by Umberto Eco
“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. And 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 holy table 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 wh
ich 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 plan, 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 reproaching him for not having yet done so) 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.”