“Worse, still worse,” Michael murmured, frightened. “On one side a mad pope, on the other the people of God, who, even if through the words of His theologians, will soon claim to interpret Scripture freely. ...”
“Why? Was what your people in Perugia did any different?” William asked.
Michael reacted as if stung. “That is why I want to meet the Pope. We can do nothing if he is not in agreement.”
“We shall see, we shall see,” William said in an enigmatic tone.
My master was truly very sharp. How could he foresee that Michael himself would later decide to support the theologians of the empire and to support the people in condemning the Pope? How could William foresee that, in four years’ time, when John was first to pronounce his incredible doctrine, there would be an uprising on the part of all Christianity? If the beatific vision was thus postponed, how could the dead intercede for the living? And what would become of the cult of the saints? It was the Minorites themselves who would open hostilities in condemning the Pope, and William of Occam would be in the front rank, stern and implacable in his arguments. The conflict was to last for three years, until John, close to death, made partial amends. I heard him described, years later, as he appeared in the consistory of December 1334, smaller than he had seemed previously, withered by age, eighty-five years old and dying, his face pale, and he was to say (the fox, so clever in playing on words not only to break his own oaths but also to deny his own stubbornness): “We confess and believe that the souls separated from the body and completely purified are in heaven, in paradise with the angels, and with Jesus Christ, and that they see God in His divine essence, clearly, face to face ...” and then, after a pause—it was never known whether this was due to his difficulty in breathing or to his perverse desire to underline the last clause as adversative—“to the extent to which the state and condition of the separated soul allows it.” The next morning, a Sunday, he had himself laid on a long chair with reclining back, and he received the cardinals, who kissed his hand, and he died.
But again I digress, and tell things other than those I should tell. Yet, after all, the rest of that conversation at table does not add much to the understanding of the events I am narrating. The Minorites agreed on the stand to be taken the next day. They sized up their adversaries one by one. They commented with concern on the news, announced by William, of the arrival of Bernard Gui. And even more on the fact that Cardinal Bertrand del Poggetto would be presiding over the Avignon legation. Two inquisitors were too many: a sign they planned to use the argument of heresy against the Minorites.
“So much the worse,” William said. “We will treat them as heretics.”
“No, no,” Michael said, “let us proceed cautiously; we must not jeopardize any possible agreement.”
“As far as I can see,” William said, “though I also worked for the realization of this meeting, and you know it, Michael, I do not believe the Avignonese are coming here to achieve any positive result. John wants you at Avignon alone, and without guarantees. But the meeting will have at least one function: to make you understand that. It would have been worse if you had gone there before having had this experience.”
“And so you have worked hard, and for many months, to bring about something you believe futile,” Michael. said bitterly.
“I was asked to, by the Emperor and by you,” William said. ‘And ultimately it is never a futile thing to know one’s enemies better.”
At this point they came to tell us that the second delegation was coming inside the walls. The Minorites rose and went out to meet the Pope’s men.
NONES
In which Cardinal del Poggetto arrives, with Bernard Gui and the other men of Avignon, and then each one does something different.
Men who had already known one another for some time, men who without knowing one another had each heard the others spoken of, exchanged greetings in the courtyard with apparent meekness. At the abbot’s side, Cardinal Bertrand del Poggetto moved like a man accustomed to power, as if he were virtually a second pope himself, and to one and all, especially to the Minorites, he distributed cordial smiles, auguring splendid agreement for the next day’s meeting and bearing explicit wishes for peace and good (he used deliberately this expression dear to the Franciscans) from John XXII.
“Excellent,” he said to me, when William was kind enough to introduce me as his scribe and pupil. Then he asked me whether I knew Bologna and he praised its beauty to me, its good food and its splendid university, inviting me to visit the city, rather than return one day, as he said, among those German people of mine who were making our lord Pope suffer so much. Then he extended his ring for me to kiss, as he directed his smile at someone else.
For that matter, my attention immediately turned to the person of whom I had heard most talk recently: Bernard Gui, as the French called him, or Bernardo Guidoni or Bernardo Guido, as he was called elsewhere.
He was a Dominican of about seventy, slender and erect. I was struck by his gray eyes, capable of staring without any expression; I was to see them often flash with ambiguous light, shrewd both in concealing thoughts and passions and in deliberately conveying them.
In the general exchange of greetings, he was not affectionate or cordial like the others, but always and just barely polite. When he saw Ubertino, whom he already knew, he was very deferential, but stared at him in a way that gave me an uneasy shudder. When he greeted Michael of Cesena, his smile was hard to decipher, and he murmured without warmth, “You have been awaited there for some time,” a sentence in which I was unable to catch either a hint of eagerness or a shadow of irony, either an injunction or, for that matter, a suggestion of interest. He met William, and when he learned who he was, he looked at him with polite hostility: not because his face betrayed his secret feelings, I was sure of that (even while I was unsure that he harbored any feelings at all), but because he certainly wanted William to feel he was hostile. William returned his hostility, smiling at him with exaggerated cordiality and saying, “For some time I have been wanting to meet a man whose fame has been a lesson to me and an admonition for many important decisions that have inspired my life.” Certainly words of praise, almost of flattery, for anyone who did not know, as Bernard did know well, that one of the most important decisions in William’s life had been to abandon the position of inquisitor. I derived the impression that, if William would gladly have seen Bernard in some imperial dungeon, Bernard certainly would have been pleased to see William suddenly seized by accidental and immediate death; and since Bernard to those days had men-at-arms under his command, I feared for my good master’s life.
Bernard must already have been informed by the abbot of the crimes committed in the abbey. In fact, pretending to ignore the venom in William’s words, he said to him, “it seems that now, at the abbot’s request, and in order to fulfill the mission entrusted to me under the terms of the agreement that has united us all here, I must concern myself with some very sad events in which the pestiferous stink of the Devil is evident. I mention this to you because I know that in remote times, when you would have been closer to me, you fought as did I—and those like me—in that field where the forces of good are arrayed against the forces of evil.”
“True,” William said calmly, “but then I went over to the other side.”
Bernard took the blow well. “Can you tell me anything helpful about these criminal deeds?”
“No, unfortunately,” William answered with civility. “I do not have your experience of criminal deeds.”
From that moment on I lost track of everyone. William, after another conversation with Michael and Ubertino, withdrew to the scriptorium. He asked Malachi’s leave to examine certain books, but I was unable to hear the titles. Malachi looked at him oddly but could not deny permission. Strangely, they did not have to be sought in the library. They were already on Venantius’s desk, all of them. My master immersed himself in his reading, and I decided not to disturb him.
I w
ent down into the kitchen. There I saw Bernard Gui. He probably wanted to comprehend the layout of the abbey and was roaming about everywhere. I heard him interrogating the cooks and other servants, speaking the local vernacular after a fashion (I recalled that he had been inquisitor in northern Italy). He seemed to be asking for information about the harvest, the organization of work in the monastery. But even while asking the most innocuous questions, he would look at his companion with penetrating eyes, then would abruptly ask another question, and at this point his victim would blanch and stammer. I concluded that, in some singular way, he was carrying out an inquisition, and was exploiting a formidable weapon that every inquisitor, in the performance of his function, possesses and employs: the fear of others. For every person, when questioned, usually tells the inquisitor, out of fear of being suspected of something, whatever may serve to make somebody else suspect.
For all the rest of the afternoon, as I gradually moved about, I saw Bernard proceed in this fashion, whether by the mills or in the cloister. But he almost never confronted monks: always lay brothers or peasants. The opposite of William’s strategy thus far.
VESPERS
In which Alinardo seems to give valuable information, and William reveals his method of arriving at a probable truth through a series of unquestionable errors.
Later William descended from the scriptorium in good humor. While we were waiting for suppertime, we came upon Alinardo in the cloister. Remembering his request, I had procured some chickpeas the day before in the kitchen, and I offered them to him. He thanked me, stuffing them into his toothless, drooling mouth. “You see, boy?” he said. “The other corpse also lay where the book announced it would be. ... Now wait for the fourth trumpet!”
I asked him why he thought the key to the sequence of crimes lay in the book of Revelation. He looked at me, amazed: “The book of John offers the key to everything!” And he added, with a grimace of bitterness, “I knew it, I’ve been saying as much for a long time. ... I was the one, you know, to suggest to the abbot ... the one we had then ... to collect as many commentaries on the Apocalypse as possible. I was to have become librarian. … But then the other one managed to have himself sent to Silos, where he found the finest manuscripts, and he came back with splendid booty. ... Oh, he knew where to look; he also spoke the language of the infidels. ... And so the library was given into his keeping, and not mine. But God punished him, and sent him into the realm of darkness before his time. Ha ha ...” He laughed in a nasty way, that old man who until then, lost in the serenity of his old age, had seemed to me like an innocent child.
“Who was the monk you were speaking of?” William asked.
He looked at us, stunned. “Whom was I speaking of? I cannot remember ... it was such a long time ago. But God punishes, God nullifies, God dims even memories. Many acts of pride were committed in the library. Especially after it fell into the hands of foreigners. God punishes still. ...”
We could get no more out of him, and we left him to his calm, embittered delirium. William declared himself very interested in that exchange: “Alinardo is a man to listen to; each time he speaks he says something interesting.”
“What did he say this time?”
“Adso,” William said, “solving a mystery is not the same as deducing from first principles. Nor does it amount simply to collecting a number of particular data from which to infer a general law. It means, rather, facing one or two or three particular data apparently with nothing in common, and trying to imagine whether they could represent so many instances of a general law you don’t yet know, and which perhaps has never been pronounced. To be sure, if you know, as the philosopher says, that man, the horse, and the mule are all without bile and are all long-lived, you can venture the principle that animals without bile live a long time. But take the case of animals with horns. Why do they have horns? Suddenly you realize that all animals with horns are without teeth in the upper jaw This would be a fine discovery, if you did not also realize that, alas, there are animals without teeth in the upper jaw who, however, do not have horns: the camel, to name one. And finally you realize that all animals without teeth in the upper jaw have four stomachs. Well, then, you can suppose that one who cannot chew well must need four stomachs to digest food better. But what about the horns? You then try to imagine a material cause for horns—say, the lack of teeth provides the animal with an excess of osseous matter that must emerge somewhere else. But is that sufficient explanation? No, because the camel has no upper teeth, has four stomachs, but does not have horns. And you must also imagine a final cause. The osseous matter emerges in horns only in animals without other means of defense. But the camel has a very tough hide and doesn’t need horns. So the law could be ...”
“But what have horns to do with anything?” I asked impatiently. “And why are you concerned with animals having horns?”
“I have never concerned myself with them, but the Bishop of Lincoln was greatly interested in them, pursuing an idea of Aristotle. Honestly, I don’t know whether his conclusions are the right ones, nor have I ever checked to see where the camel’s teeth are or how many stomachs he has. I was trying to tell you that the search for explicative laws in natural facts proceeds in a tortuous fashion. In the face of some inexplicable facts you must try to imagine many general laws, whose connection with your facts escapes you. Then suddenly, in the unexpected connection of a result, a specific situation, and one of those laws, you perceive a line of reasoning that seems more convincing than the others. You try applying it to all similar cases, to use it for making predictions, and you discover that your intuition was right. But until you reach the end you will never know which predicates to introduce into your reasoning and which to omit. And this is what I am doing now. I line up so many disjointed elements and I venture some hypotheses. I have to venture many, and many of them are so absurd that I would be ashamed to tell them to you. You see, in the case of the horse Brunellus, when I saw the clues I guessed many complementary and contradictory hypotheses: it could be a runaway horse, it could be that the abbot had ridden down the slope on that fine horse, it could be that one horse, Brunellus, had left the tracks in the snow and another horse, Favellus, the day before, the traces of mane in the bush, and the branches could have been broken by some men. I didn’t know which hypothesis was right until I saw the cellarer and the servants anxiously searching. Then I understood that the Brunellus hypothesis was the only right one, and I tried to prove it true, addressing the monks as I did. I won, but I might also have lost. The others believed me wise because I won, but they didn’t know the many instances in which I have been foolish because I lost, and they didn’t know that a few seconds before winning I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t lose. Now, for the events of the abbey I have many fine hypotheses, but there is no evident fact that allows me to say which is best. So, rather than appear foolish afterward, I renounce seeming clever now. Let me think no more, until tomorrow at least.”
I understood at that moment my master’s method of reasoning, and it seemed to me quite alien to that of the philosopher, who reasons by first principles, so that his intellect almost assumes the ways of the divine intellect. I understood that, when he didn’t have an answer, William proposed many to himself, very different one from another. I remained puzzled.
“But then ...” I venture to remark, “you are still far from the solution. ...”
“I am very close to one,” William said, “but I don’t know which.”
“Therefore you don’t have a single answer to your questions?”
“Adso, if I did I would teach theology in Paris.”
“In Paris do they always have the true answer?”
“Never,” William said, “but they are very sure of their errors.”
“And you,” I said with childish impertinence, “never commit errors?”
“Often,” he answered. “But instead of conceiving only one, I imagine many, so I become the slave of none.”
I had the impressi
on that William was not at all interested in the truth, which is nothing but the adjustment between the thing and the intellect. On the contrary, he amused himself by imagining how many possibilities were possible.
At that moment, I confess, I despaired of my master and caught myself thinking, “Good thing the inquisitor has come.” I was on the side of that thirst for truth that inspired Bernard Gui.
And in this culpable mood, more torn than Judas on the night of Holy Thursday, I went with William into the refectory to eat my supper.
COMPLINE
In which Salvatore tells of a prodigious spell.
The supper for the legation was superb. The abbot must have known well both human weaknesses and the customs of the papal court (which, I must say, did not displease Brother Michael’s Minorites, either). The freshly slaughtered pigs were to have produced blood pudding according to the Monte Cassino recipe, the cook had told us. But Venantius’s wretched end had obliged them to throw away all the pigs’ blood, though they would eventually slaughter some more pigs. I believe that in those days everyone abhorred the idea of killing the Lord’s creatures. Nevertheless, we had a ragout of pigeon, marinaded in the wine of those lands, and roast rabbit, Saint Clare’s pasties, rice with the almonds of those hills—the blanc-mange of fast days, that is—and borage tarts, stuffed olives, fried cheese, mutton with a sauce of raw peppers, white broad beans, and exquisite sweets, Saint Bernard’s cake, Saint Nicholas’s pies, Saint Lucy’s dumplings, and wines, and herb liqueurs that put everyone in a good humor, even Bernard Gui, usually so austere: an elixir of lemon verbena, walnut wine, wine against the gout, and gentian wine. It seemed an assembly of gluttons, except that every sip or every morsel was accompanied by devotional readings.
In the end, all rose very happy, some mentioning vague ailments as an excuse not to go down to compline. But the abbot did not take offense. Not all have the privilege and the obligations we assume on being consecrated in our order.
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