then, I have not completely understood how he could have such faith in his friend from Occam and at the same time swear by the words of Bacon, as he was accustomed to doing. It is also true that in those dark times a wise man had to believe things that were in contradiction among themselves.

There, of Brother William I have perhaps said things without sense, as if to collect from the very beginning the disjointed impressions of him that I had then. Who he was, and what he was doing, my good reader, you will perhaps deduce better from the actions he performed in the days we spent in the abbey. Nor do I promise you an accomplished design, but, rather, a tale of events (those, yes) wondrous and awful.

And so, after I had come to know my master day by day, and spent the many hours of our journey in long conversations which, when appropriate, I will relate little by little, we reached the foot of the hill on which the abbey stood. And it is time for my story to approach it, as we did then, and may my hand remain steady as I prepare to tell what happened.

FIRST DAY

PRIME

In which the foot of the abbey is reached, and William demonstrates his great acumen.

It was a beautiful morning at the end of November. During the night it had snowed, but only a little, and the earth was covered with a cool blanket no more than three fingers high. In the darkness, immediately after lauds, we heard Mass in a village in the valley. Then we set off toward the mountain, as the sun first appeared.

While we toiled up the steep path that wound around the mountain, I saw the abbey. I was amazed, not by the walls that girded it on every side, similar to others to be seen in all the Christian world, but by the bulk of what I later learned was the Aedificium. This was an octagonal construction that from a distance seemed a tetragon (a perfect form, which expresses the sturdiness and impregnability of the City of God), whose southern sides stood on the plateau of the abbey, while the northern ones seemed to grow from the steep side of the mountain, a sheer drop, to which they were bound. I might say that from below, at certain points, the cliff seemed to extend, reaching up toward the heavens, with the rock’s same colors and material, which at a certain point became keep and tower (work of giants who had great familiarity with earth and sky). Three rows of windows proclaimed the triune rhythm of its elevation, so that what was physically squared on the earth was spiritually triangular in the sky. As we came closer, we realized that the quadrangular form included, at each of its corners, a heptagonal tower, five sides of which were visible on the outside—four of the eight sides, then, of the greater octagon producing four minor heptagons, which from the outside appeared as pentagons. And thus anyone can see the admirable concord of so many holy numbers, each revealing a subtle spiritual significance. Eight, the number of perfection for every tetragon; four, the number of the Gospels; five, the number of the zones of the world; seven, the number of the gifts of the Holy Ghost. In its bulk and in its form, the Aedificium resembled Castel Ursino or Castel del Monte, which I was to see later in the south of the Italian peninsula, but its inaccessible position made it more awesome than those, and capable of inspiring fear in the traveler who approached it gradually. And it was fortunate that, since it was a very clear winter morning, I did not first see the building as it appears on stormy days.

I will not say, in any case, that it prompted feelings of jollity. I felt fear, and a subtle uneasiness. God knows these were not phantoms of my immature spirit, and I was rightly interpreting indubitable omens inscribed in the stone the day that the giants began their work, and before the deluded determination of the monks dared consecrate the building to the preservation of the divine word.

As our little mules strove up the last curve of the mountain, where the main path divided into three, producing two side paths, my master stopped for a while, to look around: at the sides of the road, at the road itself, and above the road, where, for a brief stretch, a series of evergreen pines formed a natural roof, white with snow.

“A rich abbey,” he said. “The abbot likes a great display on public occasions.”

Accustomed as I was to hear him make the most unusual declarations, I did not question him. This was also because, after another bit of road, we heard some noises, and at the next turn an agitated band of monks and servants appeared. One of them, seeing us, came toward us with great cordiality. “Welcome, sir,” he said, “and do not be surprised if I can guess who you are, because we have been advised of your visit. I am Remigio of Varagine, the cellarer of the monastery. And if you, as I believe, are Brother William of Baskerville, the abbot must be informed. You”—he commanded one of his party—”go up and tell them that our visitor is about to come inside the walls.”

“I thank you, Brother Cellarer,” my master replied politely, “and I appreciate your courtesy all the more since, in order to greet me, you have interrupted your search. But don’t worry. The horse came this way and took the path to the right. He will not get far, because he will have to stop when he reaches the dungheap. He is too intelligent to plunge down that precipitous slope….”

“When did you see him?” the cellarer asked.

“We haven’t seen him at all, have we, Adso?” William said, turning toward me with an amused look. “But if you are hunting for Brunellus, the horse can only be where I have said.”

The cellarer hesitated. He looked at William, then at the path, and finally asked, “Brunellus? How did you know?”

“Come, come,” William said, “it is obvious you are hunting for Brunellus, the abbot’s favorite horse, fifteen hands, the fastest in your stables, with a dark coat, a full tail, small round hoofs, but a very steady gait; small head, sharp ears, big eyes. He went to the right, as I said, but you should hurry, in any case.”

The cellarer hesitated for a moment longer, then gestured to his men and rushed off along the path to the right, while our mules resumed their climb. My curiosity aroused, I was about to question William, but he motioned me to wait: in fact, a few minutes later we heard cries of rejoicing, and at the turn of the path, monks and servants reappeared, leading the horse by its halter. They passed by us, all glancing at us with some amazement, then preceded us toward the abbey. I believe William also slowed the pace of his mount to give them time to tell what had happened. I had already realized that my master, in every respect a man of the highest virtue, succumbed to the vice of vanity when it was a matter of demonstrating his acumen; and having learned to appreciate his gifts as a subtle diplomatist, I understood that he wanted to reach his destination preceded by a firm reputation as a man of knowledge.

“And now tell me”—in the end I could not restrain myself—”how did you manage to know?”

“My good Adso,” my master said, “during our whole journey I have been teaching you to recognize the evidence through which the world speaks to us like a great book. Alanus de Insulis said thatomnis mundi creatura

quasi liber et pictura
nobis est in speculum

and he was thinking of the endless array of symbols with which God, through His creatures, speaks to us of the eternal life. But the universe is even more talkative than Alan us thought, and it speaks not only of the ultimate things (which it does always in an obscure fashion) but also of closer things, and then it speaks quite clearly. I am almost embarrassed to repeat to you what you should know. At the crossroads, on the still-fresh snow, a horse’s hoofprints stood out very neatly, heading for the path to our left. Neatly spaced, those marks said that the hoof was small and round, and the gallop quite regular—and so I deduced the nature of the horse, and the fact that it was not running wildly like a crazed animal. At the point where the pines formed a natural roof, some twigs had been freshly broken off at a height of five feet. One of the blackberry bushes where the animal must have turned to take the path to his right, proudly switching his handsome tail, still held some long black horsehairs in its brambles…. You will not say, finally, that you do not know that path leads to the dungheap, because as we passed the lower curve we saw the spill of waste down the sheer cliff below the great east tower, staining the snow; and from the situation of the crossroads, the path could only lead in that direction.”

“Yes,” I said, “but what about the small head, the sharp ears, the big eyes…?”

“I am not sure he has those features, but no doubt the monks firmly believe he does. As Isidore of Seville said, the beauty of a horse requires ‘that the head be small, siccum prope pelle ossibus adhaerente, short and pointed ears, big eyes, flaring nostrils, erect neck, thick mane and tail, round and solid hoofs.’ If the horse whose passing I inferred had not really been the finest of the stables, stableboys would have been out chasing him, but instead, the cellarer in person had undertaken the search. And a monk who considers a horse excellent, whatever his natural forms, can only see him as the auctoritates have described him, especially if”—and here he smiled slyly in my direction—”the describer is a learned Benedictine.”

“All right,” I said, “but why Brunellus?”

“May the Holy Ghost sharpen your mind, son!” my master exclaimed. “What other name could he possibly have? Why, even the great Buridan, who is about to become rector in Paris, when he wants to use a horse in one of his logical examples, always calls it Brunellus.”

This was my master’s way. He not only knew how to read the great book of nature, but also knew the way monks read the books of Scripture, and how they thought through them. A gift that, as we shall see, was to prove useful to him in the days to follow. His explanation, moreover, seemed to me at that point so obvious that my humiliation at not having discovered it by myself was surpassed only by my pride at now being a sharer in it, and I was almost congratulating myself on my insight. Such is the power of the truth that, like good, it is its own propagator. And praised be the holy name of our Lord Jesus Christ for this splendid revelation I was granted.

But resume your course, O my story, for this aging monk is lingering too long over marginalia. Tell, rather, how we arrived at the great gate of the abbey, and on the threshold stood the abbot, beside whom two novices held a golden basin filled with water. When we had dismounted, he washed William’s hands, then embraced him, kissing him on the mouth and giving him a holy welcome.

“Thank you, Abo,” William said. “It is a great joy for me to set foot in Your Magnificence’s monastery, whose fame has traveled beyond these mountains. I come as a pilgrim in the name of our Lord, and as such you have honored me. But I come also in the name of our lord on this earth, as the letter I now give you will tell you, and in his name also I thank you for your welcome.”

The abbot accepted the letter with the imperial seals and replied that William’s arrival had in any event been preceded by other missives from his brothers (it is difficult, I said to myself with a certain pride, to take a Benedictine abbot by surprise); then he asked the cellarer to take us to our lodgings, as the grooms led our mules away. The abbot was looking forward to visiting us later, when we were refreshed, and we entered the great courtyard where the abbey buildings extended all about the gentle plain that blunted in a soft bowl—or alp—the peak of the mountain.

I shall have occasion to discuss the layout of the abbey more than once, and in greater detail. After the gate (which was the only opening in the outer walls) a tree-lined avenue led to the abbatial church. To the left of the avenue there stretched a vast area of vegetable gardens and, as I later learned, the botanical garden, around the two buildings of the balneary and the infirmary and herbarium, following the curve of the walls. Behind, to the left of the church, rose the Aedificium, separated from the church by a yard scattered with graves. The north door of the church faced the south tower of the Aedificium, which offered, frontally, its west tower to the arriving visitor’s eyes; then, to the left, the building joined the walls and seemed to plunge, from its towers, toward the abyss, over which the north tower, seen obliquely, projected. To the right of the church there were some buildings, sheltering in its lee, and others around the cloister: the dormitory, no doubt, the abbot’s house, and the pilgrims’ hospice, where we were heading. We reached it after crossing a handsome flower garden. On the right side, beyond a broad lawn, along the south walls and continuing eastward behind the church, a series of peasants’ quarters, stables, mills, oil presses, granaries, and cellars, and what seemed to me to be the novices’ house. The regular terrain, only slightly rolling, had allowed the ancient builders of that holy place to respect the rules of orientation, better than Honorius Augustoduniensis or Guillaume Durant could have demanded. From the position of the sun at that hour of the day, I noticed that the main church door opened perfectly westward, so choir and altar were facing east; and the good morning sun, in rising, could directly wake the monks in the dormitory and the animals in the stables. I never saw an abbey more beautiful or better oriented, even though subsequently I saw St. Gall, and Cluny, and Fontenay, and others still, perhaps larger but less well proportioned. Unlike the others, this one was remarkable for the exceptional size of the Aedificium. I did not possess the experience of a master builder, but I immediately realized it was much older than the buildings surrounding it. Perhaps it had originated for some other purposes, and the abbey’s compound had been laid out around it at a later time, but in such a way that the orientation of the huge building should conform with that of the church, and the church’s with its. For architecture, among all the arts, is the one that most boldly tries to reproduce in its rhythm the order of the universe, which the ancients called “kosmos,” that is to say ornate, since it is like a great animal on whom there shine the perfection and the proportion of all its members. And praised be our Creator, who has decreed all things, in their number, weight, and measure.

TERCE

In which William has an instructive conversation with the abbot.

The cellarer was a stout man, vulgar in appearance but jolly, white-haired but still strong, small but quick. He led us to our cells in the pilgrims’ hospice. Or, rather, he led us to the cell assigned to my master, promising me that by the next day he would have cleared one for me also, since, though a novice, I was their guest and therefore to be treated with all honor. For that night I could sleep in a long and wide niche in the wall of the cell, in which he had had some nice fresh straw prepared.

Then the monks brought us wine, cheese, olives, bread, and excellent raisins, and left us to our refreshment. We ate and drank heartily. My master did not share the austere habits of the Benedictines and did not like to eat in silence. For that matter, he spoke always of things so good and wise that it was as if a monk were reading to us the lives of the saints.

That day I could not refrain from questioning him further about the matter of the horse.

“All the same,” I said, “when you read the prints in the snow and the evidence of the branches, you did not yet know Brunellus. In a certain sense those prints spoke of all horses, or at least all horses of that breed. Mustn’t we say, then, that the book of nature speaks to us only of essences, as many distinguished theologians teach?”

“Not entirely, dear Adso,” my master replied. “True, that kind of print expressed to me, if you like, the idea of ‘horse,’ the verbum mentis, and would have expressed the same to me wherever I might have found it. But the print in that place and at that hour of the day told me that at least one of all possible horses had passed that way. So I found myself halfway between the perception of the concept ‘horse’ and the knowledge of an individual horse. And in any case, what I knew of the universal horse had been given me by those traces, which were singular. I could say I was caught at that moment between the singularity of the traces and my ignorance, which assumed the quite diaphanous form of a universal idea. If you see something from a distance, and you do not understand what it is, you will be content with defining it as a body of some dimension. When you come closer, you will then define it as an animal, even if you do not yet know whether it is a horse or an ass. And finally, when it is still closer, you will be able to say it is a horse even if you do not yet know whether it is Brunellus or Niger. And only when you are at the proper distance will you see that it is Brunellus (or, rather, that horse and not another, however you decide to call it). And that will be full knowledge, the learning of the singular. So an hour ago I could expect all horses, but not because of the vastness of my intellect, but because of the paucity of my deduction. And my intellect’s hunger was sated only when I saw the single horse that the monks were leading by the halter. Only then did I truly know that my previous reasoning had brought me close to the truth. And so the ideas, which I was using earlier to imagine a horse I had not yet seen, were pure signs, as the hoofprints in the snow were signs of the idea of ‘horse’; and signs and the signs of signs are used only when we are lacking things.”

On other occasions I had heard him speak with great skepticism about universal ideas and with great respect about individual things; and afterward, too, I thought this tendency came to him from his being both a Briton and a Franciscan. But that day he did not have the strength to face theological disputes, so I curled up in the space allotted me, wrapped myself in a blanket, and fell sound asleep.

Anyone coming in could have mistaken me for a bundle. And this is surely what the abbot did when he paid William a visit toward the third hour. So it was that I could listen, unnoticed, to their first conversation.

***

And so Abo arrived. He apologized for the intrusion, repeated his welcome, and said that he had to speak with William privately, about a very serious matter.

He began by congratulating his guest on the skill demonstrated in the business of the horse, and asked how he had been able to give such confident information about an animal he had never seen. William explained to him briefly and with detachment the path he had followed, and the abbot complimented him highly on his acumen. He said he would have expected nothing less from a man preceded by a reputation for great wisdom. He said he had received a letter from the abbot of Farfa that not only spoke of William’s mission for the Emperor (which they would discuss in the coming days) but also added that in England and in Italy my master had acted as inquisitor in some trials, where he had distinguished himself by his perspicacity, along with a great humility.

“I was very pleased to learn,” the abbot continued, “that in numerous cases you decided the accused was innocent. I believe, and never more than during these sad days, in the constant presence of the Evil One in human affairs”—and he looked around, imperceptibly, as if the enemy were lurking within those walls—”but I believe also that often the Evil One works through second causes. And I know that he can impel his victims to do evil in such a way that the blame falls on a righteous man, and the Evil One rejoices then as the righteous man is burned in the place of his succubus. Inquisitors often, to demonstrate their zeal, wrest a confession from the accused at all costs, thinking that the only good inquisitor is one who concludes the trial by finding a scapegoat….”

“An inquisitor, too, can be impelled by the Devil,” William said.

“That is possible,” the abbot admitted with great circumspection, “because the designs of the Almighty are inscrutable, and far be it from me to cast any shadow of suspicion on such worthy men. Indeed, it is as one of them that I need you today. In this abbey something has happened that requires the attention and counsel of an acute and prudent man such as you are. Acute in uncovering, and prudent (if necessary) in covering. If a shepherd errs, he must be isolated from other shepherds, but woe unto us if the sheep begin to distrust shepherds.”

“I see your point,” William said. I had already had occasion to observe that when he expressed himself so promptly and politely he was usually concealing, in an honest way, his dissent or puzzlement.

“For this reason,” the abbot continued, “I consider that any case involving the error of a shepherd can be entrusted only to men like you, who can distinguish not only good from evil, but also what is expedient from what is not. I like to think you pronounced a sentence of guilty only when…”

“…the accused were guilty of criminal acts, of poisoning, of the corruption of innocent youths, or other abominations my mouth dares not utter…”

“…that you pronounced sentence only when,” the abbot continued, not heeding the interruption, “the presence of the Devil was so evident to all eyes that it was impossible to act otherwise without the clemency’s being more scandalous than the crime itself.”

“When I found someone guilty,” William explained, “he had really committed crimes of such gravity that in all conscience I could hand him over to the secular arm.”

The abbot was bewildered for a moment. “Why,” he asked, “do you insist on speaking of criminal acts without referring to their diabolical cause?”

“Because reasoning about causes and effects is a very difficult thing, and I believe the only judge of that can be God. We are already hard put to establish a relationship between such an obvious effect as a charred tree and the lightning bolt that set fire to it, so to trace sometimes endless chains of causes and effects seems to me as foolish as trying to build a tower that will touch the sky.

“Let us suppose a man has been killed by poisoning. This is a given fact. It is possible for me to imagine, in the face of certain undeniable signs, that the poisoner is a second man. On such simple chains of causes my mind can act with a certain confidence in its power. But how can I complicate the chain, imagining that, to cause the evil deed, there was yet another intervention, not human this time, but diabolical? I do not say it is impossible: the Devil, like your horse Brunellus, also indicates his passage through clear signs. But why must I hunt for these proofs? Is it not already enough for me to know that the guilty party is that man and for me to turn him over to the secular arm? In any case his punishment will be death, God forgive him.”

“But I have heard that in a trial held at Kilkenny three years ago, in which certain persons were accused of having committed loathsome crimes, you did not deny diabolical intervention, once the guilty parties had been identified.”

“Nor did I affirm it openly, in so many words. I did not deny it, true. Who am I to express judgments on the plots of the Evil One, especially,” he added, and seemed to want to insist on this reason, “in cases where those who had initiated the inquisition, the bishop, the city magistrates, and the whole populace, perhaps the accused themselves, truly wanted to feel the presence of the Devil? There, perhaps the only real proof of the presence of the Devil was the intensity with which everyone at that moment desired to know he was at work….”

“Are you telling me, then,” the abbot said in a worried tone, “that in many trials the Devil does not act only within the guilty one but perhaps and above all in the judges?”

“Could I make such a statement?” William asked, and I noticed that the question was formulated in such a way that the abbot was unable to affirm that he could; so William took advantage of his silence to change the direction of their dialogue. “But these, after all, are remote things. I have abandoned that noble activity and if I did so, it was because the Lord wished it…”

“No doubt,” the abbot admitted.

“…and now,” William continued, “I concern myself with other delicate questions. And I would like to deal with the one that distresses you, if you will speak to me about it.”

I felt the abbot was pleased to be able to conclude that discussion and return to his problem. He then began telling, with very careful choice of words and with long paraphrases, about an unusual event that had taken place a few days before and had left in its wake great distress among the monks. He was speaking of the matter with William, he said, because, since William had great knowledge both of the human spirit and of the wiles of the Evil One, Abo hoped his guest would be able to devote a part of his valuable time to shedding light on a painful enigma. What had happened, then, was this: Adelmo of Otranto, a monk still young though already famous as a master illuminator, who had been decorating the manuscripts of the library with the most beautiful images, had been found one morning by a goatherd at the bottom of the cliff below the Aedificium. Since he had been seen by other monks in choir during compline but had not reappeared at matins, he had probably fallen there during the darkest hours of the night. The night of a great snowstorm, in which flakes as sharp as blades fell, almost like hail, driven by a furious south wind. Soaked by that snow, which had first melted and then frozen into shards of ice, the body had been discovered at the foot of the sheer drop, torn by the rocks it had struck on the way down. Poor, fragile, mortal thing, God have mercy on him. Thanks to the battering the body had suffered in its broken fall, determining from which precise spot it had fallen was not easy: certainly from one of the windows that opened in rows on the three stories on the three sides of the tower exposed to the abyss.

“Where have you buried the poor body?” William asked.

“In the cemetery, naturally,” the abbot replied. “Perhaps you noticed it: it lies between the north side of the church, the Aedificium, and the vegetable garden.”

“I see,” William said, “and I see that your problem is the following. If that unhappy youth, God forbid, committed suicide, the next day you would have found one of those windows open, whereas you found them all closed, and with no sign of water at the foot of any of them.”

The abbot, as I have said, was a man of great and diplomatic composure, but this time he made a movement of surprise that robbed him totally of that decorum suited to a grave and magnanimous person, as Aristotle has it. “Who told you?”

“You told me,” William said. “If the window had been open, you would immediately have thought he had thrown himself out of it. From what I could tell from the outside, they are large windows of opaque glass, and windows of that sort are not usually placed, in buildings of this size, at a man’s height. So even if a window had been open, it would have been impossible for the unfortunate man to lean out and lose his balance; thus suicide would have been the only conceivable explanation. In which case you would not have allowed him to be buried in consecrated ground. But since you gave him Christian burial, the windows must have been closed. And if they were closed—for I have never encountered, not even in witchcraft trials, a dead man whom God or the Devil allowed to climb up from the abyss to erase the evidence of his misdeed—then obviously the presumed suicide was, on the contrary, pushed, either by human hand or by diabolical force. And you are wondering who was capable, I will not say of pushing him into the abyss, but of hoisting him to the sill; and you are distressed because an evil force, whether natural or supernatural, is at work in the abbey.”

“That is it…” the abbot said, and it was not clear whether he was confirming William’s words or accepting the reasons William had so admirably and reasonably expounded. “But how can you know there was no water at the foot of any window?”

“Because you told me a south wind was blowing, and the water could not be driven against windows that open to the east.”

“They had not told me enough about your talents,” the abbot said. “And you are right, there was no water, and now I know why. It was all as you say. And now you understand my anxiety. It would already be serious enough if one of my monks had stained his soul with the hateful sin of suicide. But I have reason to think that another of them has stained himself with an equally terrible sin. And if that were all…”

“In the first place, why one of the monks? In the abbey there are many other persons, grooms, goatherds, servants….”

“To be sure, the abbey is small but rich,” the abbot agreed smugly. “One hundred fifty servants for sixty monks. But everything happened in the Aedificium. There, as perhaps you already know, although on the ground floor are the kitchen and the refectory, on the two upper floors are the scriptorium and the library. After the evening meal the Aedificium is locked, and a very strict rule forbids anyone to enter.” He guessed William’s next question and added at once, though clearly with reluctance, “Including, naturally, the monks, but…”

“But?”

“But I reject absolutely—absolutely, you understand—the possibility that a servant would have had the courage to enter there at night.” There was a kind of defiant smile in his eyes, albeit brief as a flash, or a falling star. “Let us say they would have been afraid, you know … sometimes orders given to the simple-minded have to be reinforced with a threat, a suggestion that something terrible will happen to the disobedient, perforce something supernatural. A monk, on the contrary…”

“I understand.”

“Furthermore, a monk could have other reasons for venturing into a forbidden place. I mean reasons that are … reasonable, even if contrary to the rule….”

William noticed the abbot’s uneasiness and asked a question perhaps intended to change the subject, though it produced an even greater uneasiness.

“Speaking of a possible murder, you said, ‘And if that were all.’ What did you mean?”

“Did I say that? Well, no one commits murder without a reason, however perverse. And I tremble to think of the perversity of the reasons that could have driven a monk to kill a brother monk. There. That is it.”

“Nothing else?”

“Nothing else that I can say to you.”

“You mean that there is nothing else you have the power to say?”

“Please, Brother William, Brother William,” and the abbot underlined “Brother” both times.

William blushed violently and remarked, “Eris sacerdos in aeternum.”

“Thank you,” the abbot said.

O Lord God, what a terrible mystery my imprudent superiors were broaching at that moment, the one driven by anxiety and the other by curiosity. Because, a novice approaching the mysteries of the holy priesthood of God, humble youth that I was, I, too, understood that the abbot knew something but had learned it under the seal of confession. He must have heard from someone’s lips a sinful detail that could have a bearing on the tragic end of Adelmo. Perhaps for this reason he was begging Brother William to uncover a secret he himself suspected, though he was unable to reveal to anyone—and he hoped that my master, with the powers of his intellect, would cast light on—what he, the abbot, had to shroud in shadows because of the sublime law of charity.

“Very well,” William said then, “may I question the monks?”

“You may.”

“May I move freely about the abbey?”

“I grant you that power.”

“Will you assign me this mission coram monachis?”

“This very evening.”

“I shall begin, however, today, before the monks know what you have charged me to do. Besides, I already had a great desire—not the least reason for my sojourn here—to visit your library, which is spoken of with admiration in all the abbeys of Christendom.”

The abbot rose, almost starting, with a very tense face. “You can move freely through the whole abbey, as I have said. But not, to be sure, on the top floor of the Aedificium, the library.”

“Why not?”

“I would have explained to you before, but I thought you knew. You see, our library is not like others….”

“I know it has more books than any other Christian library. I know that in comparison with your cases, those of Bobbio or Pomposa, of Cluny or Fleury, seem the room of a boy barely being introduced to the abacus. I know that the six thousand codices that were the boast of Novalesa a hundred or more years ago are few compared to yours, and perhaps many of those are now here. I know your abbey is the only light that Christianity can oppose to the thirty-six libraries of Baghdad, to the ten thousand codices of the Vizir Ibn al-Alkami, that the number of your Bibles equals the two thousand four hundred Korans that are the pride of Cairo, and that the reality of your cases is luminous evidence against the proud legend of the infidels who years ago claimed (intimates as they are of the Prince of Falsehood) the library of Tripoli was rich in six million volumes and inhabited by eighty thousand commentators and two hundred scribes.”

“You are right, heaven be praised.”

“I know that many of the monks living in your midst come from other abbeys scattered all over the world. Some stay here a short time, to copy manuscripts to be found nowhere else and to carry them back then to their own house, not without having brought you in exchange some other unavailable manuscript that you will copy and add to your treasure; and others stay for a very long time, occasionally remaining here till death, because only here can they find the works that enlighten their research. And so you have among you Germans, Dacians, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Greeks. I know that the Emperor Frederick, many and many years ago, asked you to compile for him a book of the prophecies of Merlin and then to translate it into Arabic, to be sent as a gift to the Sultan of Egypt. I know, finally, that such a glorious abbey as Murbach in these very sad times no longer has a single scribe, that at St. Gall only a few monks are left who know how to write, that now in the cities corporations and guilds arise, made up of laymen who work for the universities, and only your abbey day after day renews, or—what am I saying?—it exalts to ever greater heights the glories of your order….”

“Monasterium sine libris,” the abbot recited, pensively, “est sicut civitas sine opibus, castrum sine numeris, coquina sine suppellectili, mensa sine cibis, hortus sine herbis, pratum sine floribus, arbor sine foliis…. And our order, growing up under the double command of work and prayer, was light to the whole known world, depository of knowledge, salvation of an ancient learning that threatened to disappear in fires, sacks, earthquakes, forge of new writing and increase of the ancient…. Oh, as you well know, we live now in very dark times, and I blush to tell you that not many years ago the Council of Vienne had to reaffirm that every monk is under obligation to take orders…. How many of our abbeys, which two hundred years ago were resplendent with grandeur and sanctity, are now the refuge of the slothful? The order is still powerful, but the stink of the cities is encroaching upon our holy places, the people of God are now inclined to commerce and wars of faction; down below in the great settlements, where the spirit of sanctity can find no lodging, not only do they speak (of laymen, nothing else could be expected) in the vulgar tongue, but they are already writing in it, though none of these volumes will ever come within our walls—fomenter of heresies as those volumes inevitably become! Because of mankind’s sins the world is teetering on the brink of the abyss, permeated by the very abyss that the abyss invokes. And tomorrow, as Honorius would have it, men’s bodies will be smaller than ours, just as ours are smaller than those of the ancients. Mundus senescit. If God has now given our order a mission, it is to oppose this race to the abyss, by preserving, repeating, and defending the treasure of wisdom our fathers entrusted to us. Divine Providence has ordered that the universal government, which at the beginning of the world was in the East, should gradually, as the time was nearing fulfillment, move westward to warn us that the end of the world is approaching, because the course of events has already reached the confines of the universe. But until the millennium occurs definitively, until the triumph, however brief, of the foul beast that is the Antichrist, it is up to us to defend the treasure of the Christian world, and the very word of God, as he dictated it to the prophets and to the apostles, as the fathers repeated it without changing a syllable, as the schools have tried to gloss it, even if today in the schools themselves the serpent of pride, envy, folly is nesting. In this sunset we are still torches and light, high on the horizon. And as long as these walls stand, we shall be the custodians of the divine Word.”

“Amen,” William said in a devout tone. “But what does this have to do with the fact that the library may not be visited?”

“You see, Brother William,” the abbot said, “to achieve the immense and holy task that enriches those walls”—and he nodded toward the bulk of the Aedificium, which could be glimpsed from the cell’s windows, towering above the abbatial church itself—”devout men have toiled for centuries, observing iron rules. The library was laid out on a plan which has remained obscure to all over the centuries, and which none of the monks is called upon to know. Only the librarian has received the secret, from the librarian who preceded him, and he communicates it, while still alive, to the assistant librarian, so that death will not take him by surprise and rob the community of that knowledge. And the secret seals the lips of both men. Only the librarian has, in addition to that knowledge, the right to move through the labyrinth of the books, he alone knows where to find them and where to replace them, he alone is responsible for their safekeeping. The other monks work in the scriptorium and may know the list of the volumes that the library houses. But a list of titles often tells very little; only the librarian knows, from the collocation of the volume, from its degree of inaccessibility, what secrets, what truths or falsehoods, the volume contains. Only he decides how, when, and whether to give it to the monk who requests it; sometimes he first consults me. Because not all truths are for all ears, not all falsehoods can be recognized as such by a pious soul; and the monks, finally, are in the scriptorium to carry out a precise task, which requires them to read certain volumes and not others, and not to pursue every foolish curiosity that seizes them, whether through weakness of intellect or through pride or through diabolical prompting.”

“So in the library there are also books containing falsehoods….”

“Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the Creator is revealed. And by divine plan, too, there exist also books by wizards, the cabalas of the Jews, the fables of pagan poets, the lies of the infidels. It was the firm and holy conviction of those who founded the abbey and sustained it over the centuries that even in books of falsehood, to the eyes of the sage reader, a pale reflection of the divine wisdom can shine. And therefore the library is a vessel of these, too. But for this very reason, you understand, it cannot be visited by just anyone. And furthermore,” the abbot added, as if to apologize for the weakness of this last argument, “a book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. If for a hundred and a hundred years everyone had been able freely to handle our codices, the majority of them would no longer exist. So the librarian protects them not only against mankind but also against nature, and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion, the enemy of truth.”

“And so no one, except for two people, enters the top floor of the Aedificium….”

The abbot smiled. “No one should. No one can. No one, even if he wished, would succeed. The library defends itself, immeasurable as the truth it houses, deceitful as the falsehood it preserves. A spiritual labyrinth, it is also a terrestrial labyrinth. You might enter and you might not emerge. And having said this, I would like you to conform to the rules of the abbey.”

“But you have not dismissed the possibility that Adelmo fell from one of the windows of the library. And how can I study his death if I do not see the place where the story of his death may have begun?”

“Brother William,” the abbot said, in a conciliatory tone, “a man who described my horse Brunellus without seeing him, and the death of Adelmo though knowing virtually nothing of it, will have no difficulty studying places to which he does not have access.”

William bowed. “You are wise also when you are severe. It shall be as you wish.”

“If ever I were wise, it would be because I know how to be severe,” the abbot answered.

“One last thing,” William asked. “Ubertino?”

“He is here. He is expecting you. You will find him in church.”

“When?”

“Always,” the abbot said, and smiled. “You must know that, although very learned, he is not a man to appreciate the library. He considers it a secular lure…. For the most part he stays in church, meditating, praying….”

“Is he old?” William asked, hesitating.

“How long has it been since you saw him?”

“Many years.”

“He is weary. Very detached from the things of this world. He is sixty-eight. But I believe he still possesses the spirit of his youth.”

“I will seek him out at once. Thank you.”

The abbot asked him whether he wanted to join the community for the midday refection, after sext. William said he had only just eaten—very well, too—and he would prefer to see Ubertino at once. The abbot took his leave.

He was going out of the cell when from the courtyard a heart-rending cry arose, like that of someone mortally wounded, followed by other, equally horrible cries. “What is that?” William asked, disconcerted. “Nothing,” the abbot answered, smiling. “At this time of year they slaughter the pigs. A job for the swineherds. This is not the blood that should concern you.”

He went out, and he did a disservice to his reputation as a clever man. Because the next morning … But curb your impatience, garrulous tongue of mine. For on the day of which I am telling, and before its night, many more things happened that it would be best to narrate.

SEXT

n which Adso admires the door of the church, and William meets Ubertino of Casale again.

The church was not majestic like others I saw later at Strasbourg, Chartres, Bamberg, and Paris. It resembled, rather, those I had already seen in Italy, with scant inclination to soar dizzyingly toward the heavens, indeed firmly set on the earth, often broader than they were high; but at the first level this one was surmounted, like a fortress, by a sequence of square battlements, and above this story another construction rose, not so much a tower as a solid, second church, capped by a pitched roof and pierced by severe windows. A robust abbatial church such as our forefathers built in Provence and Languedoc, far from the audacity and the excessive tracery characteristic of the modern style, which only in more recent times has been enriched, I believe, above the choir, with a pinnacle boldly pointed toward the roof of the heavens.

Two straight and unadorned columns stood on either side of the entrance, which opened, at first sight, like a single great arch; but from the columns began two embrasures that, surmounted by other, multiple arches, led the gaze, as if into the heart of an abyss, toward the doorway itself, crowned by a great tympanum, supported on the sides by two imposts and in the center by a carved pillar, which divided the entrance into two apertures protected by oak doors reinforced in metal. At that hour of the day the weak sun was beating almost straight down on the roof and the light fell obliquely on the façade without illuminating the tympanum; so after passing the two columns, we found ourselves abruptly under the almost sylvan vault of the arches that sprang from the series of lesser columns that proportionally reinforced the embrasures. When our eyes had finally grown accustomed to the gloom, the silent speech of the carved stone, accessible as it immediately was to the gaze and the imagination of anyone (for images are the literature of the layman), dazzled my eyes and plunged me into a vision that even today my tongue can hardly describe.

I saw a throne set in the sky and a figure seated on the throne. The face of the Seated One was stern and impassive, the eyes wide and glaring over a terrestrial humankind that had reached the end of its story; majestic hair and beard flowed around the face and over the chest like the waters of a river, in streams all equal, symmetrically divided in two. The crown on his head was rich in enamels and jewels, the purple imperial tunic was arranged in broad folds over the knees, woven with embroideries and laces of gold and silver thread. The left hand, resting on one knee, held a sealed book, the right was uplifted in an attitude of blessing or—I could not tell—of admonition. The face was illuminated by the tremendous beauty of a halo, containing a cross and bedecked with flowers, while around the throne and above the face of the Seated One I saw an emerald rainbow glittering. Before the throne, beneath the feet of the Seated One, a sea of crystal flowed, and around the Seated One, beside and above the throne, I saw four awful creatures—av^ful for me, as I looked at them, transported, but docile and dear for the Seated One, whose praises they sang without cease.

Or, rather, not all could be called awful, because one seemed to me handsome and kindly, the man to my left (and to the right of the Seated One), who held out a book. But on the other side there was an eagle I found horrifying, its beak agape, its thick feathers arranged like a cuirass, powerful talons, great wings outstretched. And at the feet of the Seated One, under the first two figures, there were the other two, a bull and a lion, each monster clutching a book between talons or hoofs, the body turned away from the throne, but the head toward the throne, as if shoulders and neck twisted in a fierce impulse, flanks tensed, the limbs those of a dying animal, maw open, serpentlike tails coiled and writhing, culminating, at the top, in tongues of flame. Both monsters were winged, both crowned by haloes; despite their formidable appearance, they were creatures not of hell, but of heaven, and if they seemed fearsome it was because they were roaring in adoration of One Who Is to Come and who would judge the quick and the dead.

Around the throne, beside the four creatures and under the feet of the Seated One, as if seen through the transparent waters of the crystal sea, as if to fill the whole space of the vision, arranged according to the triangular frame of the tympanum, rising from a base of seven plus seven, then to three plus three and then to two plus two, at either side of the great throne, on twenty-four little thrones, there were twenty-four ancients, wearing white garments and crowned in gold. Some held lutes in their hands, one a vase of perfumes, and only one was playing an instrument, all the others were in ecstasy, faces turned to the Seated One, whose praises they were singing, their limbs also twisted like the creatures’, so that all could see the Seated One, not in wild fashion, however, but with movements of ecstatic dance—as David must have danced before the Ark—so that wherever their pupils were, against the law governing the stature of bodies, they converged on the same radiant spot. Oh, what a harmony of abandonment and impulse, of unnatural and yet graceful postures, in that mystical language of limbs miraculously freed from the weight of corporeal matter, marked quantity infused with new substantial form, as if the holy band were struck by an impetuous wind, breath of life, frenzy of delight, rejoicing song of praise miraculously transformed, from the sound that it was, into image.

Bodies inhabited in every part by the Spirit, illuminated by revelation, faces overcome with amazement, eyes shining with enthusiasm, cheeks flushed with love, pupils dilated with joy: this one thunderstruck by a pleasurable consternation, that one pierced by a consternated pleasure, some transfigured by wonder, some rejuvenated by bliss, there they all were, singing with the expression of their faces, the drapery of their tunics, the position and tension of their limbs, singing a new song, lips parted in a smile of perennial praise. And beneath the feet of the ancients, and arched over them and over the throne and over the tetramorphic group, arranged in symmetrical bands, barely distinguishable one from another because the artist’s skill had made them all so mutually proportionate, united in their variety and varied in their unity, unique in their diversity and diverse in their apt assembly, in wondrous congruency of the parts with the delightful sweetness of hues, miracle of consonance and concord of voices among themselves dissimilar, a company arrayed like the strings of the zither, consentient and conspiring continued cognition through deep and interior force suited to perform univocally in the same alternating play of the equivocal, decoration and collage of creatures beyond reduction to vicissitudes and to vicissitudes reduced, work of amorous connecting sustained by a law at once heavenly and worldly (bond and stable nexus of peace, love, virtue, regimen, power, order, origin, life, light, splendor, species, and figure), numerous and resplendent equality through the shining of the form over the proportionate parts of the material—there, all the flowers and leaves and vines and bushes and corymbs were entwined, of all the grasses that adorn the gardens of earth and heaven, violet, cystus, thyme, lily, privet, narcissus, taro, acanthus, mallow, myrrh, and Mecca balsam.

But as my soul was carried away by that concert of terrestrial beauty and majestic supernatural signals, and was about to burst forth in a psalm of joy, my eye, accompanying the proportioned rhythm of the rose windows that bloomed at the ancients’ feet, lighted on the interwoven figures of the central pillar, which supported the tympanum. What were they and what symbolic message did they communicate, those three crisscrossed pairs of lions rampant, like arches, each with hind paws planted on the ground, forepaws on the back of his companion, mane in serpentine curls, mouth taut in a threatening snarl, bound to the very body of the pillar by a paste, or a nest, of tendrils? To calm my spirit, as they had perhaps been meant also to tame the diabolical nature of the lion and to transform it into a symbolic allusion to higher things, on the sides of the pillar there were two human figures, unnaturally tall as the column itself and twins to two others facing them on either side from the decorated imposts, where each of the oak doors had its jamb. These figures, then, were four old men, from whose paraphernalia I recognized Peter and Paul, Jeremiah and Isaiah, also twisted as if in a dance step, their long bony hands raised, the fingers splayed like wings, and like wings were their beards and hair stirred by a prophetic wind, the folds of the very long garments stirred by the long legs giving life to waves and scrolls, opposed to the lions but of the same stuff as the lions. And as I withdrew my fascinated eye from that enigmatic polyphony of sainted limbs and infernal sinews, I saw beside the door, under the deep arches, sometimes depicted on the embrasures in the space between the slender columns that supported and adorned them, and again on the thick foliage of the capital of each column, and from there ramifying toward the sylvan vault of the multiple arches, other visions horrible to contemplate, and justified in that place only by their parabolic and allegorical power or by the moral lesson that they conveyed. I saw a voluptuous woman, naked and fleshless, gnawed by foul toads, sucked by serpents, coupled with a fat-bellied satyr whose gryphon legs were covered with wiry hairs, howling its own damnation from an obscene throat; and I saw a miser, stiff in the stiffness of death on his sumptuously columned bed, now helpless prey of a cohort of demons, one of whom tore from the dying man’s mouth his soul in the form of an infant (alas, never to be again born to eternal life); and I saw a proud man with a devil clinging to his shoulders and thrusting his claws into the man’s eyes, while two gluttons tore each other apart in a repulsive hand-to-hand struggle, and other creatures as well, goat head and lion fur, panther’s jaws, all prisoners in a forest of flames whose searing breath I could almost feel. And around them, mingled with them, above their heads and below their feet, more faces and more limbs: a man and a woman clutching each other by the hair, two asps sucking the eyes of one of the damned, a grinning man whose hooked hands parted the maw of a hydra, and all the animals of Satan’s bestiary, assembled in a consistory and set as guard and crown of the throne that faced them, singing its glory in their defeat, fauns, beings of double sex, brutes with six-fingered hands, sirens, hippocentaurs, gorgons, harpies, incubi, dragopods, minotaurs, lynxes, pards, chimeras, cynophales who darted fire from their nostrils, crocodiles, polycaudate, hairy serpents, salamanders, horned vipers, tortoises, snakes, two-headed creatures whose backs were armed with teeth, hyenas, otters, crows, hydrophora with sawtooth horns, frogs, gryphons, monkeys, dog-heads, leucrota, manticores, vultures, paranders, weasels, dragons, hoopoes, owls, basilisks, hypnales, presters, spectafici, scorpions, saurians, whales, scitales, amphisbenae, iaculi, dipsases, green lizards, pilot fish, octopi, morays, and sea turtles. The whole population of the nether world seemed to have gathered to act as vestibule, dark forest, desperate wasteland of exclusion, at the apparition of the Seated One in the tympanum, at his face promising and threatening, they, the defeated of Armageddon, facing Him who will come at last to separate the quick from the dead. And stunned (almost) by that sight, uncertain at this point whether I was in a friendly place or in the valley of the last judgment, I was terrified and could hardly restrain my tears, and I seemed to hear (or did I really hear?) that voice and I saw those visions that had accompanied my youth as a novice, my first reading of the sacred books, and my nights of meditation in the choir of Melk, and in the delirium of my weak and weakened senses I heard a voice mighty as a trumpet that said, “Write in a book what you now see” (and this is what I am doing), and I saw seven golden candlesticks and in the midst of the candlesticks One like unto the son of man, his breast girt with a golden girdle, his head and hair white as purest wool, his eyes as a flame of fire, his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace, his voice as the sound of many waters, and he had in his right hand seven stars and out of his mouth went a two-edged sword. And I saw a door open in heaven and He who was seated appeared to me like a jasper and a sardonyx, and there was a rainbow round about the throne and out of the throne proceeded thunder and lightning. And the Seated One took in His hands a sharp sickle and cried: “Thrust in thy sickle and reap, for the time is come for thee to reap; for the harvest of the earth is ripe”; and He that sat on the cloud thrust His sickle on the earth; and the earth was reaped.

It was at this point that I realized the vision was speaking precisely of what was happening in the abbey, of what we had learned from the abbot’s reticent lips—and how many times in the following days did I return to contemplate the doorway, convinced I was experiencing the very events that it narrated. And I knew we had made our way up there in order to witness a great and celestial massacre.

I trembled, as if I were drenched by the icy winter rain. And I heard yet another voice, but this time it came from behind me and was a different voice, because it came from the earth and not from the blinding core of my vision; and indeed it shattered the vision, because William (I became aware again of his presence), also lost until then in contemplation, turned as I did.

The creature behind us was apparently a monk, though his torn and dirty habit made him look like a vagabond, and his face bore a resemblance to those of the monsters I had just seen on the capitals. Unlike many of my brothers, I have never in my whole life been visited by the Devil; but I believe that if he were to appear to me one day, prevented by divine decree from concealing completely his nature even though he chose to resemble a man, he would have the very features our interlocutor presented to me at this moment. His head was hairless, not shaved in penance but as the result of the past action of some viscid eczema; the brow was so low that if he had had hair on his head it would have mingled with his eyebrows (which were thick and shaggy); the eyes were round, with tiny mobile pupils, and whether the gaze was innocent or malign I could not tell: perhaps it was both, in different moods, in flashes. The nose could not be called a nose, for it was only a bone that began between the eyes, but as it rose from the face it immediately sank again, transforming itself only into two dark holes, broad nostrils thick with hair. The mouth, joined to the nose by a scar, was wide and ill-made, stretching more to the right than to the left, and between the upper lip, nonexistent, and the lower, prominent and fleshy, there protruded, in an irregular pattern, black teeth sharp as a dog’s.

The man smiled (or at least so I believed) and, holding up one finger as if in admonition, he said:

“Penitenziagite! Watch out for the draco who cometh in futurum to gnaw your anima! Death is super nos! Pray the Santo Pater come to liberar nos a malo and all our sin! Ha ha, you like this negromanzia de Domini Nostri Jesu Christi! Et anco jois m’es dols e plazer m’es dolors…. Cave el diabolo! Semper lying in wait for me in some angulum to snap at my heels. But Salvatore is not stupidus! Bonum monasterium, and aquí refectorium and pray to dominum nostrum. And the resto is not worth merda. Amen. No?”

As this story continues, I shall have to speak again, and at length, of this creature and record his speech. I confess I find it very difficult to do so because I could not say now, as I could never understand then, what language he spoke. It was not Latin, in which the lettered men of the monastery expressed themselves, it was not the vulgar tongue of those parts, or any other I had ever heard. I believe I have given a faint idea of his manner of speech, reporting just now (as I remember them) the first words of his I heard. When I learned later about his adventurous life and about the various places where he had lived, putting down roots in none of them, I realized Salvatore spoke all languages, and no language. Or, rather, he had invented for himself a language which used the sinews of the languages to which he had been exposed—and once I thought that his was, not the Adamic language that a happy mankind had spoken, all united by a single tongue from the origin of the world to the Tower of Babel, or one of the languages that arose after the dire event of their division, but precisely the Babelish language of the first day after the divine chastisement, the language of primeval confusion. Nor, for that matter, could I call Salvatore’s speech a language, because in every human language there are rules and every term signifies ad placitum a thing, according to a law that does not change, for man cannot call the dog once dog and once cat, or utter sounds to which a consensus of people has not assigned a definite meaning, as would happen if someone said the word “blitiri.” And yet, one way or another, I did understand what Salvatore meant, and so did the others. Proof that he spoke not one, but all languages, none correctly, taking words sometimes from one and sometimes from another. I also noticed afterward that he might refer to something first in Latin and later in Provençal, and I realized that he was not so much inventing his own sentences as using the disiecta membra of other sentences, heard some time in the past, according to the present situation and the things he wanted to say, as if he could speak of a food, for instance, only with the words of the people among whom he had eaten that food, and express his joy only with sentences that he had heard uttered by joyful people the day when he had similarly experienced joy. His speech was somehow like his face, put together with pieces from other people’s faces, or like some precious reliquaries I have seen (si licet magnis componere parva, if I may link diabolical things with the divine), fabricated from the shards of other holy objects. At that moment, when I met him for the first time, Salvatore seemed to me, because of both his face and his way of speaking, a creature not unlike the hairy and hoofed hybrids I had just seen under the portal. Later I realized that the man was probably good-hearted and humorous. Later still … But we must not get ahead of our story. Particularly since, the moment he had spoken, my master questioned him with great curiosity.

“Why did you say Penitenziagite?” he asked.

“Domine frate magnificentissimo,” Salvatore answered, with a kind of bow, “Jesus venturus est and les hommes must do penitenzia. No?”

William gave him a hard look. “Did you come here from a convent of Minorites?”

“Non comprends.”

“I am asking if you have lived among the friars of Saint Francis; I ask if you have known the so-called apostles….”

Salvatore blanched, or, rather, his tanned and savage face turned gray. He made a deep bow, muttered through half-closed lips a “vade retro,” devoutly blessed himself, and fled, looking back at us every now and then.

“What did you ask him?” I said to William.

He was thoughtful for a moment. “It is of no matter; I will tell you later. Let us go inside now. I want to find Ubertino.”

It was just after the sixth hour. The pale sun entered from the west, and therefore through only a few, narrow windows, into the interior of the church. A fine strip of light still touched the main altar, whose frontal seemed to glow with a golden radiance. The side naves were immersed in gloom.

Near the last chapel before the altar, in the left nave, stood a slender column on which a stone Virgin was set, carved in the modern fashion, with an ineffable smile and prominent abdomen, wearing a pretty dress with a small bodice, the child on her arm. At the foot of the Virgin, in prayer, almost prostrate, there was a man in the habit of the Cluniac order.

We approached. The man, hearing the sound of our footsteps, raised his head. He was old, bald, with a glabrous face, large pale-blue eyes, a thin red mouth, white complexion, a bony skull to which the skin clung like that of a mummy preserved in milk. The hands were white, with long tapering fingers. He resembled a maiden withered by premature death. He cast on us a gaze at first bewildered, as if we had disturbed him during an ecstatic vision; then his face brightened with joy.

“William!” he exclaimed. “My dearest brother!” He rose with some effort and came toward my master, embraced him, and kissed him on the mouth. “William!” he repeated, and his eyes became moist with tears. “How long it has been! But I recognize you still! Such a long time, so many things have happened! So many trials sent by the Lord!” He wept. William returned his embrace, clearly moved. We were in the presence of Ubertino of Casale.

I had already heard much talk about him, even before I came to Italy, and more still as I frequented the Franciscans of the imperial court. Someone had told me that the greatest poet of those days, Dante Alighieri of Florence, dead only a few years, had composed a poem (which I could not read, since it was written in vulgar Tuscan) of which many verses were nothing but a paraphrase of passages written by Ubertino in his Arbor vitae crucifixae. Nor was this the famous man’s only claim to merit. But to permit my reader better to understand the importance of this meeting, I must try to reconstruct the events of those years, as I understood them both during my brief stay in central Italy and from listening to the many conversations William had had with abbots and monks in the course of our journey.

I will try to tell what I understood of these matters, even if I am not sure I can explain them properly. My masters at Melk had often told me that it is very difficult for a Northerner to form any clear idea of the religious and political vicissitudes of Italy.

The peninsula, where the power of the clergy was more evident than in any other country, and where more than in any other country the clergy made a display of power and wealth, for at least two centuries had generated movements of men bent on a poorer life, in protest against the corrupt priests, from whom they even refused the sacraments. They gathered in independent communities, hated equally by the feudal lords, the empire, and the city magistrates.

Finally Saint Francis had appeared, spreading a love of poverty that did not contradict the precepts of the church; and after his efforts the church had accepted the summons to severe behavior of those older movements and had purified them of the elements of disruption that lurked in them. There should have followed a period of meekness and holiness, but as the Franciscan order grew and attracted the finest men, it became too powerful, too bound to earthly matters, and many Franciscans wanted to restore it to its early purity. A very difficult matter for an order that at the time when I was at the abbey already numbered more than thirty thousand members scattered throughout the whole world. But so it was, and many of those monks of Saint Francis were opposed to the Rule that the order had established, and they said the order had by now assumed the character of those ecclesiastical institutions it had come into the world to reform. And this, they said, had already happened in the days when Saint Francis was alive, and his words and his aims had been betrayed. Many of them rediscovered then a book written at the beginning of the twelfth century of our era, by a Cistercian monk named Joachim, to whom the spirit of prophecy was attributed. He had in fact foreseen the advent of a new age, in which the spirit of Christ, long corrupted through the actions of his false apostles, would again be achieved on earth. And he had announced certain future events in a way that made it seem clear to all that, unawares, he was speaking of the Franciscan order. And therefore many Franciscans had greatly rejoiced, even excessively, it seems, because then, around the middle of the century, the doctors of the Sorbonne condemned the teachings of that abbot Joachim. Apparently they did so because the Franciscans (and the Dominicans) were becoming too powerful, too learned, at the University of Paris; and those Sorbonne doctors wanted to eliminate them as heretics. But this scheme was not carried out, happily for the church, which then allowed the dissemination of the works of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, certainly not heretics. Whence it is clear that in Paris, too, there was a confusion of ideas or someone who wished to confuse them for his own purposes. And this is the evil that heresy inflicts on the Christian people, obfuscating ideas and inciting all to become inquisitors to their personal benefit. For what I saw at the abbey then (and will now recount) caused me to think that often inquisitors create heretics. And not only in the sense that they imagine heretics where these do not exist, but also that inquisitors repress the heretical putrefaction so vehemently that many are driven to share in it, in their hatred for the judges. Truly, a circle conceived by the Devil. God preserve us.

But I was speaking of the heresy (if such it was) of the Joachimites. And in Tuscany there was a Franciscan, Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, who repeated the predictions of Joachim and made a deep impression on the Minorites. Thus there arose among them a band of supporters of the old Rule, against the reorganization of the order attempted by the great Bonaventure, who had become general of the order. In the final thirty years of the last century, the Council of Lyons rescued the Franciscan order from its enemies, who wanted to abolish it, and allowed it ownership of all property in its use (already the law for older orders). But some monks in the Marches rebelled, because they believed that the spirit of the Rule had been forever betrayed, since Franciscans must own nothing, personally or as a convent or as an order. These rebels were put in prison for life. It does not seem to me that they were preaching things contrary to the Gospel, but when the possession of earthly things is in question, it is difficult for men to reason justly. I was told that years later, the new general of the order, Raymond Gaufredi, found these prisoners in Ancona and, on freeing them, said: “Would God that all of us and the whole order were stained by such a sin.” A sign that what the heretics say is not true, and there are still men of great virtue living in the church.

Among these freed prisoners there was one, Angelus Clarenus, who then met a monk from Provence. Pierre Olieu, who preached the prophecies of Joachim, and then he met Ubertino of Casale, and in this way the movement of the Spirituals originated. In those years, a most holy hermit rose to the papal throne, Peter of Murrone, who reigned as Celestine V; and he was welcomed with relief by the Spirituals. “A saint will appear,” it had been said, “and he will follow the teachings of Christ, he will live an angelic life: tremble, ye corrupt priests.” Perhaps Celestine’s life was too angelic, or the prelates around him were too corrupt, or he could not bear the strain of the interminable conflict with the Emperor and with the other kings of Europe. The fact is that Celestine renounced his throne and retired to a hermitage. But in the brief period of his reign, less than a year, the hopes of the Spirituals were all fulfilled. They went to Celestine, who founded with them the community known as that of the fratres et pauperes heremitae domini Celestini. On the other hand, while the Pope was to act as mediator among the most powerful cardinals of Rome, there were some, like a Colonna and an Orsini, who secretly supported the new poverty movement, a truly curious choice for powerful men who lived in vast wealth and luxury; and I have never understood whether they simply exploited the Spirituals for their own political ends or whether in some way they felt they justified their carnal life by supporting the Spiritual trend. Perhaps both things were true, to judge by the little I can understand of Italian affairs. But to give an example, Ubertino had been taken on as chaplain by Cardinal Orsini when, having become the most respected among the Spirituals, he risked being accused as a heretic. And the cardinal himself had protected Ubertino in Avignon.

As happens, however, in such cases, on the one hand Angelus and Ubertino preached according to doctrine, on the other, great masses of simple people accepted this preaching of theirs and spread through the country, beyond all control. So Italy was invaded by these Fraticelli or Friars of the Poor Life, whom many considered dangerous. At this point it was difficult to distinguish the spiritual masters, who maintained contact with the ecclesiastical authorities, from their simpler followers, who now lived outside the order, begging for alms and existing from day to day by the labor of their hands, holding no property of any kind. And these the populace now called Fraticelli, not unlike the French Beghards, who drew their inspiration from Pierre Olieu.

Celestine V was succeeded by Boniface VIII, and this Pope promptly demonstrated scant indulgence for Spirituals and Fraticelli in general: in the last years of the dying century he signed a bull, Firma cautela, in which with one stroke he condemned bizochi, vagabond mendicants who roamed about at the far edge of the Franciscan order, and the Spirituals themselves, who had left the life of the order and retired to a hermitage.

After the death of Boniface VIII, the Spirituals tried to obtain from certain of his successors, among them Clement V, permission to leave the order peaceably. I believe they would have succeeded, but the advent of John XXII robbed them of all hope. When he was elected in 1316, he wrote to the King of Sicily telling him to expel those monks from his lands, where many had taken refuge; and John had Angelus Clarenus and the Spirituals of Provence put in chains.

All cannot have proceeded smoothly, and many in the curia resisted. The fact is that Ubertino and Clarenus managed to obtain permission to leave the order, and the former was received by the Benedictines, the latter by the Celestinians. But for those who continued to lead their free life John was merciless, and he had them persecuted by the Inquisition, and many were burned at the stake.

He realized, however, that to destroy the weed of the Fraticelli, who threatened the very foundation of the church’s authority, he would need to condemn the notions on which their faith was based. They claimed that Christ and the apostles had owned no property, individually or in common; and the Pope condemned this idea as heretical. An amazing position, because there is no evident reason why a pope should consider perverse the notion that Christ was poor: but only a year before, a general chapter of the Franciscans in Perugia had sustained this opinion, and in condemning the one, the Pope was condemning also the other. As I have already said, the chapter was a great reverse in his struggle against the Emperor; this is the fact of the matter. So after that, many Fraticelli, who knew nothing of empire or of Perugia, were burned to death.

***

These thoughts were in my mind as I gazed on the legendary figure of Ubertino. My master introduced me, and the old man stroked my cheek, with a warm, almost burning hand. At the touch of his hand I understood many of the things I had heard about that holy man and others I had read in the pages of his Arbor vitae crucifixae; I understood the mystic fire that had consumed him from his youth, when, though studying in Paris, he had withdrawn from theological speculation and had imagined himself transformed into the penitent Magdalen; and then his intense association with Saint Angela of Foligno, who had initiated him into the riches of the mystic life and the adoration of the cross; and why his superiors, one day, alarmed by the ardor of his preaching, had sent him in retreat to La Verna.

I studied that face, its features sweet as those of the sainted woman with whom he had fraternally exchanged profound spiritual thoughts. I sensed he must have been able to assume a far harsher expression when, in 1311, the Council of Vienne, with the decretal Exivi de paradiso, had deposed Franciscan superiors hostile to the Spirituals, but had charged the latter to live in peace within the order; and this champion of renunciation had not accepted that shrewd compromise and had fought for the institution of a separate order, based on principles of maximum strictness. This great warrior then lost his battle, for in those years John XXII was advocating a crusade against the followers of Pierre Olieu (among whom Ubertino himself was numbered), and he condemned the monks of Narbonne and Beziers. But Ubertino had not hesitated to defend his friend’s memory against the Pope, and, outdone by his sanctity, John had not dared condemn him (though he then condemned the others). On that occasion, indeed, he offered Ubertino a way of saving himself, first advising him and then commanding him to enter the Cluniac order. Ubertino, apparently so disarmed and fragile, must have been equally skillful in gaining protectors and allies in the papal courts, and, in fact, he agreed to enter the monastery of Gemblach in Flanders, but I believe he never even went there, and he remained in Avignon, under the banner of Cardinal Orsini, to defend the Franciscans’ cause.

Only in recent times (and the rumors I had heard were vague) his star at court had waned, he had had to leave Avignon, and the Pope had this indomitable man pursued as a heretic who per mundum discurrit vagabundus. Then, it was said, all trace of him was lost. That afternoon I had learned, from the dialogue between William and the abbot, that he was hidden here in this abbey. And now I saw him before me.

“William,” he was saying, “they were on the point of killing me, you know. I had to flee in the dead of night.”

“Who wanted to kill you? John?”

“No. John has never been fond of me, but he has never ceased to respect me. After all, he was the one who offered me a way of avoiding a trial ten years ago, commanding me to enter the Benedictines, and so silencing my enemies. They muttered for a long time, they waxed ironical on the fact that a champion of poverty should enter such a rich order and live at the court of Cardinal Orsini…. William, you know my contempt for the things of this earth! But it was the way to remain in Avignon and defend my brothers. The Pope is afraid of Orsini, he would never have harmed a hair of my head. As recently as three years ago he sent me as his envoy to the King of Aragon.”

“Then who wished you ill?”

“All of them. The curia. They tried to assassinate me twice. They tried to silence me. You know what happened five years ago. The Beghards of Narbonne had been condemned two years before, and Berengar Talloni, though he was one of the judges, had appealed to the Pope. Those were difficult moments. John had already issued two bulls against the Spirituals, and even Michael of Cesena had given up—by the way, when does he arrive?”

“He will be here in two days’ time.”

“Michael … I have not seen him for so long. Now he has come around, he understands what we wanted, the Perugia chapter asserted that we were right. But then, still in 1318, he gave in to the Pope and turned over to him five Spirituals of Provence who were resisting submission. Burned, William … Oh, it is horrible!” He hid his face in his hands.

“But what exactly happened after Talloni’s appeal?” William asked.

“John had to reopen the debate, you understand? He had to do it, because in the curia, too, there were men seized with doubt, even the Franciscans in the curia—pharisees, whited sepulchers, ready to sell themselves for a prebend, but they were seized with doubt. It was then that John asked me to draw up a memorial on poverty. It was a fine work, William, may God forgive my pride….”

“I have read it. Michael showed it to me.”

“There were the hesitant, even among our own men, the Provincial of Aquitaine, the Cardinal of San Vitale, the Bishop of Kaffa….”

“An idiot,” William said.

“Rest in peace. He was gathered to God two years ago.”

“God was not so compassionate. That was a false report that arrived from Constantinople. He is still in our midst, and I am told he will be a member of the legation. God protect us!”

“But he is favorable to the chapter of Perugia,” Ubertino said.

“Exactly. He belongs to that race of men who are always their adversary’s best champions.”

“To tell the truth,” Ubertino said, “even then he was no great help to the cause. And it all came to nothing, but at least the idea was not declared heretical, and this was important. And so the others have never forgiven me. They have tried to harm me in every way, they have said that I was at Sachsenhausen three years ago, when Louis proclaimed John a heretic. And yet they all knew I was in Avignon that July with Orsini…. They found that parts of the Emperor’s declaration reflected my ideas. What madness.”

“Not all that mad,” William said. “I had given him the ideas, taking them from your Declaration of Avignon, and from some pages of Olieu.”

“You?” Ubertino exclaimed, between amazement and joy. “But then you agree with me!”

William seemed embarrassed. “They were the right ideas for the Emperor, at that moment,” he said evasively.

Ubertino looked at him suspiciously. “Ah, but you don’t really believe them, do you?”

“Tell me,” William said, “tell me how you saved yourself from those dogs.”

“Ah, dogs indeed, William. Rabid dogs. I found myself even in conflict with Bonagratia, you know?”

“But Bonagratia is on our side!”

“Now he is, after I spoke at length with him. Then he was convinced, and he protested against the Ad conditorem canonum. And the Pope imprisoned him for a year.”

“I have heard he is now close to a friend of mine in the curia, William of Occam.”

“I knew him only slightly. I don’t like him. A man without fervor, all head, no heart.”

“But the head is beautiful.”

“Perhaps, and it will take him to hell.”

“Then I will see him again down there, and we will argue logic.”

Hush, William, Ubertino said, smiling with deep affection, you are better than your philosophers. If only you had wanted…

What?

When we saw each other the last time in Umbria—remember?—I had just been cured of my ailments through the intercession of that marvelous woman … Clare of Montefalco… he murmured, his face radiant. Clare … When female nature, naturally so perverse, becomes sublime through holiness, then it can be the noblest vehicle of grace. You know how my life has been inspired by the purest chastity, William—he grasped my master’s arm, convulsively—you know with what … fierce—yes, that’s the word—with what fierce thirst for penance I have tried to mortify in myself the throbbing of the flesh, and make myself wholly transparent to the love of Jesus Crucified…. And yet, three women in my life have been three celestial messengers for me. Angela of Foligno, Margaret of Città di Castello (who revealed the end of my book to me when I had written only a third of it), and finally Clare of Montefalco. It was a reward from heaven that I, yes, I, should investigate her miracles and proclaim her sainthood to the crowds, before Holy Mother Church moved. And you were there, William, and you could have helped me in that holy endeavor, and you would not—

But the holy endeavor that you invited me to share was sending Bentivenga, Jacomo, and Giovannuccio to the stake, William said softly.

They were besmirching her memory with their perversions. And you were an inquisitor!

And that was precisely when I asked to be relieved of that position. I did not like the business. Nor did I like—I shall be frank—the way you induced Bentivenga to confess his errors. You pretended you wished to enter his sect, if sect it was; you stole his secrets from him, and you had him arrested.

But that is the way to proceed against the enemies of Christ! They were heretics, they were Pseudo Apostles, they reeked of the sulphur of Fra Dolcino!

They were Clare’s friends.

No, William, you must not cast even the hint of a shadow on Clare’s memory.

But they were associated with her.

They were Minorites, they called themselves Spirituals, and instead they were monks of the community! But you know it emerged clearly at the trial that Bentivenga of Gubbio proclaimed himself an apostle, and then he and Giovannuccio of Bevagna seduced nuns, telling them hell does not exist, that carnal desires can be satisfied without offending God, that the body of Christ (Lord, forgive me!) can be received after a man has lain with a nun, that the Magdalen found more favor in the Lord’s sight than the virgin Agnes, that what the vulgar call the Devil is God Himself, because the Devil is knowledge and God is by definition knowledge! And it was the blessed Clare, after hearing this talk, who had the vision in which God Himself told her they were wicked followers of the Spiritus Libertatis!

They were Minorites whose minds were aflame with the same visions as Clare’s, and often the step between ecstatic vision and sinful frenzy is very brief, William said.

Ubertino wrung his hands and his eyes were again veiled with tears. Don’t say that, William. How can you confound the moment of ecstatic love, which burns the viscera with the perfume of incense, and the disorder of the senses, which reeks of sulphur? Bentivenga urged others to touch a body’s naked limbs; he declared this was the only way to freedom from the dominion of the senses, homo nudus cum nuda iacebat, ‘naked they lay together, man and woman….’

Et non commiscebantur ad invicem, but there was no conjunction.

Lies! They were seeking pleasure, and they found it. If carnal stimulus was felt, they did not consider it a sin if, to satisfy it, man and woman lay together, and the one touched and kissed the other in every part, and naked belly was joined to naked belly!

I confess that the way Ubertino stigmatized the vice of others did not inspire virtuous thoughts in me. My master must have realized I was agitated, and he interrupted the holy man.

Yours is an ardent spirit, Ubertino, both in love of God and in hatred of evil. What I meant is that there is little difference between the ardor of the seraphim and the ardor of Lucifer, because they are always born from an extreme igniting of the will.

Oh, there is a difference, and I know it! Ubertino said, inspired. You mean that between desiring good and desiring evil there is a brief step, because it is always a matter of directing the will. This is true. But the difference lies in the object, and the object is clearly recognizable. God on this side, the Devil on that.

And I fear I no longer know how to distinguish, Ubertino. Wasn’t it your Angela of Foligno who told of that day when her spirit was transported and she found herself in the sepulcher of Christ? Didn’t she tell how first she kissed his breast and saw him lying with his eyes closed, then she kissed his mouth, and there rose from those lips an ineffable sweetness, and after a brief pause she lay her cheek against the cheek of Christ and Christ put his hand to her cheek and pressed her to him and—as she said—her happiness became sublime?…

What does this have to do with the urge of the senses? Ubertino asked. It was a mystical experience, and the body was our Lord’s.

Perhaps I am accustomed to Oxford, William said, where even mystical experience was of another sort….

All in the head. Ubertino smiled.

Or in the eyes. God perceived as light, in the rays of the sun, the images of mirrors, the diffusion of colors over the parts of ordered matter, in the reflections of daylight on wet leaves … Isn’t this love closer to Francis’s when he praises God in His creatures, flowers, grass, water, air? I don’t believe this type of love can produce any snare. Whereas I’m suspicious of a love that transmutes into a colloquy with the Almighty the shudders felt in fleshly contacts….

You blaspheme, William! It is not the same thing. There is an immense abyss between the high ecstasy of the heart loving Christ Crucified and the base, corrupt ecstasy of the Pseudo Apostles of Montefalco….

They were not Pseudo Apostles, they were Brothers of the Free Spirit; you said as much yourself.

What difference is there? You haven’t heard everything about that trial, I myself never dared record certain confessions, for fear of casting, if only for a moment, the shadow of the Devil on the atmosphere of sanctity Clare had created in that place. But I learned certain things, certain things, William! They gathered at night in a cellar, they took a newborn boy, they threw him from one to another until he died, of blows … or other causes…. And he who caught him alive for the last time, and held him as he died, became the leader of the sect…. And the child’s body was torn to pieces and mixed with flour, to make blasphemous hosts!

Ubertino, William said firmly, these things were said, many centuries ago, by the Armenian bishops, about the sect of the Paulicians. And about the Bogomils.

What does that matter? The Devil is stubborn, he follows a pattern in his snares and his seductions, he repeats his rituals at a distance of millennia, he is always the same, this is precisely why he is recognized as the enemy! I swear to you: They lighted candles on Easter night and took maidens into the cellar. Then they extinguished the candles and threw themselves on the maidens, even if they were bound to them by ties of blood…. And if from this conjunction a baby was born, the infernal rite was resumed, all around a little jar of wine, which they called the keg, and they became drunk and would cut the baby to pieces, and pour its blood into the goblet, and they threw babies on the fire, still alive, and they mixed the baby’s ashes and his blood, and drank!

But Michael Psellus wrote this in his book on the workings of devils three hundred years ago! Who told you these things?

They did. Bentivenga and the others, and under torture!

There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him…. These things I know, Ubertino; I also have belonged to those groups of men who believe they can produce the truth with white-hot iron. Well, let me tell you, the white heat of truth comes from another flame. Under torture Bentivenga may have told the most absurd lies, because it was no longer himself speaking, but his lust, the devils of his soul.

Lust?

Yes, there is a lust for pain, as there is a lust for adoration, and even a lust for humility. If it took so little to make the rebellious angels direct their ardor away from worship and humility toward pride and revolt, what can we expect of a human being? There, now you know: this was the thought that struck me in the course of my inquisitions. And this is why I gave up that activity. I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.

Ubertino had listened to William’s last words as if not understanding them. From the old man’s expression, as it became filled with affectionate commiseration, I realized he considered William prey to culpable sentiments, which he forgave because he loved my master greatly. Ubertino interrupted him and said in a very bitter voice, It does not matter. If that was how you felt, you were right to stop. Temptations must be fought. Still, I lacked your support; with it, we could have routed that band. And instead, you know what happened, I myself was accused of being weak toward them, and I was suspected of heresy. You were weak also, in fighting evil. Evil, William! Will this condemnation never cease, this shadow, this mire that prevents us from arriving at the holy source? He moved still closer to William, as if he were afraid someone might overhear.

Here, too, even among these walls consecrated to prayer, you know?

I know. The abbot has spoken to me; in fact, he asked me to help him shed light on it.

Then observe, investigate, look with a lynx’s eye in both directions: lust and pride….

Lust?

Yes, lust. There was something … feminine, and therefore diabolical, about that young man who is dead. He had the eyes of a maiden seeking commerce with an incubus. But I said ‘pride’ also, the pride of the intellect, in this monastery consecrated to the pride of the word, to the illusion of wisdom.

If you know something, help me.

I know nothing. There is nothing that I know. But the heart senses certain things. Let your heart speak, question faces, do not listen to tongues…. But come, why must we talk of these sad things and frighten this young friend of ours? He looked at me with his pale-blue eyes, grazing my cheek with his long white fingers, and I instinctively almost withdrew; I controlled myself and was right to do so, because I would have offended him, and his intention was pure. Tell me of yourself instead, he said, turning again to William. What have you done since then? It has been—

Eighteen years. I went back to my country. I resumed studying at Oxford. I studied nature.

Nature is good because she is the daughter of God, Ubertino said.

And God must be good, since He generated nature, William said with a smile. I studied, I met some very wise friends. Then I came to know Marsilius, I was attracted by his ideas about empire, the people, about a new law for the kingdoms of the earth, and so I ended up in that group of our brothers who are advising the Emperor. But you know these things: I wrote you. I rejoiced at Bobbio when they told me you were here. We believed you were lost. But now that you are with us you can be of great help in a few days, when Michael also arrives. It will be a harsh conflict with Berengar Talloni. I really believe we will have some amusement.

Ubertino looked at him with a tentative smile. I can never tell when you Englishmen are speaking seriously. There is nothing amusing about such a serious question. At stake is the survival of the order, which is your order; and in my heart it is mine, too. But I shall implore Michael not to go to Avignon. John wants him, seeks him, invites him too insistently. Don’t trust that old Frenchman. O Lord, into what hands has Thy church fallen! He turned his head toward the altar. Transformed into harlot, weakened by luxury, she roils in lust like a snake in heat! From the naked purity of the stable of Bethlehem, made of wood as the lignum vitae of the cross was wood, to the bacchanalia of gold and stone! Look, look here: you have seen the doorway! There is no escaping the pride of images! The days of the Antichrist are finally at hand, and I am afraid, William! He looked around, staring wide-eyed among the dark naves, as if the Antichrist were going to appear any moment, and I actually expected to glimpse him. His lieutenants are already here, dispatched as Christ dispatched the apostles into the world! They are trampling on the City of God, seducing through deceit, hypocrisy, violence. It will be then that God will have to send His servants, Elijah and Enoch, whom He maintained alive in the earthly paradise so that one day they may confound the Antichrist, and they will come to prophesy clad in sackcloth, and they will preach penance by word and by example….

They have already come, Ubertino, William said, indicating his Franciscan habit.

But they have not yet triumphed; this is the moment when the Antichrist, filled with rage, will command the killing of Enoch and Elijah and the exposure of their bodies for all to see and thus be afraid of imitating them. Just as they wanted to kill me….

At that moment, terrified, I thought Ubertino was in the power of a kind of holy frenzy, and I feared for his reason. Now, with the distance of time, knowing what I know—namely, that two years later he would be mysteriously killed in a German city by a murderer never discovered—I am all the more terrified, because obviously that evening Ubertino was prophesying.

The abbot Joachim spoke the truth, you know. We have reached the sixth era of human history, when two Antichrists will appear, the mystic Antichrist and the Antichrist proper. This is happening now, in the sixth era, after Francis appeared to receive in his own flesh the five wounds of Jesus Crucified. Boniface was the mystic Antichrist, and the abdication of Celestine was not valid. Boniface was the beast that rises up from the sea whose seven heads represent the offenses to the deadly sins and whose ten horns the offenses to the commandments, and the cardinals who surrounded him were the locusts, whose body is Apollyon! But the number of the beast, if you read the name in Greek letters, is Benedicti! He stared at me to see whether I had understood, and he raised a finger, cautioning me: Benedict XI was the Antichrist proper, the beast that rises up from the earth! God allowed such a monster of vice and iniquity to govern His church so that his successor’s virtues would blaze with glory!

But, Sainted Father, I replied in a faint voice, summoning my courage, his successor is John!

Ubertino put a hand to his brow as if to dispel a troublesome dream. He was breathing with difficulty; he was tired. True, the calculations were wrong, we are still awaiting the Angelic Pope…. But meanwhile Francis and Dominic have appeared. He raised his eyes to heaven and said, as if praying (but I was sure he was quoting a page of his great book on the tree of life): Quorum primus seraphico calculo purgatus et ardore celico inflammatus totum incendere videbatur. Secundus vero verbo predicationis fecundus super mundi tenebras clarius radiavit…. Yes, these were the promises: the Angelic Pope must come.

And so be it, Ubertino, William said. Meanwhile, I am here to prevent the human Emperor from being deposed. Your Angelic Pope was also preached by Fra Dolcino….

Never utter again the name of that serpent! Ubertino cried, and for the first time I saw his sorrow turn into rage. He has befouled the words of Joachim of Calabria, and has made them bringers of death and filth! Messenger of the Antichrist if ever there was one! But you, William, speak like this because you do not really believe in the advent of the Antichrist, and your masters at Oxford have taught you to idolize reason, drying up the prophetic capacities of your heart!

You are mistaken, Ubertino, William answered very seriously. You know that among my masters I venerate Roger Bacon more than any other….

Who raved of flying machines, Ubertino muttered bitterly.

Who spoke clearly and calmly of the Antichrist, and was aware of the import of the corruption of the world and the decline of learning. He taught, however, that there is only one way to prepare against his coming: study the secrets of nature, use knowledge to better the human race. We can prepare to fight the Antichrist by studying the curative properties of herbs, the nature of stones, and even by planning those flying machines that make you smile.

Your Bacon’s Antichrist was a pretext for cultivating intellectual pride.

A holy pretext.

Nothing pretextual is holy. William, you know I love you. You know I have great faith in you. Mortify your intelligence, learn to weep over the wounds of the Lord, throw away your books.

I will devote myself only to yours. William smiled.

Ubertino also smiled and waved a threatening finger at him. Foolish Englishman. Do not laugh too much at your fellows. Those whom you cannot love you should, rather, fear. And be on your guard here at the abbey. I do not like this place.

I want to know it better, in fact, William said, taking his leave. Come, Adso.

I tell you it is not good, and you reply that you want to know it better. Ah! Ubertino said, shaking his head.

By the way, William said, already halfway down the nave, who is that monk who looks like an animal and speaks the language of Babel?

Salvatore? Ubertino, who had already knelt down, turned. I believe he was a gift of mine to this abbey … along with the cellarer. When I put aside the Franciscan habit I returned for a while to my old convent at Casale, and there I found other monks in difficulty, because the community accused them of being Spirituals of my sect … as they put it. I exerted myself in their favor, procuring permission for them to follow my example. And two, Salvatore and Remigio, I found here when I arrived last year. Salvatore … he does indeed look like an animal. But he is obliging.

William hesitated a moment. I heard him say Penitenziagite.

Ubertino was silent. He waved one hand, as if to drive off a bothersome thought. No, I don’t believe so. You know how these lay brothers are. Country people, who have perhaps heard some wandering preacher and don’t know what they are saying. I would have other reproaches to make to Salvatore: he is a greedy animal and lustful. But nothing, nothing against orthodoxy. No, the sickness of the abbey is something else: seek it among those who know too much, not in those who know nothing. Don’t build a castle of suspicions on one word.

I would never do that, William answered. I gave up being an inquisitor precisely to avoid doing that. But I like also to listen to words, and then I think about them.

You think too much. Boy, he said, addressing me, don’t learn too many bad examples from your master. The only thing that must be pondered—and I realize this at the end of my life—is death. Mors est quies viatoris—finis est omnis laboris. Let me pray now.

TOWARD NONES

hich William has a very erudite conversation with Severinus the herbalist.

We walked again down the central nave and came out through the door by which we had entered. I could still hear Ubertino’s words, all of them, buzzing in my head.

“That man is … odd,” I dared say to William.

“He is, or has been, in many ways a great man. But for this very reason he is odd. It is only petty men who seem normal. Ubertino could have become one of the heretics he helped burn, or a cardinal of the holy Roman church. He came very close to both perversions. When I talk with Ubertino I have the impression that hell is heaven seen from the other side.”

I did not grasp his meaning. “From what side?” I asked.

“Ah, true,” William acknowledged the problem. “It is a matter of knowing whether there are sides and whether there is a whole. But pay no attention to me. And stop looking at that doorway,” he said, striking me lightly on the nape as I was turning, attracted by the sculptures I had seen on entering. “They have frightened you enough for today. All of them.”

As I turned back to the exit, I saw in front of me another monk. He could have been William’s age. He smiled and greeted us cordially. He said he was Severinus of Sankt Wendel, and he was the brother herbalist, in charge of the balneary, the infirmary, the gardens, and he was ours to command if we would like to learn our way better around the abbey compound.

William thanked him and said he had already remarked, on coming in, the very fine vegetable garden, where it looked to him as if not only edible plants were grown, but also medicinal ones, from what he could tell, given the snow.

“In summer or spring, through the variety of its plants, each then adorned with its flowers, this garden sings better the praises of the Creator,” Severinus said, somewhat apologetically. “But even now, in winter, the herbalist’s eye sees through the dry branches the plants that will come, and he can tell you that this garden is richer than any herbal ever was, and more varicolored, beautiful as the illuminations are in those volumes. Furthermore, good herbs grow also in winter, and I preserve others gathered and ready in the pots in my laboratory. And so with the roots of the wood sorrel I treat catarrhs, and with the decoction of althea roots I make plasters for skin diseases; burrs cicatrize eczemas; by chopping and grinding the snakeroot rhizome I treat diarrheas and certain female complaints; pepper is a fine digestive; coltsfoot eases the cough; and we have good gentian also for the digestion, and I have glycyrrhiza, and juniper for making excellent infusions, and elder bark with which I make a decoction for the liver, soapwort, whose roots are macerated in cold water for catarrh, and valerian, whose properties you surely know.”

“You have widely varied herbs, and suited to different climates. How do you manage that?”

“On the one hand, I owe it to the mercy of the Lord, who set our high plain between a range that overlooks the sea to the south and receives its warm winds, and the higher mountain to the north whose sylvan balsams we receive. And on the other hand, I owe it to my art, which, unworthily, I learned at the wish of my masters. Certain plants will grow even in an adverse climate if you take care of the terrain around them, and their nourishment, and their growth.”

“But you also have plants that are good only to eat?” I asked.

“Ah, my hungry young colt, there are no plants good for food that are not good for treating the body, too, provided they are taken in the right quantity. Only excess makes them cause illness. Consider the pumpkin. It is cold and damp by nature and slakes thirst, but if you eat it when rotten it gives you diarrhea and you must bind your viscera with a paste of brine and mustard. And onions? Warm and damp, in small quantities they enhance coitus (for those who have not taken our vows, naturally), but too many bring on a heaviness of the head, to be combatted with milk and vinegar. A good reason,” he added slyly, “why a young monk should always eat them sparingly. Eat garlic instead. Warm and dry, it is good against poisons. But do not use it to excess, for it causes too many humors to be expelled from the brain. Beans, on the contrary, produce urine and are fattening, two very good things. But they induce bad dreams. Far less, however, than certain other herbs. There are some that actually provoke evil visions.”

“Which?” I asked.

“Aha, our novice wants to know too much. These are things that only the herbalist must know; otherwise any thoughtless person could go about distributing visions: in other words, lying with herbs.”

“But you need only a bit of nettle,” William said then, “or roybra or olieribus to be protected against such visions. I hope you have some of these good herbs.”

Severinus gave my master a sidelong glance. “You are interested in herbalism?”

“Just a little,” William said modestly, “since I came upon the Theatrum Sanitatis of Ububchasym de Baldach…”

“Abul Asan al-Muchtar ibn-Botlan.”

“Or Ellucasim Elimittar: as you prefer. I wonder whether a copy is to be found here.”

“One of the most beautiful. With many rich illustrations.”

“Heaven be praised. And the De virtutibus herbarum of Platearius?”

“That, too. And the De plantis of Aristotle, translated by Alfred of Sareshel.”

“I have heard it said that Aristotle did not really write that work,” William remarked, “just as he was not the author of the De causis, it has been discovered.”

“In any event it is a great book,” Severinus observed, and my master agreed most readily, not asking whether the herbalist was speaking of the De plantis or of the De causis, both works that I did not know but which, from that conversation, I deduced must be very great.

“I shall be happy,” Severinus concluded, “to have some frank conversation with you about herbs.”

“I shall be still happier,” William said, “but would we not be breaking the rule of silence, which I believe obtains in your order?”

“The Rule,” Severinus said, “has been adapted over the centuries to the requirements of the different communities. The Rule prescribed the lectio divina but not study, and yet you know how much our order has developed inquiry into divine and human affairs. Also, the Rule prescribes a common dormitory, but at times it is right that the monks have, as we do here, chances to meditate also during the night, and so each of them is given his own cell. The Rule is very rigid on the question of silence, and here with us, not only the monk who performs manual labor but also those who write or read must not converse with their brothers. But the abbey is first and foremost a community of scholars, and often it is useful for monks to exchange the accumulated treasures of their learning. All conversation regarding our studies is considered legitimate and profitable, provided it does not take place in the refectory or during the hours of the holy offices.”

“Had you much occasion to talk with Adelmo of Otranto?” William asked abruptly.

Severinus did not seem surprised. “I see the abbot has already spoken with you,” he said. “No. I did not converse with him often. He spent his time illuminating. I did hear him on occasion talking with other monks, Venantius of Salvemec, or Jorge of Burgos, about the nature of his work. Besides, I don’t spend my day in the scriptorium, but in my laboratory.” And he nodded toward the infirmary building.

“I understand,” William said. “So you don’t know whether Adelmo had visions.”

“Visions?”

“Like the ones your herbs induce, for example.”

Severinus stiffened. “I told you: I store the dangerous herbs with great care.”

“That is not what I meant,” William hastened to clarify. “I was speaking of visions in general.”

“I don’t understand,” Severinus insisted.

“I was thinking that a monk who wanders at night about the Aedificium, where, by the abbot’s admission … terrible things can happen … to those who enter during forbidden hours—well, as I say, I was thinking he might have had diabolical visions that drove him to the precipice.”

“I told you: I don’t visit the scriptorium, except when I need a book; but as a rule I have my own herbaria, which I keep in the infirmary. As I said, Adelmo was very close to Jorge, Venantius, and … naturally, Berengar.”

Even I sensed the slight hesitation in Severinus’s voice. Nor did it escape my master. “Berengar? And why ‘naturally’?”

“Berengar of Arundel, the assistant librarian. They were of an age, they had been novices together, it was normal for them to have things to talk about. That is what I meant.”

“Ah, that is what you meant,” William repeated. And to my surprise he did not pursue the matter. In fact, he promptly changed the subject. “But perhaps it is time for us to visit the Aedificium. Will you act as our guide?”

“Gladly,” Severinus said, with all-too-evident relief. He led us along the side of the garden and brought us to the west façade of the Aedificium.

“Facing the garden is the door leading to the kitchen,” he said, “but the kitchen occupies only the western half of the ground floor; in the other half is the refectory. And at the south entrance, which you reach from behind the choir in the church, there are two other doors leading to the kitchen and the refectory. But we can go in here, because from the kitchen we can then go on through to the refectory.”

As I entered the vast kitchen, I realized that the entire height of the Aedificium enclosed an octagonal court; I understood later that this was a kind of huge well, without any access, onto which, at each floor, opened broad windows, like the ones on the exterior. The kitchen was a vast smoke-filled entrance hall, where many servants were already busy preparing the food for supper. On a great table two of them were making a pie of greens, barley, oats, and rye, chopping turnips, cress, radishes, and carrots. Nearby, another cook had just finished poaching some fish in a mixture of wine and water, and was covering them with a sauce of sage, parsley, thyme, garlic, pepper, and salt.

Beneath the west tower an enormous oven opened, for baking bread; it was already flashing with reddish flames. In the south tower there was an immense fireplace, where great pots were boiling and spits were turning. Through the door that opened onto the barnyard behind the church, the swineherds were entering at that moment, carrying the meat of the slaughtered pigs. We went out through that same door and found ourselves in the yard, at the far eastern end of the plain, against the walls, where there were many buildings. Severinus explained to me that the first was the series of barns, then there stood the horses’ stables, then those for the oxen, and then chicken coops, and the covered yard for the sheep. Outside the pigpens, swineherds were stirring a great jarful of the blood of the freshly slaughtered pigs, to keep it from coagulating. If it was stirred properly and promptly, it would remain liquid for the next few days, thanks to the cold climate, and then they would make blood puddings from it.

We re-entered the Aedificium and cast a quick glance at the refectory as we crossed it, heading toward the east tower. Of the two towers between which the refectory extended, the northern one housed a fireplace, the other a circular staircase that led to the scriptorium, on the floor above. By this staircase the monks went up to their work every day, or else they used the other two staircases, less comfortable but well heated, which rose in spirals inside the fireplace here and inside the oven in the kitchen.

William asked whether we would find anyone in the scriptorium, since it was Sunday. Severinus smiled and said that work, for the Benedictine monk, is prayer. On Sunday offices lasted longer, but the monks assigned to work on books still spent some hours up there, usually engaged in fruitful exchanges of learned observations, counsel, reflections on Holy Scripture.

AFTER NONES

In wich there is a visit to the scriptorium, and a meeting with many scholars, copyists, and rubricators, as well as an old blind man who is expecting the Antichrist.

As we climbed up I saw my master observing the windows that gave light to the stairway. I was probably becoming as clever as he, because I immediately noticed that their position would make it difficult for a person to reach them. On the other hand, the windows of the refectory (the only ones on the ground floor that overlooked the cliff face) did not seem easily reached, either, since below them there was no furniture of any kind.

When we reached the top of the stairs, we went through the east tower into the scriptorium, and there I could not suppress a cry of wonder. This floor was not divided in two like the one below, and therefore it appeared to my eyes in all its spacious immensity. The ceilings, curved and not too high (lower than in a church, but still higher than in any chapter house I ever saw), supported by sturdy pillars, enclosed a space suffused with the most beautiful light, because three enormous windows opened on each of the longer sides, whereas a smaller window pierced each of the five external sides of each tower; eight high, narrow windows, finally, allowed light to enter from the octagonal central well.

The abundance of windows meant that the great room was cheered by a constant diffused light, even on a winter afternoon. The panes were not colored like church windows, and the lead-framed squares of clear glass allowed the light to enter in the purest possible fashion, not modulated by human art, and thus to serve its purpose, which was to illuminate the work of reading and writing. I have seen at other times and in other places many scriptoria, but none where there shone so luminously, in the outpouring of physical light which made the room glow, the spiritual principle that light incarnates, radiance, source of all beauty and learning, inseparable attribute of that proportion the room embodied. For three things concur in creating beauty: first of all integrity or perfection, and for this reason we consider ugly all incomplete things; then proper proportion or consonance; and finally clarity and light, and in fact we call beautiful those things of definite color. And since the sight of the beautiful implies peace, and since our appetite is calmed similarly by peacefulness, by the good, and by the beautiful, I felt myself filled with a great consolation and I thought how pleasant it must be to work in that place.

As it appeared to my eyes, at that afternoon hour, it seemed to me a joyous workshop of learning. I saw later at St. Gall a scriptorium of similar proportions, also separated from the library (in other convents the monks worked in the same place where the books were kept), but not so beautifully arranged as this one. Antiquarians, librarians, rubricators, and scholars were seated, each at his own desk, and there was a desk under each of the windows. And since there were forty windows (a number truly perfect, derived from the decupling of the quadragon, as if the Ten Commandments had been multiplied by the four cardinal virtues), forty monks could work at the same time, though at that moment there were perhaps thirty. Severinus explained to us that monks working in the scriptorium were exempted from the offices of terce, sext, and nones so they would not have to leave their work during the hours of daylight, and they stopped their activity only at sunset, for vespers.

The brightest places were reserved for the antiquarians, the most expert illuminators, the rubricators, and the copyists. Each desk had everything required for illuminating and copying: inkhorns, fine quills which some monks were sharpening with a thin knife, pumice stone for smoothing the parchment, rulers for drawing the lines that the writing would follow. Next to each scribe, or at the top of the sloping desk, there was a lectern, on which the codex to be copied was placed, the page covered by a sheet with a cut-out window which framed the line being copied at that moment. And some had inks of gold and various colors. Other monks were simply reading books, and they wrote down their annotations in their personal notebooks or on tablets.

I did not have time, however, to observe their work, because the librarian came to us. We already knew he was Malachi of Hildesheim. His face was trying to assume an expression of welcome, but I could not help shuddering at the sight of such a singular countenance. He was tall and extremely thin, with large and awkward limbs. As he took his great strides, cloaked in the black habit of the order, there was something upsetting about his appearance. The hood, which was still raised since he had come in from outside, cast a shadow on the pallor of his face and gave a certain suffering quality to his large melancholy eyes. In his physiognomy there were what seemed traces of many passions which his will had disciplined but which seemed to have frozen those features they had now ceased to animate. Sadness and severity predominated in the lines of his face, and his eyes were so intense that with one glance they could penetrate the heart of the person speaking to him, and read the secret thoughts, so it was difficult to tolerate their inquiry and one was not tempted to meet them a second time.

The librarian introduced us to many of the monks who were working at that moment. Of each, Malachi also told us what task he was performing, and I admired the deep devotion of all to knowledge and to the study of the divine word. Thus I met Venantius of Salvemec, translator from the Greek and the Arabic, devoted to that Aristotle who surely was the wisest of all men. Benno of Uppsala, a young Scandinavian monk who was studying rhetoric. Aymaro of Alessandria, who had been copying works on loan to the library for a few months only, and then a group of illuminators from various countries, Patrick of Clonmacnois, Rabano of Toledo, Magnus of Iona, Waldo of Hereford.

The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis. But I must come to the subject of our discussion, from which emerged many useful indications as to the nature of the subtle uneasiness among the monks, and some concerns, not expressed, that still weighed on all our conversations.

My master began speaking with Malachi, praising the beauty and the industry of the scriptorium and asking him for information about the procedure for the work done there, because, he said very acutely, he had heard this library spoken of everywhere and would like to examine many of the books. Malachi explained to him what the abbot had already said: the monk asked the librarian for the work he wished to consult and the librarian then went to fetch it from the library above, if the request was justified and devout. William asked how he could find out the names of the books kept in the cases upstairs, and Malachi showed him, fixed by a little gold chain to his own desk, a voluminous codex covered with very thickly written lists.

William slipped his hands inside his habit, at the point where it billowed over his chest to make a kind of sack, and he drew from it an object that I had already seen in his hands, and on his face, in the course of our journey. It was a forked pin, so constructed that it could stay on a man’s nose (or at least on his, so prominent and aquiline) as a rider remains astride his horse or as a bird clings to its perch. And, one on either side of the fork, before the eyes, there were two ovals of metal, which held two almonds of glass, thick as the bottom of a tumbler. William preferred to read with these before his eyes, and he said they made his vision better than what nature had endowed him with or than his advanced age, especially as the daylight failed, would permit. They did not serve him to see from a distance, for then his eyes were, on the contrary, quite sharp, but to see close up. With these lenses he could read manuscripts penned in very faint letters, which even I had some trouble deciphering. He explained to me that, when a man had passed the middle point of his life, even if his sight had always been excellent, the eye hardened and the pupil became recalcitrant, so that many learned men had virtually died, as far as reading and writing were concerned, after their fiftieth summer. A grave misfortune for men who could have given the best fruits of their intellect for many more years. So the Lord was to be praised since someone had devised and constructed this instrument. And he told me this in support of the ideas of his Roger Bacon, who had said that the aim of learning was also to prolong human life.

The other monks looked at William with great curiosity but did not dare ask him questions. And I noticed that, even in a place so zealously and proudly dedicated to reading and writing, that wondrous instrument had not yet arrived. I felt proud to be at the side of a man who had something with which to dumbfound other men famous in the world for their wisdom.

With those objects on his eyes William bent over the lists inscribed in the codex. I looked, too, and we found titles of books we had never before heard of, and others most famous, that the library possessed.

“De pentagono Salomonis, Ars loquendi et intelligendi in lingua hebraica, De rebus metallicis by Roger of Hereford, Algebra by Al-Kuwarizmi, translated into Latin by Robertus Anglicus, the Punica of Silius Italicus, the Gesta francorum, De laudibus sanctae crucis by Rabanus Maurus, and Flavii Claudii Giordani de aetate mundi et bominis reservatis singulis litteris per singulos libros ab A usque ad Z,” my master read. “Splendid works. But in what order are they listed?” He quoted from a text I did not know but which was certainly familiar to Malachi: “‘The librarian must have a list of all books, carefully ordered by subjects and authors, and they must be classified on the shelves with numerical indications.’ How do you know the collocation of each book?”

Malachi showed him some annotations beside each title. I read: “iii, IV gradus, V in prima graecorum”; “ii, V gradus, VII in tertia anglorum,” and so on. I understood that the first number indicated the position of the book on the shelf or gradus, which was in turn indicated by the second number, while the case was indicated by the third number; and I understood also that the other phrases designated a room or a corridor of the library, and I made bold to ask further information about these last distinctions. Malachi looked at me sternly: “Perhaps you do not know, or have forgotten, that only the librarian is allowed access to the library. It is therefore right and sufficient that only the librarian know how to decipher these things.”

“But in what order are the books recorded in this list?” William asked. “Not by subject, it seems to me.” He did not suggest an order by author, following the same sequence as the letters of the alphabet, for this is a system I have seen adopted only in recent years, and at that time it was rarely used.

“The library dates back to the earliest times,” Malachi said, “and the books are registered in order of their acquisition, donation, or entrance within our walls.”

“They are difficult to find, then,” William observed.

“It is enough for the librarian to know them by heart and know when each book came here. As for the other monks, they can rely on his memory.” He spoke as if discussing someone other than himself, and I realized he was speaking of the office that at that moment he unworthily held, but which had been held by a hundred others, now deceased, who had handed down their knowledge from one to the other.

“I understand,” William said. “If I were then to seek something, not knowing what, on the pentagon of Solomon, you would be able to tell me that there exists the book whose title I have just read, and you could identify its location on the floor above.”

“If you really had to learn something about the pentagon of Solomon,” Malachi said. “But before giving you that book, I would prefer to ask the abbot’s advice.”

“I have been told that one of your best illuminators died recently,” William said then. “The abbot has spoken to me a great deal of his art. Could I see the codices he was illuminating?”

“Because of his youth, Adelmo of Otranto,” Malachi said, looking at William suspiciously, “worked only on marginalia. He had a very lively imagination and from known things he was able to compose unknown and surprising things, as one might join a human body to an equine neck. His books are over there. Nobody has yet touched his desk.”

We approached what had been Adelmo’s working place, where the pages of a richly illuminated psalter still lay. They were folios of the finest vellum—that queen among parchments—and the last was still fixed to the desk. Just scraped with pumice stone and softened with chalk, it had been smoothed with the plane, and, from the tiny holes made on the sides with a fine stylus, all the lines that were to have guided the artist’s hand had been traced. The first half had already been covered with writing, and the monk had begun to sketch the illustrations in the margins. The other pages, on the contrary, were already finished, and as we looked at them, neither I nor William could suppress a cry of wonder. This was a psalter in whose margins was delineated a world reversed with respect to the one to which our senses have accustomed us. As if at the border of a discourse that is by definition the discourse of truth, there proceeded, closely linked to it, through wondrous allusions in aenigmate, a discourse of falsehood on a topsy-turvy universe, in which dogs flee before the hare, and deer hunt the lion. Little bird-feet heads, animals with human hands on their back, hirsute pates from which feet sprout, zebra-striped dragons, quadrupeds with serpentine necks twisted in a thousand inextricable knots, monkeys with stags’ horns, sirens in the form of fowl with membranous wings, armless men with other human bodies emerging from their backs like humps, and figures with tooth-filled mouths on the belly, humans with horses’ heads, and horses with human legs, fish with birds’ wings and birds with fishtails, monsters with single bodies and double heads or single heads and double bodies, cows with cocks’ tails and butterfly wings, women with heads scaly as a fish’s back, two-headed chimeras interlaced with dragonflies with lizard snouts, centaurs, dragons, elephants, manticores stretched out on tree branches, gryphons whose tails turned into an archer in battle array, diabolical creatures with endless necks, sequences of anthropomorphic animals and zoomorphic dwarfs joined, sometimes on the same page, with scenes of rustic life in which you saw, depicted with such impressive vivacity that the figures seemed alive, all the life of the fields, plowmen, fruit gatherers, harvesters, spinning-women, sowers alongside foxes, and martens armed with crossbows who were scaling the walls of a towered city defended by monkeys. Here an initial letter, bent into an L, in the lower part generated a dragon; there a great V, which began the word “verba,” produced as a natural shoot from its trunk a serpent with a thousand coils, which in turn begot other serpents as leaves and clusters.

Next to the psalter there was, apparently finished only a short time before, an exquisite book of hours, so incredibly small that it would fit into the palm of the hand. The writing was tiny; the marginal illuminations, barely visible at first sight, demanded that the eye examine them closely to reveal all their beauty (and you asked yourself with what superhuman instrument the artist had drawn them to achieve such vivid effects in a space so reduced). The entire margins of the book were invaded by minuscule forms that generated one another, as if by natural expansion, from the terminal scrolls of the splendidly drawn letters: sea sirens, stags in flight, chimeras, armless human torsos that emerged like slugs from the very body of the verses. At one point, as if to continue the triple “Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus” repeated on three different lines, you saw three ferocious figures with human heads, two of which were bent, one downward and one upward, to join in a kiss you would not have hesitated to call immodest if you were not persuaded that a profound, even if not evident, spiritual meaning must surely have justified that illustration at that point.

As I followed those pages I was torn between silent admiration and laughter, because the illustrations naturally inspired merriment, though they were commenting on holy pages. And Brother William examined them smiling and remarked, “Babewyn: so they are called in my islands.”

“Babouins: that is what they call them in Gaul,” Malachi said. “Adelmo learned his art in your country, although he studied also in France. Baboons, that is to say: monkeys from Africa. Figures of an inverted world, where houses stand on the tip of a steeple and the earth is above the sky.”

I recalled some verses I had heard in the vernacular of my country, and I could not refrain from repeating them:Aller wunder si geswigen,

das erde himel hât überstigen,
daz suit ir vür ein wunder wigen.

And Malachi continued, quoting from the same text:

Erd oh un himel unter,

das suit ir hân besunder
vür aller wunder ein wunder.

“Good for you, Adso,” the librarian continued. “In fact, these images tell of that country where you arrive mounted on a blue goose, where hawks are found that catch fish in a stream, bears that pursue falcons in the sky, lobsters that fly with the doves, and three giants are caught in a trap and bitten by a cock.”

And a pale smile brightened his lips. Then the other monks, who had followed the conversation a bit shyly, laughed heartily, as if they had been awaiting the librarian’s consent. He frowned as the others continued laughing, praising the skill of poor Adelmo and pointing out to one another the more fantastic figures. And it was while all were still laughing that we heard, at our backs, a solemn and stern voice.

“Verba vana aut risui apta non loqui.”

We turned. The speaker was a monk bent under the weight of his years, an old man white as snow, not only his skin, but also his face and his pupils. I saw he was blind. The voice was still majestic and the limbs powerful, even if the body was withered by age. He stared at us as if he could see us, and always thereafter I saw him move and speak as if he still possessed the gift of sight. But the tone of his voice was that of one possessing only the gift of prophecy.

“The man whom you see, venerable in age and wisdom,” Malachi said to William, pointing out the newcomer, “is Jorge of Burgos. Older than anyone else living in the monastery save Alinardo of Grottaferrata, he is the one to whom many monks here confide the burden of their sins in the secret of confession.” Then, turning to the old man, he said, “The man standing before you is Brother William of Baskerville, our guest.”

“I hope my words did not anger you,” the old man said in a curt tone. “I heard persons laughing at laughable things and I reminded them of one of the principles of our Rule. And as the psalmist says, if the monk must refrain from good speech because of his vow of silence, all the more reason why he should avoid bad speech. And as there is bad speech there are also bad images. And they are those that lie about the form of creation and show the world as the opposite of what it should be, has always been, and always will be throughout the centuries until the end of time. But you come from another order, where I am told that merriment, even the most inopportune sort, is viewed with indulgence.” He was repeating what the Benedictines said about the eccentricities of Saint Francis of Assisi, and perhaps also the bizarre whims attributed to those friars and Spirituals of every kind who were the most recent and embarrassing offshoots of the Franciscan order. But William gave no sign of understanding the insinuation.

“Marginal images often provoke smiles, but to edifying ends,” he replied. “As in sermons, to touch the imagination of devout throngs it is necessary to introduce exempla, not infrequently jocular, so also the discourse of images must indulge in these trivia. For every virtue and for every sin there is an example drawn from bestiaries, and animals exemplify the human world.”

“Ah, yes,” the old man said mockingly, but without smiling, “any image is good for inspiring virtue, provided the masterpiece of creation, turned with his head down, becomes the subject of laughter. And so the word of God is illustrated by the ass playing a lyre, the owl plowing with a shield, oxen yoking themselves to the plow, rivers flowing upstream, the sea catching fire, the wolf turning hermit! Go hunting for hares with oxen, have owls teach you grammar, have dogs bite fleas, the one-eyed guard the dumb, and the dumb ask for bread, the ant give birth to a calf, roast chickens fly, cakes grow on rooftops, parrots hold rhetoric lessons, hens fertilize cocks, make the cart go before the oxen, the dog sleep in a bed, and all walk with their heads on the ground! What is the aim of this nonsense? A world that is the reverse and the opposite of that established by God, under the pretext of teaching divine precepts!”

“But as the Areopagite teaches,” William said humbly, “God can be named only through the most distorted things. And Hugh of St. Victor reminded us that the more the simile becomes dissimilar, the more the truth is revealed to us under the guise of horrible and indecorous figures, the less the imagination is sated in carnal enjoyment, and is thus obliged to perceive the mysteries hidden under the turpitude of the images….”

“I know that line of reasoning! And I confess with shame that it was the chief argument of our order when the Cluniac abbots combatted the Cistercians. But Saint Bernard was right: little by little the man who depicts monsters and portents of nature to reveal the things of God per speculum et in aenigmate, comes to enjoy the very nature of the monstrosities he creates and to delight in them, and as a result he no longer sees except through them. You have only to look, you who still have your sight, at the capitals of your cloister.” And he motioned with his hand beyond the window, toward the church. “Before the eyes of monks intent on meditation, what is the meaning of those ridiculous grotesques, those monstrous shapes and shapely monsters? Those sordid apes? Those lions, those centaurs, those half-human creatures, with mouths in their bellies, with single feet, ears like sails? Those spotted tigers, those fighting warriors, those hunters blowing their horns, and those many bodies with single heads and many heads with single bodies? Quadrupeds with serpents’ tails, and fish with quadrupeds’ faces, and here an animal who seems a horse in front and a ram behind, and there a horse with horns, and so on; by now it is more pleasurable for a monk to read marble than manuscript, and to admire the works of man than to meditate on the law of God. Shame! For the desire of your eyes and for your smiles!”

The old man stopped, out of breath. And I admired the vivid memory thanks to which, blind perhaps for many years, he could still recall the images whose wickedness he decried. I was led to suspect they had greatly seduced him when he had seen them, since he could yet describe them with such passion. But it has often happened/ that I have found the most seductive depictions of sin in the pages of those very men of incorruptible virtue who condemned their spell and their effects. A sign that these men are impelled by such eagerness to bear witness to the truth that they do not hesitate, out of love of God, to confer on evil all the seductions in which it cloaks itself; thus the writers inform men better of the ways through which the Evil One enchants them. And, in fact, Jorge’s words filled me with a great desire to see the tigers and monkeys of the cloister, which I had not yet admired. But Jorge interrupted the flow of my thoughts because he resumed speaking, in a much calmer tone.

“Our Lord did not have to employ such foolish things to point out the strait and narrow path to us. Nothing in his parables arouses laughter, or fear. Adelmo, on the contrary, whose death you now mourn, took such pleasure in the monsters he painted that he lost sight of the ultimate things which they were to illustrate. And he followed all, I say all”—his voice became solemn and ominous—”the paths of monstrosity. Which God knows how to punish.”

A heavy silence fell. Venantius of Salvemec dared break it.

“Venerable Jorge,” he said, “your virtue makes you unjust. Two days before Adelmo died, you were present at a learned debate right here in the scriptorium. Adelmo took care that his art, indulging in bizarre and fantastic images, was directed nevertheless to the glory of God, as an instrument of the knowledge of celestial things. Brother William mentioned just now the Areopagite, who spoke of learning through distortion. And Adelmo that day quoted another lofty authority, the doctor of Aquino, when he said that divine things should be expounded more properly in figures of vile bodies than of noble bodies. First because the human spirit is more easily freed from error; it is obvious, in fact, that certain properties cannot be attributed to divine things, and become uncertain if portrayed by noble corporeal things. In the second place because this humbler depiction is more suited to the knowledge that we have of God on this earth: He shows Himself here more in that which is not than in that which is, and therefore the similitudes of those things furthest from God lead us to a more exact notion of Him, for thus we know that He is above what we say and think. And in the third place because in this way the things of God are better hidden from unworthy persons. In other words, that day we were discussing the question of understanding how the truth can be revealed through surprising expressions, both shrewd and enigmatic. And I reminded him that in the work of the great Aristotle I had found very clear words on this score….”

“I do not remember,” Jorge interrupted sharply, “I am very old. I do not remember. I may have been excessively severe. Now it is late, I must go.”

“It is strange you should not remember,” Venantius insisted; “it was a very learned and fine discussion, in which Benno and Berengar also took part. The question, in fact, was whether metaphors and puns and riddles, which also seem conceived by poets for sheer pleasure, do not lead us to speculate on things in a new and surprising way, and I said that this is also a virtue demanded of the wise man…. And Malachi was also there….”

“If the venerable Jorge does not remember, respect his age and the weariness of his mind … otherwise always so lively,” one of the monks following the discussion said. The sentence was uttered in an agitated tone—at least at the beginning, because the speaker, once realizing that in urging respect for the old man he was actually calling attention to a weakness, had slowed the pace of his own interjection, ending almost in a whisper of apology. It was Berengar of Arundel who had spoken, the assistant librarian. He was a pale-faced young man, and, observing him, I remembered Ubertino’s description of Adelmo: his eyes seemed those of a lascivious woman. Made shy, for everyone was now looking at him, he held the fingers of both hands enlaced like one wishing to suppress an internal tension.

Venantius’s reaction was unusual. He gave Berengar a look that made him lower his eyes. “Very well, Brother,” he said, “if memory is a gift of God, then the ability to forget can also be good, and must be respected. I respect it in the elderly brother to whom I was speaking. But from you I expected a sharper recollection of the things that happened when we were here with a dear friend of yours….”

I could not say whether Venantius underlined with his tone the word “dear.” The fact is that I sensed an embarrassment among those present. Each looked in a different direction, and no one looked at Berengar, who had blushed violently. Malachi promptly spoke up, with authority: “Come, Brother William,” he said, “I will show you other interesting books.”

The group dispersed. I saw Berengar give Venantius a look charged with animosity, and Venantius return the look, silent and defiant. Seeing that old Jorge was leaving, I was moved by a feeling of respectful reverence, and bowed to kiss his hand. The old man received the kiss, put his hand on my head, and asked who I was. When I told him my name, his face brightened.

“You bear a great and very beautiful name,” he said. “Do you know who Adso of Montier-en-Der was?” he asked. I did not know, I confess. So Jorge added, “He was the author of a great and awful book, the Libellus de Anticbristo, in which he foresaw things that were to happen; but he was not sufficiently heeded.”

“The book was written before the millennium,” William said, “and those things did not come to pass….”

“For those who lack eyes to see,” the blind man said. “The ways of the Antichrist are slow and tortuous. He arrives when we do not expect him: not because the calculation suggested by the apostle was mistaken, but because we have not learned the art.” Then he cried, in a very loud voice, his face turned toward the hall, making the ceiling of the scriptorium re-echo: “He is coming! Do not waste your last days laughing at little monsters with spotted skins and twisted tails! Do not squander the last seven days!”

VESPERS

In which the rest of the abbey is visited, William comes to some conclusions about Adelmo’s death, there is a conversation with the brother glazier about glasses for reading and about phantoms for those who seek to read too much.

At that point the bell rang for vespers and the monks prepared to leave their desks. Malachi made it clear to us that we, too, should leave. He would remain with his assistant, Berengar, to put things back in order (those were his words) and arrange the library for the night. William asked him whether he would be locking the doors.

“There are no doors that forbid access to the scriptorium from the kitchen and the refectory, or to the library from the scriptorium. Stronger than any door must be the abbot’s prohibition. And the monks need both the kitchen and the refectory until compline. At that point, to prevent entry into the Aedificium by outsiders or animals, for whom the interdiction is not valid, I myself lock the outside doors, which open into the kitchen and the refectory, and from that hour on the Aedificium remains isolated.”

We went down. As the monks headed toward the choir, my master decided the Lord would forgive us if we did not attend holy office (the Lord had a great deal to forgive us in the days that followed!), and he suggested I walk a bit with him over the grounds, so that we might familiarize ourselves with the place.

The weather was turning bad. A cold wind had risen and the sky was becoming foggy. The sun could be sensed, setting beyond the vegetable gardens; and toward the east it was already growing dark as we proceeded in that direction, flanking the choir of the church and reaching the rear part of the grounds. There, almost against the outside wall, where it joined the east tower of the Aedificium, were the stables; the swineherds were covering the jar containing the pigs’ blood. We noticed that behind the stables the outside wall was lower, so that one could look over it. Beyond the sheer drop of the walls, the terrain that sloped dizzyingly down was covered with loose dirt that the snow could not completely hide. I realized this was the pile of old straw, which was thrown over the wall at that point and extended down to the curve where the path taken by the fugitive Brunellus began.

In the stalls nearby, the grooms were leading the animals to the manger. We followed the path along which, toward the wall, the various stalls were located; to the right, against the choir, were the dormitory of the monks and the latrines. Then, as the east wall turned northward, at the angle of the stone girdle, was the smithy. The last smiths were putting down their tools and extinguishing the fires, about to head for the holy office. William moved with curiosity toward one part of the smithy, almost separated from the rest of the workshop, where one monk was putting away his things. On his table was a very beautiful collection of multicolored pieces of glass, of tiny dimensions, but larger panes were set against the wall. In front of him there was a still-unfinished reliquary of which only the silver skeleton existed, but on it he had obviously been setting bits of glass and stones, which his instruments had reduced to the dimensions of gems.

Thus we met Nicholas of Morimondo, master glazier of the abbey. He explained to us that in the rear part of the forge they also blew glass, whereas in this front part, where the smiths worked, the glass was fixed to the leads, to make windows. But, he added, the great works of stained glass that adorned the church and the Aedificium had been completed at least two centuries before. Now he and the others confined themselves to minor tasks, and to repairing the damage of time.

“And with great difficulty,” he added, “because it’s impossible now to find the colors of the old days, especially the remarkable blue you can still see in the choir, so limpid that, when the sun is high, it pours a light of paradise into the nave. The glass on the west side of the nave, restored not long ago, is not of the same quality, and you can tell, on summer days. It’s hopeless,” he went on. “We no longer have the learning of the ancients, the age of giants is past!”

“We are dwarfs,” William admitted, “but dwarfs who stand on the shoulders of those giants, and small though we are, we sometimes manage to see farther on the horizon than they.”

“Tell me what we can do better than they were able to do,” Nicholas exclaimed. “If you go down to the crypt of the church, where the abbey’s treasure is kept, you will find reliquaries of such exquisite craftsmanship that the little monstrosity I am now cobbling up”—he nodded toward his own work on the table—”will seem a mockery of those!”

“It is not written that master glaziers must go on making windows, and goldsmiths reliquaries, since the masters of the past were able to produce such beautiful ones, destined to last over the centuries. Otherwise, the earth would become filled with reliquaries in a time when saints from whom to take relics are so rare,” William jested. “Nor will windows have to be soldered forever. But in various countries I have seen new works made of glass which suggest a future world where glass will serve not only for holy purposes but also as a help for man’s weakness. I want to show you a creation of our own times, of which I am honored to own a very useful example.” He dug inside his habit and drew out the lenses, which dumbfounded our interlocutor.

With great interest, Nicholas took the forked instrument William held out to him. “Oculi de vitro cum capsula!” he cried. “I had heard tell of them from a Brother Jordan I met in Pisa! He said it was less than twenty years since they had been invented. But I spoke with him more than twenty years ago.”

“I believe they were invented much earlier,” William said, “but they are difficult to make, and require highly expert master glaziers. They cost time and labor. Ten years ago a pair of these glasses ab oculis ad legendum were sold for six Bolognese crowns. I was given a pair of them by a great master, Salvinus of the Armati, more than ten years ago, and I have jealously preserved them all this time, as if they were—as they now are—a part of my very body.”

“I hope you will allow me to examine them one of these days; I would be happy to produce some similar ones,” Nicholas said, with emotion.

“Of course,” William agreed, “but mind you, the thickness of the glass must vary according to the eye it is to serve, and you must test many of these lenses, trying them on the person until the suitable thickness is found.”

“What a wonder!” Nicholas continued. “And yet many would speak of witchcraft and diabolical machination….”

“You can certainly speak of magic in this device,” William allowed. “But there are two forms of magic. There is a magic that is the work of the Devil and which aims at man’s downfall through artifices of which it is not licit to speak. But there is a magic that is divine, where God’s knowledge is made manifest through the knowledge of man, and it serves to transform nature, and one of its ends is to prolong man’s very life. And this is holy magic, to which the learned must devote themselves more and more, not only to discover new things but also to rediscover many secrets of nature that divine wisdom had revealed to the Hebrews, the Greeks, to other ancient peoples, and even, today, to the infidels (and I cannot tell you all the wonderful things on optics and the science of vision to be read in the books of the infidels!). And of all this learning Christian knowledge must regain possession, taking it from the pagans and the infidels tamquam ab iniustis possessoribus.”

“But why don’t those who possess this learning communicate it to all the people of God?”

“Because not all the people of God are ready to accept so many secrets, and it has often happened that the possessors of this learning have been mistaken for necromancers in league with the Devil, and they have paid with their lives for their wish to share with others their store of knowledge. I myself, during trials in which someone was suspected of dealings with the Devil, have had to take care not to use these lenses, resorting to eager secretaries who would read to me the writings I required. Otherwise, in a moment when the Devil’s presence was so widespread, and everyone could smell, so to speak, the odor of sulphur, I myself would have been considered a friend of the accused. And finally, as the great Roger Bacon warned, the secrets of science must not always pass into the hands of all, for some could use them to evil ends. Often the learned man must make seem magic certain books that are not magic, but simply good science, in order to protect them from indiscreet eyes.”

“You fear the simple can make evil use of these secrets, then?” Nicholas asked.

“As far as simple people are concerned, my only fear is that they may be terrified by them, confusing them with those works of the Devil of which their preachers speak too often. You see, I have happened to know very skilled physicians who had distilled medicines capable of curing a disease immediately. But when they gave their unguent or their infusion to the simple, they accompanied it with holy words and chanted phrases that sounded like prayers: not because these prayers had the power to heal, but because, believing that the cure came from the prayers, the simple would swallow the infusion or cover themselves with the unguent, and so they would be cured, while paying little attention to the effective power of the medicine. Also, the spirit, aroused by faith in the pious formula, would be better prepared for the corporal action of the medication. But often the treasures of learning must be defended, not against the simple but, rather, against other learned men. Wondrous machines are now made, of which I shall speak to you one day, with which the course of nature can truly be predicted. But woe if they should fall into the hands of men who would use them to extend their earthly power and satisfy their craving for possession. I am told that in Cathay a sage has compounded a powder that, on contact with fire, can produce a great rumble and a great flame, destroying everything for many yards around. A wondrous device, if it were used to shift the beds of streams or shatter rock when ground is being broken for cultivation. But if someone were to use it to bring harm to his personal enemies?”

“Perhaps it would be good, if they were enemies of the people of God,” Nicholas said piously.

“Perhaps,” William admitted. “But who today is the enemy of the people of God? Louis the Emperor or John the Pope?”

“Oh, my Lord!” Nicholas said, quite frightened. “I really wouldn’t like to decide such a painful question!”

“You see?” William said. “Sometimes it is better for certain secrets to remain veiled by arcane words. The secrets of nature are not transmitted on skins of goat or sheep. Aristotle says in the book of secrets that communicating too many arcana of nature and art breaks a celestial seal and many evils can ensue. Which does not mean that secrets must not be revealed, but that the learned must decide when and how.”

“Wherefore it is best that in places like this,” Nicholas said, “not all books be within the reach of all.”

“This is another question,” William said. “Excess of loquacity can be a sin, and so can excess of reticence. I didn’t mean that it is necessary to conceal the sources of knowledge. On the contrary, this seems to me a great evil. I meant that, since these are arcana from which both good and evil can derive, the learned man has the right and the duty to use an obscure language, comprehensible only to his fellows. The life of learning is difficult, and it is difficult to distinguish good from evil. And often the learned men of our time are only dwarfs on the shoulders of dwarfs.”

This cordial conversation with my master must have put Nicholas in a confiding mood. For he winked at William (as if to say: You and I understand each other because we speak of the same things) and he hinted: “But over there”—he nodded toward the Aedificium—”the secrets of learning are well defended by works of magic….”

“Really?” William said, with a show of indifference. “Barred doors, stern prohibitions, threats, I suppose.”

“Oh, no. More than that…”

“What, for example?”

“Well, I don’t know exactly; I am concerned with glass, not books. But in the abbey there are rumors … strange rumors….”

“Of what sort?”

“Strange. Let us say, rumors about a monk who decided to venture into the library during the night, to look for something Malachi had refused to give him, and he saw serpents, headless men, and men with two heads. He was nearly crazy when he emerged from the labyrinth….”

“Why do you speak of magic rather than diabolical apparitions?”

“Because even if I am only a poor master glazier I am not so ignorant. The Devil (God save us!) does not tempt a monk with serpents and two-headed men. If anything, with lascivious visions, as he tempted the fathers in the desert. And besides, if it is evil to handle certain books, why would the Devil distract a monk from committing evil?”

“That seems to me a good enthymeme,” my master admitted.

“And finally, when I was repairing the windows of the infirmary, I amused myself by leafing through some of Severinus’s books. There was a book of secrets written, I believe, by Albertus Magnus; I was attracted by some curious illustrations, and I read some pages about how you can grease the wick of an oil lamp, and the fumes produced then provoke visions. You must have noticed—or, rather, you cannot have noticed yet, because you have not yet spent a night in the abbey—that during the hours of darkness the upper floor of the Aedificium is illuminated. At certain points there is a dim glow from the windows. Many have wondered what it is, and there has been talk of will-o’-the-wisps, or souls of dead librarians who return to visit their realm. Many here believe these tales. I think those are lamps prepared for visions. You know, if you take the wax from a dog’s ear and grease a wick, anyone breathing the smoke of that lamp will believe he has a dog’s head, and if he is with someone else, the other will see a dog’s head. And there is another unguent that makes those near the lamp feel big as elephants. And with the eyes of a bat and of two fish whose names I cannot recall, and the venom of a wolf, you make a wick that, as it burns, will cause you to see the animals whose fat you have taken. And with a lizard’s tail you make everything around you seem of silver, and with the fat of a black snake and a scrap of a shroud, the room will appear filled with serpents. I know this. Someone in the library is very clever….”

“But couldn’t it be the souls of the dead librarians who perform these feats of magic?”

Nicholas remained puzzled and uneasy. “I hadn’t thought of that. Perhaps. God protect us. It’s late. Vespers have already begun. Farewell.” And he headed for the church.

We continued along the south side: to our right the hospice for pilgrims and the chapter house with its gardens, to the left the olive presses, the mill, the granaries, the cellars, the novices’ house. And everyone was hurrying toward the church.

“What do you think of what Nicholas said?” I asked.

“I don’t know. There is something in the library, and I don’t believe it is the souls of dead librarians….”

“Why not?”

“Because I imagine they were so virtuous that today they remain in the kingdom of heaven to contemplate the divine countenance, if this answer will satisfy you. As for the lamps, we shall see if they are there. And as for the unguents our glazier spoke of, there are easier ways to provoke visions, and Severinus knows them very well, as you realized today. What is certain is that in the abbey they want no one to enter the library at night and that many, on the contrary, have tried or are trying to do so.”

“And what does our crime have to do with this business?”

“Crime. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that Adelmo killed himself.”

“Why is that?”

“You remember this morning when I remarked the heap of dirty straw? As we were climbing up the curve beneath the east tower I had noticed at that point the traces left by a landslide: or, rather, a part of the terrain had given way below the tower, more or less there where the waste collects, and had slipped. And that is why this evening, when we looked down from above, the straw seemed to have little snow covering it; it was covered only by the latest fall, yesterday’s snow, and not by that of the past few days. As for Adelmo’s corpse, the abbot told us that it had been lacerated by the rocks, and beneath the east tower, where the building joins a sheer drop, there are pines growing. The rocks, however, are directly under the point where the wall ends, forming a kind of step, and afterward the straw dump begins.”

“And so?”

“And so, think whether it is not less—how shall I say it?—less costly for our minds to believe that Adelmo, for reasons yet to be ascertained, threw himself of his own will from the parapet of the wall, struck the rocks, and, dead or wounded as he may have been, sank into the straw. Then the landslide, caused by the storm that night, carried the straw and part of the terrain and the poor young man’s body down below the east tower.”

“Why do you say this solution is less costly for our minds?”

“Dear Adso, one should not multiply explanations and causes unless it is strictly necessary. If Adelmo fell from the east tower, he must have got into the library, someone must have first struck him so he would offer no resistance, and then this person must have found a way of climbing up to the window with a lifeless body on his back, opening it, and pitching the hapless monk down. But with my hypothesis we need only Adelmo, his decision, and a shift of some land. Everything is explained, using a smaller number of causes.”

“But why would he have killed himself?”

“But why would anyone have killed him? In either case reasons have to be found. And it seems to me beyond doubt that they existed. In the Aedificium there is an atmosphere of reticence; they are all keeping something quiet. Meanwhile, we have already collected a few insinuations—quite vague, to be sure—about some strange relationship between Adelmo and Berengar. That means we will keep an eye on the assistant librarian.”

While we were talking in this fashion, the office of vespers ended. The servants were going back to their tasks before retiring for supper, the monks were heading for the refectory. The sky was now dark and it was beginning to snow. A light snow, in soft little flakes, which must have continued, I believe, for most of the night, because the next morning all the grounds were covered with a white blanket, as I shall tell.

I was hungry and welcomed with relief the idea of going to table.

COMPLINE

In which William and Adso enjoy the jolly hospitality of the abbot and the angry conversation of Jorge.

The refectory was illuminated by great torches. The monks sat at a row of tables dominated by the abbot’s table, set perpendicularly to theirs on a broad dais. On the opposite side there was a pulpit, where the monk who would read during supper had already taken his place. The abbot was waiting for us next to a little fountain, with a white cloth to wipe our hands after the lavabo, following the ancient counsels of Saint Pachomius.

The abbot invited William to his table and said that for this evening, since I was also a new guest, I would enjoy the same privilege, even though I was a Benedictine novice. In the following days, he said to me paternally, I could sit at table with the monks, or, if I were employed in some task for my master, I could stop in the kitchen before or after meals, and there the cooks would take care of me.

The monks were now standing at the tables, motionless, their cowls lowered over their faces, their hands under their scapulars. The abbot approached his table and pronounced the “Benedicite.” From the pulpit the precentor intoned the “Edent pauperes.” The abbot imparted his benediction and everyone sat down.

Our founder’s Rule prescribes a frugal meal but allows the abbot to determine how much food the monks actually need. In our abbeys now, however, there is greater indulgence in the pleasures of the table. I will not speak of those that, unfortunately, have been transformed into dens of gluttony; but even those that follow standards of penance and virtue provide the monks, almost always engaged in taxing intellectual labors, with a nourishment not effete but substantial. On the other hand, the abbot’s table is always favored, not least because honored guests frequently sit there, and the abbeys take pride in the produce of their lands and their barns, and in the skill of their cooks.

The monks’ meal proceeded in silence, as is customary; they communicated among themselves with the usual alphabet of fingers. The novices and younger monks were served first, immediately after the dishes meant for all had been passed at the abbot’s table.

With us at the abbot’s table sat Malachi, the cellarer, and the two oldest monks, Jorge of Burgos, the venerable blind man I had met in the scriptorium, and Alinardo of Grottaferrata: ancient, almost a centenarian, lame, and fragile-looking, and—it seemed to me—addled. The abbot told us that, having come to the abbey as a novice, Alinardo had lived there always and recalled almost eighty years of its events. The abbot told us these things in a whisper at the beginning, because afterward he observed the custom of our order and followed the reading in silence. But, as I said, certain liberties were taken at the abbot’s table, and we praised the dishes we were offered as the abbot extolled the quality of his olive oil, or of his wine. Indeed, once, as he poured some for us, he recalled for us that passage in the Rule where the holy founder observed that wine, to be sure, is not proper for monks, but since the monks of our time cannot be persuaded not to drink, they should at least not drink their fill, because wine induces even the wise to apostasy, as Ecclesiastes reminds us. Benedict said “of our time” referring to his own day, now very remote: you can imagine the time in which we were supping at the abbey, after such decadence of behavior (and I will not speak of my time, in which I write, except to say that here at Melk there is greater indulgence in beer!): in short, we drank without excess but not without enjoyment.

We ate meat cooked on the spit, freshly slaughtered pigs, and I realized that in cooking other foods they did not use animal fats or rape oil but good olive oil, which came from lands the abbey owned at the foot of the mountain toward the sea. The abbot made us taste (reserved for his table) the chicken I had seen being prepared in the kitchen. I saw that he also possessed a metal fork, a great rarity, whose form reminded me of my master’s glasses. A man of noble extraction, our host did not want to soil his hands with food, and indeed offered us his implement, at least to take the meat from the large plate and put it in our bowls. I refused, but I saw that William accepted gladly and made nonchalant use of that instrument of great gentlemen, perhaps to show the abbot that not all Franciscans were men of scant education or humble birth.

In my enthusiasm for all these fine foods (after several days of travel in which we had eaten what we could find), I had been distracted from the reading, which meanwhile continued devoutly. I was reminded of it by a vigorous grunt of assent from Jorge, and I realized we had reached the point at which a chapter of the Rule is always read. I understood why Jorge was so content, since I had listened to him that afternoon. The reader was saying, “Let us imitate the example of the prophet, who says: I have decided, I shall watch over my way so as not to sin with my tongue, I have put a curb upon my mouth, I have fallen dumb, humbling myself, I have refrained from speaking even of honest things. And if in this passage the prophet teaches us that sometimes our love of silence should cause us to refrain from speaking even of licit things, how much more should we refrain from illicit talk, to avoid the chastisement of this sin!” And then he continued: “But vulgarities, nonsense, and jests we condemn to perpetual imprisonment, in every place, and we do not allow the disciple to open his mouth for speech of this sort.”

“And this goes for the marginalia we were discussing today,” Jorge could not keep from commenting in a low voice. “John Chrysostom said that Christ never laughed.”

“Nothing in his human nature forbade it,” William remarked, “because laughter, as the theologians teach, is proper to man.”

“The son of man could laugh, but it is not written that he did so,” Jorge said sharply, quoting Petrus Cantor.

“Manduca, iam coctum est,” William murmured. “Eat, for it is well done.”

“What?” asked Jorge, thinking he referred to some dish that was being brought to him.

“Those are the words that, according to Ambrose, were uttered by Saint Lawrence on the gridiron, when he invited his executioners to turn him over, as Prudentius also recalls in the Peristepbanon,” William said with a saintly air. “Saint Lawrence therefore knew how to laugh and say ridiculous things, even if it was to humiliate his enemies.”

“Which proves that laughter is something very close to death and to the corruption of the body,” Jorge replied with a snarl; and I must admit that he spoke like a good logician.

At this point the abbot good-naturedly invited us to be silent. The meal was ending, in any case. The abbot stood up and introduced William to the monks. He praised his wisdom, expounded his fame, and informed them that the visitor had been asked to investigate Adelmo’s death; and the abbot also urged the monks to answer any questions and to instruct their underlings, throughout the abbey, to do the same.

Supper over, the monks prepared to go off to the choir for the office of compline. They again lowered their cowls over their faces and formed a line at the door. Then they moved in a long file, crossing the cemetery and entering the choir through the north doorway.

We went off with the abbot. “Is this the hour when the doors of the Aedificium are locked?” William asked.

“As soon as the servants have finished cleaning the refectory and the kitchens, the librarian will personally close all the doors, barring them on the inside.”

“On the inside? And where does he come out?”

The abbot glared at William for a moment. “Obviously he does not sleep in the kitchen,” he said brusquely. And he began to walk faster.

“Very well,” William whispered to me, “so another door does exist, but we are not to know about it.” I smiled, proud of his deduction, and he scolded me: “And don’t laugh. As you have seen, within these walls laughter doesn’t enjoy a good reputation.”

We entered the choir. A single lamp was burning on a heavy bronze tripod, tall as two men. The monks silently took their places in the stalls.

Then the abbot gave a signal, and the precentor intoned, “Tu autem Domine miserere nobis.” The abbot replied, “Adiutorium nostrum in nomine Domini”; and all continued, in chorus, with “Qui fecit coelum et terram.” Then the chanting of the psalms began: “When I call Thee answer me O God of my justice”; “I shall thank Thee Lord with all my heart”; “Come bless the Lord, all ye servants of the Lord.” We had not sat in the stalls, but had withdrawn into the main nave. From there, we suddenly glimpsed Malachi emerging from the darkness of a side chapel.

“Keep your eye on that spot,” William said to me. “There could be a passage leading to the Aedificium.”

“Under the cemetery?”

“And why not? In fact, now that I think about it, there must be an ossarium somewhere; they can’t possibly have buried all their monks for centuries in that patch of ground.”

“But do you really want to enter the library at night?” I asked, terrified.

“Where there are dead monks and serpents and mysterious lights, my good Adso? No, my boy. I was thinking about it today, and not from curiosity but because I was pondering the question of how Adelmo died. Now, as I told you, I tend toward a more logical explanation, and, all things considered, I would prefer to respect the customs of this place.”

“Then why do you want to know?”

“Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.”

SECOND DAY

MATINS

In which a few hours of mystic happiness are interrupted by a most bloody occurrence.

Symbol sometimes of the Devil, sometimes of the Risen Christ, no animal is more untrustworthy than the cock. Our order knew some slothful ones who never crowed at sunrise. On the other hand, especially in winter, the office of matins takes place when night is still total and all nature is asleep, for the monk must rise in darkness and pray at length in darkness, waiting for day and illuminating the shadows with the flame of devotion. Therefore, custom wisely provided for some wakers, who were not to go to bed when their brothers did, but would spend the night reciting in cadence the exact number of psalms that would allow them to measure the time passed, so that, at the conclusion of the hours of sleep granted the others, they would give the signal to wake.

So that night we were waked by those who moved through the dormitory and the pilgrims’ house ringing a bell, as one monk went from cell to cell shouting, “Benedicamus Domino,” to which each answered, “Deo gratias.”

William and I followed the Benedictine custom: in less than half an hour we prepared to greet the new day, then we went down into the choir, where the monks, prostrate on the floor, reciting the first fifteen psalms, were waiting until the novices entered led by their master. Then each sat in his regular stall and the choir chanted, “Domine labia mea aperies et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam.” The cry rose toward the vaulted ceiling of the church like a child’s plea. Two monks climbed to the pulpit and intoned the ninety-fourth psalm, “Venite exultemus,” which was followed by the others prescribed. And I felt the warmth of renewed faith.

The monks were in the stalls, sixty figures made indistinguishable by their habits and cowls, sixty shadows barely illuminated by the fire from the great tripod, sixty voices joined in praise of the Almighty. And, hearing this moving harmony, vestibule of the delights of paradise, I asked myself whether the abbey were truly a place of concealed mysteries, of illicit attempts to reveal them, and of grim threats. Because it now seemed to me, on the contrary, the dwelling of sainted men, cenacle of virtue, vessel of learning, ark of prudence, tower of wisdom, domain of meekness, bastion of strength, thurible of sanctity.

After six psalms, the reading of Holy Scripture began. Some monks were nodding with sleepiness, and one of the night wakers wandered among the stalls with a little lamp to wake any who had dozed off again. If a monk succumbed to drowsiness, as penance he would take the lamp and continue the round. The chanting of another six psalms continued. Then the abbot gave his benediction, the hebdomadary said the prayers, all bowed toward the altar in a moment of meditation whose sweetness no one can comprehend who has not experienced those hours of mystic ardor and intense inner peace. Finally, cowls again over their faces, all sat and solemnly intoned the “Te Deum.” I, too, praised the Lord because He had released me from my doubts and freed me from the feeling of uneasiness with which my first day at the abbey had filled me. We are fragile creatures, I said to myself; even among these learned and devout monks the Evil One spreads petty envies, foments subtle hostilities, but all these are as smoke then dispersed by the strong wind of faith, the moment all gather in the name of the Father, and Christ descends into their midst.

Between matins and lauds the monk does not return to his cell, even if the night is still dark. The novices followed their master into the chapter house to study the psalms; some of the monks remained in church to tend to the church ornaments, but the majority strolled in the cloister in silent meditation, as did William and I. The servants were asleep and they went on sleeping when, the sky still dark, we returned to the choir for lauds.

The chanting of the psalms resumed, and one in particular, among those prescribed for Mondays, plunged me again into my earlier fears: “The transgression of the wicked saith within my heart, that there is no fear of God before his eyes. The words of his mouth are iniquity.” It seemed to me an ill omen that the Rule should have set for that very day such a terrible admonition. Nor were my pangs of uneasiness eased, after the psalms of praise, by the usual reading of the Apocalypse; the figures of the doorway returned to my mind, the carvings that had so overwhelmed my heart and eyes the day before. But after the responsory, the hymn, and the versicle, as the chanting of the Gospel began, I glimpsed just above the altar, beyond the windows of the choir, a pale glow that was already making the panes shine in their various colors, subdued till then by the darkness. It was not yet dawn, which would triumph during Prime, just as we would be singing “Deus qui est sanctorum splendor mirabilis” and “lam lucis orto sidere.” It was barely the first faint herald of a winter daybreak, but it was enough, and the dim penumbra now replacing the night’s darkness in the nave was enough to relieve my heart.

We sang the words of the divine book and, as we were bearing witness to the Word come to enlighten all peoples, it was as if the daystar in all its splendor were invading the temple. The light, still absent, seemed to me to shine in the words of the canticle, mystic, scented lily that opened among the arches of the vaults. “I thank Thee, O Lord, for this moment of ineffable joy,” I prayed silently, and said to my heart, “Foolish heart, what do you fear?”

Suddenly some noises were heard from the direction of the north door. I wondered why the servants, preparing for their work, disturbed the sacred functions in this way. At that moment three swineherds came in, terror on their faces; they went to the abbot and whispered something to him. The abbot first calmed them with a gesture, as if he did not want to interrupt the office; but other servants entered, and the shouts became louder. “A man! A dead man!” some were saying. And others: “A monk. You saw the sandals?”

Prayers stopped, and the abbot rushed out, motioning the cellarer to follow him. William went after them, but by now the other monks were also leaving their stalls and hurrying outside.

The sky was now light, and the snow on the ground made the compound even more luminous. Behind the choir, in front of the pens, where the day before had stood the great jar with the pigs’ blood, a strange object, almost cruciform, protruded above the edge of the vessel, as if two stakes had been driven into the ground, to be covered with rags for scaring off birds.

But they were human legs, the legs of a man thrust head down into the vessel of blood.

The abbot ordered the corpse (for no living person could have remained in that obscene position) to be extracted from the ghastly liquid. The hesitant swineherds approached the edge and, staining themselves with blood, drew out the poor, bloody thing. As had been explained to me, the blood, having been properly stirred immediately after it was shed, and then left out in the cold, had not clotted, but the layer covering the corpse was now beginning to solidify; it soaked the habit, made the face unrecognizable. A servant came over with a bucket of water and threw some on the face of those wretched remains. Another bent down with a cloth to wipe the features. And before our eyes appeared the white face of Venantius of Salvemec, the Greek scholar with whom we had talked that afternoon by Adelmo’s codices.

The abbot came over. “Brother William, as you see, something is afoot in this abbey, something that demands all your wisdom. But I beseech you: act quickly!”

“Was he present in choir during the office?” William asked, pointing to the corpse.

“No,” the abbot said. “I saw his stall was empty.”

“No one else was absent?”

“It did not seem so. I noticed nothing.”

William hesitated before asking the next question, and he did so in a whisper, taking care that the others could not hear: “Berengar was in his stall?”

The abbot looked at him with uneasy amazement, as if to signify that he was struck to see my master harbor a suspicion that he himself had briefly harbored, for more comprehensible reasons. He said then rapidly, “He was there. He sits in the first row, almost at my right hand.”

“Naturally,” William said, “all this means nothing. I don’t believe anyone entering the choir passed behind the apse, and therefore the corpse could have been here for several hours, at least since the time when everyone had gone to bed.”

“To be sure, the first servants rise at dawn, and that is why they discovered him only now.”

William bent over the corpse, as if he were used to dealing with dead bodies. He dipped the cloth lying nearby into the water of the bucket and further cleansed Venantius’s face. Meanwhile, the other monks crowded around, frightened, forming a talkative circle on which the abbot imposed silence. Among the others, now making his way forward, came Severinus, who saw to matters of physical health in the abbey; and he bent down next to my master. To hear their dialogue, and to help William, who needed a new clean cloth soaked in the water, I joined them, overcoming my terror and my revulsion.

“Have you ever seen a drowned man?” William asked.

“Many times,” Severinus said. “And if I guess what you imply, they do not have this face: the features are swollen.”

“Then the man was already dead when someone threw the body into the jar.”

“Why would he have done that?”

“Why would he have killed him? We are dealing with the work of a twisted mind. But now we must see whether there are wounds or bruises on the body. I suggest it be carried to the balneary, stripped, washed, and examined. I will join you there at once.”

And while Severinus, receiving permission from the abbot, was having the body carried away by the swineherds, my master asked that the monks be told to return to the choir by the path they had taken before, and that the servants retire in the same way, so the ground would remain deserted. Thus we remained alone, beside the vessel, from which blood had spilled during the macabre operation of the body’s recovery. The snow all around was red, melting in several puddles where the water had been thrown; and there was a great dark stain where the corpse had been stretched out.

“A fine mess,” William said, nodding toward the complex pattern of footprints left all around by the monks and the servants. “Snow, dear Adso, is an admirable parchment on which men’s bodies leave very legible writing. But this palimpsest is badly scraped, and perhaps we will read nothing interesting on it. Between here and the church there has been a great bustle of monks, between here and the barn and the stables the servants have moved in droves. The only intact space is between the barns and the Aedificium. Let us see if we can find something of interest.”

“What do you expect to find?” I asked.

“If he didn’t throw himself into the vessel on his own, someone carried him there, already dead, I imagine. And a man carrying another man’s body leaves deep tracks in snow. So look and see if you find around here some prints that seem different to you from the prints of those noisy monks who have ruined our parchment for us.”

And we did. And I will say immediately that I was the one, God preserve me from all vanity, who discovered something between the jar and the Aedificium. They were human footprints, fairly deep, in a zone where no one had yet passed, and, as my master remarked at once, fainter than those left by the monks and the servants, a sign that more snow had fallen and thus they had been made some time before. But what seemed to us most noteworthy was that among those prints there was a more continuous trail, as of something dragged by the one leaving the prints. In short, a spoor that went from the jar to the door of the refectory, on the side of the Aedificium between the south tower and the east tower.

“Refectory, scriptorium, library,” William said. “Once again, the library. Venantius died in the Aedificium, and most probably in the library.”

“And why in the library exactly?”

“I am trying to put myself in the murderer’s place. If Venantius had died, been killed, in the refectory, in the kitchen, or in the scriptorium, why not leave him there? But if he died in the library, then he had to be carried elsewhere, both because in the library the body would never have been discovered (and perhaps the murderer was particularly interested in its being discovered) and because the murderer probably does not want attention to be concentrated on the library.”

“And why should the murderer be interested in the body’s being discovered?”

“I don’t know. I can suggest some hypotheses. How do we know that the murderer killed Venantius because he hated Venantius? He could have killed him, rather than another, to leave a sign, to signify something else.”

“Omnis mundi creatura, quasi liber et scriptura…” I murmured. “But what would that sign be?”

“This is what I do not know. But let us not forget that there are also signs that seem such and are instead without meaning, like blitiri or bu-ba-baff….”

“It would be atrocious,” I said, “to kill a man in order to say bu-ba-baff!”

“It would be atrocious,” William remarked, “to kill a man even to say ‘Credo in unum Deum.’…”

At that moment Severinus joined us. The corpse had been washed and examined carefully. No wound, no bruise on the head.

“Do you have poisons in your laboratory?” William asked, as we headed for the infirmary.

“Among the other things. But that depends on what you mean by poison. There are substances that in small doses are healthful and in excessive doses cause death. Like every good herbalist I keep them, and I use them with discretion. In my garden I grow, for example, valerian. A few drops in an infusion of other herbs calms the heart if it is beating irregularly. An exaggerated dose brings on drowsiness and death.”

“And you noticed no signs of any particular poison on the corpse?”

“None. But many poisons leave no trace.”

We had reached the infirmary. Venantius’s body, washed in the balneary, had been brought there and was lying on the great table in Severinus’s laboratory; alembics and other instruments of glass and earthenware made me think of an alchemist’s shop (though I knew of such things only by indirect accounts). On some long shelves against the wall by the door was arrayed a vast series of cruets, ampoules, jugs, pots, filled with substances of different colors.

“A fine collection of simples,” William said. “All products of your garden?”

“No,” Severinus said, “many substances, rare, or impossible to grow in this climate, have been brought to me over the years by monks arriving from every part of the world. I have many precious things that cannot be found readily, along with substances easily obtained from the local flora. You see … aghalingho pesto comes from Cathay: I received it from a learned Arab. Indian aloe, excellent cicatricizant. Live arient revives the dead, or, rather, wakes those who have lost their senses. Arsenacho: very dangerous, a mortal poison for anyone who swallows it. Borage, a plant good for ailing lungs. Betony, good for fractures of the head. Mastic: calms pulmonary fluxions and troublesome catarrhs. Myrrh…”

“The gift of the Magi?” I asked.

“The same. But now used to prevent miscarriage, gathered from a tree called Balsamodendron myrra. And this is mumia, very rare, produced by the decomposition of mummified cadavers; it is used in the preparation of many almost miraculous medicines. Mandragora officinalis, good for sleep…”

“And to stir desires of the flesh,” my master remarked.

“So they say, but here it is not used for that purpose, as you can imagine.” Severinus smiled. “And look at this,” he said, taking down an ampoule. “Tutty, miraculous for the eyes.”

“And what is this?” William asked in a bright voice, touching a stone lying on a shelf.

“That? It was given to me some time ago. It apparently has therapeutic virtues, but I have not yet discovered what they are. Do you know it?”

“Yes,” William said, “but not as a medicine.” He took from his habit a little knife and slowly held it toward the stone. As the knife, moved by his hand with extreme delicacy, came close to the stone, I saw that the blade made an abrupt movement, as if William had shifted his wrist, which was, however, absolutely still. And the blade stuck to the stone, making a faint metallic sound.

“You see,” William said to me, “it attracts iron.”

“And what is its use?” I asked.

“It has various uses, of which I will tell you. But for the present I would like to know, Severinus, if there is anything here that could kill a man.”

Severinus reflected a moment—too long, I would have said, considering the clarity of his answer: “Many things. As I said, the line between poison and medicine is very fine; the Greeks used the word ‘pharmacon’ for both.”

“And there is nothing that has been removed recently?”

Severinus reflected again, then, as if weighing his words: “Nothing recently.”

“And in the past?”

“Who knows? I don’t recall. I have been in this abbey thirty years, and twenty-five in the infirmary.”

“Too long for a human memory,” William admitted. Then, abruptly, he said, “We were speaking yesterday of plants that can induce visions. Which ones are they?”

Severinus’s actions and the expression on his face indicated an intense desire to avoid that subject. “I would have to think, you know. I have so many miraculous substances here. But let us speak, rather, of Venantius’s death. What do you say about it?”

“I would have to think,” William answered.

PRIME

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.

TERCE

In which the visitors witness a brawl among vulgar persons, Aymaro of Alessandria makes some allusions, and Adso meditates on saintliness and on the dung of the Devil. Subsequently William and Adso go back to the scriptorium, William sees something interesting, has a third conversation on the licitness of laughter, but in the end is unable to look where he wishes.

Before climbing up to the scriptorium, we stopped by the kitchen to refresh ourselves, for we had partaken of nothing since rising. I drank a bowl of warm milk and was heartened at once. The great south fireplace was already blazing like a forge while the day’s bread baked in the oven. Two herdsmen were setting down the body of a freshly slaughtered sheep. Among the cooks I saw Salvatore, who smiled at me with his wolf’s mouth. And I saw that he was taking from a table a scrap of chicken left over from the night before and stealthily passing it to the herdsmen, who hid the food in their sheepskin jerkins with pleased grins. But the chief cook noticed and scolded Salvatore. “Cellarer, cellarer,” he said, “you must look after the goods of the abbey, not squander them!”

“Filii Dei they are,” said Salvatore, “Jesus has said that you do for him what you do for one of these pueri!”

“Filthy Fraticello, fart of a Minorite!” the cook shouted at him. “You’re not among those louse-bitten friars of yours any more! The abbot’s charity will see to the feeding of the children of God!”

Salvatore’s face turned grim and he swung around, in a rage: “I am not a Minorite friar! I am a monk Sancti Benedicti! Merdre a toy, Bogomil de merdre!”

“Call Bogomil that whore you screw at night, with your heretic cock, you pig!” the cook cried.

Salvatore thrust the herdsmen through the door and, passing close to us, looked at us, worried. “Brother,” he said to William, “you defend the order that is not mine; tell him the filii de Francesco non sunt hereticos!” Then he whispered into an ear, “Ille menteur, puah!” and he spat on the ground.

The cook came over and roughly pushed him out, shutting the door after him. “Brother,” he said to William with respect, “I was not speaking ill of your order or of the most holy men who belong to it. I was speaking to that false Minorite and false Benedictine who is neither flesh nor fowl.”

“I know where he came from,” William said, conciliatory. “But now he is a monk as you are and you owe him fraternal respect.”

“But he sticks his nose in where he has no business only because he is under the cellarer’s protection and believes himself the cellarer. He uses the abbey as if it belonged to him, day and night.”

“How at night?” William asked. The cook made a gesture as if to say he was unwilling to speak of things that were not virtuous. William questioned him no further and finished drinking his milk.

My curiosity was becoming more and more aroused. The meeting with Ubertino, the muttering about the past of Salvatore and his cellarer, the more and more frequent references to the Fraticelli and the heretic Minorites I had heard in those days, my master’s reluctance to speak to me about Fra Dolcino … A series of images began to return to my mind. For example, in the course of our journey we had at least twice come upon a procession of flagellants. Once the local populace was looking at them as if they were saints; the other time there was murmuring that these were heretics. And yet they were the same people. They walked in procession two by two, through the streets of the city, only their pudenda covered, as they had gone beyond any sense of shame. Each carried a leather lash in his hand and hit himself on the shoulders till blood came; and they were shedding abundant tears as if they saw with their own eyes the Passion of the Saviour; in a mournful chant they implored the Lord’s mercy and the intercession of the Mother of God. Not only during the day but also at night, with lighted tapers, in the harsh winter, they went in a great throng from church to church, prostrating themselves humbly before the altars, preceded by priests with candles and banners, and they were not only men and women of the populace, but also noble ladies and merchants…. And then great acts of penance were to be seen: those who had stolen gave back their loot, others confessed their crimes….

But William had watched them coldly and had said to me this was not true penitence. He spoke then much as he had only a short while ago, this very morning: the period of the great penitential cleansing was finished, and these were the ways preachers now organized the devotion of the mobs, precisely so that they would not succumb to a desire for penance that—in this case—really was heretical and frightened all. But I was unable to understand the difference, if there actually was any. It seemed to me that the difference did not lie in the actions of the one or the other, but in the church’s attitude when she judged this act or that.

I remembered the discussion with Ubertino. William had undoubtedly been insinuating, had tried to say to him, that there was little difference between his mystic (and orthodox) faith and the distorted faith of the heretics. Ubertino had taken offense, as one who saw the difference clearly. My own impression was that he was different precisely because he was the one who could see the difference. William had renounced the duties of inquisitor because he could no longer see it. For this reason he was unable to speak to me of that mysterious Fra Dolcino. But then, obviously (I said to myself), William has lost the assistance of the Lord, who not only teaches how to see the difference, but also invests his elect with this capacity for discrimination. Ubertino and Clare of Montefalco (who was, however, surrounded by sinners) had remained saints precisely because they knew how to discriminate. This and only this is sanctity.

But why did William not know how to discriminate? He was such an acute man, and as far as the facts of nature went, he could perceive the slightest discrepancy or the slightest kinship between things….

I was immersed in these thoughts, and William was finishing his milk, when we heard someone greet us. It was Aymaro of Alessandria, whom we had met in the scriptorium, and who had struck me by the expression of his face, a perpetual sneer, as if he could never reconcile himself to the fatuousness of all human beings and yet did not attach great importance to this cosmic tragedy. “Well, Brother William, have you already become accustomed to this den of madmen?”

“It seems to me a place of men admirable in sanctity and learning,” William said cautiously.

“It was. When abbots acted as abbots and librarians as librarians. Now you have seen, up there”—and he nodded toward the floor above—”that half-dead German with a blind man’s eyes, listening devoutly to the ravings of that blind Spaniard with a dead man’s eyes; it would seem as though the Antichrist were to arrive every morning. They scrape their parchments, but few new books come in…. We are up here, and down below in the city they act. Once our abbeys ruled the world. Today you see the situation: the Emperor uses us, sending his friends here to meet his enemies (I know something of your mission, monks talk and talk, they have nothing else to do); but if he wants to control the affairs of this country, he remains in the city. We are busy gathering grain and raising fowl, and down there they trade lengths of silk for pieces of linen, and pieces of linen for sacks of spices, and all of them for good money. We guard our treasure, but down there they pile up treasures. And also books. More beautiful than ours, too.”

“In the world many new things are happening, to be sure. But why do you think the abbot is to blame?”

“Because he has handed the library over to foreigners and directs the abbey like a citadel erected to defend the library. A Benedictine abbey in this Italian region should be a place where Italians decide Italian questions. What are the Italians doing today, when they no longer have even a pope? They are trafficking, and manufacturing, and they are richer than the King of France. So, then, let us do the same; since we know how to make beautiful books, we should make them for the universities and concern ourselves with what is happening down in the valley—I do not mean with the Emperor, with all due respect for your mission, Brother William, but with what the Bolognese or the Florentines are doing. From here we could control the route of pilgrims and merchants who go from Italy to Provence and vice versa. We should open the library to texts in the vernacular, and those who no longer write in Latin will also come up here. But instead we are controlled by a group of foreigners who continue to manage the library as if the good Odo of Cluny were still abbot….”

“But your abbot is Italian,” William said.

“The abbot here counts for nothing,” Aymaro said, still sneering. “In the place of his head he has a bookcase. Wormeaten. To spite the Pope he allows the abbey to be invaded by Fraticelli…. I mean the heretical ones, Brother, those who have abandoned your most holy order … and to please the Emperor he invites monks from all the monasteries of the North, as if we did not have fine copyists and men who know Greek and Arabic in our country, and as if in Florence or Pisa there were not sons of merchants, rich and generous, who would gladly enter the order, if the order offered the possibility of enhancing their fathers’ prestige and power. But here indulgence in secular matters is recognized only when the Germans are allowed to … O good Lord, strike my tongue, for I am about to say improper things!”

“Do improper things take place in the abbey?” William asked absently, pouring himself a bit more milk.

“A monk is also human,” Aymaro declared. Then he added, “But here they are less human than elsewhere. And what I have said: remember that I did not say it.”

“Very interesting,” William said. “And are these your personal opinions, or are there many who think as you do?”

“Many, many. Many who now mourn the loss of poor Adelmo, but if another had fallen into the abyss, someone who moves about the library more than he should, they would not have been displeased.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have talked too much. Here we talk too much, as you must have noticed already. Here, on the one hand, nobody respects silence any more. On the other, it is respected too much. Here, instead of talking or remaining silent, we should act. In the golden age of our order, if an abbot did not have the temper of an abbot, a nice goblet of poisoned wine would make way for a successor. I have said these things to you, Brother William, obviously not to gossip about the abbot or other brothers. God save me, fortunately I do not have the nasty habit of gossiping. But I would be displeased if the abbot had asked you to investigate me or some others like Pacificus of Tivoli or Peter of Sant’Albano. We have no say in the affairs of the library. But we would like to have a bit of say. So uncover this nest of serpents, you who have burned so many heretics.”

“I have never burned anyone,” William replied sharply.

“It was just a figure of speech,” Aymaro confessed with a broad smile. “Good hunting, Brother William, but be careful at night.”

“Why not during the day?”

“Because during the day here the body is tended with good herbs, but at night the mind falls ill with bad herbs. Do not believe that Adelmo was pushed into the abyss by someone’s hands or that someone’s hands put Venantius in the blood. Here someone does not want the monks to decide for themselves where to go, what to do, and what to read. And the powers of hell are employed, or the powers of the necromancers, friends of hell, to derange the minds of the curious….”

“Are you speaking of the father herbalist?”

“Severinus of Sankt Wendel is a good person. Of course, he is also a German, as Malachi is a German….” And, having shown once again his aversion to gossip, Aymaro went up to work.

“What did he want to tell us?” I asked.

“Everything and nothing. An abbey is always a place where monks are in conflict among themselves to gain control of the community. At Melk, too, but perhaps as a novice you were not able to realize it. But in your country, gaining control of an abbey means winning a position in which you deal directly with the Emperor. In this country, on the other hand, the situation is different; the Emperor is far away, even when he comes all the way down to Rome. There is no court, not even the papal court now. There are the cities, as you will have seen.”

“Certainly, and I was impressed by them. A city in Italy is something different from one in my land…. It is not only a place to live, it is also a place to decide, the people are always in the square, the city magistrates count far more than the Emperor or the Pope. The cities are like … so many kingdoms….”

“And the kings are the merchants. And their weapon is money. Money, in Italy, has a different function from what it has in your country, or in mine. Money circulates everywhere, but much of life elsewhere is still dominated and regulated by the bartering of goods, chickens or sheaves of wheat, or a scythe, or a wagon, and money serves only to procure these goods. In the Italian city, on the contrary, you must have noticed that goods serve to procure money. And even priests, bishops, even religious orders have to take money into account. This is why, naturally. rebellion against power takes the form of a call to poverty. The rebels against power are those denied any connection with money, and so every call to poverty provokes great tension and argument, and the whole city, from bishop to magistrate, considers a personal enemy the one who preaches poverty too much. The inquisitors smell the stink of the Devil where someone has reacted to the stink of the Devil’s dung. And now you can understand also what Aymaro is thinking about. A Benedictine abbey, in the golden period of the order, was the place from which shepherds controlled the flock of the faithful. Aymaro wants a return to the tradition. Only the life of the flock has changed, and the abbey can return to the tradition (to its glory, to its former power) only if it accepts the new ways of the flock, becoming different itself. And since today the flock here is dominated, not with weapons or the splendor of ritual, but with the control of money, Aymaro wants the whole fabric of the abbey, and the library itself, to become a workshop, a factory for making money.”

“And what does this have to do with the crimes, or the crime?”

“I don’t know yet. But now I would like to go upstairs. Come.”

The monks were already at work. Silence reigned in the scriptorium, but it was not the silence that comes from the industrious peace of all hearts. Berengar, who had preceded us by only a short time, received us with embarrassment. The other monks looked up from their work. They knew we were there to discover something about Venantius, and the very direction of their gaze drew our attention to a vacant desk, under a window that opened onto the interior, the central octagon.

Although it was a very cold day, the temperature in the scriptorium was rather mild. It was not by chance that it had been situated above the kitchen, whence came adequate heat, especially because the flues of the two ovens below passed inside the columns supporting the two circular staircases in the west and south towers. As for the north tower, on the opposite side of the great room, it had no stair, but a big fireplace that burned and spread a happy warmth. Moreover, the floor had been covered with straw, which muffled our footsteps. In other words, the least-heated corner was that of the east tower, and in fact I noticed that, although there were few places left vacant, given the number of monks at work, all of the monks tended to avoid the desks located in that part. When I later realized that the circular staircase of the east tower was the only one that led, not only down to the refectory, but also up to the library, I asked myself whether a shrewd calculation had not regulated the heating of the room so that the monks would be discouraged from investigating that area and the librarian could more easily control the access to the library.

Poor Venantius’s desk had its back to the great fireplace, and it was probably one of the most desired. At that time I had passed very little of my life in a scriptorium, but I spent a great deal of it subsequently and I know what torment it is for the scribe, the rubricator, the scholar to spend the long winter hours at his desk, his fingers numb around the stylus (when even in a normal temperature, after six hours of writing, the fingers are seized by the terrible monk’s cramp and the thumb aches as if it had been trodden on). And this explains why we often find in the margins of a manuscript phrases left by the scribe as testimony to his suffering (and his impatience), such as “Thank God it will soon be dark,” or “Oh, if I had a good glass of wine,” or also “Today it is cold, the light is dim, this vellum is hairy, something is wrong.” As an ancient proverb says, three fingers hold the pen, but the whole body works. And aches.

But I was telling about Venantius’s desk. It was rather small, like the others set around the octagonal courtyard, since they were meant for scholars, whereas the larger ones under the windows of the outer walls were meant for illuminators and copyists. Venantius also worked with a lectern, because he probably consulted manuscripts on loan to the abbey, of which he made a copy. Under the desk was a low set of shelves piled with unbound sheets, and since they were all in Latin, I deduced they were his most recent translations. They were written hastily and did not represent the pages of a book, for they had yet to be entrusted to a copyist and an illuminator. For this reason they were difficult to read. Among the pages were a few books, in Greek. Another Greek book was open on the lectern, the work on which Venantius had been exercising his skill as translator in the past days. At that time I knew no Greek, but my master read the title and said this was by a certain Lucian and was the story of a man turned into an ass. I recalled then a similar fable by Apuleius, which, as a rule, novices were strongly advised against reading.

Why was Venantius making this translation? William asked Berengar, who was at our side.

The abbey was asked to do it by the lord of Milan, and the abbey will gain from it a preferential right to the wine production of some farms to the east of here. Berengar pointed with his hand toward the distance. But he promptly added, Not that the abbey performs venal tasks for laymen. But the lord who has given us this commission went to great pains to have this precious Greek manuscript lent us by the Doge of Venice, who received it from the Emperor of Byzantium, and when Venantius had finished his work, we would have made two copies, one for the lord of Milan and one for our library.

Which therefore does not disdain to add pagan fables to its collection, William said.

The library is testimony to truth and to error, a voice then said behind us. It was Jorge. Once again I was amazed (but I was to be amazed often in the days that followed) by the old man’s way of suddenly, unexpectedly appearing, as if we did not see him and he did see us. I wondered also why on earth a blind man was in the scriptorium, but I realized later that Jorge was omnipresent in all corners of the abbey. And often he was in the scriptorium, seated on a stool by the fireplace, and he seemed to follow everything going on in the room. Once I heard him ask from his place, in a loud voice, Who is going upstairs? and he turned to Malachi, who was going toward the library, his steps silenced by the straw. The monks all held him in high esteem and often had recourse to him, reading him passages difficult to understand, consulting him for a gloss, or asking counsel on how to depict an animal or a saint. And he would look into the void with his spent eyes, as if staring at pages vivid in his memory, and he would answer that false prophets are dressed like bishops and frogs come from their mouths, or would say what stones were to adorn the walls of the heavenly Jerusalem, or that the Arimaspi should be depicted on maps near the land of Prester John—urging that their monstrosity not be made excessively seductive, for it sufficed to portray them as emblems, recognizable, but not desirable, or repellent to the point of laughter.

Once I heard him advise a scholiast on how to interpret the recapitulatio in the texts of Tyconius according to the thought of Saint Augustine, so that the Donatist heresy could be avoided. Another time I heard him give advice on how, in making commentary, to distinguish heretics from schismatics. Or again, he told a puzzled scholar what book to seek in the library catalogue, and more or less on what page he would find it listed, assuring him that the librarian would certainly give it to him because it was a work inspired by God. Finally, on another occasion I heard him say that such-and-such a book should not be sought because, though it did indeed exist in the catalogue, it had been ruined by mice fifty years earlier, and by now it would crumble to powder in the fingers of anyone who touched it. He was, in other words, the library’s memory and the soul of the scriptorium. At times he admonished monks he heard chatting among themselves: Hurry, and leave testimony to the truth, for the time is at hand! He was referring to the coming of the Antichrist.

The library is testimony to truth and to error, Jorge said.

Undoubtedly Apuleius and Lucian were reputed to be magicians, William said. But this fable, beneath the veil of its fictions, contains also a good moral, for it teaches how we pay for our errors, and, furthermore, I believe that the story of the man transformed into an ass refers to the metamorphosis of the soul that falls into sin.

That may be, Jorge said.

But now I understand why, during that conversation of which I was told yesterday, Venantius was so interested in the problems of comedy; in fact, fables of this sort can also be considered kin to the comedies of the ancients. Both tell not of men who really existed, as tragedies do; on the contrary, as Isidore says, they are fictions: ‘fabulas poetae a fando nominaverunt, quia non sunt res factae sed tantum loquendo fictae….’

At first I could not understand why William had embarked on this learned discussion, and with a man who seemed to dislike such subjects, but Jorge’s reply told me how subtle my master had been.

That day we were not discussing comedies, but only the licitness of laughter, Jorge said grimly. I remembered very well that when Venantius had referred to that discussion, only the day before, Jorge had claimed not to remember it.

Ah, William said casually, I thought you had spoken of poets’ lies and shrewd riddles….

We talked about laughter, Jorge said sharply. The comedies were written by the pagans to move spectators to laughter, and they acted wrongly. Our Lord Jesus never told comedies or fables, but only clear parables which allegorically instruct us on how to win paradise, and so be it.

I wonder, William said, why you are so opposed to the idea that Jesus may have laughed. I believe laughter is a good medicine, like baths, to treat humors and the other afflictions of the body, melancholy in particular.

Baths are a good thing, Jorge said, and Aquinas himself advises them for dispelling sadness, which can be a bad passion when it is not addressed to an evil that can be dispelled through boldness. Baths restore the balance of the humors. Laughter shakes the body, distorts the features of the face, makes man similar to the monkey.

Monkeys do not laugh; laughter is proper to man, it is a sign of his rationality, William said.

Speech is also a sign of human rationality, and with speech a man can blaspheme against God. Not everything that is proper to man is necessarily good. He who laughs does not believe in what he laughs at, but neither does he hate it. Therefore, laughing at evil means not preparing oneself to combat it, and laughing at good means denying the power through which good is self-propagating. This is why the Rule says, ‘The tenth degree of humility is not to be quick to laughter, as it is written: stultus in risu exaltat vocem suam.’

Quintilian, my master interrupted, says that laughter is to be repressed in the panegyric, for the sake of dignity, but it is to be encouraged in many other cases. Pliny the Younger wrote, ‘Sometimes I laugh, I jest, I play, because I am a man.’

They were pagans, Jorge replied. The Rule forbids with stern words these trivialities: ‘Scurrilitates vero vel verba otiosa et risum moventia aeterna clausura in omnibus locis damnamus, et ad talia eloquia discipulum aperire os non permittimus.’

But once the word of Christ had triumphed on the earth, Synesius of Cyrene said that the divinity could harmoniously combine comic and tragic, and Aelius Spartianus said of the Emperor Hadrian, man of lofty behavior and of naturaliter Christian spirit, that he could mingle moments of gaiety with moments of gravity. And finally Ausonius recommended moderate use of the serious and the jocose.

But Paulinus of Nola and Clement of Alexandria put us on guard against such foolishness, and Sulpicius Severus said that no one ever saw Saint Martin in the grip of wrath or in the grip of hilarity.

But he recalled some replies of the saint spiritualiter salsa, William said.

They were prompt and wise, not ridiculous. Saint Ephraim wrote an exhortation against the laughter of monks, and in the De habitu et conversatione monachorum there is a strong warning to avoid obscenity and witticisms as if they were asp venom!

But Hildebertus said, ‘Admittenda tibi ioca sunt post seria quaedam, sed tamen et dignis ipsa gerenda modis.’ And John of Salisbury authorized a discreet hilarity. And finally Ecclesiastes, whom you quoted in the passage to which your Rule refers, where it says that laughter is proper to the fool, permits at least silent laughter, in the serene spirit.

The spirit is serene only when it contemplates the truth and takes delight in good achieved, and truth and good are not to be laughed at. This is why Christ did not laugh. Laughter foments doubt.

But sometimes it is right to doubt.

I cannot see any reason. When you are in doubt, you must turn to an authority, to the words of a father or of a doctor; then all reason for doubt ceases. You seem to me steeped in debatable doctrines, like those of the logicians of Paris. But Saint Bernard knew well how to intervene against the castrate Abelard, who wanted to submit all problems to the cold, lifeless scrutiny of reason not enlightened by Scripture, pronouncing his It-is-so and It-is-not-so. Certainly one who accepts dangerous ideas can also appreciate the jesting of the ignorant man who laughs at the sole truth one should know, which has already been said once and for all. With his laughter the fool says in his heart, ‘Deus non est.’

Venerable Jorge, you seem to me unjust when you call Abelard a castrate, because you know that he incurred that sad condition through the wickedness of others….

For his sins. For the pride of his faith in man’s reason. So the faith of the simple was mocked, the mysteries of God were eviscerated (or at least this was tried, fools they who tried), questions concerning the loftiest things were treated recklessly, the fathers were mocked because they had considered that such questions should have been subdued, rather than raised.

I do not agree, venerable Jorge. Of us God demands that we apply our reason to many obscure things about which Scripture has left us free to decide. And when someone suggests you believe in a proposition, you must first examine it to see whether it is acceptable, because our reason was created by God, and whatever pleases our reason can but please divine reason, of which, for that matter, we know only what we infer from the processes of our own reason by analogy and often by negation. Thus, you see, to undermine the false authority of an absurd proposition that offends reason, laughter can sometimes also be a suitable instrument. And laughter serves to confound the wicked and to make their foolishness evident. It is told of Saint Maurus that when the pagans put him in boiling water, he complained that the bath was too cold; the pagan governor foolishly put his hand in the water to test it, and burned himself. A fine action of that sainted martyr who ridiculed the enemies of the faith.

Jorge sneered. Even in the episodes the preachers tell, there are many old wives’ tales. A saint immersed in boiling water suffers for Christ and restrains his cries, he does not play childish tricks on the pagans!

You see? William said. This story seems to you offensive to reason and you accuse it of being ridiculous! Though you are controlling your lips, you are tacitly laughing at something, nor do you wish me to take it seriously. You are laughing at laughter, but you are laughing.

Jorge made a gesture of irritation. Jesting about laughter, you draw me into idle debate. But you know that Christ did not laugh.

I am not sure of that. When he invites the Pharisees to cast the first stone, when he asks whose image is on the coin to be paid in tribute, when he plays on words and says ‘Tu es petrus,’ I believe he was making witticisms to confound sinners, to keep up the spirits of his disciples. He speaks with wit also when he says to Caiaphas, ‘Thou hast said it.’ And you well know that in the most heated moment of the conflict between Cluniacs and Cistercians, the former accused the latter, to make them look ridiculous, of not wearing trousers. And in the Speculum stultorum it is narrated of the ass Brunellus that he wonders what would happen if at night the wind lifted the blankets and the monks saw their own pudenda….

The monks gathered around laughed, and Jorge became infuriated: You are drawing these brothers of mine into a feast of fools. I know that among the Franciscans it is the custom to curry the crowd’s favor with nonsense of this kind, but of such tricks I will say to you what is said in a verse I heard from one of your preachers: Turn podex carmen extulit horridulum.

The reprimand was a bit too strong. William had been impertinent, but now Jorge was accusing him of breaking wind through the mouth. I wondered if this stern reply did not signify, on the part of the elderly monk, an invitation to leave the scriptorium. But I saw William, so mettlesome a moment earlier, now become meek.

I beg your pardon, venerable Jorge, he said. My mouth has betrayed my thoughts. I did not want to show you a lack of respect. Perhaps what you say is correct, and I was mistaken.

Jorge, faced by this act of exquisite humility, emitted a grunt that could express either satisfaction or forgiveness; and he could only go back to his seat, while the monks who had gradually collected during the argument scattered to their places. William knelt again at Venantius’s desk and resumed searching through the paper. With his humble reply, William had gained a few seconds of quiet. And what he saw in those few seconds inspired his investigation during the night that was to come.

But they were really only a few seconds. Benno came over at once, pretending he had forgotten his stylus on the desk when he had approached to hear the conversation with Jorge; and he whispered to William that he had to speak with him urgently, fixing a meeting place behind the balneary. He told William to leave first, and he would join him in a short while.

William hesitated a few moments, then called Malachi, who, from his librarian’s desk near the catalogue, had followed everything that had happened. William begged him, in view of the injunction received from the abbot (and he heavily emphasized this privilege), to have someone guard Venantius’s desk, because William considered it important to his inquiry that no one approach it throughout the day, until he himself could come back. He said this in a loud voice, and so not only committed Malachi to keep watch over the monks, but also set the monks themselves to keep watch over Malachi. The librarian could only consent, and William and I took our leave.

As we were crossing the garden and approaching the balneary, which was next to the infirmary building, William observed, Many seem to be afraid I might find something that is on or under Venantius’s desk.

What can that be?

I have the impression that even those who are afraid do not know.

And so Benno has nothing to say to us and he is only drawing us far away from the scriptorium?

We will soon find out, William said. In fact, a short while later Benno joined us.

SEXT

In which Benno tells a strange tale from which unedifying things about the life of the abbey are learned.

What Benno told us was quite confused. It really seemed that he had drawn us down there only to lure us away from the scriptorium, but it also seemed that, incapable of inventing a plausible pretext, he was telling us fragments of a truth of vaster dimensions than he knew.

He admitted he had been reticent that morning, but now, on sober consideration, he felt William should know the whole truth. During the famous conversation about laughter, Berengar had referred to the “finis Africae.” What was it? The library was full of secrets, and especially of books that had never been given to the monks to read. Benno had been struck by William’s words on the rational scrutiny of propositions. He considered that a monk-scholar had a right to know everything the library contained, he uttered words of fire against the Council of Soissons, which had condemned Abelard, and while he spoke we realized that this monk was still young, that he delighted in rhetoric, was stirred by yearnings toward freedom, and was having a hard time accepting the limitations the discipline of the abbey set on his intellectual curiosity. I have learned always to distrust such curiosity, but I know well this attitude did not displease my master, and I saw he was sympathizing with Benno and giving him credence. In short, Benno told us he did not know what secrets Adelmo, Venantius, and Berengar had discussed, but he would not be sorry if as a result of this sad story a bit more light were to be cast on the running of the library, and he hoped that my master, however he might unravel the tangle of the inquiry, would have reason to urge the abbot to relax the intellectual discipline that oppressed the monks—some from far places, like himself, he added, who had come for the express purpose of nourishing the mind on the marvels hidden in the vast womb of the library.

I believe Benno was sincere in expecting of the inquiry what he said. Probably, however, as William had foreseen, he wanted at the same time to retain for himself the possibility of rummaging in Venantius’s desk first, devoured as he was by curiosity, and in order to keep us away from that desk, he was prepared to give us information in exchange. And here is what it was.

Berengar was consumed, as many of the monks now knew, by an insane passion for Adelmo, the same passion whose evils divine wrath had castigated in Sodom and Gomorrah. So Benno expressed himself, perhaps out of regard for my tender years. But anyone who has spent his adolescence in a monastery, even if he has kept himself chaste, often hears talk of such passions, and at times he has to protect himself from the snares of those enslaved by them. Little novice that I was, had I not already received from an aged monk, at Melk, scrolls with verses that as a rule a layman devotes to a woman? The monkish vows keep us far from that sink of vice that is the female body, but often they bring us close to other errors. Can I finally hide from myself the fact that even today my old age is still stirred by the noonday demon when my eyes, in choir, happen to linger on the beardless face of a novice, pure and fresh as a maiden’s?

I say these things not to cast doubt on the choice I made to devote myself to monastic life, but to justify the error of many to whom this holy burden proves heavy. Perhaps to justify Berengar’s horrible crime. But, according to Benno, this monk apparently pursued his vice in a yet more ignoble fashion, using the weapon of extortion to obtain from others what virtue and decorum should have advised them against giving.

So for some time the monks had been making sarcastic observations on the tender looks Berengar cast at Adelmo, who, it seems, was of great comeliness. Whereas Adelmo, enamored only of his work, from which he seemed to derive his sole pleasure, paid little attention to Berengar’s passion. But perhaps—who knows?—he was unaware that his spirit, secretly, tended toward the same ignominy. The fact is, Benno said, he had overheard a dialogue between Adelmo and Berengar in which Berengar, referring to a secret Adelmo was asking him to reveal, proposed a vile barter, which even the most innocent reader can imagine. And it seems that from Adelmo’s lips Benno heard words of consent, spoken as if with relief. As if, Benno ventured, Adelmo at heart desired nothing else, and it sufficed for him to find some excuse other than carnal desire in order to agree. A sign, Benno argued, that Berengar’s secret must have concerned arcana of learning, so that Adelmo could harbor the illusion of submitting to a sin of the flesh to satisfy a desire of the intellect. And, Benno added with a smile, how many times had he himself not been stirred by desires of the intellect so violent that to satisfy them he would have consented to complying with others’ carnal desires, even against his own inclination.

“Are there not moments,” he asked William, “when you would also do shameful things to get your hands on a book you have been seeking for years?”

“The wise and most virtuous Sylvester II, centuries ago, gave as a gift a most precious armillary sphere in exchange for a manuscript, I believe, of Statius or Lucan,” William said. He added then, prudently, “But it was an armillary sphere, not his virtue.”

Benno admitted that his enthusiasm had carried him away, and he resumed his story. The night before Adelmo’s death, Benno followed the pair, driven by curiosity, and he saw them, after compline, go off together to the dormitory. He waited a long time, holding ajar the door of his cell, not far from theirs, and when silence had fallen over the sleep of the monks, he clearly saw Adelmo slip into Berengar’s cell. Benno remained awake, unable to fall asleep, until he heard Berengar’s door open again and Adelmo flee, almost running, as his friend tried to hold him back. Berengar followed Adelmo down to the floor below. Cautiously Benno went after them, and at the mouth of the lower corridor he saw Berengar, trembling, huddled in a corner, staring at the door of Jorge’s cell. Benno guessed that Adelmo had flung himself at the feet of the venerable brother to confess his sin. And Berengar was trembling, knowing his secret was being revealed, even if under the seal of the sacrament.

Then Adelmo came out, his face pale, thrust away Berengar, who was trying to speak to him, and rushed out of the dormitory, moving behind the apse of the church and entering the choir from the north door (which at night remains open). Probably he wanted to pray. Berengar followed him but did not enter the church; he wandered among the graves in the cemetery, wringing his hands.

Benno was wondering what to do when he realized that a fourth person was moving about the vicinity. This person, too, had followed the pair and certainly had not noticed the presence of Benno, who flattened himself against the trunk of an oak growing at the edge of the cemetery. The fourth man was Venantius. At the sight of him Berengar crouched among the graves, as Venantius also went into the choir. At this point, fearing he would be discovered, Benno returned to the dormitory. The next morning Adelmo’s corpse was found at the foot of the cliff. And more than that, Benno did not know.

Dinner hour was now approaching. Benno left us, and my master asked him nothing further. We remained for a little while behind the balneary, then strolled briefly in the garden, meditating on those singular revelations.

“Frangula,” William said suddenly, bending over to observe a plant that, on that winter day, he recognized from the bare bush. “A good infusion is made from the bark, for hemorrhoids. And that is arctium lappa; a good cataplasm of fresh roots cicatrizes skin eczemas.”

“You are cleverer than Severinus,” I said to him, “but now tell me what you think of what we have heard!”

“Dear Adso, you should learn to think with your own head. Benno probably told us the truth. His story fits with what Berengar told us early this morning, for all its hallucinations. Berengar and Adelmo do something very evil together: we had already guessed that. And Berengar must reveal to Adelmo that secret that remains, alas, a secret. Adelmo, after committing his crime against chastity and the law of nature, thinks only of confiding in someone who can absolve him, and he rushes to Jorge. Whose character is very stern, as we know from experience, and he surely attacks Adelmo with distressing reprimands. Perhaps he refuses absolution, perhaps he imposes an impossible penance: we don’t know, nor would Jorge ever tell us. The fact remains that Adelmo rushes into church and prostrates himself before the altar, but doesn’t quell his remorse. At this point, he is approached by Venantius. We don’t know what they say to each other. Perhaps Adelmo confides in Venantius the secret received as a gift (or as payment) from Berengar, which no longer matters to him, since he now has a far more terrible and burning secret. What happens to Venantius? Perhaps, overcome by the same ardent curiosity that today also seized our friend Benno, satisfied with what he has learned, he leaves Adelmo to his remorse. Adelmo sees himself abandoned, determines to kill himself, comes in despair to the cemetery, and there encounters Berengar. He says terrible words to him, flings his responsibilities at him, calls him his master in turpitude. I believe, actually, that Berengar’s story, stripped of all hallucination, was exact. Adelmo repeats to him the same words of desperation he must have heard from Jorge. And now Berengar, overcome, goes off in one direction, and Adelmo goes in the other, to kill himself. Then comes the rest, of which we were almost witnesses. All believe Adelmo was murdered, so Venantius has the impression that the secret of the library is more important than he had believed, and he continues the search on his own. Until someone stops him, either before or after he has discovered what he wanted.”

“Who killed him? Berengar?”

“Perhaps. Or Malachi, who must guard the Aedificium. Or someone else. Berengar is suspect because he is frightened, and he knew that by then Venantius possessed his secret. Malachi is suspect: guardian of the inviolability of the library, he discovers someone has violated it, and he kills. Jorge knows everything about everyone, possesses Adelmo’s secret, does not want me to discover what Venantius may have found…. Many facts would point to him. But tell me how a blind man can kill another man in the fullness of his strength? And how can an old man, even if strong, carry the body to the jar? But finally, why couldn’t the murderer be Benno himself? He could have lied to us, impelled by reasons that cannot be confessed. And why limit our suspicions only to those who took part in the discussion of laughter? Perhaps the crime had other motives, which have nothing to do with the library. In any case, we need two things: to know how to get into the library at night, and a lamp. You provide the lamp. Linger in the kitchen at dinner hour, take one….”

“A theft?”

“A loan, to the greater glory of the Lord.”

“If that is so, then count on me.”

“Good. As for getting into the Aedificium, we saw where Malachi came from last night. Today I will visit the church, and that chapel in particular. In an hour we go to table. Afterward we have a meeting with the abbot. You will be admitted, because I have asked to bring a secretary to make a note of what we say.”

NONES

In which the abbot declares his pride in the wealth of his abbey and his fear of heretics, and eventually Adso wonders whether he has made a mistake in going forth into the world.

We found the abbot in church, at the main altar. He was following the work of some novices who had brought forth from a secret place a number of sacred vessels, chalices, patens, and monstrances, and a crucifix I had not seen during the morning function. I could not repress a cry of wonder at the dazzling beauty of those holy objects. It was noon and the light came in bursts through the choir windows, and even more through those of the façade, creating white cascades that, like mystic streams of divine substance, intersected at various points of the church, engulfing the altar itself.

The vases, the chalices, each piece revealed its precious materials: amid the yellow of the gold, the immaculate white of the ivory, and the transparency of the crystal, I saw gleaming gems of every color and dimension, and I recognized jacinth, topaz, ruby, sapphire, emerald, chrysolite, onyx, carbuncle, and jasper and agate. And at the same time I realized how, that morning, first transported by prayer and then overcome with terror, I had failed to notice many things: the altar frontal and three other panels that flanked it were entirely of gold, and eventually the whole altar seemed of gold, from whatever direction I looked at it.

The abbot smiled at my amazement. “These riches you see,” he said, addressing me and my master, “and others you will see later, are the heritage of centuries of piety and devotion, testimony to the power and holiness of this abbey. Princes and potentates of the earth, archbishops and bishops have sacrificed to this altar and to the objects destined for it the rings of their investiture, the gold and precious stones that were the emblem of their greatness, to have them melted down here to the greater glory of the Lord and of this His place. Though today the abbey is distressed by another, sad event, we must not forget, reminded of our fragility, the strength and power of the Almighty. The celebration of the Holy Nativity is approaching, and we are beginning to polish the sacred vessels, so that the Saviour’s birth may be celebrated with all the pomp and magnificence it deserves and demands. Everything must appear in its full splendor,” he added, looking hard at William, and afterward I understood why he insisted so proudly on justifying his action, “because we believe it useful and fitting not to hide, but on the contrary to proclaim divine generosity.”

“Certainly,” William said politely, “if Your Sublimity feels that the Lord must be so glorified, your abbey has achieved the greatest excellence in this meed of praise.”

“And so it must be,” the abbot said. “If it was the custom that amphoras and phials of gold and little gold mortars served, by the will of God or order of the prophets, to collect the blood of goats or calves or of the heifer in the temple of Solomon, then there is all the more reason why vases of gold and precious stones, and the most valuable things created, should be used with constant reverence and complete devotion to receive the blood of Christ! If in a second creation our substance were to be the same as that of the cherubim and the seraphim, the service it could perform for such an ineffable victim would still be unworthy….”

“Amen,” I said.

“Many protest that a devoutly inspired mind, a pure heart, a will led by faith should suffice for this sacred function. We are the first to declare explicitly and resolutely that these are the essential things; but we are convinced that homage must also be paid through the exterior ornament of the sacred vessel, because it is profoundly right and fitting that we serve our Saviour in all things, totally. He who has not refused to provide for us, totally and without reservation.”

“This has always been the opinion of the great men of your order,” William agreed, “and I recall beautiful things written on the ornaments of churches by the very great and venerable abbot Suger.”

“True,” the abbot said. “You see this crucifix. It is not yet complete….” He took it in his hand with infinite love, gazed at it, his face radiant with bliss. “Some pearls are still missing here, for I have found none the right size. Once Saint Andrew addressed the cross of Golgotha, saying it was adorned with the limbs of Christ as with pearls. And pearls must adorn this humble simulacrum of that great wonder. Still, I have found it proper to set, here, over the very head of the Saviour, the most beautiful diamond you will ever see.” His devout hands, his long white fingers, stroked the most precious parts of the sacred wood, or, rather, the sacred ivory, for this noble material had served to form the arms of the cross.

“As I take pleasure in all the beauties of this house of God, when the spell of the many-colored stones has torn me from outside concerns and a worthy meditation has led me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues, then I seem to find myself, so to speak, in a strange region of the universe, no longer completely enclosed in the mire of the earth or completely free in the purity of heaven. And it seems to me that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this lower world to that higher world by anagoge….”

As he spoke, he turned his face to the nave. A shaft of light from above was illuminating his countenance, through a special benevolence of the daystar, and his hands, which he had extended in the form of a cross, caught up as he was in his fervor. “Every creature,” he said, “visible or invisible, is a light, brought into being by the father of lights. This ivory, this onyx, but also the stone that surrounds us, are a light, because I perceive that they are good and beautiful, that they exist according to their own rules of proportion, that they differ in genus and species from all other genera and species, that they are defined by their own number, that they are true to their order, that they seek their specific place according to their weight. And the more these things are revealed to me, the more the matter I gaze on is by its nature precious, and the better illuminated is the divine power of creation, for if I must strive to grasp the sublimity of the cause, inaccessible in its fullness, through the sublimity of the effect, how much better am I told of the divine causality by an effect as wondrous as gold and diamond, if even dung or an insect can speak to me of it! And then, when I perceive in these stones such superior things, the soul weeps, moved to joy, and not through terrestrial vanity or love of riches, but through the purest love of the prime, uncaused cause.”

“Truly this is the sweetest of theologies,” William said, with perfect humility, and I thought he was using that insidious figure of speech that rhetors call irony, which must always be prefaced by the pronunciatio, representing its signal and its justification—something William never did. For which reason the abbot, more inclined to the use of figures of speech, took William literally and added, still in the power of his mystical transport, “It is the most immediate of the paths that put us in touch with the Almighty: theophanic matter.”

William coughed politely. “Er … hm…” he said. This is what he did when he wanted to introduce a new subject. He managed to do it gracefully because it was his habit—and I believe this is typical of the men of his country—to begin every remark with long preliminary moans, as if starting the exposition of a completed thought cost him a great mental effort. Whereas, I am now convinced, the more groans he uttered before his declaration, the surer he was of the soundness of the proposition he was expressing.

“Eh … oh…” William continued. “We should talk of the meeting and the debate on poverty.”

“Poverty…” the abbot said, still lost in thought, as if having a hard time coming down from that beautiful region of the universe to which his gems had transported him. “Ah, yes, the meeting…”

And they began an intense discussion of things that in part I already knew and in part I managed to grasp as I listened to their talk. As I said at the beginning of this faithful chronicle, it concerned the double quarrel that had set, on the one hand, the Emperor against the Pope, and, on the other, the Pope against the Franciscans, who in the Perugia chapter, though only after many years, had espoused the Spirituals’ theories about the poverty of Christ; and it concerned the jumble that had been created as the Franciscans sided with the empire, a triangle of oppositions and alliances that had now been transformed into a square, thanks to the intervention, to me still very obscure, of the abbots of the order of Saint Benedict.

I never clearly grasped the reason why the Benedictine abbots had given refuge and protection to the Spiritual Franciscans, some time before their own order came to share their opinions to a certain extent. Because if the Spirituals preached the renunciation of all worldly goods, the abbots of my order—I had seen that very day the radiant confirmation—followed a path no less virtuous, though exactly the opposite. But I believe the abbots felt that excessive power for the Pope meant excessive power for the bishops and the cities, whereas my order had retained its power intact through the centuries precisely by opposing the secular clergy and the city merchants, setting itself as direct mediator between earth and heaven, and as adviser of sovereigns.

I had often heard repeated the motto according to which the people of God were divided into shepherds (namely, the clerics), dogs (that is, warriors), and sheep (the populace). But I later learned that this sentence can be rephrased in several ways. The Benedictines had often spoken, not of three orders, but of two great divisions, one involving the administration of earthly things and the other the administration of heavenly things. As far as earthly things went, there was a valid division into clergy, lay lords, and populace, but this tripartite division was dominated by the presence of the ordo monachorum, direct link between God’s people and heaven, and the monks had no connection with those secular shepherds, the priests and bishops, ignorant and corrupt, now supine before the interests of the cities, where the sheep were no longer the good and faithful peasants but, rather, the merchants and artisans. The Benedictine order was not sorry that the governing of the simple should be entrusted to the secular clerics, provided it was the monks who established the definitive regulation of this government, the monks being in direct contact with the source of all earthly power, the empire, just as they were with the source of all heavenly power. This, I believe, is why many Benedictine abbots, to restore dignity to the empire against the government of the cities (bishops and merchants united), agreed to protect the Spiritual Franciscans, whose ideas they did not share but whose presence was useful to them, since it offered the empire good syllogisms against the overweening power of the Pope.

These were the reasons, I then deduced, why Abo was now preparing to collaborate with William, the Emperor’s envoy, and to act as mediator between the Franciscan order and the papal throne. In fact, even in the violence of the dispute that so endangered the unity of the church, Michael of Cesena, several times called to Avignon by Pope John, was ultimately prepared to accept the invitation, because he did not want his order to place itself in irrevocable conflict with the Pontiff. As general of the Franciscans, he wanted at once to see their positions triumph and to obtain papal assent, not least because he surmised that without the Pope’s agreement he would not be able to remain for long at the head of the order.

But many had assured him the Pope would be awaiting him in France to ensnare him, charge him with heresy, and bring him to trial. Therefore, they advised that Michael’s appearance at Avignon should be preceded by negotiations. Marsilius had had a better idea: to send with Michael an imperial envoy who would present to the Pope the point of view of the Emperor’s supporters. Not so much to convince old Cahors but to strengthen the position of Michael, who, as part of an imperial legation, would not then be such easy prey to papal vengeance.

This idea, however, had numerous disadvantages and could not be carried out immediately. Hence the idea of a preliminary meeting between the imperial legation and some envoys of the Pope, to essay their respective positions and to draw up the agreement for a further encounter at which the safety of the Italian visitors would be guaranteed. To organize this first meeting, William of Baskerville had been appointed. Later, he would present the imperial theologians’ point of view at Avignon, if he deemed the journey possible without danger. A far-from-simple enterprise, because it was supposed that the Pope, who wanted Michael alone in order to be able to reduce him more readily to obedience, would send to Italy a mission with instructions to make the planned journey of the imperial envoys to his court a failure, as far as possible. William had acted till now with great ability. After long consultations with various Benedictine abbots (this was the reason for the many stops along our journey), he had chosen the abbey where we now were, precisely because the abbot was known to be devoted to the empire and yet, through his great diplomatic skill, not disliked by the papal court. Neutral territory, therefore, this abbey where the two groups could meet.

But the Pope’s resistance was not exhausted. He knew that, once his legation was on the abbey’s terrain, it would be subject to the abbot’s jurisdiction; and since some of his envoys belonged to the secular clergy, he would not accept this control, claiming fears of an imperial plot. He had therefore made the condition that his envoys’ safety be entrusted to a company of archers of the King of France, under the command of a person in the Pope’s trust. I had vaguely listened as William discussed this with an ambassador of the Pope at Bobbio: it was a matter of defining the formula to prescribe the duties of this company—or, rather, defining what was meant by the guaranteeing of the safety of the papal legates. A formula proposed by the Avignonese had finally been accepted, for it seemed reasonable: the armed men and their officers would have jurisdiction “over all those who in any way made an attempt on the life of members of the papal delegation or tried to influence their behavior or judgment by acts of violence.” Then the pact had seemed inspired by purely formal preoccupations. Now, after the recent events at the abbey, the abbot was uneasy, and he revealed his doubts to William. If the legation arrived at the abbey while the author of the two crimes was still unknown (and the following day the abbot’s worries were to increase, because the crimes would increase to three), they would have to confess that within those walls someone in circulation was capable of influencing the judgment and behavior of the papal envoys with acts of violence.

Trying to conceal the crimes committed would be of no avail, because if anything further were to happen, the papal envoys would suspect a plot against them. And so there were only two solutions. Either William discovered the murderer before the arrival of the legation (and here the abbot stared hard at him as if silently reproaching him for not having resolved the matter yet) or else the Pope’s envoy had to be informed frankly and his collaboration sought, to place the abbey under close surveillance during the course of the discussions. The abbot did not like this second solution, because it meant renouncing a part of his sovereignty and submitting his own monks to French control. But he could run no risks. William and the abbot were both vexed by the turn things were taking; however, they had few choices. They proposed, therefore, to come to a final decision during the next day. Meanwhile, they could only entrust themselves to divine mercy and to William’s sagacity.

“I will do everything possible, Your Sublimity,” William said. “But, on the other hand, I fail to see how the matter can really compromise the meeting. Even the papal envoy will understand that there is a difference between the act of a madman or a sanguinary, or perhaps only of a lost soul, and the grave problems that upright men will meet to discuss.”

“You think so?” the abbot asked, looking hard at William. “Remember: the Avignonese know they are to meet Minorites, and therefore very dangerous persons, close to the Fraticelli and others even more demented than the Fraticelli, dangerous heretics who are stained with crimes”—here the abbot lowered his voice—”compared with which the events that have taken place here, horrible as they are, pale like mist in the sun.”

“It is not the same thing!” William cried sharply. “You cannot put the Minorites of the Perugia chapter on the same level as some bands of heretics who have misunderstood the message of the Gospel, transforming the struggle against riches into a series of private vendettas or bloodthirsty follies….”

“It is not many years since, not many miles from here, one of those bands, as you call them, put to fire and the sword the estates of the Bishop of Vercelli and the mountains beyond Novara,” the abbot said curtly.

“You speak of Fra Dolcino and the Apostles….”

“The Pseudo Apostles,” the abbot corrected him. And once more I heard Fra Dolcino and the Pseudo Apostles mentioned, and once more in a circumspect tone, with almost a hint of terror.

“The Pseudo Apostles,” William readily agreed. “But they had no connection with the Minorites….”

“…with whom they shared the same professed reverence for Joachim of Calabria,” the abbot persisted, “and you can ask your brother Ubertino.”

“I must point out to Your Sublimity that now he is a brother of your own order,” William said, with a smile and a kind of bow, as if to compliment the abbot on the gain his order had made by receiving a man of such renown.

“I know, I know.” The abbot smiled. “And you know with what fraternal care our order welcomed the Spirituals when they incurred the Pope’s wrath. I am not speaking only of Ubertino, but also of many other, more humble brothers, of whom little is known, and of whom perhaps we should know more. Because it has happened that we accepted fugitives who presented themselves garbed in the habit of the Minorites, and afterward I learned that the various vicissitudes of their life had brought them, for a time, quite close to the Dolcinians….”

“Here, too?” William asked.

“Here, too. I am revealing to you something about which, to tell the truth, I know very little, and in any case not enough to pronounce accusations. But inasmuch as you are investigating the life of this abbey, it is best for you to know these things also. I will tell you, further, that on the basis of things I have heard or surmised, I suspect—mind you, only suspect—that there was a very dark moment in the life of our cellarer, who arrived here, in fact, two years ago, following the exodus of the Minorites.”

“The cellarer? Remigio of Varagine a Dolcinian? He seems to me the mildest of creatures, and, for that matter, the least interested in Sister Poverty that I have ever seen…” William said.

“I can say nothing against him, and I make use of his good services, for which the whole community is also grateful to him. But I mention this to make you understand how easy it is to find connections between a friar of ours and a Fraticello.”

“Once again your magnanimity is misplaced, if I may say so,” William interjected. “We were talking about Dolcinians, not Fraticelli. And much can be said about the Dolcinians without anyone’s really knowing who is being discussed, because there are many kinds. Still, they cannot be called sanguinary. At most they can be reproached for putting into practice without much consideration things that the Spirituals preached with greater temperance, animated by true love of God, and here I agree the borderline between one group and the other is very fine….”

“But the Fraticelli are heretics!” the abbot interrupted sharply. “They do not confine themselves to sustaining the poverty of Christ and the apostles, a doctrine that—though I cannot bring myself to share it—can be usefully opposed to the haughtiness of Avignon. The Fraticelli derive from that doctrine a practical syllogism: they infer a right to revolution, to looting, to the perversion of behavior.”

“But which Fraticelli?”

“All, in general. You know they are stained with unmentionable crimes, they do not recognize matrimony, they deny hell, they commit sodomy, they embrace the Bogomil heresy of the ordo Bulgariae and the ordo Drygonthie….”

“Please,” William said, “do not mix things that are separate! You speak as if the Fraticelli, Patarines, Waldensians, Catharists, and within these the Bogomils of Bulgaria and the heretics of Dragovitsa, were all the same thing!”

“They are,” the abbot said sharply, “they are because they are heretics, and they are because they jeopardize the very order of the civilized world, as well as the order of the empire you seem to me to favor. A hundred or more years ago the followers of Arnold of Brescia set fire to the houses of the nobles and the cardinals, and these were the fruits of the Lombard heresy of the Patarines.”

“Abo,” William said, “you live in the isolation of this splendid and holy abbey, far from the wickedness of the world. Life in the cities is far more complex than you believe, and there are degrees, you know, also in error and in evil. Lot was much less a sinner than his fellow citizens who conceived foul thoughts also about the angels sent by God, and the betrayal of Peter was nothing compared with the betrayal of Judas: one, indeed, was forgiven, the other not. You cannot consider Patarines and Catharists the same thing. The Patarines were a movement to reform behavior within the laws of Holy Mother Church. They wanted always to improve the ecclesiastics’ behavior.”

“Maintaining that the sacraments should not be received from impure priests…”

“And they were mistaken, but it was their only error of doctrine. They never proposed to alter the law of God….”

“But the Patarine preaching of Arnold of Brescia, in Rome, more than two hundred years ago, drove the mob of rustics to burn the houses of the nobles and the cardinals.”

“Arnold tried to draw the magistrates of the city into his reform movement. They did not follow him, and he found support among the crowds of the poor and the outcast. He was not responsible for the violence and the anger with which they responded to his appeals for a less corrupt city.”

“The city is always corrupt.”

“The city is the place where today live the people of God, of whom you, we, are the shepherds. It is the place of scandal in which the rich prelates preach virtue to poor and hungry people. The Patarine disorders were born of this situation. They are sad, but not incomprehensible. 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.”

“And you tell me that the Catharists have not mingled with the Patarines, and that both are not simply two of the faces, the countless faces, of the same demoniacal phenomenon?”

“I say that many of these heresies, independently of the doctrines they assert, encounter success among the simple because they suggest to such people the possibility of a different life. I say that very often the simple do not know much about doctrine. I say that often hordes of simple people have confused Catharist preaching with that of the Patarines, and these together with that of the Spirituals. The life of the simple, Abo, is not illuminated by learning and by the lively sense of distinctions that makes us wise. And it is haunted by illness and poverty, tongue-tied by ignorance. Joining a heretical group, for many of them, is often only another way of shouting their own despair. You may burn a cardinal’s house because you want to perfect the life of the clergy, but also because you believe that the hell he preaches does not exist. It is always done because on earth there does exist a hell, where lives the flock whose shepherds we no longer are. But you know very well that, just as they do not distinguish between the Bulgarian church and the followers of the priest Liprando, so often the imperial authorities and their supporters did not distinguish between Spirituals and heretics. Not infrequently, imperial forces, to combat their adversaries, encouraged Catharist tendencies among the populace. In my opinion they acted wrongly. But what I now know is that the same forces often, to rid themselves of these restless and dangerous and too “simple” adversaries, attributed to one group the heresies of the others, and flung them all on the pyre. I have seen—I swear to you, Abo, I have seen with my own eyes—men of virtuous life, sincere followers of poverty and chastity, but enemies of the bishops, whom the bishops thrust into the hands of the secular arm, whether it was in the service of the empire or of the free cities, accusing these men of sexual promiscuity, sodomy, unspeakable practices—of which others, perhaps, but not they, had been guilty. The simple are meat for slaughter, to be used when they are useful in causing trouble for the opposing power, and to be sacrificed when they are no longer of use.”

“Therefore,” the abbot said, with obvious maliciousness, “were Fra Dolcino and his madmen, and Gherardo Segarelli and those evil murderers, wicked Catharists or virtuous Fraticelli, sodomite Bogomils or Patarine reformers? Will you tell me, William, you who know so much about heretics that you seem one of them, where the truth lies?”

“Nowhere, at times,” William said, sadly.

“You see? You yourself can no longer distinguish between one heretic and another. I at least have a rule. I know that heretics are those who endanger the order that sustains the people of God. And I defend the empire because it guarantees this order for me. I combat the Pope because he is handing the spiritual power over to the bishops of the cities, who are allied with the merchants and the corporations and will not be able to maintain this order. We have maintained it for centuries. And as for the heretics, I also have a rule, and it is summed up in the reply that Arnald Amalaricus, Bishop of Citeaux, gave to those who asked him what to do with the citizens of Beziers: Kill them all, God will recognize His own.”

William lowered his eyes and remained silent for a while. Then he said, “The city of Beziers 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, too, find myself caught in a game of strange alliances. Strange the alliance between Spirituals and the empire, and strange that of the empire with Marsilius, who seeks sovereignty for the people. And strange the alliance between the two of us, so different in our ideas and traditions. But we have two tasks in common: the success of the meeting and the discovery of a murderer. Let us try to proceed in peace.”

The abbot held out his arms. “Give me the kiss of peace, Brother William. With a man of your knowledge I could argue endlessly about fine points of theology and morals. We must not give way, however, to the pleasure of disputation, as the masters of Paris do. You are right: we have an important task ahead of us, and we must proceed in agreement. But I have spoken of these things because I believe there is a connection. Do you understand? A possible connection—or, rather, a connection others can make—between the crimes that have occurred here and the theses of your brothers. This is why I have warned you, and this is why we must ward off every suspicion or insinuation on the part of the Avignonese.”

“Am I not also to suppose Your Sublimity has suggested to me a line for my inquiry? Do you believe that the source of the recent events can be found in some obscure story dating back to the heretical past of one of the monks?”

The abbot was silent for a few moments, looking at William but allowing no expression to be read on his face. Then he said: “In this sad affair you are the inquisitor. It is your task to be suspicious, even to risk unjust suspicion. Here I am only the general father. And, I will add, if I knew that the past of one of my monks lent itself to well-founded suspicion, I would myself already have taken care to uproot the unhealthy plant. What I know, you know. What I do not know should properly be brought to light by your wisdom.” He nodded to us and left the church.

“The story is becoming more complicated, dear Adso,” William said, frowning. “We pursue a manuscript, we become interested in the diatribes of some overcurious monks and in the actions of other, overlustful ones, and now, more and more insistently, an entirely different trail emerges. The cellarer, then … And with the cellarer that strange animal Salvatore also arrived here…. But now we must go and rest, because we plan to stay awake during the night.”

“Then you still mean to enter the library tonight? You are not going to abandon that first trail?”

“Not at all. Anyway, who says the two trails are separate? And finally, this business of the cellarer could merely be a suspicion of the abbot’s.”

He started toward the pilgrims’ hospice. On reaching the threshold, he stopped and spoke, as if continuing his earlier remarks.

“After all, the abbot asked me to investigate Adelmo’s death when he thought that something unhealthy was going on among his young monks. But now that the death of Venantius arouses other suspicions, perhaps the abbot has sensed that the key to the mystery lies in the library, and there he does not wish any investigating. So he offers me the suggestion of the cellarer, to distract my attention from the Aedificium….”

“But why would he not want—”

“Don’t ask too many questions. The abbot told me at the beginning that the library was not to be touched. He must have his own good reasons. It could be that he is involved in some matter he thought unrelated to Adelmo’s death, and now he realizes the scandal is spreading and could also touch him. And he doesn’t want the truth to be discovered, or at least he doesn’t want me to be the one who discovers it….”

“Then we are living in a place abandoned by God,” I said, disheartened.

“Have you found any places where God would have felt at home?” William asked me, looking down from his great height.

Then he sent me to rest. As I lay on my pallet, I concluded that my father should not have sent me out into the world, which was more complicated than I had thought. I was learning too many things.

“Salva me ab ore leonis,” I prayed as I fell asleep.

AFTER VESPERS

In which, though the chapter is short, old Alinardo says very interesting things about the labyrinth and about the way to enter it.

I woke when it was almost tolling the hour for the evening meal. 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. William was not in his cell; obviously he had risen much earlier. I found him, after a brief search, coming out of the Aedificium. He told me he had been in the scriptorium, leafing through the catalogue and observing the monks at work, while trying to approach Venantius’s desk and resume his inspection. But for one reason or another, each monk seemed bent on keeping him from searching among those papers. First Malachi had come over to him, to show him some precious illuminations. Then Benno had kept him busy on trifling pretexts. Still later, when he had bent over to resume his examination, Berengar had begun hovering around him, offering his collaboration.

Finally, seeing that my master appeared seriously determined to look into Venantius’s things, Malachi told him outright that, before rummaging among the dead man’s papers, he ought perhaps to obtain the abbot’s authorization; that he himself, even though he was the librarian, had refrained, out of respect and discipline, from looking; and that in any case, as William had requested, no one had approached that desk, and no one would approach it until the abbot gave instructions. William realized it was not worth engaging in a test of strength with Malachi, though all that stir and those fears about Venantius’s papers had of course increased his desire to become acquainted with them. But he was so determined to get back in there that night, though he still did not know how, that he decided not to create incidents. He was harboring, however, thoughts of retaliation, which, if they had not been inspired as they were by a thirst for truth, would have seemed very stubborn and perhaps reprehensible.

Before entering the refectory, we took another little walk in the cloister, to dispel the mists of sleep in the cold evening air. Some monks were still walking there in meditation. In the garden opening off the cloister we glimpsed old Alinardo of Grottaferrata, who, by now feeble of body, spent a great part of his day among the trees, when he was not in church praying. He seemed not to feel the cold, and he was sitting in the outer porch.

William spoke a few words of greeting to him, and the old man seemed happy that someone should spend time with him.

“A peaceful day,” William said.

“By the grace of God,” the old man answered.

“Peaceful in the heavens, but grim on earth. Did you know Venantius well?”

“Venantius who?” the old man said. Then a light flashed in his eyes. “Ah, the dead boy. The beast is roaming about the abbey….”

“What beast?”

“The great beast that comes from the sea … Seven heads and ten horns and upon his horns ten crowns and upon his heads three names of blasphemy. The beast like unto a leopard, with the feet of a bear, and the mouth of a lion … I have seen him.”

“Where have you seen him? In the library?”

“Library? Why there? I have not gone to the scriptorium for years and I have never seen the library. No one goes to the library. I knew those who did go up to the library….”

“Who? Malachi? Berengar?”

“Oh, no…” the old man said, chuckling. “Before. The librarian who came before Malachi, many years ago…”

“Who was that?”

“I do not remember; he died when Malachi was still young. And the one who came before Malachi’s master, and was a young assistant librarian when I was young … But I never set foot in the library. Labyrinth…”

“The library is a labyrinth?”

“Hunc mundum tipice labyrinthus denotat ille,” the old man recited, absently. “Intranti largus, redeunti sed nimis artus. The library is a great labyrinth, sign of the labyrinth of the world. You enter and you do not know whether you will come out. You must not transgress the pillars of Hercules….”

“So you don’t know how one enters the library when the Aedificium doors are closed?”

“Oh, yes.” The old man laughed. “Many know. You go by way of the ossarium. You can go through the ossarium, but you do not want to go through the ossarium. The dead monks keep watch.”

“Those dead monks who keep watch—they are not those who move at night through the library with a lamp?”

“With a lamp?” The old man seemed amazed. “I have never heard this story. The dead monks stay in the ossarium, the bones drop gradually from the cemetery and collect there, to guard the passage. Have you never seen the altar of the chapel that leads to the ossarium?”

“It is the third on the left, after the transept, is it not?”

“The third? Perhaps. It is the one whose altar stone is carved with a thousand skeletons. The fourth skull on the right: press the eyes … and you are in the ossarium. But do not go there; I have never gone. The abbot does not wish it.”

“And the beast? Where did you see the beast?”

“The beast? Ah, the Antichrist … He is about to come, the millennium is past; we await him….”

“But the millennium was three hundred years ago, and he did not come then….”

“The Antichrist does not come after a thousand years have passed. When the thousand years have passed, the reign of the just begins; then comes the Antichrist, to confound the just, and then there will be the final battle….”

“But 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.”

“The millennium is not calculated from the death of Christ but from the donation of Constantine, three centuries later. Now it is a thousand years….”

“So the reign of the just is ending?”

“I do not know…. I do not know any more. I am tired. The calculation is difficult. Beatus of Liebana made it; ask Jorge, he is young, he remembers well…. But the time is ripe. Did you not hear the seven trumpets?”

“Why the seven trumpets?”

“Did you not hear how the other boy died, the illuminator? The first angel sounded the first trumpet, and hail and fire fell mingled with blood. And the second angel sounded the second trumpet, and the third part of the sea became blood…. Did the second boy not die in the sea of blood? Watch out for the third trumpet! The third part of the creatures in the sea will die. God punishes us. The world all around the abbey is rank with heresy; they tell me that on the throne of Rome there is a perverse pope who uses hosts for practices of necromancy, and feeds them to his morays…. And in our midst someone has violated the ban, has broken the seals of the labyrinth….”

“Who told you that?”

“I heard it. All were whispering that sin has entered the abbey. Do you have any chickpeas?”

The question, addressed to me, surprised me. “No, I have no chickpeas,” I said, confused.

“Next time, bring me some chickpeas. I hold them in my mouth—you see my poor toothless mouth?—until they are soft. They stimulate saliva, aqua fons vitae. Will you bring me some chickpeas tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow I will bring you some chickpeas,” I said to him. But he had dozed off. We left him and went to the refectory.

COMPLINE

In which the Aedificium is entered, a mysterious visitor is discovered, a secret message with necromantic signs is found, and also a book is found, but then promptly vanishes, to be sought through many subsequent chapters; nor is the theft of William’s precious lenses the last of the vicissitudes.

The supper was joyless and silent. It had been just over twelve hours since the discovery of Venantius’s corpse. All the others stole glimpses at his empty place at table. When it was the hour for compline, the procession that marched into the choir seemed a funeral cortège. We followed the office standing in the nave and keeping an eye on the third chapel. The light was scant, and when we saw Malachi emerge from the darkness to reach his stall, we could not tell exactly where he had come from. We moved into the shadows, hiding in the side nave, so that no one would see us stay behind when the office was over. Under my scapular I had the lamp I had purloined in the kitchen during supper. We would light it later at the great bronze tripod that burned all night. I had procured a new wick and ample oil. We would have light for a long time.

I was too excited about our imminent venture to pay attention to the service, which ended almost without my noticing. The monks lowered their cowls over their faces and slowly filed out, to go to their cells. The church remained deserted, illuminated by the glow of the tripod.

“Now,” William said, “to work.”

We approached the third chapel. The base of the altar was really like an ossarium, a series of skulls with deep hollow eyesockets, which filled those who looked at them with terror, set on a pile of what, in the admirable relief, appeared to be tibias. William repeated in a low voice the words he had heard from Alinardo (fourth skull on the right, press the eyes). He stuck his fingers into the sockets of that fleshless face, and at once we heard a kind of hoarse creak. The altar moved, turning on a hidden pivot, allowing a glimpse of a dark aperture. As I shed light on it with my raised lamp, we made out some damp steps. We decided to go down them, after debating whether to close off the passage again behind us. Better not, William said; we did not know whether we would be able to reopen it afterward. And as for the risk of being discovered, if anyone came at that hour to operate the same mechanism, that meant he knew how to enter, and a closed passage would not deter him.

We descended perhaps a dozen steps and came into a corridor on whose sides there were some horizontal niches, such as I was later to see in many catacombs. But now I was entering an ossarium for the first time, and I was very much afraid. The monks’ bones had been collected there over the centuries, dug from the earth and piled in the niches with no attempt to recompose the forms of their bodies. Some niches had only tiny bones, others only skulls, neatly arranged in a kind of pyramid, so that one would not roll over another; and it was a truly terrifying sight, especially in the play of shadows the lamp created as we walked on. In one niche I saw only hands, many hands, now irrevocably interlaced in a tangle of dead fingers. I let out a cry in that place of the dead, for a moment sensing some presence above, a squeaking, a rapid movement in the dark.

“Mice,” William said, to reassure me.

“What are mice doing here?”

“Passing through, like us: because the ossarium leads to the Aedificium, and then to the kitchen. And to the tasty books of the library. And now you understand why Malachi’s face is so austere. His duties oblige him to come through here twice daily, morning and evening. Truly he has nothing to laugh about.”

“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.”

And, in fact, the corridor was ending, thank God; new steps began. After climbing them, we would have only to push an ironclad wooden door and we would find ourselves behind the fireplace of the kitchen, just below the circular staircase leading to the scriptorium. As we went up, we thought we heard a noise above us.

We remained a moment in silence; then I said, “It’s impossible. No one came in before us….”

“Assuming this is the only way into the Aedificium. In centuries past this was a fortress, and it must have more secret entrances than we know of. We’ll go up slowly. But we have little choice. If we put out the light we can’t see where we are going; if we leave it burning we give anyone upstairs the alarm. Our only hope is that if someone really is there, he will be afraid of us.”

We reached the scriptorium, emerging from the south tower. Venantius’s desk was directly opposite. The room was so vast that, as we moved, we illuminated only a few yards of wall at a time. We hoped no one was in the court, to see the light through the windows. The desk appeared to be in order, but William bent at once to examine the pages on the shelf below, and he cried out in dismay.

“Is something missing?” I asked.

“Today I saw two books here, one of them in Greek. And that’s the one missing. Somebody has taken it, and in great haste, because one page fell on the floor here.”

“But the desk was watched….”

“Of course. Perhaps somebody grabbed it just a short while ago. Perhaps he’s still here.” He turned toward the shadows and his voice echoed among the columns: “If you are here, beware!” It seemed to me a good idea: as William had said before, it is always better when the person who frightens us is also afraid of us.

William set down the page he had found under the desk and bent his face toward it. He asked me for more light. I held the lamp closer and saw a page, the first half of it blank, the second covered with tiny characters whose origin I recognized with some difficulty.

“Is it Greek?” I asked.

“Yes, but I don’t understand clearly.” He took his lenses from his habit and set them firmly astride his nose, then bent his head again.

“It’s Greek, written in a very fine hand, and yet in a disorderly way. Even with my lenses I have trouble reading it. I need still more light. Come closer….”

He had picked up the sheet of parchment, holding it to his face; and instead of stepping behind him and holding the lamp high over his head, I foolishly stood directly in front of him. He asked me to move aside, and as I did, I grazed the back of the page with the flame. William pushed me away, asking me whether I wanted to burn the manuscript for him. Then he cried out. I saw clearly that some vague signs, in a yellow-brown color, had appeared on the upper part of the page. William made me give him the lamp and moved it behind the page, holding the flame fairly close to the surface of the parchment, which he heated without setting it afire. Slowly, as if an invisible hand were writing “Mane, Tekel, Peres,” I saw some marks emerge one by one on the white side of the sheet as William moved the lamp, and as the smoke that rose from the top of the flame blackened the recto; the marks did not resemble those of any alphabet, except that of necromancers.

“Fantastic!” William said. “More and more interesting!” He looked around. “But it would be better not to expose this discovery to the tricks of our mysterious companion, if he is still here….” He took off his lenses, set them on the desk, then carefully rolled up the parchment and hid it inside his habit. Still amazed by this sequence of events, which were nothing if not miraculous, I was about to ask further explanations when all of a sudden a sharp sound distracted us. It came from the foot of the east stairway, leading to the library.

“Our man is there! After him!” William shouted, and we flung ourselves in that direction, he moving faster, I more slowly, for I was carrying the lamp. I heard the clatter of someone stumbling and falling. I ran, and found William at the foot of the steps, observing a heavy volume, its binding reinforced with metal studs. At that same moment we heard another noise, in the direction from which we had come. “Fool that I am!” William cried. “Hurry! To Venantius’s desk!”

I understood: somebody, from the shadows behind us, had thrown the volume to send us far away.

Once again William was faster than I and reached the desk first. Following him, I glimpsed among the columns a fleeing shadow, taking the stairway of the west tower.

Seized with warlike ardor, I thrust the lamp into William’s hand and dashed blindly off toward the stairs where the fugitive had descended. At that moment I felt like a soldier of Christ fighting all the legions of hell, and I burned with the desire to lay my hands on the stranger, to turn him over to my master. I tumbled down almost the whole stairway, tripping over the hem of my habit (that was the only moment of my life, I swear, when I regretted having entered a monastic order!); but at that same instant—and it was the thought of an instant—I consoled myself with the idea that my adversary was suffering the same impediment. And, further, if he had taken the book, he would have his hands full. From behind the bread oven I almost dived into the kitchen, and in the starry light that faintly illuminated the vast entrance, I saw the shadow I was pursuing as it slipped past the refectory door, then pulled this shut. I rushed toward the door, I labored a few seconds opening it, entered, looked around, and saw no one. The outside door was still barred. I turned. Shadows and silence. I noticed a glow advancing from the kitchen and I flattened myself against a wall. On the threshold of the passage between the two rooms a figure appeared, illuminated by a lamp. I cried out. It was William.

“Nobody around? I foresaw that. He didn’t go out through a door? He didn’t take the passage through the ossarium?”

“No, he went out through here, but I don’t know where!”

“I told you: there are other passages, and it’s useless for us to look for them. Perhaps our man is emerging at some distant spot. And with him my lenses.”

“Your lenses?”

“Yes. Our friend could not take the page away from me, but with great presence of mind, as he rushed past, he snatched my glasses from the desk.”

“Why?”

“Because he is no fool. He heard me speak of these notes, he realized they were important, he assumed that without my lenses I would be unable to decipher them, and he knows for sure that I would not entrust them to anyone else. In fact, now it’s as if I didn’t have them.”

“But how did he know about your lenses?”

“Come, come. Apart from the fact that we spoke about them yesterday with the master glazier, this morning in the scriptorium I put them on to search among Venantius’s papers. So there are many people who could know how valuable those objects are to me. Actually, I could read a normal manuscript, but not this one.” And he was again unrolling the mysterious parchment. “The part in Greek is written too fine and the upper part is too hazy….”

He showed me the mysterious signs that had appeared as if by magic in the heat of the flame. “Venantius wanted to conceal an important secret, and he used one of those inks that leave no trace when written but reappear when warmed. Or else he used lemon juice. But since I don’t know what substance he used and the signs could disappear again: quickly, you who have good eyes, copy them at once as faithfully as you can, perhaps enlarging them a bit.” And so I did, without knowing what I was copying. It was a series of four or five lines, really necromantic, and I will reproduce only the very first signs, to give the reader an idea of the puzzle I had before my eyes:

When I had finished copying, William looked, unfortunately without lenses, holding my tablet at some distance from his nose. “It is unquestionably a secret alphabet that will have to be deciphered,” he said. “The signs are badly drawn, and perhaps you copied them worse, but it is certainly a zodiacal alphabet. You see? In the first line we have”—he held the page away from him again and narrowed his eyes with an effort of concentration—”Sagittarius, Sun, Mercury, Scorpio….”

“And what do they mean?”

“If Venantius had been ingenuous he would have used the most common zodiacal alphabet: A equals Sun, B equals Jupiter…. The first line would then read … Try transcribing this: RAIQASVL….” He broke off. “No, it means nothing, and Venantius was not ingenuous. He reformulated the alphabet according to another key. I shall have to discover it.”

“Is it possible?” I asked, awed.

“Yes, if you know a bit of the learning of the Arabs. The best treatises on cryptography are the work of infidel scholars, and at Oxford I was able to have some read to me. Bacon was right in saying that the conquest of learning is achieved through the knowledge of languages. Abu Bakr Ahmad ben Ali ben Washiyya an-Nabati wrote centuries ago a Book of the Frenzied Desire of the Devout to Learn the Riddles of Ancient Writings, and he expounded many rules for composing and deciphering mysterious alphabets, useful for magic practices but also for the correspondence between armies, or between a king and his envoys. I have seen other Arab books that list a series of quite ingenious devices. For example, you can substitute one letter for another, you can write a word backward, you can put the letters in reverse order, using only every other one; and then starting over again, you can, as in this case, replace letters with zodiacal signs, but attributing to the hidden letters their numerical value, and then, according to another alphabet, convert the numbers into other letters….”

“And which of these systems can Venantius have used?”

“We would have to test them all, and others besides. But the first rule in deciphering a message is to guess what it means.”

“But then it’s unnecessary to decipher it!” I laughed.

“Not exactly. Some hypotheses can be formed on the possible first words of the message, and then you see whether the rule you infer from them can apply to the rest of the text. For example, here Venantius has certainly noted down the key for penetrating the finis Africae. If I try thinking that the message is about this, then I am suddenly enlightened by a rhythm…. Try looking at the first three words, not considering the letters, but the number of the signs … IIIIIIII IIIII IIIIIII…. Now try dividing them into syllables of at least two signs each, and recite aloud: ta-ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta-ta…. Doesn’t anything come to your mind?”

“No.”

“To mine, yes. ‘Secretum finis Africae’… But if this were correct, then the last word should have the same first and sixth letter, and so it does, in fact: the symbol of the Earth is there twice. And the first letter of the first word, the S, should be the same as the last of the second: and, sure enough, the sign of the Virgin is repeated. Perhaps this is the right track. But it could also be just a series of coincidences. A rule of correspondence has to be found….”

“Found where?”

“In our heads. Invent it. And then see whether it is the right one. But with one test and another, the game could cost me a whole day. No more than that because—remember this—there is no secret writing that cannot be deciphered with a bit of patience. But now we risk losing time, and we want to visit the library. Especially since, without lenses, I will never be able to read the second part of the message, and you cannot help me because these signs, to your eyes…”

“Graecum est, non legitur,” I finished his sentence, humiliated. “It is Greek to me.”

“Exactly; and you see that Bacon was right. Study! But we must not lose heart. We’ll put away the parchment and your notes, and we’ll go up to the library. Because tonight not even ten infernal legions will succeed in keeping us out.”

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

“Benno was burning with the desire to know what there was among Venantius’s papers, but I can’t see him as one with the courage to enter the Aedificium at night.”

“Berengar, then? Or Malachi?”

“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.”

“But it could also be Malachi, for the same motives.”

“I would say no. Malachi had all the time he wanted to search Venantius’s desk when he remained alone to shut up the Aedificium. I knew that very well, but there was no way to avoid it. Now we know he didn’t do it. 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….”

“Then either Berengar or Benno…”

“And why not Pacificus of Tivoli or another of the monks we saw here today? Or Nicholas the glazier, who knows about my glasses? Or that odd character Salvatore, who they have told us roams around at night on God knows what errands? We must take care not to restrict the field of suspects just because Benno’s revelations have oriented us in a single direction; perhaps Benno wanted to mislead us.”

“But he seemed sincere to you.”

“Certainly. But remember that the first duty of a good inquisitor is to suspect especially those who seem sincere to him.”

“A nasty job, being an inquisitor.”

“That’s why I gave it up. And as you say, I am forced to resume it. But come now: to the library.”

NIGHT

In which the labyrinth is finally broached, and the intruders have strange visions and, as happens in labyrinths, lose their way.

We climbed back up to the scriptorium, this time by the east staircase, which rose also to the forbidden floor. Holding the light high before us, I thought of Alinardo’s words about the labyrinth, and I expected frightful things.

I was surprised, as we emerged into the place we should not have entered, at finding myself in a not very large room with seven sides, windowless, where there reigned—as, for that matter, throughout the whole floor—a strong odor of stagnation or mold. Nothing terrifying.

The room, as I said, had seven walls, but only four of them had an opening, a passage flanked by two little columns set in the wall; the opening was fairly wide, surmounted by a round-headed arch. Against the blind walls stood huge cases, laden with books neatly arranged. Each case bore a scroll with a number, and so did each individual shelf; obviously the same numbers we had seen in the catalogue. In the midst of the room was a table, also covered with books. On all the volumes lay a fairly light coat of dust, sign that the books were cleaned with some frequency. Nor was there dirt of any kind on the floor. Above one of the archways, a big scroll, painted on the wall, bore the words “Apocalypsis Iesu Christi.” It did not seem faded, even though the lettering was ancient. We noticed afterward, also in the other rooms, that these scrolls were actually carved in the stone, cut fairly deeply, and the depressions had subsequently been filled with color, as painters do in frescoing churches.

We passed through one of the openings. We found ourselves in another room, where there was a window that, in place of glass panes, had slabs of alabaster, with two blind walls and one aperture, like the one we had just come through. It opened into another room, which also had two blind walls, another with a window, and another passage that opened opposite us. In these two rooms, the two scrolls were similar in form to the first we had seen, but with different words. The scroll in the first room said “Super thronos viginti quatuor,” and the one in the second room, “Nomen illi mors.” For the rest, even though the two rooms were smaller than the one by which we had entered the library (actually, that one was heptagonal, these two rectangular), the furnishing was the same.

We entered the third room. It was bare of books and had no scroll. Under the window, a stone altar. There were three doors: the one by which we had entered; another, leading to the heptagonal room already visited; and a third, which led to a new room, no different from the others except for the scroll, which said “Obscuratus est sol et aer,” announcing the growing darkness of sun and air. From here you went into a new room, whose scroll said “Facta est grando et ignis,” threatening turmoil and fire. This room was without other apertures: once you reached it, you could proceed no farther and had to turn back.

“Let us think about this,” William said. “Five quadrangular or vaguely trapezoidal rooms, each with one window, arranged around a windowless heptagonal room to which the stairway leads. It seems elementary to me. We are in the east tower. From the outside each tower shows five windows and five sides. It works out. The empty room is the one facing east, the same direction as the choir of the church; the dawn sun illuminates the altar, which I find right and pious. The only clever idea, it seems to me, is the use of alabaster slabs. In the daytime they admit a fine light, and at night not even the moon’s rays can penetrate. Now let’s see where the other two doors of the heptagonal room lead.”

My master was mistaken, and the builders of the library had been shrewder than we thought. I cannot explain clearly what happened, but as we left the tower room, the order of the rooms became more confused. Some had two doorways, others three. All had one window each, even those we entered from a windowed room, thinking we were heading toward the interior of the Aedificium. Each had always the same kind of cases and tables; the books arrayed in neat order seemed all the same and certainly did not help us to recognize our location at a glance. We tried to orient ourselves by the scrolls. Once we crossed a room in which was written “In diebus illis,” “In those days,” and after some roaming we thought we had come back to it. But we remembered that the door opposite the window led into a room whose scroll said “Primogenitus mortuorum,” “The firstborn of the dead,” whereas now we came upon another that again said “Apocalypsis Iesu Christi,” though it was not the heptagonal room from which we had set out. This fact convinced us that sometimes the scrolls repeated the same words in different rooms. We found two rooms with “Apocalypsis” one after the other, and, immediately following them, one with “Cecidit de coelo stella magna,” “A great star fell from the heavens.”

The source of the phrases on the scrolls was obvious—they were verses from the Apocalypse of John—but it was not at all clear why they were painted on the walls or what logic was behind their arrangement. To increase our confusion, we discovered that some scrolls, not many, were colored red instead of black.

At a certain point we found ourselves again in the original heptagonal room (easily identified because the stairwell began there), and we resumed moving toward our right, trying to go straight from room to room. We went through three rooms and then found ourselves facing a blank wall. The only opening led into a new room that had only one other aperture, which we went through, and then, after another four rooms, we found ourselves again facing a wall. We returned to the previous room, which had two exits, took the one we had not tried before, went into a new room, and then found ourselves back in the heptagonal room of the outset.

“What was the name of the last room, the one where we began retracing our steps?” William asked.

I strained my memory and I had a vision of a white horse: “Equus albus.”

“Good. Let’s find it again.” And it was easy. From there, if we did not want to turn back as we had before, we could only pass through the room called “Gratia vobis et pax,” and from there, on the right, we thought we found a new passage, which did not take us back. Actually we again came upon “In diebus illis” and “Primogenitus mortuorum” (were they the rooms of a few moments earlier?); then finally we came to a room that we did not seem to have visited before: “Tertia pars terrae combusta est.” But even when we had learned that a third of the earth had been burned up, we still did not know what our position was with respect to the east tower.

Holding the lamp in front of me, I ventured into the next rooms. A giant of threatening dimensions, a swaying and fluttering form came toward me, like a ghost.

“A devil!” I cried and almost dropped the lamp as I wheeled around and took refuge in William’s arms. He seized the lamp from my hands and, thrusting me aside, stepped forward with a decisiveness that to me seemed sublime. He also saw something, because he brusquely stepped back. Then he leaned forward again and raised the lamp. He burst out laughing.

“Really ingenious. A mirror!”

“A mirror?”

“Yes, my bold warrior. You flung yourself so courageously on a real enemy a short while ago in the scriptorium, and now you are frightened by your own image. A mirror that reflects your image, enlarged and distorted.”

He took me by the hand and led me up to the wall facing the entrance to the room. On a corrugated sheet of glass, now that the light illuminated it more closely, I saw our two images, grotesquely misshapen, changing form and height as we moved closer or stepped back.

“You must read some treatise on optics,” William said, amused, “as the creators of the library surely did. The best ones are by the Arabs. Alhazen wrote a treatise, De aspectibus, in which, with precise geometrical demonstrations, he spoke of the power of mirrors, some of which, depending on how their surface is gauged, can enlarge the tiniest things (what else are my lenses?), while others make images appear upside down, or oblique, or show two objects in the place of one, and four in place of two. Still others, like this one, turn a dwarf into a giant or a giant into a dwarf.”

“Lord Jesus!” I exclaimed. “Are these, then, the visions some say they have had in the library?”

“Perhaps. A really clever idea.” He read the scroll on the wall, over the mirror: “Super thronos viginti quatuor.” “‘The twenty-four elders upon their seats.’ We have seen this inscription before, but it was a room without any mirror. This one, moreover, has no windows, and yet it is not heptagonal. Where are we?” He looked around and went over to a case. “Adso, without those wondrous oculi ad legendum I cannot figure out what is written on these books. Read me some titles.”

I picked out a book at random. “Master, it is not written!”

“What do you mean? I can see it is written. What do you read?”

“I am not reading. These are not letters of the alphabet, and it is not Greek. I would recognize it. They look like worms, snakes, fly dung….”

“Ah, it’s Arabic. Are there others like it?”

“Yes, several. But here is one in Latin, thank God. A1 … Al-Kuwarizmi, Tabulae.“

“The astronomical tables of Al-Kuwarizmi, translated by Adelard of Bath! A very rare work! Continue.”

“Isa ibn-Ali, De oculis; Alkindi, De radiis stellatis…“

“Now look on the table.”

I opened a great volume lying on the table, a De bestiis. I happened on a delicately illuminated page where a very beautiful unicorn was depicted.

“Beautifully made,” William commented, able to see the illustrations well. “And that?”

I read: “Liber monstrorum de diversis generibus. This also has beautiful images, but they seem older to me.”

William bent his face to the text. “Illuminated by Irish monks, at least five centuries ago. The unicorn book, on the other hand, is much more recent; it seems to me made in the French fashion.” Once again I admired my master’s erudition. We entered the next room and crossed the four rooms after it, all with windows, and all filled with volumes in unknown languages, in addition to some texts of occult sciences. Then we came to a wall, which forced us to turn back, because the last five rooms opened one into the other, with no other egress possible.

“To judge by the angles of the walls, I would say we are in the pentagon of another tower,” William said, “but there is no central heptagonal room. Perhaps we are mistaken.”

“But what about the windows?” I asked. “How can there be so many windows? It is impossible for all the rooms to overlook the outside.”

“You’re forgetting the central well. Many of the windows we have seen overlook the octagon, the well. If it were day, the difference in light would tell us which are external windows and which internal, and perhaps would even reveal to us a room’s position with respect to the sun. But after dusk no difference is perceptible. Let’s go back.”

We returned to the room with the mirror and headed for the third doorway, which we thought we had not gone through previously. We saw before us a sequence of three or four rooms, and toward the last we noticed a glow.

“Someone’s there!” I exclaimed in a stifled voice.

“If so, he has already seen our light,” William said, nevertheless shielding the flame with his hand. We hesitated a moment or two. The glow continued to flicker slightly, but without growing stronger or weaker.

“Perhaps it is only a lamp,” William said, “set here to convince the monks that the library is inhabited by the souls of the dead. But we must find out. You stay here, and keep covering the light. I’ll go ahead cautiously.”

Still ashamed at the sorry figure I had cut before the mirror, I wanted to redeem myself in William’s eyes. “No, I’ll go,” I said. “You stay here. I’ll proceed cautiously. I am smaller and lighter. As soon as I’ve made sure there is no risk, I’ll call you.”

And so I did. I proceeded through three rooms, sticking close to the walls, light as a cat (or as a novice descending into the kitchen to steal cheese from the larder: an enterprise in which I excelled at Melk). I came to the threshold of the room from which the glow, quite faint, was coming. I slipped along the wall to a column that served as the right jamb, and I peered into the room. No one was there. A kind of lamp was set on the table, lighted, and it was smoking, flickering. It was not a lamp like ours: it seemed, rather, an uncovered thurible. It had no flame, but a light ash smoldered, burning something. I plucked up my courage and entered. On the table beside the thurible, a brightly colored book was lying open. I approached and saw four strips of different colors on the page: yellow, cinnabar, turquoise, and burnt sienna. A beast was set there, horrible to see, a great dragon with ten heads, dragging after him the stars of the sky and with his tail making them fall to earth. And suddenly I saw the dragon multiply, and the scales of his hide become a kind of forest of glittering shards that came off the page and took to circling around my head. I flung my head back and I saw the ceiling of the room bend and press down toward me, then I heard something like the hiss of a thousand serpents, but not frightening, almost seductive, and a woman appeared, bathed in light, and put her face to mine, breathing on me. I thrust her away with outstretched hands, and my hands seemed to touch the books in the case opposite, or to grow out of all proportion. I no longer realized where I was, where the earth was, and where the sky. In 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.

I woke again after a time I thought was centuries, hearing some blows pounding in my head. I was stretched out on the floor and William was slapping me on the cheeks. I was no longer in that room, and before my eyes was a scroll that said “Requiescant a laboribus suis,” “May they rest from their labors.”

“Come, come, Adso,” William was whispering to me. “There’s nothing….”

“Everything…” I said, still delirious. “Over there, the beast…”

“No beast. I found you raving underneath a table with a beautiful Mozarabic apocalypse on it, opened to the page of the mulier amicta sole confronting the dragon. But I realized from the odor that you had inhaled something dangerous and I carried you away immediately. My head also aches.”

“But what did I see?”

“You saw nothing. The fact is that some substances capable of inducing visions were burning there. I recognized the smell: it is an Arab stuff, perhaps the same that the Old Man of the Mountain gave his assassins to breathe before sending them off on their missions. And so we have explained the mystery of the visions. Someone puts magic herbs there during the night to convince importunate visitors that the library is guarded by diabolical presences. What did you experience, by the way?”

In confusion, as best I could recall, I told him of my vision, and William laughed: “For half of it you were developing what you had glimpsed in the book, and for the other half you let your desires and your fears speak out. This is the operation certain herbs set in action. Tomorrow we must talk about it with Severinus; I believe he knows more than he wants us to believe. They are herbs, only herbs, requiring none of those necromantic preparations the glazier talked to us about. Herbs, mirrors … This place of forbidden knowledge is guarded by many and most cunning devices. Knowledge is used to conceal, rather than to enlighten. I don’t like it. A perverse mind presides over the holy defense of the library. But this has been a toilsome night; we must leave here for the present. You’re distraught and you need water and fresh air. It’s useless to try to open these windows: too high, and perhaps closed for decades. How could they think Adelmo had thrown himself down from here?”

Leave, William had said. As if it were easy. We knew the library could be reached only from one tower, the eastern one. But where were we at that moment? We had completely lost our orientation. We wandered, fearing never to emerge from that place again; I, still stumbling, seized with fits of vomiting; and William, somewhat worried about me and irritated by the inadequacy of his learning; but this wandering gave us, or gave him, an idea for the following day. We would come back to the library, assuming we ever got out of it, with a charred firebrand, or some other substance capable of leaving signs on the walls.

“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.”

“How do you know that? Are you an expert on labyrinths?”

“No, I am citing an ancient text I once read.”

“And by observing this rule you get out?”

“Almost never, as far as I know. But we will try it, all the same. And besides, within the next day or so I will have lenses and time to devote myself more to the books. It may be that where the succession of scrolls confuses us, the arrangement of the books will give us a rule.”

“You’ll have your lenses? How will you find them again?”

“I said I’ll have lenses. I’ll have new ones made. I believe the glazier is eager for an opportunity of this kind, to try something new. As long as he has the right tools for grinding the bits of glass. When it comes to bits of glass, he has plenty in his workshop.”

As we roamed, seeking the way, suddenly, in the center of one room, I felt an invisible hand stroke my cheek, while a groan, not human and not animal, echoed in both that room and the next, as if a ghost were wandering from one to the other. I should have been prepared for the library’s surprises, but once again I was terrified and leaped backward. William must have had an experience similar to mine, because he was touching his cheek as he held up the light and looked around.

He raised one hand, examined the flame, which now seemed brighter, then moistened a finger and held it straight in front of him.

“It’s clear,” he said then, and showed me two points, on opposite walls, at a man’s height. Two narrow slits opened there, and if you put your hand to them you could feel the cold air coming from outside. Putting your ear to them, you could hear a rustling sound, as of a wind blowing outside.

“The library must, of course, have a ventilation system,” William said. “Otherwise the atmosphere would be stifling, especially in the summer. Moreover, those slits provide the right amount of humidity, so the parchments will not dry out. But the cleverness of the founders did not stop there. Placing the slits at certain angles, they made sure that on windy nights the gusts penetrating from these openings would encounter other gusts, and swirl inside the sequence of rooms, producing the sounds we have heard. Which, along with the mirrors and the herbs, increase the fear of the foolhardy who come in here, as we have, without knowing the place well. And we ourselves for a moment thought ghosts were breathing on our faces. We’ve realized it only now because the wind has sprung up only now. So this mystery, too, is solved. But we still don’t know how to get out!”

As we spoke, we wandered aimlessly, now bewildered, not bothering to read the scrolls, which seemed all alike. We came into a new heptagonal room, we went through the nearby rooms, we found no exit. We retraced our steps and walked for almost an hour, making no effort to discover where we were. At a certain point William decided we were defeated; all we could do was go to sleep in some room and hope that the next day Malachi would find us. As we bemoaned the miserable end of our bold adventure, we suddenly found again the room from which the stairway descended. We fervently thanked heaven and went down in high spirits.

Once we were in the kitchen, we rushed to the fireplace and entered the corridor of the ossarium, and I swear that the deathly grin of those fleshless heads looked to me like the smiles of dear friends. We re-entered the church and came out through the north door, finally sitting down happily on the tombstones. The beautiful night air seemed a divine balm. The stars shone around us and I felt the visions of the library were far away.

“How beautiful the world is, and how ugly labyrinths are,” I said, relieved.

“How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths,” my master replied.

We walked along the left side of the church, passed the great door (I looked away, to avoid seeing the elders of the Apocalypse: “Super thronos viginti quatuor”!), and crossed the cloister to reach the pilgrims’ hospice.

At the door of the building stood the abbot, staring at us sternly. “I have been looking for you all night,” he said to William. “I did not find you in your cell, I did not find you in church….”

“We were pursuing a trail…” William said vaguely, with visible embarrassment. The abbot gave him a long look, then said in a slow and severe voice, “I looked for you immediately after compline. Berengar was not in choir.”

“What are you telling me?” William said, with a cheerful expression. In fact, it was now clear to him who had been in ambush in the scriptorium.

“He was not in choir at compline,” the abbot repeated, “and has not come back to his cell. Matins are about to ring, and we will now see if he reappears. Otherwise I fear some new calamity.”

At matins Berengar was absent.

THIRD DAY

FROM LAUDS TO PRIME

In which a bloodstained cloth is found in the cell of Berengar, who has disappeared; and that is all.

In setting down these words, I feel weary, as I felt that night—or, rather, that morning. What can be said? After matins the abbot sent most of the monks, now in a state of alarm, to seek everywhere; but without any result.

Toward lauds, searching Berengar’s cell, a monk found under the pallet a white cloth stained with blood. He showed it to the abbot, who drew the direst omens from it. Jorge was present, and as soon as he was informed, he said, “Blood?” as if the thing seemed improbable to him. They told Alinardo, who shook his head and said, “No, no, at the third trumpet death comes by water….”

William examined the cloth, then said, “Now everything is clear.”

“Where is Berengar?” they asked him.

“I don’t know,” he answered. Aymaro heard him and raised his eyes to heaven, murmuring to Peter of Sant’Albano, “Typically English.”

Toward prime, when the sun was already up, servants were sent to explore the foot of the cliff, all around the walls. They came back at terce, having found nothing.

William told me that we could not have done any better. We had to await events. And he went to the forges, to engage in a deep conversation with Nicholas, the master glazier.

I sat in church, near the central door, as the Masses were said. 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.

TERCE

In which Adso, in the scriptorium, reflects on the history of his order and on the destiny of books.

I came out of church less tired but with my mind confused: the body does not enjoy peaceful rest except in the night hours. I went up to the scriptorium and, after obtaining Malachi’s permission, began to leaf through the catalogue. But as I glanced absently at the pages passing before my eyes, I was really observing the monks.

I was struck by their calm, their serenity. Intent on their work, they seemed to forget that one of their brothers was being anxiously sought throughout the grounds, and that two others had disappeared in frightful circumstances. Here, I said to myself, is the greatness of our order: for centuries and centuries men like these have seen the barbarian hordes burst in, sack their abbeys, plunge kingdoms into chasms of fire, and yet they have gone on cherishing parchments and inks, have continued to read, moving their lips over words that have been handed down through centuries and which they will hand down to the centuries to come. They went on reading and copying as the millennium approached; why should they not continue to do so now?

The day before, Benno had said he would be prepared to sin in order to procure a rare book. He was not lying and not joking. A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.

I leafed through the catalogue, and a feast of mysterious titles danced before my eyes: Quinti Sereni de medicamentis, Phaenomena, Liber Aesopi de natura animalium, Liber Aetbici peronymi de cosmographia, Libri tres quos Arculphus episcopus Adamnano escipiente de locis sanctis ultramarinis designavit conscribendos, Libellus Q. Iulii Hilarionis de origine mundi, Solini Polyhistor de situ orbis terrarum et mirabilibus, Almagesthus. …I was not surprised that the mystery of the crimes should involve the library. For these men devoted to writing, the library was at once the celestial Jerusalem and an underground world on the border between terra incognita and Hades. They were dominated by the library, by its promises and by its prohibitions. They lived with it, for it, and perhaps against it, sinfully hoping one day to violate all its secrets. Why should they not have risked death to satisfy a curiosity of their minds, or have killed to prevent someone from appropriating a jealously guarded secret of their own?

Temptations, to be sure; intellectual pride. Quite different was the scribe-monk imagined by our sainted founder, capable of copying without understanding, surrendered to the will of God, writing as if praying, and praying inasmuch as he was writing. Why was it no longer so? Oh, this was surely not the only degeneration of our order! It had become too powerful, its abbots competed with kings: in Abo did I not perhaps have the example of a monarch who, with monarch’s demeanor, tried to settle controversies between monarchs? The very knowledge that the abbeys had accumulated was now used as barter goods, cause for pride, motive for boasting and prestige; just as knights displayed armor and standards, our abbots displayed illuminated manuscripts…. And all the more so now (what madness!), when our monasteries had also lost the leadership in learning: cathedral schools, urban corporations, universities were copying books, perhaps more and better than we, and producing new ones, and this may have been the cause of many misfortunes.

The abbey where I was staying was probably the last to boast of excellence in the production and reproduction of learning. But perhaps for this very reason, the monks were no longer content with the holy work of copying; they wanted also to produce new complements of nature, impelled by the lust for novelty. And they did not realize, as I sensed vaguely at that moment (and know clearly today, now aged in years and experience), that in doing so they sanctioned the destruction of their excellence. Because if this new learning they wanted to produce were to circulate freely outside those walls, then nothing would distinguish that sacred place any longer from a cathedral school or a city university. Remaining isolated, on the other hand, it maintained its prestige and its strength intact, it was not corrupted by disputation, by the quodlibetical conceit that would subject every mystery and every greatness to the scrutiny of the sic et non. There, I said to myself, are the reasons for the silence and the darkness that surround the library: it is the preserve of learning but can maintain this learning unsullied only if it prevents its reaching anyone at all, even the monks themselves. Learning is not like a coin, which remains physically whole even through the most infamous transactions; it is, rather, like a very handsome dress, which is worn out through use and ostentation. Is not a book like that, in fact? Its pages crumble, its ink and gold turn dull, if too many hands touch it. I saw Pacificus of Tivoli, leafing through an ancient volume whose pages had become stuck together because of the humidity. He moistened his thumb and forefinger with his tongue to leaf through his book, and at every touch of his saliva those pages lost vigor; opening them meant folding them, exposing them to the harsh action of air and dust, which would erode the subtle wrinkles of the parchment, and would produce mildew where the saliva had softened but also weakened the corner of the page. As an excess of sweetness makes the warrior flaccid and inept, this excess of possessive and curious love would make the book vulnerable to the disease destined to kill it.

What should be done? Stop reading, and only preserve? Were my fears correct? What would my master have said?

Nearby I saw a rubricator, Magnus of Iona, who had finished scraping his vellum with pumice stone and was now softening it with chalk, soon to smooth the surface with the ruler. Another, next to him, Rabano of Toledo, had fixed the parchment to the desk, pricking the margins with tiny holes on both sides, between which, with a metal stylus, he was now drawing very fine horizontal lines. Soon the two pages would be filled with colors and shapes, the sheet would become a kind of reliquary, glowing with gems studded in what would then be the devout text of the writing. Those two brothers, I said to myself, are living their hours of paradise on earth. They were producing new books, just like those that time would inexorably destroy…. Therefore, the library could not be threatened by any earthly force, it was a living thing…. But if it was living, why should it not be opened to the risk of knowledge? Was this what Benno wanted and what Venantius perhaps had wanted?

I felt confused, afraid of my own thoughts. Perhaps they were not fitting for a novice, who should only follow the Rule scrupulously and humbly through all the years to come—which is what I subsequently did, without asking myself further questions, while around me the world was sinking deeper and deeper into a storm of blood and madness.

It was the hour of our morning meal. I went to the kitchen, where by now I had become a friend of the cooks, and they gave me some of the best morsels.

SEXT

In which Adso receives the confidences of Salvatore, which cannot be summarized in a few words, but which cause him long and concerned meditation.

As I was eating, I saw Salvatore in one corner, obviously having made his peace with the cook, for he was merrily devouring a mutton pie. He ate as if he had never eaten before in his life, not letting even a crumb fall, and he seemed to be giving thanks to God for this extraordinary event.

He winked at me and said, in that bizarre language of his, that he was eating for all the years when he had fasted. I questioned him. He told me of a very painful childhood in a village where the air was bad, the rains frequent, where the fields rotted while the air was polluted by deathly miasmas. There were floods, or so I understood, season after season, when the fields had no furrows and with a bushel of seed you harvested a sextary, and then the sextary was reduced to nothing. 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…. A sextary cost fifteen pence, a bushel sixty pence, the preachers announced the end of the world, but Salvatore’s parents and grandparents remembered the same story in the past as well, so they came to the conclusion that the world was always about to end. And after they had eaten all the bird carcasses and all the unclean animals they could find, there was a rumor in the village that somebody was beginning to dig up the dead. Salvatore explained with great dramatic ability, as if he were an actor, how those “homeni malissimi” behaved, the wicked men who scrabbled with their fingers in the earth of the cemeteries the day after somebody’s funeral. “Yum!” he said, and bit into his mutton pie, but I could see on his face the grimace of the desperate man eating the corpse. And then, not content with digging in consecrated ground, some, worse than the others, like highwaymen, crouched in the forest and took travelers by surprise. “Thwack!” Salvatore said, holding his knife to his throat, and “Nyum!” And the worst among the worst accosted boys, offering an egg or an apple, and then devoured them, though, as Salvatore explained to me very gravely, always cooking them first. He told of a man who came to the village selling cooked meat for a few pence, and nobody could understand this great stroke of luck, but then the priest said it was human flesh, and the man was torn to pieces by the infuriated crowd. That same night, however, one man from the village went and dug up the grave of the murdered victim and ate the flesh of the cannibal, whereupon, since he was discovered, the village put him to death, too.

But Salvatore did not tell me only this tale. In broken words, obliging me to recall what little I knew of Provençal and of Italian dialects, he told me the story of his flight from his native village and his roaming about the world. And in his story I recognized many men I had already known or encountered along the road, and I now recognize many more that I have met since, so that after all this time I may even attribute to him adventures and crimes that belonged to others, before him and after him, and which now, in my tired mind, flatten out to form a single image. 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.

Often during our journey I heard William mention “the simple,” a term by which some of his brothers denoted not only the populace but, at the same time, the unlearned. This expression always seemed to me generic, because in the Italian cities I had met men of trade and artisans who were not clerics but were not unlearned, even if their knowledge was revealed through the use of the vernacular. And, for that matter, some of the tyrants who governed the peninsula at that time were ignorant of theological learning, and medical, and of logic, and ignorant of Latin, but they were surely not simple or benighted. So I believe that even my master, when he spoke of the simple, was using a rather simple concept. But unquestionably Salvatore was simple. He came from a rural land that for centuries had been subjected to famine and the arrogance of the feudal lords. He was simple, but he was not a fool. He yearned for a different world, which, when he fled from his family’s house, I gathered, assumed the aspect of the land of Cockaigne, where wheels of cheese and aromatic sausages grow on the trees that ooze honey.

Driven by such a hope, as if refusing to recognize this world as a vale of tears where (as they taught me) even injustice is foreordained by Providence to maintain the balance of things, whose design often eludes us, Salvatore journeyed through various lands, from his native Montferrat toward Liguria, then up through Provence into the lands of the King of France.

Salvatore wandered through the world, begging, pilfering, pretending to be ill, entering the temporary service of some lord, then again taking to the forest or the high road. 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, pardoners, 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. There were those who put plasters on their bodies to imitate incurable ulcerations, others who filled their mouths with a blood-colored substance to feign accesses of consumption, rascals who pretended to be weak in one of their limbs, carrying unnecessary crutches and imitating the falling sickness, scabies, buboes, swellings, while applying bandages, tincture of saffron, carrying irons on their hands, their heads swathed, slipping into the churches stinking, and suddenly fainting in the squares, spitting saliva and popping their eyes, making the nostrils spurt blood concocted of blackberry juice and vermilion, to wrest food or money from the frightened people who recalled the church fathers’ exhortations to give alms: Share your bread with the hungry, take the homeless to your hearth, we visit Christ, we house Christ, we clothe Christ, because as water purges fire so charity purges our sins.

Long after the events I am narrating, along the course of the Danube I saw many, and still see some, of these charlatans who had their names and their subdivisions in legions, like the devils.

It was like a mire that flowed over the paths of our world, and with them mingled preachers in good faith, heretics in search of new victims, agitators of discord. It was Pope John—always fearing movements of the simple who might preach and practice poverty—who inveighed against the mendicant preachers, for, he said, they attracted the curious by raising banners with painted figures, preaching, and extorting money. Was the simoniacal and corrupt Pope right in considering the mendicant monks preaching poverty the equivalent of bands of outcasts and robbers? In those days, having journeyed a bit in the Italian peninsula, I no longer had firm opinions on the subject: I had heard of the monks of Altopascio, who, when they preached, threatened excommunications and promised indulgences, absolved those who committed robberies and fratricides, homicides and perjury, for money; they let it be believed that in their hospital every day up to a hundred Masses were said, for which they collected donations, and they said that with their income they supplied dowries for two hundred poor maidens. And I had heard tales of Brother Paolo Zoppo, who in the forest of Rieti lived as a hermit and boasted of having received directly from the Holy Spirit the revelation that the carnal act was not a sin—so he seduced his victims, whom he called sisters, forcing them to submit to the lash on their naked flesh, making five genuflections on the ground in the form of a cross, before he presented them to God and claimed from them what he called the kiss of peace. But was it true? And what link was there between these hermits who were said to be enlightened and the monks of poor life who roamed the roads of the peninsula really doing penance, disliked by the clergy and the bishops, whose vices and thefts they excoriated?

From Salvatore’s tale, as it became mingled with the things I already knew from my own experience, these distinctions did not emerge clearly: everything looked the same as everything else. At times he seemed to me one of those crippled beggars of Touraine who, as the story goes, took flight at the approach of the miraculous corpse of Saint Martin, for they feared the saint would heal them and thus deprive them of their source of income, and the saint mercilessly saved them before they reached the border, punishing their wickedness by restoring to them the use of their limbs. At times, however, the monk’s ferocious face brightened with a sweet glow as he told me how, when living among those bands, he listened to the word of the Franciscan preachers, as outcast as he was, and he understood that the poor and vagabond life he led should be taken, not as a grim necessity, but as a joyous act of dedication, and he joined penitential sects and groups whose names he could not pronounce properly and whose doctrine he defined in highly unlikely terms. I deduced that he had encountered Patarines and Waldensians, and perhaps Catharists, Arnoldists, and Umiliati, and that, roaming about the world, he had passed from one group to another, gradually assuming as a mission his vagrant state, and doing for the Lord what he had done till then for his belly.

But how, and for how long? As far as I could tell, about thirty years before, he had joined a convent of Minorites in Tuscany, and there he had assumed the habit of Saint Francis, without taking orders. There, I believe, he learned that smattering of Latin he spoke, mixing it with the speech of all the places where he had been as a poor homeless wanderer, and of all the vagabond companions he had encountered, from the mercenaries of my lands to the Bogomils of Dalmatia. In the convent he had devoted himself to a life of penance, he said (Penitenziagite, he quoted to me, with eyes shining, and I heard again the expression that had aroused William’s curiosity), but apparently also the monks he was staying with had confused ideas, because, enraged by the canon of the neighboring church, who was accused of thefts and other wickedness, they invaded his house one day and sent him flying down the steps, and the sinner died; then they looted his house. For which the bishop sent his armed guards, the monks were dispersed, and Salvatore roamed at length in northern Italy with a band of Fraticelli, or mendicant Minorites, at this point without any law or discipline.

From there he took refuge in the Toulouse region and a strange adventure befell him, for he was inflamed by hearing the story of the crusaders’ great enterprises. A horde of shepherds and humble folk in great numbers gathered one day to cross the sea and fight against the enemies of the faith. They were called the Pastoureaux, the Shepherds. Actually, they wanted to escape their own wretched land. There were two leaders, who filled their heads with false theories: a priest who had been dismissed from his church because of his conduct, and an apostate monk of the order of Saint Benedict. This pair drove ignorant men so mad that they came running after the two in throngs, even boys of sixteen, against their parents’ wishes, carrying only knapsack and stick, all without money, leaving their fields, to follow the leaders like a flock, and they formed a great crowd. At this point they would no longer heed reason or justice, but only power and their own caprice. Gathered together and finally free, with a dim hope of promised lands, they were as if drunk. They stormed through villages and cities, taking everything, and if one of their number was arrested, they would attack the prison and free him. And they killed all the Jews they came upon here and there and stripped them of their possessions.

“Why the Jews?” I asked Salvatore. He answered, “And why not?” He explained to me that all his life preachers had told him the Jews were the enemies of Christianity and accumulated possessions that had been denied the Christian poor. 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 called. Only the powerful always know with great clarity who their true enemies are. The lords did not want the Shepherds to jeopardize their possessions, and it was a great good fortune for them that the Shepherds’ leaders spread the notion that the greatest wealth belonged to the Jews.

I asked him who had put into the crowd’s head the idea of attacking the Jews. Salvatore could not remember. I believe that when such crowds collect, lured by a promise and immediately demanding something, there is never any knowing who among them speaks. I recalled that their leaders had been educated in convents and cathedral schools, and they spoke the language of the lords, even if they translated it into terms that the Shepherds could understand. The Shepherds did not know where the Pope was, but they knew where the Jews were. 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 and pitilessly, hurling wood and stones. But the Shepherds set fire to the gate of the tower, tormenting the barricaded Jews with smoke and flames. And the Jews, unable to defeat their attackers, 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. He consented, and 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 baptized. Then they headed for Carcassonne, carrying out many bloody robberies along the way. Then the King of France warned them that they had gone too far and ordered that they be resisted in every city they passed through, and he proclaimed that even the Jews should be defended as if they were the King’s men….

Why did the King become so considerate of the Jews at that point? Perhaps because he was beginning to realize what the Shepherds might do throughout the kingdom, and he was concerned because their number was increasing too rapidly. 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. But many Christians did not obey the King, thinking it wrong to defend the Jews, who had always been enemies of the Christian faith. And in many cities the humble people, who had had to pay usury to the Jews, were happy to see the Shepherds punish them for their wealth. Then the King commanded, under pain of death, that no aid be given the Shepherds. He gathered a considerable army and attacked them, and many of them were killed, while others saved themselves by taking flight and seeking refuge in the forests, but there they died of hardship. Soon all were annihilated. The King’s general captured them and hanged them, twenty or thirty at a time, from the highest trees, so the sight of their corpses would serve as an eternal example and no one would dare to disturb the peace of the realm again.

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, and it was impossible for me to convince him that this fine conquest had already been achieved, in the days of Peter the Hermit and Saint Bernard, and under the reign of Saint Louis of France. In any case, Salvatore did not reach the infidels, because he had to leave French territory in a hurry. He went into the Novara region, he told me, but he was very vague about what happened at this point. And finally he arrived at Casale, where he was received by the convent of Minorites (and here I believe he met Remigio) at the very time when many of them, persecuted by the Pope, were changing habit and seeking refuge in monasteries of other orders, to avoid being burned at the stake. As, indeed, Ubertino had told us. Thanks to his long familiarity with many manual tasks (which he had performed both for dishonest purposes, when he was roaming freely, and for holy purposes, when he was roaming for the love of Christ), Salvatore was immediately taken on by the cellarer as his personal assistant. And that was why he had been here for many years, with scant interest in the order’s pomp, but much in the administration of its cellar and larder, where he was free to eat without stealing and to praise the Lord without being burned.

I looked at him with curiosity, not because of the singularity of his experience, but because what had happened to him seemed to me the splendid epitome of so many events and movements that made the Italy of that time fascinating and incomprehensible.

What had emerged from those tales? The picture of a man who had led an adventurous life, capable even of killing a fellow man without realizing his own crime. But although at that time one offense to the divine law seemed to me the same as another, I was already beginning to understand some of the phenomena I was hearing discussed, and I saw that it is one thing for a crowd, in an almost ecstatic frenzy, mistaking the laws of the Devil for those of the Lord, to commit a massacre, but it is another thing for an individual to commit a crime in cold blood, with calculation, in silence. And it did not seem to me that Salvatore could have stained his soul with such a crime.

On the other hand, I wanted to discover something about the abbot’s insinuations, and I was obsessed by the idea of Fra Dolcino, of whom I knew almost nothing, though his ghost seemed to hover over many conversations I had heard these past few days.

So I asked Salvatore point-blank: “In your journeys did you ever meet Fra Dolcino?”

His reaction was most strange. He widened his eyes, if it were possible to open them wider than they were, he blessed himself repeatedly, murmured some broken phrases in a language that this time I really did not understand. But they seemed to me phrases of denial. Until then he had looked at me with good-natured trust, I would say with friendship. At that moment he looked at me almost with irritation. Then, inventing an excuse, he left.

Now I could no longer resist. Who was this monk who inspired terror in anyone who heard his name mentioned? I decided I could not remain any longer in the grip of my desire to know. An idea crossed my mind. Ubertino! He himself had uttered that name, the first evening we met him; he knew everything of the vicissitudes, open and secret, of monks, friars, and other species of these last years. Where could I find him at this hour? Surely in church, immersed in prayer. And since I was enjoying a moment of liberty, I went there.

I did not find him; indeed, I did not find him until evening. And so my curiosity stayed with me, for other events were occurring, of which I must now tell.

NONES

In which William speaks to Adso of the great river of heresy, of the function of the simple within the church, of his doubts concerning the possibility of knowing universal laws; and almost parenthetically he tells how he deciphered the necromantic signs left by Venantius.

I found William at the forge, working with Nicholas, both deeply involved in their task. On the counter they had laid out a number of tiny glass discs, perhaps originally intended as parts of a window; with instruments they had reduced some of these to the desired thickness. William was holding them up before his eyes, testing them. Nicholas, for his part, was issuing instructions to the smiths for making the fork in which the correct lenses would be set.

William was grumbling, irritated because so far the most satisfactory lens was an emerald color, and, as he said, he did not want parchments to seem meadows to him. Nicholas went off to supervise the smiths. As William tried out the various discs, I told him of my dialogue with Salvatore.

“The man has had various experiences,” he said. “Perhaps he actually was with the Dolcinians. The abbey really is a microcosm, and when we have Pope John’s envoys and Brother Michael here, we’ll be complete.”

“Master,” I said to him, “I understand nothing.”

“About what, Adso?”

“First, about the differences among heretical groups. But I’ll ask you about that later. 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.”

William set the lenses on the table for a moment. “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.”

“Excellent. But Thomas is different from Bonaventure, Thomas is fat while Bonaventure is thin, and it may even be that Hugh is bad while Francis is good, and Aldemar is phlegmatic while Agilulf is bilious. Or am I mistaken?”

“No, that is the case, beyond any doubt.”

“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.”

“That is so, unquestionably.”

“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. Does this seem to you a good reason for insisting on the differences?”

“The trouble is,” I said, “I can no longer distinguish the accidental difference among Waldensians, Catharists, the poor of Lyons, the Umiliati, the Beghards, Joachimites, Patarines, Apostles, Poor Lombards, Arnoldists, Williamites, Followers of the Free Spirit, and Luciferines. What am I to do?”

“Oh, poor Adso,” William said, laughing and giving me an affectionate slap on the nape, “you’re not really wrong! You see, it’s as if, over the last two centuries, and even earlier, this world of ours had been struck by storms of intolerance, hope, and despair, all together…. No, that’s not a good analogy. 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….”

“If I understand your allegory, the river is the city of God, or the kingdom of the just, which is approaching the millennium, and in this uncertainty it no longer remains secure, false and true prophets are born, and everything flows into the great plain where Armageddon will take place….”

“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. My allegory was meant only to tell you how the branches of heresy and the movements of renewal, when the river is no longer intact, are numerous and become mingled. You can also add to my poor allegory the image of someone who is trying to reconstruct the banks of the river with brute strength, but cannot do so. And some branches of the delta silt up, others are redirected to the river by artificial channels, still others are allowed to flow, because it is impossible to restrain everything and it is better for the river to lose a part of its water and still maintain its course, if it wants to have a recognizable course.”

“I understand less and less.”

“So do I. I’m not good at speaking in parables. Forget this story of the river. Try instead to understand that many of the movements you mentioned were born at least two hundred years ago and are already dead, yet others are recent….”

“But when heretics are discussed, they are all mentioned together.”

“True, and this is one of the ways heresy spreads and one of the ways it is destroyed.”

“Again I don’t understand.”

“God, how difficult it is. Very well. Imagine you are a reformer of morals and you collect some companions on a mountaintop, to live in poverty. And after a while you see that many come to you, even from distant lands, and they consider you a prophet, or a new apostle, and they follow you. Have they really come there for you or for what you say?”

“I don’t know. I hope so. Why otherwise?”

“Because from their fathers they have heard stories of other reformers, and legends of more or less perfect communities, and they believe this is that and that is this.”

“And so every movement inherits the offspring of others?”

“Of course, because the majority of those who flock after reformers are the simple, who have no subtlety of doctrine. And yet moral reform movements originate in different places and ways and with different doctrines. For example, the Catharists and the Waldensians are often mixed up. But there is a great difference between them. The Waldensians preached a moral reform within the church, the Catharists preached a different church, a different view of God and morality. 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. Nor did they think of reforming the world, because the opposition between good and evil for them can never be settled. 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.”

“But why, then, are they confused and spoken of as the same evil weed?”

“I told you: what makes them live is also what makes them die. The movements grow, gathering simple people who have been aroused by other movements and who believe all have the same impulse of revolt and hope; and they are destroyed by the inquisitors, who attribute to one the errors of the other, and if the sectarians of one movement commit a crime, this crime will be attributed to each sectarian of each movement. The inquisitors are mistaken, rationally speaking, because they lump contradictory doctrines together; they are right, according to others’ irrationality, because when a movement of, say, Arnoldists springs up in one city, it is swelled by those who would have been or have been Catharists or Waldensians elsewhere. Fra Dolcino’s Apostles preached the physical destruction of clerics and lords, and committed many acts of violence; the Waldensians are opposed to violence, and so are the Fraticelli. But I am sure that in Fra Dolcino’s day there were many in his group who had previously followed the preachings of the Fraticelli or the Waldensians. The simple cannot choose their personal heresy, Adso; they cling to the man preaching in their land, who passes through their village or stops in their square. This is what their enemies exploit. To present to the eyes of the people a single heresy, which perhaps may suggest at the same time the renunciation of sexual pleasure and the communion of bodies, is good preaching technique: it shows the heretics as one jumble of diabolical contradictions which offend common sense.”

“So there is no relationship among them, and it is the Devil’s deception that makes a simple man who would like to be a Joachimite or a Spiritual fall into the hands of the Catharists, and vice versa?”

“No, that is not quite it. Let’s try again from the beginning, Adso. But I assure you, I am attempting to explain to you something about which I myself am not sure I possess the truth. I think the mistake is to believe that the heresy comes first, and then the simple folk who join it (and damn themselves for it). Actually, first comes the condition of being simple, then the heresy.”

“What do you mean?”

“You have a clear conception of the people of God. A great flock—good sheep and bad sheep—kept in order by mastiffs—the warriors, or the temporal power—the Emperor, and the overlords, under the guidance of the shepherds, the clerics, the interpreters of the divine word. The picture is straightforward.”

“But false. The shepherds fight with the dogs, because each covets the rights of the other.”

“True, and this is exactly what makes the nature of the flock unsure. Concerned as they are with tearing each other apart reciprocally, dogs and shepherds no longer tend the flock. A part of it is left outside.”

“What do you mean by outside?”

“On the margin. Peasants: only they are not really peasants, because they have no land, or what land they have does not feed them. And citizens: only they are not citizens, because they do not belong to a guild or a corporation; they are the little people, prey of anyone. Have you sometimes seen groups of lepers in the countryside?”

“Yes, once I saw a hundred together. Misshapen, their flesh decaying and all whitish, hobbling on their crutches, with swollen eyelids, bleeding eyes. They didn’t speak or shout; they twittered, like mice.”

“For the Christian people they are the others, those who remain on the fringe of the flock. The flock hates them, they hate the flock, who wish all lepers like them would die.”

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.

VESPERS

In which the abbot speaks again with the visitors, and William has some astounding ideas for deciphering the riddle of the labyrinth and succeeds in the most rational way. Then William and Adso eat cheese in batter.

The abbot was waiting for us with a grim, worried look. He was holding a paper in his hand.

“I have just received a letter from the abbot of Conques,” he said. “He discloses the name of the man to whom John has entrusted the command of the French soldiers and the responsibility for the safety of the legation. He is not a man of arms, he is not a man of the court, and he will be at the same time a member of the legation.”

“A rare combination of different qualities,” William said uneasily. “Who is it?”

“Bernard Gui, or Bernardo Guidoni, whichever you choose to call him.”

William made an ejaculation in his own language that I didn’t understand, nor did the abbot understand it, and perhaps it was best for us both, because the word William uttered had an obscene hissing sound.

“I don’t like this,” he added at once. “For years Bernard was the scourge of heretics in the Toulouse area, and he has written a Practica officii inquisitionis heretice pravitatis for the use of those who must persecute and destroy Waldensians, Beghards, Fraticelli, and Dolcinians.”

“I know. I am familiar with the book; remarkably learned.”

“Remarkably learned,” William conceded. “He’s devoted to John, who in recent years has assigned him many missions in Flanders and here in northern Italy. And even when he was named Bishop of Galicia, he was never seen in his diocese but continued his activity as inquisitor. I thought he had now retired to the bishopric of Lodéve, but apparently John is recalling him to duty, right here in northern Italy. But why Bernard, of all people, and why with a command of soldiers…?”

“There is an answer,” the abbot said, “and it confirms all the fears I expressed to you yesterday. You know well—even if you will not admit it to me—that the positions on the poverty of Christ and of the church sustained by the chapter of Perugia, though supported by an abundance of theological arguments, are the same ones that many heretical movements sustain, much less prudently and in a much less orthodox fashion. It does not take much to demonstrate that the positions of Michael of Cesena, espoused by the Emperor, are the same as those of Ubertino and Angelus Clarenus. And up to this point, the two legations will concur. But Gui could do more, and he has the skill: he will try to insist that the theses of Perugia are the same as those of the Fraticelli, or the Pseudo Apostles.

“This was foreseen. I mean, we knew that things would come to this, even without Bernard’s presence. At most Bernard will act more effectively than so many of those inept men of the curia, and the debate with him will necessarily be more subtle.”

“Yes,” the abbot said, “but at this point we come up against the question raised yesterday. If by tomorrow we have not discovered the person guilty of two, perhaps three, crimes, I must allow Bernard to exercise control over the abbey’s affairs. I cannot conceal from a man invested with the power Bernard will have (and because of our mutual agreement, we must not forget) that here in the abbey inexplicable events have taken place, are still taking place. Otherwise, the moment he finds out, the moment (God forbid) some new mysterious event happens, he will have every right to cry betrayal….”

“True,” William murmured, worried. “But there is nothing to be done. Perhaps it will be a good thing: Bernard occupied with the assassin will have less time to participate in the debate.”

“Bernard occupied with discovering the murderer will be a thorn in the side of my authority; remember that. This murky business obliges me for the first time to surrender a part of my power within these walls, and it is a new turn in the history not only of this abbey but of the Cluniac order itself. I would do anything to avoid it. Where is Berengar? What has happened to him? What are you doing?”

“I am only a monk who, a long time ago, conducted some effective inquisitorial investigations. You know that the truth is not to be found in two days. And after all, what power have you granted me? May I enter the library? May I ask all the questions I’d like, always supported by your authority?”

“I see no connection between the crimes and the library,” the abbot said angrily.

“Adelmo was an illuminator, Venantius a translator, Berengar the assistant librarian…” William explained patiently.

“In this sense all sixty monks have something to do with the library, as they have with the church. Why not investigate the church, then? Brother William, you are conducting an inquiry at my behest and within the limits I have established. For the rest, within this girdle of walls I am the only master after God, and by His grace. And this will hold true for Bernard as well. In any event,” he added, in a milder tone, “Bernard may not necessarily be coming here specifically for the meeting. The abbot of Conques writes me that the Pope has asked Cardinal Bertrand del Poggetto to come up from Bologna and assume command of the papal legation. Perhaps Bernard is coming here to meet the cardinal.”

“Which, in a broader perspective, would be worse. Bertrand is the scourge of heretics in central Italy. This encounter between the two champions of the battle against heretics may herald a vaster offensive in the country, eventually against the whole Franciscan movement….”

“And of this we will promptly inform the Emperor,” the abbot said, “but in this case the danger would not be immediate. We will be alert. Good-bye.”

William remained silent a moment as the abbot departed. Then he said to me: “First of all, Adso, we must try not to let ourselves be overcome by haste. Things cannot be solved rapidly when so many small, individual experiences have to be put together. I am going back to the laboratory, because in addition to keeping me from reading the manuscript, being without my lenses also makes it pointless for me to return tonight to the library.”

At that moment Nicholas of Morimondo came running toward us, bearer of very bad tidings. While he was trying to grind more finely the best lens, the one on which William had based such hope, it had broken. And another, which could perhaps have replaced it, had cracked as he was trying to insert it into the fork. Nicholas, disconsolately, pointed to the sky. It was already the hour of vespers, and darkness was falling. For that day no more work could be done. Another day lost, William acknowledged bitterly, suppressing (as he confessed to me afterward) the temptation to strangle the master glazier, though Nicholas was already sufficiently humiliated.

We left him to his humiliation and went to inquire about Berengar. Naturally, no one had found him.

We felt we had reached a dead end. We strolled awhile in the cloister, uncertain what to do next. But soon I saw William was lost in thought, staring into the air, as if he saw nothing. A bit earlier he had taken from his habit a twig of those herbs that I had seen him gather weeks before, and he was chewing it as if it gave him a kind of calm stimulus. In fact, he seemed absent, but every now and then his eyes brightened as if in the vacuum of his mind a new idea had kindled; then he would plunge once more into that singular and active hebetude of his. All of a sudden he said, “Of course, we could…”

“What?” I asked.

“I was thinking of a way to get our bearings in the labyrinth. It is not simple, but it would be effective…. After all, the exit is in the east tower: this we know. Now, suppose that we had a machine that tells us where north is. What would happen?

“Naturally, we would have only to turn to our right and we would be heading east. Or else it would suffice to go in the opposite direction and we would know we were going toward the south tower. But, even assuming such magic existed, the labyrinth is in fact a labyrinth, and as soon as we headed east we would come upon a wall that would prevent us from going straight, and we would lose our way again…” I observed.

“Yes, but the machine I am talking about would always point north, even if we had changed our route, and at every point it would tell us which way to turn.”

“It would be marvelous. But we would have to have this machine, and it would have to be able to recognize north at night and indoors, without being able to see the sun or the stars…. And I believe not even your Bacon possessed such a machine.” I laughed.

“But you are wrong,” William said, “because a machine of the sort has been constructed, and some navigators have used it. It doesn’t need the stars or the sun, because it exploits the power of a marvelous stone, like the one we saw in Severinus’s infirmary, the one that attracts iron. And it was studied by Bacon and by a Picard wizard, Pierre of Maricourt, who described its many uses.”

“But could you construct it?”

“In itself, that wouldn’t be difficult. The stone can be used to produce many wonders, including a machine that moves perpetually without any external power, but the simplest discovery was described also by an Arab, Baylek al-Qabayaki. Take a vessel filled with water and set afloat in it a cork into which you have stuck an iron needle. Then pass the magnetic stone over the surface of the water, until the needle has acquired the same properties as the stone. And at this point the needle—though the stone would also have done it if it had had the capacity to move around a pivot—will turn and point north, and if you move it with the vessel, it will always turn in the direction of the north wind. Obviously, if you bear north in mind and also mark on the edge of the vessel the positions of east, south, and west, you will always know which way to turn in the library to reach the east tower.”

“What a marvel!” I exclaimed. “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, ‘hie 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….”

“Let’s go, then, and take Severinus’s stone, and a vessel, and some water, and a cork…” I said, excited.

“Wait a moment,” William said. “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…. I’m afraid that wandering around the labyrinth with a lamp in one hand, a vessel full of water in the other … Wait, though! I have another idea. The machine would point north even if we were outside the labyrinth, would it not?”

“Yes, but at that point it would be of no use to us, because we would have the sun and the stars…” I said.

“I know, I know. But if the machine functions both indoors and outdoors, why should it not be the same with our heads?”

“Our heads? Of course, they also function outside, and in fact, on the outside we know quite well the layout of the Aedificium! But it is when we are inside that we become disoriented!”

“Precisely. But forget the machine for now. Thinking about the machine has led me to think about natural laws and the laws of thought. Here is the point: we must find, from the outside, a way of describing the Aedificium as it is inside….”

“But how?”

“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? Instead, you who have good eyes take a parchment, a tablet, something you can make signs on, and a stylus…. Good, you have it? Good for you, Adso. Let’s go and take a turn around the Aedificium, while we still have a bit of light.”

So we took a long turn around the Aedificium. That is, from the distance we examined the east, south, and west towers, with the walls connecting them. The rest rose over the cliff, though for reasons of symmetry it could not be very different from what we were seeing.

And what we saw, William observed as he made me take precise notes on my tablet, was that each wall had two windows, and each tower five.

“Now, think,” my master said to me. “Each room we saw had a window….”

“Except those with seven sides,” I said.

“And, naturally, they are the ones in the center of each tower.”

“And except some others that we found without windows but that were not heptagonal.”

“Forget them. First let us find the rule, then we will try to explain the exceptions. So: we will have on the outside five rooms for each tower and two rooms for each straight wall, each room with a window. But if from a room with a window we proceed toward the interior of the Aedificium, we meet another room with a window. A sign that there are internal windows. Now, what shape is the internal well, as seen from the kitchen and from the scriptorium?”

“Octagonal,” I said.

“Excellent. And on each side of the octagon there could easily be two windows. Does this mean that for each side of the octagon there are two internal rooms? Am I right?”

“Yes, but what about the windowless rooms?”

“There are eight in all. In fact, the internal room of every tower, with seven sides, has five walls that open each into one of the five rooms of the tower. What do the other two walls confine with? Not with rooms set along the outside walls, or there would be windows, and not with rooms along the octagon, for the same reason and because they would then be excessively long rooms. Try to draw a plan of how the library might look from above. You see that in each tower there must be two rooms that confine with the heptagonal room and open into two rooms that confine with the internal octagonal well.”

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!”

“And the four towers each have five rooms with four walls and one with seven…. The library is constructed according to a celestial harmony to which various and wonderful meanings can be attributed….”

“A splendid discovery,” I said, “but why is it so difficult to get our bearings?”

“Because what does not correspond to any mathematical law is the arrangement of the openings. Some rooms allow you to pass into several others, some into only one, and we must ask ourselves whether there are not rooms that do not allow you to go anywhere else. If you consider this aspect, plus the lack of light or of any clue that might be supplied by the position of the sun (and if you add the visions and the mirrors), you understand how the labyrinth can confuse anyone who goes through it, especially when he is already troubled by a sense of guilt. Remember, too, how desperate we were last night when we could no longer find our way. The maximum of confusion achieved with the maximum of order: it seems a sublime calculation. The builders of the library were great masters.”

“How will we orient ourselves, then?”

“At this point it isn’t difficult. With the map you’ve drawn, which should more or less correspond to the plan of the library, as soon as we are in the first heptagonal room we will move immediately to reach one of the blind rooms. Then, always turning right, after two or three rooms we should again be in a tower, which can only be the north tower, until we come to another blind room, on the left, which will confine with the heptagonal room, and on the right will allow us to rediscover a route similar to what I have just described, until we arrive at the west tower.”

“Yes, if all the rooms opened into all the other rooms…”

“In fact. And for this reason we’ll need your map, to mark the blank walls on it, so we’ll know what detours we’re making. But it won’t be difficult.”

“But are we sure it will work?” I asked, puzzled; it all seemed too simple to me.

“It will work,” William replied. “But unfortunately we don’t know everything yet. We have learned how to avoid being lost. Now we must know whether there is a rule governing the distribution of the books among the rooms. And the verses from the Apocalypse tell us very little, not least because many are repeated identically in different rooms….”

“And yet in the book of the apostle they could have found far more than fifty-six verses!”

“Undoubtedly. Therefore only certain verses are good. Strange. As if they had had fewer than fifty: thirty or twenty … Oh, by the beard of Merlin!”

“Of whom?”

“Pay no attention. A magician of my country … They used as many verses as there are letters in the alphabet! Of course, that’s it! The text of the verse doesn’t count, it’s the initial letters that count. Each room is marked by a letter of the alphabet, and all together they make up some text that we must discover!”

“Like a figured poem, in the form of a cross or a fish!”

“More or less, and probably in the period when the library was built, that kind of poem was much in vogue.”

“But where does the text begin?”

“With a scroll larger than the others, in the heptagonal room of the entrance tower … or else … Why, of course, with the sentences in red!”

“But there are so many of them!”

“And therefore there must be many texts, or many words. Now make a better and larger copy of your map; while we visit the library, you will mark down with your stylus the rooms we pass through, the positions of the doors and walls (as well as the windows), and also the first letters of the verses that appear there. And like a good illuminator, you will make the letters in red larger.”

“But how does it happen,” I said with admiration, “that you were able to solve the mystery of the library looking at it from the outside, and you were unable to solve it when you were inside?”

“Thus God knows the world, because He conceived it in His mind, as if from the outside, before it was created, and we do not know its rule, because we live inside it, having found it already made.”

“So one can know things by looking at them from the outside!”

“The creations of art, because we retrace in our minds the operations of the artificer. Not the creations of nature, because they are not the work of our minds.”

“But for the library this suffices, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” William said. “But only for the library. Now let’s go and rest. I can do nothing until tomorrow morning, when I will have, I hope, my lenses. We might as well sleep, and rise early. I will try to reflect.”

“And supper?”

“Ah, of course, supper. The hour has passed by now. The monks are already at compline. But perhaps the kitchen is still open. Go look for something.”

“And steal it?”

“Ask. Ask Salvatore, who is now your friend.”

“But he will steal!”

“Are you perhaps your brother’s keeper?” William asked, with the words of Cain. But I saw he was joking and meant to say that God is great and merciful. And so I went looking for Salvatore and found him near the horses’ stalls.

“A fine animal,” I said, nodding at Brunellus, as a way of starting a conversation. “I would like to ride him.”

“No se puede. Abbonis est. But you do not need a pulcher horse to ride hard….” He pointed out a sturdy but ill-favored horse. “That one also sufficit…. Vide illuc, tertius equi….”

He wanted to point out to me the third horse. I laughed at his comical Latin. “And what will you do with that one?” I asked him.

And he told me a strange story. He said that any horse, even the oldest and weakest animal, could be made as swift as Brunellus. You had only to mix into his oats an herb called satirion, chopped fine, and then grease his thighs with stag fat. Then you mount the horse, and before spurring him you turn his face eastward and you whisper into his ear, three times, the words: “Nicander, Melchior, and Merchizard.” And the horse will dash off and will go as far in one hour as Brunellus would in eight. And if you hang around his neck the teeth of a wolf that the horse himself has trampled and killed, the animal will not even feel the effort.

I asked him whether he had ever tried this. He said to me, coming closer circumspectly and whispering into my ear with his really foul breath, that it was very difficult, because satirion was now cultivated only by bishops and by their lordly friends, who used it to increase their power. Then I put an end to his talk and told him that this evening my master wanted to read certain books in his cell and wished to eat up there.

“I will do,” he said, “I will do cheese in batter.”

“How is that made?”

“Facilis. You take the cheese before it is too antiquum, without too much salis, and cut in cubes or sicut you like. And postea you put a bit of butierro or lardo to rechauffer over the embers. And in it you put two pieces of cheese, and when it becomes tenero, zucharum et cinnamon supra positurum du bis. And immediately take to table, because it must be ate caldo caldo.”

“Cheese in batter it is, then,” I said to him. And he vanished toward the kitchen, telling me to wait for him. He arrived half an hour later with a dish covered by a cloth. The aroma was good.

“Here,” he said to me, and he also held out a great lamp filled with oil.

“What for?” I asked.

“Sais pas, moi,” he said, slyly. “Peut-être your magister wants to go in dark place esta noche.”

Salvatore apparently knew more things than I had suspected. I inquired no further, but took the food to William. We ate, and I withdrew to my cell. Or at least, so I implied. I wanted to find Ubertino again, and stealthily I returned to the church.

AFTER COMPLINE

In which Ubertino tells Adso the story of Fra Dolcino, after which Adso recalls other stories or reads them on his own in the library, and then he has an encounter with a maiden, beautiful and terrible as an army arrayed for battle.

I found Ubertino at the statue of the Virgin. Silently I joined him and for a while pretended (I confess) to pray. Then I made bold to speak to him.

“Holy Father,” I said to him, “may I ask enlightenment and counsel of you?”

Ubertino looked at me and, taking me by the hand, rose and led me to a bench, where we both sat. He embraced me tightly, and I could feel his breath on my face.

“Dearest son,” he said, “anything this poor sinner can do for your soul will be done joyfully. What is distressing you? Yearnings?” he asked, almost with yearning himself. “The yearnings of the flesh?”

“No,” I replied, blushing, “if anything the yearnings of the mind, which wants to know too many things…”

“And that is bad. The Lord knows all things, and we must only adore His knowledge.”

“But we must also distinguish good from evil and understand human passions. I am a novice, but I will be monk and priest, and I must learn where evil lies, and what it looks like, in order to recognize it one day and teach others to recognize it.”

“This is true, my boy. What do you want to know, then?”

“The tare of heresy, Father,” I said with conviction. And then, all in one breath, “I have heard tell of a wicked man who has led others astray: Fra Dolcino.”

Ubertino remained silent, then he said: “That is right, you heard Brother William and me refer to him the other evening. But it is a nasty story, and it grieves me to talk about it, because it teaches (yes, in this sense you should know it, to derive a useful lesson from it)—because, I was saying, it teaches how the love of penance and the desire to purify the world can produce bloodshed and slaughter.” He shifted his position on the bench, relaxing his grasp of my shoulders but still keeping one hand on my neck, as if to communicate to me his knowledge or (I could not tell) his intensity.

“The story begins before Fra Dolcino,” he said, “more than sixty years ago, when I was a child. It was in Parma. There a certain Gherardo Segarelli began preaching, exhorting all to a life of penitence, and he would go along the roads crying ‘Penitenziagite!’ which was the uneducated man’s way of saying ‘Penitentiam agite, appropinquabit enim regnum coelorum.’ He enjoined his disciples to imitate the apostles, and he chose to call his sect the order of the Apostles, and his men were to go through the world like poor beggars, living only on alms….”

“Like the Fraticelli,” I said. “Wasn’t this the command of our Lord and of your own Francis?”

“Yes,” Ubertino admitted with a slight hesitation in his voice, sighing. “But perhaps Gherardo exaggerated. He and his followers were accused of denying the authority of the priests and the celebration of Mass and confession, and of being idle vagabonds.”

“But the Spiritual Franciscans were accused of the same thing. And aren’t the Minorites saying today that the authority of the Pope should not be recognized?”

“Yes, but not the authority of priests. We Minorites are ourselves priests. It is difficult, boy, to make distinctions in these things. The line dividing good from evil is so fine…. In some way Gherardo erred and became guilty of heresy…. He asked to be admitted to the order of the Minorites, but our brothers would not receive him. He spent his days in the church of our brothers, and he saw the paintings there of the apostles wearing sandals on their feet and cloaks wrapped around their shoulders, and so he let his hair and beard grow, put sandals on his feet, and wore the rope of the Friars Minor, because anyone who wants to found a new congregation always takes something from the order of the Blessed Francis.”

“Then he was in the right….”

“But somewhere he did wrong…. Dressed in a white cloak over a white tunic, with his hair long, he acquired among simple people the reputation for saintliness. He sold a little house of his, and having received the money, he stood on a stone from which in ancient times the magistrates were accustomed to harangue, and he held the little sack of gold pieces in his hand, and he did not scatter them or give them to the poor, but, after summoning some rogues dicing nearby, he flung the money in their midst and said, ‘Let him take who will,’ and those rogues took the money and went off to gamble it away, and they blasphemed the living God, and he who had given to them heard and did not blush.”

“But Francis also stripped himself of everything, and today from William I heard that he went to preach to ravens and hawks, as well as to the lepers—namely, to the dregs that the people who call themselves virtuous had cast out….”

“Yes, but Gherardo somehow erred; Francis never set himself in conflict with the holy church, and the Gospel says to give to the poor, not to rogues. Gherardo gave and received nothing in return because he had given to bad people, and he had a bad beginning, a bad continuation, and a bad end, because his congregation was disapproved by Pope Gregory the Tenth.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “he was a less broad-minded pope than the one who approved the Rule of Francis….”

“He was, but Gherardo somehow erred, and Francis, on the contrary, knew well what he was doing. And finally, boy, these keepers of pigs and cows who suddenly became Pseudo Apostles wanted to live blissfully and without sweat off the alms of those whom the Friars Minor had educated with such efforts and such heroic examples of poverty! But that is not the point,” he added promptly. “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…. But Gherardo did still worse: he went about collecting the simple people and saying, ‘Come with me into the vineyard,’ and those who did not know him went with him into another’s vineyard, believing it his, and they ate another’s grapes….”

“Surely the Minorites didn’t defend private property,” I said impertinently.

Ubertino stared at me severely. “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. And so it happened to Gherardo. 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…. And then they began to brawl among themselves over the command of the sect, and evil things happened. And yet many came to Gherardo, not only peasants but also people of the city, members of the guilds, and Gherardo made them strip themselves so that, naked, they could follow the naked Christ, and he sent them out into the world to preach, but he had a sleeveless tunic made for himself, white, of strong stuff, and in this garb he looked more like a clown than like a religious! They lived in the open air, but sometimes they climbed into the pulpits of the churches, disturbing the assembly of devout folk and driving out their preachers, and once they set a child on the bishop’s throne in the Church of Sant’Orso in Ravenna. And they proclaimed themselves heirs of the doctrine of Joachim of Floris….”

“But so do the Franciscans,” I said, “and also Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, and you, too!” I cried.

“Calm yourself, boy. Joachim of Floris was a great prophet and he was the first to understand that Francis would begin a renewal of the church. But the Pseudo Apostles used his doctrine to justify their follies. Segarelli took with him a female apostle, one Tripia or Ripia, who claimed to have the gift of prophecy. A woman, you understand?”

“But, Father,” I tried to counter, “the other evening you yourself spoke of the saintliness of Clare of Montefalco and Angela of Foligno….”

“They were saints! They lived in humility, recognizing the power of the church; they never claimed the gift of prophecy! But the Pseudo Apostles asserted that women could go preaching from city to city, as many other heretics also said. And they recognized no difference among the wed and the unwed, nor was any vow considered perpetual. In short, not to weary you too much with very sad stories whose subtleties you cannot understand well, Bishop Obizzo of Parma finally decided to put Gherardo in irons. But here a strange thing happened that tells you how weak is human nature, and how insidious the weed of heresy. Because in the end the bishop freed Gherardo and received him at his own table, and laughed at his japes, and kept him as his buffoon.”

“But why?”

“I do not know—or, rather, I fear I do know. The bishop was a nobleman and did not like the merchants and craftsmen of the city. Perhaps he did not mind Gherardo’s preaching against them with his talk of poverty, or did not care that from begging for alms Gherardo proceeded to robbery. But in the end the Pope intervened, and the bishop resumed his proper severity, and Gherardo ended on the pyre as an impenitent heretic. It was at the beginning of this century.”

“And what do these things have to do with Fra Dolcino?”

“They are connected, and this shows you how heresy survives even the destruction of the heretics. This Dolcino was a priest’s bastard, living in the Novara diocese, this part of Italy, a bit farther north. He was a youth of sharp mind and he was educated in letters, but he stole from the priest who housed him and fled eastward, to the city of Trent. And there he resumed the preaching of Gherardo, but in a more heretical vein, declaring that he was the only true apostle of God and that everything should be common in love, and that it was licit to lie indiscriminately with all women, whereby no one could be accused of concubinage, even if he went with both a wife and a daughter….”

“Did he truly preach those things, or was he just accused of preaching them? I have heard that the Spirituals, like those monks of Montefalco, were accused of similar crimes….”

“De hoc satis,” Ubertino interrupted me sharply. “They were no longer monks. They were heretics. And befouled by Fra Dolcino himself. And, furthermore, listen to me: it is enough to know what Fra Dolcino did afterward to call him a wicked man. How he became familiar with the Pseudo Apostles’ teachings, I do not even know. Perhaps he went through Parma as a youth and heard Gherardo. It is known that in the Bologna region he kept in touch with those heretics after Segarelli’s death. And it is known for certain that he began his preaching at Trent. There he seduced a very beautiful maiden of noble family, Margaret, or she seduced him, as Hélodïse seduced Abelard, because—never forget—it is through woman that the Devil penetrates men’s hearts! At that point, the Bishop of Trent drove him from the diocese, but by then Dolcino had gathered more than a thousand followers, and he began a long march, which took him back to the area where he was born. And along the way other deluded folk joined him, seduced by his words, and perhaps he was also joined by many Waldensian heretics who lived in the mountains he passed through, or he himself wanted to join the Waldensians of these lands to the north. When he reached the Novara region, Dolcino found a situation favorable to his revolt, because the vassals governing the town of Gattinara in the name of the Bishop of Vercelli had been driven out by the populace, who then welcomed Dolcino’s outlaws as their worthy allies.”

“What had the bishop’s vassals done?”

“I do not know, and it is not my place to judge. But as you see, heresy in many cases is wed to the revolt against overlords, and this is why the heretic begins by preaching Madonna Poverty and then falls prey to all the temptations of power, war, violence. There was a conflict among certain families in the city of Vercelli, and the Pseudo Apostles took advantage of it, and these families exploited the disorder brought by the Pseudo Apostles. The feudal lords hired mercenaries to rob the citizens, and the citizens sought the protection of the Bishop of Novara.”

“What a complicated story. But whose side was Dolcino on?”

“I do not know; he was a faction unto himself; he entered into all these disputes and saw them as an opportunity for preaching the struggle against private ownership in the name of poverty. Dolcino and his followers, who were now three thousand strong, camped on a hill near Novara known as Bald Mountain, and they built hovels and fortifications, and Dolcino ruled over that whole throng of men and women, who lived in the most shameful promiscuity. From there he sent letters to his faithful in which he expounded his heretical doctrine. He said and he wrote that their ideal was poverty and they were not bound by any vow of external obedience, and that he, Dolcino, had been sent by God to break the seals of the prophecies and to understand the writings of the Old and the New Testaments. And he called secular clerics—preachers and Minorites—ministers of the Devil, and he absolved everyone from the duty of obeying them. 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.”

“Then Dolcino was preaching the things that the Franciscans had preached, and among the Franciscans, the Spirituals in particular, and you yourself, Father!”

“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, nuns, religious male and female, all those who belong to the preaching orders and the Minorites, the 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, though he is now Louis, destroy the temporal power of the Pope and the cardinals?”

“It is characteristic of heresy, or of madness, that it transforms the most upright thoughts and aims them at consequences contrary to the law of God and man. 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. But I was beginning to wonder, especially after that afternoon’s conversation with William, if it were possible for the simple people who followed Dolcino to distinguish between the promises of the Spirituals and Dolcino’s enactment of them. Was he not perhaps guilty of putting into practice what presumably orthodox men had preached, in a purely mystical fashion? Or was that perhaps where the difference lay? Did holiness consist in waiting for God to give us what His saints had promised, without trying to obtain it through earthly means? Now I know this is the case and I know why Dolcino was in error: the order of things must not be transformed, even if we must fervently hope for its transformation. But that evening I was in the grip of contradictory thoughts.

“Finally,” Ubertino was saying to me, “you always find the mark of heresy in pride. In a second letter, in the year 1303, Dolcino appointed himself supreme head of the Apostolic congregation, and named as his lieutenants the perfidious Margaret—a woman—and Longinus of Bergamo, Frederick of Novara, Albert Carentinus, and Walderic of Brescia. And he began raving about a sequence of future popes, two good—the first and the last—and two wicked, the second and the third. The first is Celestine, the second is Boniface the Eighth, of whom the prophets say, ‘The pride of your heart has dishonored you, O you who live in the fissures of cliffs.’ The third Pope is not named, but of him Jeremiah is supposed to have said, ‘There, like a lion.’ And—infamy!—Dolcino recognized the lion in Frederick of Sicily. For Dolcino the fourth Pope was still unknown, and he was to be the Sainted Pope, the Angelic Pope of whom the abbot Joachim spoke. He would be chosen by God, and then Dolcino and all his people (who at this point were already four thousand) would receive together the grace of the Holy Spirit, and it would renew the church until the end of the world. But in the three years preceding his coming, all evil would have to be consummated. And this Dolcino tried to do, carrying war everywhere. And the fourth Pope, and here you see how the Devil mocks his familiars, was in fact Clement the Fifth, who proclaimed the crusade against Dolcino. And it was right, because in his letters at this point Dolcino sustained theories that could not be reconciled with orthodoxy. He declared the Roman church a whore, said that obedience is not due priests, that all spiritual power had now passed to the sect of the Apostles, that only the Apostles represented the new church, the Apostles could annul matrimony, no one would be saved unless he was a member of the sect, no pope could absolve sin, tithes should not be paid, a more perfect life was lived without vows than with vows, and a consecrated church was worthless for prayer, no better than a stable, and Christ could be worshiped both in the woods and in the churches.”

“Did he really say these things?”

“Of course, this is certain. He wrote them. But unfortunately he did still worse. After he had settled on Bald Mountain, he began sacking the villages in the valley, raiding them to procure provisions—waging outright war, in short, against the nearby towns.”

“Were all opposed to him?”

“We do not know. Perhaps he received support from some; I told you that he had involved himself in the snarled knot of local dissensions. Meanwhile winter had come, the winter of the year 1305, one of the harshest in recent decades, and there was great famine all around. Dolcino sent a third letter to his followers, and many more joined him, but on that hill life had become intolerable, and they grew so hungry that they ate the flesh of horses and other animals, and boiled hay. And many died.”

“But whom were they fighting against now?”

“The Bishop of Vercelli had appealed to Clement the Fifth, and a crusade had been called against the heretics. A plenary indulgence was granted to anyone taking part in it, and Louis of Savoy, the inquisitors of Lombardy, the Archbishop of Milan were prompt to act. Many took up the cross to aid the people of Vercelli and Novara, even from Savoy, Provence, France; and the Bishop of Vercelli was the supreme commander. There were constant clashes between the vanguards of the two armies, but Dolcino’s fortifications were impregnable, and somehow the wicked received help.”

“From whom?”

“From other wicked men, I believe, who were happy to foment this disorder. Toward the end of the year 1305, the heresiarch was forced, however, to abandon Bald Mountain, leaving behind the wounded and ill, and he moved into the territory of Trivero, where he entrenched himself on a mountain that was called Zubello at the time and later was known as Rubello or Rebello, because it had become the fortress of the rebels of the church. In any case, I cannot tell you everything that happened. There were terrible massacres, but in the end the rebels were forced to surrender, Dolcino and his people were captured, and they rightly ended up on the pyre.”

“The beautiful Margaret, too?”

Ubertino looked at me. “So you remembered she was beautiful? She was beautiful, they say, and many local lords tried to make her their bride to save her from the stake. But she would not have it; she died impenitent with her impenitent lover. And let this be a lesson to you: beware of the whore of Babylon, even when she assumes the form of the most exquisite creature.”

“But now tell me, Father: I have learned that the cellarer of the convent, and perhaps also Salvatore, met Dolcino and were with him in some way….”

“Be silent! Do not utter rash statements. I found the cellarer in a convent of Minorites. I do not know where Remigio had been before that. I know he was always a good monk, at least from the standpoint of orthodoxy. As for the rest, alas, the flesh is weak….”

“What do you mean?”

“These are not things you should know.” He drew me close again, embracing me and pointing to the statue of the Virgin. “You must be introduced to the immaculate love. There is she in whom femininity is sublimated. This is why you may call her beautiful, like the beloved in the Song of Songs. In her,” he said, his face carried away by an inner rapture, like the abbot’s the day before when he spoke of gems and the gold of his vessels, “in her, even the body’s grace is a sign of the beauties of heaven, and this is why the sculptor has portrayed her with all the graces that should adorn a woman.” He pointed to the Virgin’s slender bust, held high and tight by a cross-laced bodice, which the Child’s tiny hands fondled. “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…. What do you feel before this sweetest of visions?”

I blushed violently, feeling myself stirred as if by an inner fire. Ubertino must have realized it, or perhaps he glimpsed my flushed cheeks, for he promptly added, “But you must learn to distinguish the fire of supernatural love from the raving of the senses. It is difficult even for the saints.”

“But how can the good love be recognized?” I asked, trembling.

“What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man nor Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing. Nothing exists that so fills and binds the heart as love does. Therefore, unless you have those weapons that subdue it, the soul plunges through love into an immense abyss. And I believe that without Margaret’s seductions Dolcino would not have damned himself, and without the reckless and promiscuous life on Bald Mountain, fewer would have felt the lure of his rebellion. Mind you, I do not say these things to you only about evil love, which of course all must shun as a thing of the Devil; 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. Oh, love has various properties: first the soul grows tender, then it sickens … but then it feels the true warmth of divine love and cries out and moans and becomes as stone flung in the forge to melt into lime, and it crackles, licked by the flame….”

“And this is good love?”

Ubertino stroked my head, and as I looked at him, I saw his eyes melt with tears. “Yes, this, finally, is good love.” He took his hand from my shoulder. “But how difficult it is,” he added, “how difficult it is to distinguish it from the other. And sometimes when devils tempt your soul you feel like the man hanged by the neck who, with his hands tied behind him and his eyes blindfolded, remains hanging on the gallows and yet lives, with no help, no support, no remedy, swinging in the empty air….”

His face was bathed not only with tears but also by a faint perspiration. “Go now,” he said to me quickly. “I have told you what you wanted to know. On this side the choir of angels; on that, the gaping maw of hell. Go, and the Lord be praised.” He prostrated himself again before the Virgin, and I heard him sobbing softly. He was praying.

I did not leave the church. The talk with Ubertino had kindled in my spirit, and in my viscera, a strange fire and an unspeakable restlessness. Perhaps for this reason, I felt inclined to disobedience and decided to return to the library alone. I myself didn’t know what I was looking for. I wanted to explore an unknown place on my own; I was fascinated by the idea of being able to orient myself there without my master’s help. I climbed the stairs as Dolcino had climbed up Monte Rubello.

I had the lamp with me (why had I brought it—was I perhaps already harboring this secret plan?) and I entered the ossarium almost with my eyes closed. In no time I was in the scriptorium.

It was a fatal evening, I believe, because as I was wandering among the desks, I glimpsed one on which lay an open manuscript that a monk had been copying: Historia fratris Dulcini Heresiarche. I believe it was the desk of Peter of Sant’Albano, who I had been told was writing a monumental history of heresy (after what happened in the abbey, he naturally gave up writing it—but we must not get ahead of the story). So it was therefore normal that the text should be there, and with it others on kindred subjects, on the Patarines and the flagellants. But I took this circumstance as a supernatural sign, whether celestial or diabolical I still cannot say, and I bent eagerly to read the writing. It was not very long, and I found there also what Ubertino had not told me, obviously recounted by one who had seen all and whose imagination was still inflamed by it.

I learned then how, in March of 1307, on Holy Saturday, Dolcino, Margaret, and Longinus, captured at last, were taken into the city of Biella and handed over to the bishop, who was awaiting the decision of the Pope. The Pope, hearing the news, transmitted it to King Philip of France, writing: “We have received most welcome news, rich in joy and exultation, for that pestiferous demon, son of Belial, the most horrendous heresiarch Dolcino, after many dangers, long efforts, massacres, and frequent battles, is finally incarcerated with his followers in our prisons, thanks to our venerated brother Ranier, Bishop of Vercelli, captured on the day of the Lord’s holy supper; and numerous people who were with him, infected by the contagion, were killed that same day.” The Pope was merciless toward the prisoners and ordered the bishop to put them to death. Then, in July of that same year, the first day of the month, the heretics were handed over to the secular arm. As the bells of the city rang joyously, the heretics were placed in a wagon, surrounded by the executioners, followed by the militia, and carried through the entire city, and at every corner, men with red-hot pincers tore the flesh of the guilty. Margaret was burned first, before Dolcino, who did not move a muscle of his face, just as he had not uttered a moan when the pincers bit into his limbs. Then the wagon continued on its way, while the executioners thrust their irons into pots filled with glowing coals. Dolcino underwent other torments and remained silent, though when they amputated his nose he shrugged a bit, and when they tore off his male member he emitted a long sigh, like a groan. The last things he said sounded impertinent, for he warned that he would rise on the third day. Then he was burned and his ashes were scattered in the wind.

I folded the manuscript with trembling hands. Dolcino had committed many crimes, I had been told, but he had been horribly burned to death. And at the stake he had behaved … how? With the steadfastness of martyrs or with the arrogance of the damned? As I staggered up the steps to the library, I realized why I was so upset. I suddenly recalled a scene I had witnessed not many months before, shortly after my arrival in Tuscany. I wondered, indeed, why I had almost forgotten it till then, as if my sick soul had wanted to erase a memory that weighed on me like a nightmare. Or, rather, I had not forgotten it, because every time I heard the Fraticelli discussed, I saw again the scenes of that event, but I immediately thrust them down into the recesses of my spirit, as if witnessing that horror had been a sin.

I had first heard talk of the Fraticelli in the days when, in Florence, I had seen one burned at the stake. It was shortly before I met Brother William in Pisa. He had delayed his arrival in that city, and my father had given me leave to visit Florence, whose churches I had heard praised as most beautiful. I wandered about Tuscany, to learn better the vulgar Italian tongue, and I finally stayed a week in Florence, because I had heard much talk of that city and wished to know it.

And so it was that when I had barely arrived I learned of a great trial that was stirring up the whole city. A heretic Fraticello, accused of crimes against religion and haled before the bishop and other ecclesiastics, was being subjected to severe inquisition at the time. And, following those who told me about it, I went to the place where the trial was taking place, for I heard the people say that this friar, Michael by name, was truly a very pious man who had preached penance and poverty, repeating the words of Saint Francis, and had been brought before the judges because of the spitefulness of certain women who, pretending to confess themselves to him, had then attributed heretical notions to him; 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 info due consideration, and perhaps there was some truth in the popular belief that held them to be not only heretics but also of dubious behavior (as it was always said of the Catharists that they were Bulgars and sodomites).

I came to the Church of San Salvatore, where the inquisition was in progress, but I could not enter, because of the great crowd outside it. However, some had hoisted themselves to the bars of the windows and, clinging there, could see and hear what was going on, and they reported it to those below. The inquisitors were reading to Brother Michael the confession he had made the day before, in which he said that Christ and his apostles “held nothing individually or in common as property,” but Michael protested that the notary had now added “many false consequences” and he shouted (this I heard from outside), “You will have to defend yourselves on the day of judgment!” But the inquisitors read the confession as they had drawn it up, and at the end they asked him whether he wanted humbly to follow the opinions of the church and all the people of the city. And I heard Michael shouting in a loud voice that he wanted to follow what he believed, namely that he “wanted to keep Christ poor and crucified, and Pope John XXII was a heretic because he said the opposite.” A great debate ensued, in which the inquisitors, many of them Franciscans, sought to make him understand that the Scriptures had not said what he was saying, and he accused them of denying the very Rule of their order, and they assailed him, asking him whether he thought he understood Scripture better than they, who were masters. And Fra Michael, very stubborn indeed, contested them, so that they began provoking him with such assertions as “Then we want you to consider Christ a property owner and Pope John a Catholic and holy man.” And Michael, never faltering, said, “No, a heretic.” And they said they had never seen anyone so tenacious in his own wickedness. But among the crowd outside the building I heard many compare him to Christ before the Pharisees, and I realized that among the people many believed in the holiness of the friar Michael.

Finally the bishop’s men took him back to prison in irons. And that evening I was told that many monks, friends of the bishop, had gone to insult him and enjoin him to retract, but he answered like a man sure of his own truth. And he repeated to each of them that Christ was poor and that Saint Francis and Saint Dominic had said so as well, and that if for professing this upright opinion he had to be condemned to the stake, so much the better, because in a short time he would be able to see what the Scriptures describe, the twenty-four elders of the Apocalypse and Jesus Christ and Saint Francis and the glorious martyrs. And I was told that he said, “If we read with such fervor the doctrine of certain sainted abbots, how much greater should be our fervor and our joy in desiring to be in their midst?” And after words of this sort, the inquisitors left the prison with grim faces, crying out in indignation (and I heard them), “He has a devil in him!”

The next day we learned that the sentence had been pronounced; I went to the bishop’s palace, where I could see the parchment, and I copied a part of it onto my tablet.

It began “In nomine Domini amen. Hec est quedam condemnatio corporalis et sententia condemnationis corporalis lata, data et in hiis scriptis sententialiter pronumptiata et promulgata…,” etc., and it went on with a stern description of the sins and crimes of the said Michael; among these one seemed to me most foul, even if I do not know (considering the conduct of the trial) whether he really affirmed this, but it was said, in short, that the afore-mentioned Minorite had proclaimed that Saint Thomas Aquinas was not a saint nor did he enjoy eternal salvation, but was, on the contrary, damned and in a state of perdition! And the sentence concluded, establishing the punishment, since the accused would not mend his ways:

Idcirco, dictum Johannem vocatum fratrem Micchaelem hereticum et scismaticum quod ducatur ad locum iustitie consuetum, et ibidem igne et flammis igneis accensis concremetur et comburatur, ita quod penitus moriatur et anima a corpore separetur.

And after the sentence had been made public, more men of the church came to the prison and warned Michael of what would happen, and I heard them say then, “Brother Michael, the miters and copes have already been made, and painted on them are Fraticelli accompanied by devils.” To frighten him and force him finally to retract. But Brother Michael knelt down and said, “I believe that beside the pyre there will be our father Francis, and I further believe there will be Jesus and the apostles, and the glorious martyrs Bartholomew and Anthony.” Which was a way of refusing for the last time the inquisitors’ offers.

The next morning I, too, was on the bridge before the bishop’s palace, where the inquisitors had gathered; Brother Michael, still in irons, was brought to face them. One of his faithful followers knelt before him to receive his benediction, and this follower was seized by the men-at-arms and taken at once to prison. Afterward, the inquisitors again read the sentence to the condemned man and asked him once more whether he wished to repent. At every point where the sentence said he was a heretic Michael replied, “I am no heretic; a sinner, yes, but Catholic,” and when the text named “the most venerable and holy Pope John XXII” Michael answered, “No, a heretic.” Then the bishop ordered Michael to come and kneel before him, and Michael said no one should kneel before heretics. They forced him to his knees and he murmured, “God will pardon me.” And after he had been led out in all his priestly vestments, a ritual began, and one by one his vestments were stripped away until he remained in that little garment that the Florentines call a “cioppa.” And as is the custom when a priest is defrocked, they seared the pads of his fingers with a hot iron and they shaved his head. Then he was handed over to the captain and his men, who treated him very harshly and put him in irons, to take him back to prison, as he said to the crowd, “Per Dominum moriemur.” He was to be burned, as I found out, only the next day. And on this day they also went to ask him whether he wished to confess himself and receive communion. And he refused, saying it was a sin to accept the sacraments from one in a state of sin. Here, I believe, he was wrong, and he showed he had been corrupted by the heresy of the Patarines.

Finally it was the day of the execution, and a gonfalonier came for him, appearing friendly, for he asked what sort of man Michael was and why he was so stubborn when he had only to affirm what the whole populace affirmed and accept the opinion of Holy Mother Church. But Michael, very harshly, said, “I believe in Christ poor and crucified.” And the gonfalonier went away, making a helpless gesture. Then the captain arrived with his men and took Michael into the courtyard, where the bishop’s vicar reread the confession and the sentence to him. Michael interrupted again to contest opinions falsely attributed to him; these truly were matters of such subtlety that I do not recall them, and at that time did not understand them clearly. But these were surely what decided the death of Michael and the persecution of the Fraticelli. I did not understand why the men of the church and of the secular arm were so violent against people who wanted to live in poverty and held that Christ had not owned worldly goods. Because, I said to myself, if anything, they should fear men who wish to live in wealth and take money away from others, and lead the church into sin and introduce simoniacal practices into it. And I spoke of this with a man standing near me, for I could not keep silent any more. He smiled mockingly and said to me that a monk who practices poverty sets a bad example for the populace, for then they cannot accept monks who do not practice it. And, he added, the preaching of poverty put the wrong ideas into the heads of the people, who would consider their poverty a source of pride, and pride can lead to many proud acts. And, finally, he said that I should know, thanks to some syllogism which was not clear to him, either, that preaching poverty for monks put you on the side of the Emperor, and this did not please the Pope. All excellent reasons, they seemed to me, even if expounded by a man of scant learning, except that at this point I did not understand why Brother Michael wanted to die so horribly to please the Emperor, or to settle a controversy among religious orders. And in fact some of those present were saying, “He is not a saint, he was sent by Louis to stir up discord among the citizens, and the Fraticelli are Tuscans but behind them are the Emperor’s agents.” And others said, “He is a madman, he is possessed by the Devil, swollen with pride, and he enjoys martyrdom for his wicked pride; they make these monks read too many lives of the saints, it would be better for them to take a wife!” And still others added, “No, all Christians should be like him, ready to proclaim their faith, as in the time of the pagans.” As I listened to those voices, no longer knowing what to think myself, it so happened that I looked straight at the condemned man’s face, which at times was hidden by the crowd ahead of me. And I saw the face of a man looking at something that is not of this earth, as I had sometimes seen on statues of saints in ecstatic vision. And I understood that, madman or seer as he might be, he knowingly wanted to die because he believed that in dying he would defeat his enemy, whoever it was. And I understood that his example would lead others to death. And I remain amazed by the possessors of such steadfastness only because I do not know, even today, whether what prevails in them is a proud love of the truth they believe, which leads them to death, or a proud desire for death, which leads them to proclaim their truth, whatever it may be. And I am overwhelmed with admiration and fear.

But let us go back to the execution, for now all were heading for the place where Michael would be put to death.

The captain and his men brought him out of the gate, with his little skirt on him and some of the buttons undone, and as he walked with a broad stride and a bowed head, reciting his office, he seemed one of the martyrs. And the crowd was unbelievably large and many cried, “Do not die!” and he would answer, “I want to die for Christ.” “But you are not dying for Christ,” they said to him; and he said, “No, for the truth.” When they came to a place called the Proconsul’s Corner, one man cried to him to pray to God for them all, and he blessed the crowd.

At the Church of the Baptist they shouted to him, “Save your life!” and he answered, “Run for your life from sin!”; at the Old Market they shouted to him, “Live, live!” and he replied, “Save yourselves from hell”; at the New Market they yelled, “Repent, repent,” and he replied, “Repent of your usury.” And on reaching Santa Croce, he saw the monks of his order on the steps, and he reproached them because they did not follow the Rule of Saint Francis. And some of them shrugged, but others pulled their cowls over their faces to cover them, in shame.

And going toward the Justice Gate, many said to him, “Recant! Recant! Don’t insist on dying,” and he said, “Christ died for us.” And they said, “But you are not Christ, you must not die for us!” And he said, “But I want to die for him.” At the Field of Justice, one said to him he should do as a certain monk, his superior, had done, abjuring; but Michael answered that he would not abjure, and I saw many in the crowd agree and urge Michael to be strong: so I and many others realized those were his followers, and we moved away from them.

Finally we were outside the city and before us the pyre appeared, the “hut,” as they called it there, because the wood was arranged in the form of a hut, and there a circle of armed horsemen formed, to keep people from coming too close. And there they bound Brother Michael to the stake. And again I heard someone shout to him, “But what is it you’re dying for?” And he answered, “For a truth that dwells in me, which I can proclaim only by death.” They set fire to the wood. And Brother Michael, who had chanted the “Credo,” afterward chanted the “Te Deum.” He sang perhaps eight verses of it, then he bent over as if he had to sneeze, and fell to the ground, because his bonds had burned away. He was already dead: before the body is completely burned it has already died from the great heat, which makes the heart explode, and from the smoke that fills the chest.

Then the hut burned entirely, like a torch, and there was a great glow, and if it had not been for the poor charred body of Michael, still glimpsed among the glowing coals, I would have said I was standing before the burning bush. And I was close enough to have a view (I recalled as I climbed the steps of the library) that made some words rise spontaneously to my lips, about ecstatic rapture; I had read them in the books of Saint Hildegard: “The flame consists of a splendid clarity, of an unusual vigor, and of an igneous ardor, but possesses the splendid clarity that it may illuminate and the igneous ardor that it may burn.”

I remembered some words of Ubertino about love. The image of Michael on the pyre became confused with that of Dolcino, and that of Dolcino with that of the beautiful Margaret. I felt again the restlessness that had seized me in church.

I tried not to think about it and headed straight for the labyrinth.

This was the first time I entered it alone; the long shadows cast by the lamp on the floor terrified me as much as had the visions the previous night. At every moment I feared I would find myself before another mirror, because the magic of mirrors is such that even when you know they are mirrors they still upset you.

On the other hand, I did not try to orient myself, or to avoid the room with the perfumes that induce visions. I proceeded as if in the grip of a fever, nor did I know where I wanted to go. In fact, I did not move far from my starting point, because a short time later I found myself again in the heptagonal room by which I had entered. Here, on a table, some books were laid out that I did not seem to have seen the night before. I guessed they were works that Malachi had withdrawn from the scriptorium and had not yet replaced on their proper shelves. I could not comprehend how far I was from the perfume room, because I felt dazed, which could be the effect of some effluvium that reached even that spot, or else of the things I had been pondering until then. I opened a richly illuminated volume that, by its style, seemed to me to come from the monasteries of Ultima Thule.

On a page where the holy Gospel of the apostle Mark began, I was struck by the image of a lion. I was certain it was a lion, even though I had never seen one in the flesh, and the artist had reproduced its features faithfully, inspired perhaps by the sight of the lions of Hibernia, land of monstrous creatures, and I was convinced that this animal, as for that matter the Physiologus says, concentrates in itself all the characteristics of the things at once most horrible and most regal. So that image suggested to me both the image of the Enemy and that of Christ our Lord, nor did I know by what symbolic key I was to read it, and I was trembling all over, out of fear and also because of the wind coming through the fissures in the walls.

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.

I was already quite awed by the lion (and more than once I had looked around as if I expected to see an animal of that description suddenly appear) when I decided to look at other pages and my eye fell, at the opening of the Gospel of Matthew, on the image of a man. I do not know why, but it frightened me more than the lion: the face was a man’s, but this man was sheathed in a kind of stiff chasuble that covered him to his feet, and this chasuble, or cuirass, was encrusted with red and yellow semiprecious stones. The head, which emerged enigmatically from a castle of rubies and topazes, seemed (how blasphemous terror made me!) that of the mysterious murderer whose impalpable trail we were following. And then I realized why I linked the animal and the armored man so closely with the labyrinth: both illustrations, like all in that book, emerged from a pattern of interlocking labyrinths, whose lines of onyx and emerald, threads of chrysoprase, ribbons of beryl seemed all to refer to the tangle of rooms and corridors where I was. My eye became lost, on the page, along gleaming paths, as my feet were becoming lost in the troublous succession of the rooms of the library, and seeing my own wandering depicted on those parchments filled me with uneasiness and convinced me that each of those books was telling, through mysterious cachinnations, my present story. “De te fabula narratur,” I said to myself, and I wondered if those pages did not already contain the story of future events in store for me.

I opened another book, and this seemed of the Hispanic school. The colors were violent, the reds suggested blood or fire. It was the book of Revelation of the apostle, and once again, as the night before, I happened upon the page of the mulier amicta sole. But it was not the same book; the illumination was different. Here the artist had dwelled at greater length on the woman’s form. I compared her face, her bosom, her curving thighs with the statue of the Virgin I had seen with Ubertino. The line was different, but this mulier also seemed very beautiful to me. I thought I should not dwell on these notions, and I turned several more pages. I found another woman, but this time it was the whore of Babylon. I was not so much struck by her form as by the thought that she, too, was a woman like the other, and yet this one was the vessel of every vice, whereas the other was the receptacle of every virtue. But the forms were womanly in both cases, and at a certain point I could no longer understand what distinguished them. Again I felt an inner agitation; the image of the Virgin in the church became superimposed on that of the beautiful Margaret. “I am damned!” I said to myself. Or, “I am mad.” And I decided I should leave the library.

Luckily I was near the staircase. I rushed down, at the risk of stumbling and extinguishing the lamp. I found myself again under the broad vaults of the scriptorium, but I did not linger even there, and hurled myself down the stairs leading to the refectory.

***

Here I paused, gasping. The light of the moon came through the windows, very radiant, and I hardly needed the lamp, which would have been indispensable for cells and for passages of the library. Nevertheless, I kept it burning, as if to seek comfort. But I was still breathless, and I decided I should drink some water to calm my tension. Since the kitchen was near, I crossed the refectory and slowly opened one of the doors that led into the second half of the ground floor of the Aedificium.

And at this point my terror, instead of lessening, increased. Because I immediately realized someone else was in the kitchen, near the bread oven—or at least I realized a light was shining in that corner. Filled with fear, I blew mine out. Frightened as I was, I instilled fright, and in fact the other person (or persons) immediately put out their light, too. But in vain, because the moonlight illuminated the kitchen sufficiently to cast before me one or more confused shadows on the floor.

Frozen, I did not dare draw back, or advance. I heard a stammering sound, and I thought I heard, softly, a woman’s voice. Then from the shapeless group that could be discerned vaguely near the oven, a dark, squat form broke away and fled toward the outside door, evidently left ajar, closing it after himself.

I remained, on the threshold between refectory and kitchen, and so did a vague something near the oven. A vague and—how to say it?—moaning something. From the shadows, in fact, came a groan, a kind of subdued weeping, rhythmic sobs of fear.

Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another’s fear, but it was not fear that impelled me toward the shadow. Rather, I would say, I was driven by an intoxication not unlike the one that had gripped me when I was having visions. In the kitchen there was something kin to the fumes that had overcome me in the library the night before. It was perhaps not the same substance, but on my overexcited senses it had the same effect. I sniffed a pungent smell of traganth, alum, and tartar, which cooks use to make wine aromatic. Or perhaps, as I learned later, in those days they were brewing beer (which in that northern part of the peninsula was held in some esteem), and it was prepared with the method of my country, with heather, swamp myrtle, and wild rosemary. All spices that intoxicated, more than my nostrils, my mind.

And while my rational instinct was to cry out “Vade retro!” and get away from the moaning thing that was certainly a succubus summoned for me by the Evil One, something in my vis appetitiva urged me forward, as if I wanted to take part in some marvel.

And so I approached the shadow, until, in the moonlight that fell from the high windows, I realized that it was a woman, trembling, clutching to her breast one hand holding a package, and drawing back, weeping, toward the mouth of the oven.

May God, the Blessed Virgin, and all the saints of paradise assist me in telling what then happened. Modesty, the dignity of my position (as an aged monk by now, in this handsome monastery of Melk, a haven of peace and serene meditation), would counsel me to take the most devout precautions. I should simply say that something evil took place and that it would not be meet to tell what it was, and so I would upset neither my reader nor myself.

But I have determined to tell, of those remote events, the whole truth, and truth is indivisible, it shines with its own transparency and does not allow itself to be diminished by our interests or our shame. The problem is, rather, of telling what happened not as I see it now and remember it (even if I still remember everything with pitiless vividness, nor do I know whether my subsequent repentance has so fixed in my memory these situations and thoughts, or whether the inadequacy of that same repentance still torments me, resuscitating in my oppressed mind the smallest details of my shame), but as I saw it and felt it then. And I can do so with the fidelity of a chronicler, for if I close my eyes I can repeat not only everything I did but also what I thought in those moments, as if I were copying a parchment written at the time. I must therefore proceed in this way, Saint Michael Archangel protect me, because for the edification of future readers and the flaying of my guilt I want now to tell how a young man can succumb to the snares of the Devil, that they may be known and evident, so anyone encountering them in the future may defeat them.

So, it was a woman. Or, rather, a girl. Having had until then (and since then, God be thanked) little intimacy with creatures of that sex, I cannot say what her age may have been. I know she was young, almost adolescent, perhaps she had passed sixteen or eighteen springs, or perhaps twenty; and I was struck by the impression of human reality that emanated from that form. It was not a vision, and in any case it seemed to me valde bona. Perhaps because she was trembling like a little bird in winter, and was weeping, and was afraid of me.

Thinking that the duty of every good Christian is to succor his neighbor, I approached her with great gentleness and in good Latin told her she should not fear, because I was a friend, in any case not an enemy, certainly not the enemy she perhaps dreaded.

Because of the meekness of my gaze, I imagine, the creature grew calm and came to me. I sensed that she did not understand my Latin and instinctively I addressed her in my German vernacular, and this frightened her greatly, whether because of the harsh sounds, unfamiliar to the people of those parts, or because those sounds reminded her of some other experience with soldiers from my lands, I cannot say which. Then I smiled, considering that the language of gestures and of the face is more universal than that of words, and she was reassured. She smiled at me, too, and said a few words.

I knew her vernacular very slightly; it was different from the bit I had learned in Pisa, but I realized from her tone that she was saying sweet words to me, and she seemed to be saying something like “You are young, you are handsome….” It is rare for a novice who has spent his whole childhood in a monastery to hear declarations of his beauty; indeed, we are regularly admonished that physical beauty is fleeting and must be considered base. But the snares of the Enemy are infinite, and I confess that this reference to my comeliness, though mendacious, fell sweetly on my ears and filled me with an irrepressible emotion. Especially since the girl, in saying this, had extended her hand until the tips of her fingers grazed my cheek, then quite beardless. I felt a kind of delirium, but at that moment I was unable to sense any hint of sin in my heart. Such is the force of the Devil when he wants to try us and dispel from our spirit the signs of grace.

What did I feel? What did I see? I remember only that the emotions of the first moment were bereft of any expression, because my tongue and my mind had not been instructed in how to name sensations of that sort. Until I recalled other inner words, heard in another time and in other places, spoken certainly for other ends, but which seemed wondrously in keeping with my joy in that moment, as if they had been born consubstantially to express it. Words pressed into the caverns of my memory rose to the (dumb) surface of my lips, and I forgot that they had served in Scripture or in the pages of the saints to express quite different, more radiant realities. But was there truly a difference between the delights of which the saints had spoken and those that my agitated spirit was feeling at that moment? At that moment the watchful sense of difference was annihilated in me. And this, it seems to me, is precisely the sign of rapture in the abysses of identity.

Suddenly the girl appeared to me as the black but comely virgin of whom the Song of Songs speaks. She wore a threadbare little dress of rough cloth that opened in a fairly immodest fashion over her bosom, and around her neck was a necklace made of little colored stones, very commonplace, I believe. But her head rose proudly on a neck as white as an ivory tower, her eyes were clear as the pools of Heshbon, her nose was as the tower of Lebanon, her hair like purple. Yes, her tresses seemed to me like a flock of goats, her teeth like flocks of sheep coming up from their bath, all in pairs, so that none preceded its companion. And I could not help murmuring: “Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair. Thy hair is as a flock of goats that lie along the side of Mount Gilead; thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate, thy neck is like the tower of David whereon there hang a thousand bucklers.” And I asked myself, frightened and rapt, who was she who rose before me like the dawn, beautiful as the moon, radiant as the sun, terribilis ut castorum acies ordinata.

Then the creature came still closer to me, throwing into a corner the dark package she had till then held pressed to her bosom; and she raised her hand to stroke my face, and repeated the words I had already heard. And while I did not know whether to flee from her or move even closer, while my head was throbbing as if the trumpets of Joshua were about to bring down the walls of Jericho, as I yearned and at once feared to touch her, she smiled with great joy, emitted the stifled moan of a pleased she-goat, and undid the strings that closed her dress over her bosom, slipped the dress from her body like a tunic, and stood before me as Eve must have appeared to Adam in the garden of Eden. “Pulchra sunt ubera quae paululum supereminent et tument modice,” I murmured, repeating the words I had heard from Ubertino, because her breasts appeared to me like two fawns that are twins of a roe, feeding among the lilies, her navel was a goblet wherein no mingled wine is wanting, her belly a heap of wheat set about with lilies.

“O sidus clarum pellarum,” I cried to her, “o porta clausa, fons hortorum, cella custos unguentorum, cella pigmentaria!” Inadvertently I found myself against her body, feeling its warmth and the sharp perfume of unguents never known before. I remembered, “Sons, when mad love comes, man is powerless!” and I understood that, whether what I felt was a snare of the Enemy or a gift of heaven, I was now powerless against the impulse that moved me, and I cried, “O langueo,” and, “Causam languoris video nec caveo!,” also because a rosy perfume breathed from her lips and her feet were beautiful in sandals, and her legs were like columns and jewels were the joints of her thighs, the work of the hands of a cunning workman. O love, daughter of delights, a king is held captive in your tresses, I murmured to myself, and I was in her arms, and we fell together onto the bare floor of the kitchen, and, whether on my own initiative or through her wiles, I found myself free of my novice’s habit and we felt no shame at our bodies and cuncta erant bona.

And she kissed me with the kisses of her mouth, and her loves were more delicious than wine and her ointments had a goodly fragrance, and her neck was beautiful among pearls and her cheeks among earrings, behold thou art fair, my beloved, behold thou art fair; thine eyes are as doves (I said), and let me see thy face, let me hear thy voice, for thy voice is harmonious and thy face enchanting, thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck, thy lips drop as the honeycomb, honey and milk are under thy tongue, the smell of thy breath is of apples, thy two breasts are clusters of grapes, thy palate a heady wine that goes straight to my love and flows over my lips and teeth…. A fountain sealed, spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, myrrh and aloes, I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey, I have drunk my wine with my milk. Who was she, who was she who rose like the dawn, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, terrible as an army with banners?

O Lord, when the soul is transported, the only virtue lies in loving what you see (is that not true?), the supreme happiness in having what you have; there blissful life is drunk at its source (has this not been said?), there you savor the true life that we will live after this mortal life among the angels for all eternity…. This is what I was thinking and it seemed to me the prophecies were being fulfilled at last, as the girl lavished indescribable sweetness on me, and it was as if my whole body were an eye, before and behind, and I could suddenly see all surrounding things. And I understood that from it, from love, unity and tenderness are created together, as are good and kiss and fulfillment, as I had already heard, believing I was being told about something else. And only for an instant, as my joy was about to reach its zenith, did I remember that perhaps I was experiencing, and at night, the possession of the noontime Devil, who was condemned finally to reveal himself in his true, diabolical nature to the soul that in ecstasy asks “Who are you?,” who knows how to grip the soul and delude the body. But I was immediately convinced that my scruples were indeed devilish, for nothing could be more right and good and holy than what I was experiencing, the sweetness of which grew with every moment. As a little drop of water added to a quantity of wine is completely dispersed and takes on the color and taste of wine, as red-hot iron becomes like molten fire losing its original form, as air when it is inundated with the sun’s light is transformed into total splendor and clarity so that it no longer seems illuminated but, rather, seems to be light itself, so I felt myself die of tender liquefaction, and I had only the strength left to murmur the words of the psalm: “Behold my bosom is like new wine, sealed, which bursts new vessels,” and suddenly I saw a brilliant light and in it a saffron-colored form which flamed up in a sweet and shining fire, and that splendid light spread through all the shining fire, and this shining fire through that golden form and that brilliant light and that shining fire through the whole form.

As, half fainting, I fell on the body to which I had joined myself, I understood in a last vital spurt that flame consists of a splendid clarity, an unusual vigor, and an igneous ardor, but it possesses the splendid clarity so that it may illuminate and the igneous ardor that it may burn. Then I understood the abyss, and the deeper abysses that it conjured up.

Now that, with a hand that trembles (either in horror at the sin I am recounting or in guilty nostalgia of the event I recall), I write these lines, I realize that to describe my wicked ecstasy of that instant I have used the same words that I used, not many pages before, to describe the fire that burned the martyred body of the Fraticello Michael. Nor is it an accident that my hand, passive agent of the soul, has penned the same expression for two experiences so disparate, because probably I experienced them in the same way both at the time, when I lived through them, and now, as I have tried to bring them back to life on this parchment.

There is a mysterious wisdom by which phenomena among themselves disparate can be called by analogous names, just as divine things can be designated by terrestrial terms, and through equivocal symbols God can be called lion or leopard; and death can be called sword; joy, flame; flame, death; death, abyss; abyss, perdition; perdition, raving; and raving, passion.

Why did I, as a youth, depict the ecstasy of death that had impressed me in the martyr Michael in the words the saint had used for the ecstasy of (divine) life, and yet I could not refrain from depicting in the same words the ecstasy (culpable and fleeting) of earthly pleasure, which immediately afterward had spontaneously appeared to me as a sensation of death and annihilation? I shall try now to reflect both on the way I felt, a few months apart, two experiences at once uplifting and painful, and on the way in which that night in the abbey I consciously remembered the one and felt with my senses the other, a few hours apart, and, further, on the way I have relived them now, penning these lines, and on how in all three instances I recited them to myself with the words of the different experience of that sainted soul annihilated in the divine vision. Have I perhaps blasphemed (then? now?)? What was similar in Michael’s desire for death, in the transport I felt at the sight of the flame consuming him, in the desire for carnal union I felt with the girl, in the mystic shame with which I translated it allegorically, and in the desire for joyous annihilation that moved the saint to die in his own love in order to live longer and eternally? Is it possible that things so equivocal can be said in such a univocal way? And this, it seems, is the teaching left us by Saint Thomas, the greatest of all doctors: the more openly it remains a figure of speech, the more it is a dissimilar similitude and not literal, the more a metaphor reveals its truth. But if love of the flame and of the abyss are the metaphor for the love of God, can they be the metaphor for love of death and love of sin? Yes, as the lion and the serpent stand both for Christ and the Devil. The fact is that correct interpretation can be established only on the authority of the fathers, and in the case that torments me, I have no auctoritas to which my obedient mind can refer, and I burn in doubt (and again the image of fire appears to define the void of the truth and the fullness of the error that annihilate me!). What is happening, O Lord, in my spirit, now that I allow myself to be gripped by the vortex of memories and I conflagrate different times at once, as if I were to manipulate the order of the stars and the sequence of their celestial movements? Certainly I am overstepping the boundaries of my sinful and sick intelligence. Now, let us return to the task I had humbly set myself. I was telling about that day and the total bewilderment of the senses into which I sank. There, I have told what I remembered on that occasion, and let my feeble pen, faithful and truthful chronicler, stop there.

I lay, how long I do not know, the girl at my side. With a light motion her hand continued to touch my body, now damp with sweat. I felt an inner exultation, which was not peace, but like the last subdued flicker of a fire taking time to die beneath the embers, when the flame is already dead. I would not hesitate to call blessed a man to whom it was granted to experience something similar in this life (I murmured as if in my sleep), even rarely (and, in fact, I experienced it only that time), and very rapidly, for the space of a single moment. As if one no longer existed, not feeling one’s identity at all, or feeling lowered, almost annihilated: if some mortal (I said to myself) could for a single moment and most rapidly enjoy what I have enjoyed, he would immediately look with a baleful eye at this perverse world, would be upset by the bane of daily life, would feel the weight of the body of death…. Was this not what I had been taught? That invitation of my whole spirit to lose all memory in bliss was surely (now I understood it) the radiance of the eternal sun; and the joy that it produces opens, extends, enlarges man, and the gaping chasm man bears within himself is no longer sealed so easily, for it is the wound cut by the blow of love’s sword, nor is there anything else here below more sweet and terrible. But such is the right of the sun: it riddles the wounded man with its rays and all the wounds widen, the man uncloses and extends, his very veins are laid open, his strength is now incapable of obeying the orders it receives and is moved solely by desire, the spirit burns, sunk into the abyss of what it is now touching, seeing its own desire and its own truth outstripped by the reality it has lived and is living. And one witnesses, dumbfounded, one’s own raving.

And in the grip of these sensations of ineffable inner joy, I dozed off.

I reopened my eyes some time later, and the moonlight, perhaps because of a cloud, had grown much fainter. I stretched out my hand at my side and no longer felt the girl’s body. I turned my head; she was gone.

The absence of the object that had unleashed my desire and slaked my thirst made me realize suddenly both the vanity of that desire and the perversity of that thirst. Omne animal triste post coitum. I became aware that I had sinned. Now, after years and years, while I still bitterly bemoan my error, I cannot forget how that evening I had felt great pleasure, and I would be doing a wrong to the Almighty, who created all things in goodness and beauty, if I did not admit that also between those two sinners something happened that in itself, naturaliter, was good and beautiful. But perhaps it is my present old age, which makes me feel, culpably, how beautiful and good all my youth was. Just when I should turn my thoughts to death, which is approaching. Then, a young man, I did not think of death, but, hotly and sincerely, I wept for my sin.

I stood up, trembling, also because I had lain a long time on the cold stones of the kitchen and my body was numb. I dressed, almost feverish. I glimpsed then in a corner the package that the girl had abandoned in her flight. I bent to examine the object: it was a kind of bundle, a rolled-up cloth that seemed to come from the kitchen. I unwrapped it, and at first I did not understand what was inside, both because of the scant light and because of the shapeless shape of the contents. Then I understood. Among clots of blood and scraps of flabbier and whitish meat, before my eyes, dead but still throbbing with the gelatinous life of dead viscera, lined by livid nerves: a heart, of great size.

A dark veil descended over my eyes, an acid saliva rose in my mouth, I let out a cry and fell as a dead body falls.

NIGHT

In which Adso, distraught, confesses to William and meditates on the function of woman in the plan of creation, but then he discovers the corpse of a man.

I came around to find someone bathing my face. There, holding a lamp, was Brother William, who had put something under my head.

“What’s happened, Adso?” he asked me. “Have you been roaming about at night stealing offal from the kitchen?”

In short, William had awakened, sought me for I forget what reason, and, not finding me, suspected me of going to perform some bit of bravado in the library. Approaching the Aedificium on the kitchen side, he saw a shadow slip from the door toward the vegetable garden (it was the girl, leaving, perhaps because she had heard someone approaching). He tried to figure out who it was and follow her, but she (or, rather, the shadow, as she was for him) went toward the outside wall of the compound and disappeared. Then William—after an exploration of the environs—entered the kitchen and found me lying in a faint.

When, still terrified, I mentioned to him the package with the heart, blurting out something about another crime, he started laughing: “Adso, what man could have such a big heart? It’s the heart of a cow, or an ox; they slaughtered an animal today, in fact. But tell me, how did it come into your hands?”

At that point, overwhelmed with remorse, and still stunned by my great fear, I burst into a flood of tears and asked him to administer to me the sacrament of confession. Which he did, and I told him all, concealing nothing.

Brother William heard me out earnestly, but with a hint of indulgence. When I had finished his face turned grave and he said: “Adso, you have sinned, that is certain, against the commandment that bids you not to fornicate, and also against your duties as a novice. In your defense there is the fact that you found yourself in one of those situations in which even a father in the desert would have damned himself. And of woman as source of temptation the Scriptures have already said enough. Ecclesiastes says of woman that her conversation is like burning fire, and the Proverbs say that she takes possession of man’s precious soul and the strongest men are ruined by her. And Ecclesiastes further says: ‘And I find more bitter than death the woman, whose heart is snares and nets, and her hands as bands.’ And others have said she is the vessel of the Devil. Having affirmed this, dear Adso, I cannot convince myself that God chose to introduce such a foul being into creation without also endowing it with some virtues. And I cannot help reflecting that He granted her many privileges and motives of prestige, three of them very great indeed. In fact, He created man in this base world, and from mud; woman He created later, in paradise and of noble human matter. And he did not mold her from Adam’s feet or his viscera, but from the rib. In the second place, the Lord, who is all-powerful, could have become incarnate as a man directly in some miraculous way, but he chose instead to dwell in the womb of a woman, a sign that it was not so foul after all. And when he appeared after the Resurrection, he appeared to a woman. And finally, in the celestial glory no man shall be king of that realm, but the queen will be a woman who has never sinned. If, then, the Lord showed such favor to Eve herself and to her daughters, is it so abnormal that we also should feel drawn by the graces and the nobility of that sex? What I mean to say to you, Adso, is that you must not do it again, of course, but it is not so monstrous that you were tempted to do it. And as far as that goes, for a monk to have, at least once in his life, experience of carnal passion, so that he can one day be indulgent and understanding with the sinners he will counsel and console … well, dear Adso, it is not a thing to be wished before it happens, but it is not something to vituperate too much once it has happened. So go with God and let us speak of it no more. Indeed, rather than reflect and dwell too much on something best forgotten, if possible”—and it seemed to me at this point that his voice faded as if at some private emotion—”let us ask ourselves the meaning of what happened this night. Who was this girl and whom was she meeting?”

“This I don’t know, and I didn’t see the man who was with her,” I said.

“Very well, but we can deduce who it was from many and certain clues. First of all, the man was old and ugly, one with whom a girl does not go willingly, especially if she is beautiful, as you say, though it seems to me, my dear wolf cub, that you were prepared to find any food delicious.”

“Why old and ugly?”

“Because the girl didn’t go with him for love, but for a pack of scraps. Certainly she is a girl from the village who, perhaps not for the first time, grants her favors to some lustful monk out of hunger, and receives as recompense something for her and her family to eat.”

“A harlot!” I said, horrified.

“A poor peasant girl, Adso. Probably with smaller brothers to feed. Who, if she were able, would give herself for love and not for, lucre. As she did last night. In fact, you tell me she found you young and handsome, and gave you gratis and out of love what to others she would have given for an ox heart and some bits of lung. And she felt so virtuous for the free gift she made of herself, and so uplifted, that she ran off without taking anything in exchange. This is why I think the other one, to whom she compared you, was neither young nor handsome.”

I confess that, profound as my repentance was, that explanation filled me with a sweet pride; but I kept silent and allowed my master to continue.

“This ugly old man must have the opportunity to go down to the village and deal with the peasants, for some purpose connected with his position. He must know how to get people into the abbey and out of it, and know there would be that offal in the kitchen (perhaps tomorrow it would be said that the door had been left open and a dog had come in and eaten the scraps). And, finally, he must have had a certain sense of economy, and a certain interest in seeing that the kitchen was not deprived of more precious victuals: otherwise he would have given her a steak or some choice cut. And so you see that the picture of our stranger is drawn very clearly and that all these properties, or accidents, are suited to a substance that I would have no fear in defining as our cellarer, Remigio of Varagine. Or, if I am mistaken, our mysterious Salvatore—who, for that matter, since he comes from these parts, can speak easily with the local people and would know how to persuade a girl to do what he would have made her do, if you had not arrived.”

“That is certainly all correct,” I said, convinced, “but what is the good of knowing it now?”

“None. Or much,” William said. “The story may or may not have a connection with the crimes that concern us. On the other hand, if the cellarer was a Dolcinian, that would explain this, and vice versa. And we now know, finally, that this abbey is a place of many, bizarre events at night. And who can say that our cellarer, and Salvatore, who move through it in darkness with such ease, do not know, in any event, more things than what they tell?”

“But will they tell them to us?”

“No, not if we behave in a compassionate manner, ignoring their sins. But if we were really to know something, we would possess a way of persuading them to speak. In other words, if there is need, the cellarer and Salvatore are ours, and may God forgive us this deception, since He forgives so many other things,” he said, looking at me slyly; I did not have the heart to make any comment on the licitness of these notions of his.

“And now we should go to bed, because in an hour it is matins. But I see you are still agitated, my poor Adso, still fearful because of your sin…. There is nothing like a good spell in church to calm the spirit. I have absolved you, but one never knows. Go and ask the Lord’s confirmation.” And he gave me a rather brisk slap on the head, perhaps as a show of paternal and virile affection, perhaps as an indulgent penance. Or perhaps (as I culpably thought at that moment) in a sort of good-natured envy, since he was a man who so thirsted for new and vital experiences.

We headed for the church, taking our usual path, which I followed in haste, closing my eyes, because all those bones reminded me too obviously, that night, of how I was dust and how foolish had been the pride of my flesh.

When we reached the nave we saw a shadowy figure before the main altar. I thought it was again Ubertino, but it was Alinardo, who did not recognize us at first. He said he was unable to sleep and had decided to spend the night praying for that young monk who had disappeared (he could not even remember the name). He prayed for his soul, if he were dead, and for his body, if he were lying ill and alone somewhere.

“Too many dead,” he said, “too many dead … But it was written in the book of the apostle. With the first trumpet came the hail, with the second a third part of the sea became blood; and you found one body in the hail, the other in blood…. The third trumpet warns that a burning star will fall in the third part of rivers and fountains of waters. So I tell you, our third brother has disappeared. And fear for the fourth, because the third part of the sun will be smitten, and of the moon and the stars, so there will be almost complete darkness….”

As we came out of the transept, William asked himself whether there were not some element of truth in the old man’s words.

“But,” I pointed out to him, “this would mean assuming that a single diabolical mind, using the Apocalypse as guide, had arranged the three disappearances, also assuming that Berengar is dead. But, on the contrary, we know Adelmo died of his own volition….”

“True,” William said, “but the same diabolical or sick mind could have been inspired by Adelmo’s death to arrange the other two in a symbolic way. And if this were so, Berengar should be found in a river or a fountain. And there are no rivers or fountains in the abbey, at least not such as someone could drown or be drowned in….”

“There are only the baths,” I observed, almost by chance.

“Adso!” William said. “You know, that could be an idea? The balneary!”

“But they must have looked there….”

“I saw the servants this morning when they were making the search; they opened the door of the balneary and took a glance inside, without investigating. They did not expect to find something carefully hidden: they were looking for a corpse lying somewhere theatrically, like Venantius’s body in the jar…. Let’s go and have a look. It is still dark anyway, and our lamp seems to go on burning merrily.”

So we did, and without difficulty we opened the door of the balneary, next to the infirmary.

Separated one from the other by thick curtains were some tubs, I don’t recall how many. The monks used them for their ablutions, on the days the Rule established, and Severinus used them for therapeutic reasons, because nothing can restore body and mind better than a bath. A fireplace in one corner allowed the water to be heated easily. We found it dirty with fresh ashes, and before it a great cauldron lay, overturned. The water could be drawn from a font in another corner.

We looked in the first tubs, which were empty. Only the last, concealed by a drawn curtain, was full, and next to it lay a garment, in a heap. At first sight, in the beam of our lamp, the surface of the liquid seemed smooth; but as the light struck it we glimpsed on the bottom, lifeless, a naked human body. We pulled it out slowly: Berengar. And this one, William said, truly had the face of a drowned man. The features were swollen. The body, white and flabby, without hair, seemed a woman’s except for the obscene spectacle of the flaccid pudenda. I blushed, then shuddered. I made the sign of the cross as William blessed the corpse.