Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose

“So, then … I conceived a false pattern to interpret the moves of the guilty man, and the guilty man fell in with it. And it was this same false pattern that put me on your trail. Everyone nowadays is obsessed with the book of John, but you seemed to me the one who pondered it most, and not so much because of your speculations about the Antichrist as because you came from the country that has produced the most splendid Apocalypses. One day somebody told me it was you who had brought the most beautiful codices of this book to the library. Then, another day. Alinardo was raving about a mysterious enemy who had been sent to seek books in Silos (my curiosity was piqued when he said this enemy had returned prematurely into the realm of darkness: at first it might have seemed the man he was speaking of had died young, but he was referring to your blindness). Silos is near Burgos, and this morning, in the catalogue, I found a series of acquisitions, all of them Spanish Apocalypses, from the period when you had succeeded or were about to succeed Paul of Rimini. And in that group of acquisitions there was this book also. But I couldn’t be positive of my reconstruction until I learned that the stolen book was on linen paper. Then I remembered Silos, and I was sure. Naturally, as the idea of this book and its venomous power gradually began to take shape, the idea of an apocalyptic pattern began to collapse, though I couldn’t understand how both the book and the sequence of the trumpets pointed to you. But I understood the story of the book better because, directed by the apocalyptic pattern, I was forced more and more to think of you, and your debates about laughter. So that this evening, when I no longer believed in the apocalyptic pattern, I insisted on watching the stables, and in the stables, by pure chance, Adso gave me the key to entering the finis Africae.”

I cannot follow you,” Jorge said. “You are proud to show me how, following the dictates of your reason, you arrived at me, and yet you have shown me you arrived here by following a false reasoning. What do you mean to say to me?”

“To you, nothing. I am disconcerted, that is all. But it is of no matter. I am here.”

“The Lord was sounding the seven trumpets. And you, even in your error, heard a confused echo of that sound.”

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

“I have killed no one. Each died according to his destiny because of his sins. I was only an instrument.”

“Yesterday you said that Judas also was an instrument. That does not prevent him from being damned.”

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

“A few minutes a1o you were ready to kill me, too, and also this boy…”

“You are subtler, but no better than the others.”

“And now what will happen, now that I have eluded the trap?”

“We shall see,” Jorge answered. “I do not necessarily want your death; perhaps I will succeed in convincing you. But first tell me: how did you guess it was the second book of Aristotle?”

“Your anathemas against laughter would surely not have been enough for me, or what little I learned about your argument with the others. At first I didn’t understand their significance. But there were references to a shameless stone that rolls over the plain, and to cicadas that will sing from the ground, to venerable fig trees. I had already read something of the sort: I verified it during these past few days. These are examples that Aristotle used in the first book of the Poetics , and in the Rhetoric . Then I remembered that Isidore of Seville defines comedy as something that tells of stupra virginum et amores meretricum — how shall I put it? — of less than virtuous loves… Gradually this second book took shape in my mind as it had to be. I could tell you almost all of it, without reading the pages that were meant to poison me. Comedy is born from the komai — that is, from the peasant villages — as a joyous celebration after a meal or a feast. Comedy does not tell of famous and powerful men, but of base and ridiculous creatures, though not wicked; and it does not end with the death of the protagonists. It achieves the effect of the ridiculous by showing the defects and vices of ordinary men. Here Aristotle sees the tendency to laughter as a force for good, which can also have an instructive value: through witty riddles and unexpected metaphors, though it tells us things differently from the way they are, as if it were lying, it actually obliges us to examine them more closely, and it makes us say: Ah, this is just how things are, and I didn’t know it. Truth reached by depicting men and the world as worse than they are or than we believe them to be, worse in any case than the epics, the tragedies, lives of the saints have shown them to us. Is that it?”

“Fairly close. You reconstructed it by reading other books?”

“Many of which Venantius was working on. I believe Venantius had been hunting for this book for some time. He must have read in the catalogue the indications I also read, and must have been convinced this was the book he was seeking. But he didn’t know how to enter the finis Africae. When he heard Berengar speak of it with Adelmo, then he was of like a dog on the track of a hare.”

“That is what happened. I understood at once. I realized the moment had come when I would have to defend the library tooth and nail…”

“And you spread the ointment. It must have been a hard task … in the dark…”

“By now my hands see more than your eyes. I had taken a brush from Severinus, and I also used gloves. It was a good idea, was it not? It took you a long time to arrive at it…”

“Yes. I was thinking of a more complex device, a poisoned pin or something of the sort. I must say that your solution was exemplary: the victim poisoned himself when he was alone, and only to the extent that he wanted to read…”

I realized, with a shudder, that at this moment these two men, arrayed in a mortal conflict, were admiring each other, as if each had acted only to win the other’s applause. The thought crossed my mind that he artifices Berengar used to seduce Adelmo, and the simple and natural acts with which the irl had aroused my passion and my desire, were noting compared with the cleverness and mad skill each used to conquer the other, nothing compared with the act of seduction going on before my eyes at that moment, which had unfolded over seven days, each of the two interlocutors making, as it were, mysterious appointments with the other, each secretly aspiring to the other’s approbation, each fearing and hating the other.

“But now tell me,” William was saying, “why? Why did you want to shield this book more than so many others? Why did you hide — though not at the price of crime — treatises on necromancy, pages that may have blasphemed against the name of God, while for these pages you damned your brothers and have damned yourself? There are many other books that speak of coined y, many others that praise laughter. Why did this one fill you with such fear?”

“Because it was by the Philosopher. Every book by that man has destroyed a part of the learning that Christianity had accumulated over the centuries. The fathers had said everything that needed to be known about the power of the Word, but then Boethius had only to gloss the Philosopher and the divine mystery of the Word was transformed into a human parody of categories and syllogism. The book of Genesis says what has to be known about the composition of the cosmos, but it sufficed to rediscover the Physics of the Philosopher to have the universe reconceived in terms of dull and slimy matter, and the Arab Averroes almost convinced everyone of the eternity of the world. We knew everything about the divine names, and the Dominican buried by Abo — seduced by the Philosopher — renamed them, following the proud paths of natural reason. And so the cosmos, which for the Areopagite revealed itself to those who knew how to look up at the luminous cascade of the exemplary first cause, has become a preserve of terrestrial evidence for which they refer to an abstract agent. Before, we used to look to heaven, deigning only a frowning glance at the mire of matter; now we look at the earth, and we believe in the heavens because of earthly testimony. Every word of the Philosopher, by whom now even saints and prophets swear, has overturned the image of the word. But he had not succeeded in overturning the image of God. If this book were to become … had become an object for open interpretation, we would have crossed the last boundary.”