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, &o 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 w
ish 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, “u 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 morel 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 à 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 kno
w 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!”
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