The Name of the Rose (28 page)

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.

In any case, Salvatore did not reach the infidels and moved 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, to avoid being burned at the stake, changed habit and sought refuge in monasteries of other orders. 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, that was where I went.

He wasn't there, and 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.

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.”