The Name of the Rose

by Umberto Eco

  “It would be marvelous. But we would have to have this machine, and it would have to be able to recognize north at night and indoors, without being able to see the sun or the stars. . . . And I believe not even your Bacon possessed such a machine.” I laughed.

  “But you are wrong,” William said, “because a machine of the sort has been constructed, and some navigators have used it. It doesn’t need the stars or the sun, because it exploits the power of a marvelous stone, like the one we saw in Severinus’s infirmary, the one that attracts iron. And it was studied by Bacon and by a Picard wizard, Pierre of Maricourt, who described its many uses.”

  “But could you construct it?”

  “In itself, that wouldn’t be difficult. The stone can be used to produce many wonders, including a machine that moves perpetually without any external power, but the simplest discovery was described also by an Arab, Baylek al-Qabayaki. Take a vessel filled with water and set afloat in it a cork into which you have stuck an iron needle. Then pass the stone over the surface of the water, until the needle has acquired the same properties as the stone. And at this point the needle—though the stone would also have done it if it had had the capacity to move around a pivot—will turn and point north, and if you move it with the vessel, it will always turn in the direction of the north wind. Obviously, if you bear north in mind and also mark on the edge of the vessel the positions of east, south, and west, you will always know which way to turn in the library to reach the east tower.”

  “What a marvel!” I exclaimed. “But why does the needle always point north? The stone attracts iron, I saw that, and I imagine that an immense quantity of iron attracts the stone. But then . . . then in the direction of the polestar, at the extreme confines of the globe, there exist great iron mines!”

  “Someone, in fact, has suggested such is the case. Except that the needle doesn’t point precisely in the direction of the daystar, but toward the intersection of the celestial meridians. A sign that, as has been said, ‘hic lapis gerit in se similitudinem coeli,’ and the poles of the magnet receive their inclination from the poles of the sky, not from those of the earth. Which is a fine example of movement provoked at a distance, not by direct material causality: a problem that my friend John of Jandun is studying, when the Emperor does not ask him to make Avignon sink into the bowels of the earth. . . .”

  “Let’s go, then, and take Severinus’s stone, and a vessel, and some water, and a cork . . .” I said, excited.

  “Wait a moment,” William said. “I do not know why, but I have never seen a machine that, however perfect in the philosophers’ description, is perfect in its mechanical functioning. Whereas a peasant’s billhook, which no philosopher has ever described, always functions as it should. . . . I’m afraid that wandering around the labyrinth with a lamp in one hand, a vessel full of water in the other . . . Wait, though! I have another idea. The machine would point north even if we were outside the labyrinth, would it not?”

  “Yes, but at that point it would be of no use to us, because we would have the sun and the stars . . .” I said.

  “I know, I know. But if the machine functions both indoors and outdoors, why should it not be the same with our heads?”

  “Our heads? Of course, they also function outside, and in fact, on the outside we know quite well the layout of the Aedificium! But it is when we are inside that we become disoriented!”

  “Precisely. But forget the machine for now. Thinking about the machine has led me to think about natural laws and the laws of thought. Here is the point: we must find, from the outside, a way of describing the Aedificium as it is inside. . . .”

  “But how?”

  “We will use the mathematical sciences. Only in the mathematical sciences, as Averroës says, are things known to us identified with those known absolutely.”

  “Then you do admit universal notions, you see.”

  “Mathematical notions are propositions constructed by our intellect in such a way that they function always as truths, either because they are innate or because mathematics was invented before the other sciences. And the library was built by a human mind that thought in a mathematical fashion, because without mathematics you cannot build labyrinths. And therefore we must compare our mathematical propositions with the propositions of the builder, and from this comparison science can be produced, because it is a science of terms upon terms. And, in any case, stop dragging me into discussions of metaphysics. What the Devil has got into you today? Instead, you who have good eyes take a parchment, a tablet, something you can make signs on, and a stylus. . . . Good, you have it? Good for you, Adso. Let’s go and take a turn around the Aedificium, while we still have a bit of light.”

  So we took a long turn around the Aedificium. That is, from the distance we examined the east, south, and west towers, with the walls connecting them. The rest rose over the cliff, though for reasons of symmetry it could not be very different from what we were seeing.

  And what we saw, William observed as he made me take precise notes on my tablet, was that each wall had two windows, and each tower five.

  “Now, think,” my master said to me. “Each room we saw had a window. . . .”

  “Except those with seven sides,” I said.

  “And, naturally, they are the ones in the center of each tower.”

  “And except some others that we found without windows but that were not heptagonal.”

  “Forget them. First let us find the rule, then we will try to explain the exceptions. So: we will have on the outside five rooms for each tower and two rooms for each straight wall, each room with a window. But if from a room with a window we proceed toward the interior of the Aedificium, we meet another room with a window. A sign that there are internal windows. Now, what shape is the internal well, as seen from the kitchen and from the scriptorium?”

  “Octagonal,” I said.

  “Excellent. And on each side of the octagon there could easily be two windows. Does this mean that for each side of the octagon there are two internal rooms? Am I right?”

  “Yes, but what about the windowless rooms?”

  “There are eight in all. In fact, the internal room of every tower, with seven sides, has five walls that open each into one of the five rooms of the tower. What do the other two walls confine with? Not with rooms set along the outside walls, or there would be windows, and not with rooms along the octagon, for the same reason and because they would then be excessively long rooms. Try to draw a plan of how the library might look from above. You see that in each tower there must be two rooms that confine with the heptagonal room and open into two rooms that confine with the internal octagonal well.”

  I tried drawing the plan that my master suggested, and I let out a cry of triumph. “But now we know everything! Let me count. . . . The library has fifty-six rooms, four of them heptagonal and fifty-two more or less square, and of these, there are eight without windows, while twenty-eight look to the outside and sixteen to the interior!”

  “And the four towers each have five rooms with four walls and one with seven. . . . The library is constructed according to a celestial harmony to which various and wonderful meanings can be attributed. . . .”

  “A splendid discovery,” I said, “but why is it so difficult to get our bearings?”

  “Because what does not correspond to any mathematical law is the arrangement of the openings. Some rooms allow you to pass into several others, some into only one, and we must ask ourselves whether there are not rooms that do not allow you to go anywhere else. If you consider this aspect, plus the lack of light or of any clue that might be supplied by the position of the sun (and if you add the visions and the mirrors), you understand how the labyrinth can confuse anyone who goes through it, especially when he is already troubled by a sense of guilt. Remember, too, how desperate we were last night when we could no longer find our way. The maximum of confusion achieved with the maximum of order: it seems a sublime calculation. The builders of the library
were great masters.”

  “How will we orient ourselves, then?”

  “At this point it isn’t difficult. With the map you’ve drawn, which should more or less correspond to the plan of the library, as soon as we are in the first heptagonal room we will move immediately to reach one of the blind rooms. Then, always turning right, after two or three rooms we should again be in a tower, which can only be the north tower, until we come to another blind room, on the left, which will confine with the heptagonal room, and on the right will allow us to rediscover a route similar to what I have just described, until we arrive at the west tower.”

  “Yes, if all the rooms opened into all the other rooms . . .”

  “In fact. And for this reason we’ll need your map, to mark the blank walls on it, so we’ll know what detours we’re making. But it won’t be difficult.”

  “But are we sure it will work?” I asked, puzzled; it all seemed too simple to me.

  “It will work,” William replied. “But unfortunately we don’t know everything yet. We have learned how to avoid being lost. Now we must know whether there is a rule governing the distribution of the books among the rooms. And the verses from the Apocalypse tell us very little, not least because many are repeated identically in different rooms. . . .”

  “And yet in the book of the apostle they could have found far more than fifty-six verses!”

  “Undoubtedly. Therefore only certain verses are good. Strange. As if they had had fewer than fifty: thirty or twenty . . . Oh, by the beard of Merlin!”

  “Of whom?”

  “Pay no attention. A magician of my country . . . They used as many verses as there are letters in the alphabet! Of course, that’s it! The text of the verse doesn’t count, it’s the initial letters that count. Each room is marked by a letter of the alphabet, and all together they make up some text that we must discover!”

  “Like a figured poem, in the form of a cross or a fish!”

  “More or less, and probably in the period when the library was built, that kind of poem was much in vogue.”

  “But where does the text begin?”

  “With a scroll larger than the others, in the heptagonal room of the entrance tower . . . or else . . . Why, of course, with the sentences in red!”

  “But there are so many of them!”

  “And therefore there must be many texts, or many words. Now make a better and larger copy of your map; while we visit the library, you will mark down with your stylus the rooms we pass through, the positions of the doors and walls (as well as the windows), and also the first letters of the verses that appear there. And like a good illuminator, you will make the letters in red larger.”

  “But how does it happen,” I said with admiration, “that you were able to solve the mystery of the library looking at it from the outside, and you were unable to solve it when you were inside?”

  “Thus God knows the world, because He conceived it in His mind, as if from the outside, before it was created, and we do not know its rule, because we live inside it, having found it already made.”

  “So one can know things by looking at them from the outside!”

  “The creations of art, because we retrace in our minds the operations of the artificer. Not the creations of nature, because they are not the work of our minds.”

  “But for the library this suffices, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” William said. “But only for the library. Now let’s go and rest. I can do nothing until tomorrow morning, when I will have, I hope, my lenses. We might as well sleep, and rise early. I will try to reflect.”

  “And supper?”

  “Ah, of course, supper. The hour has passed by now. The monks are already at compline. But perhaps the kitchen is still open. Go look for something.”

  “And steal it?”

  “Ask. Ask Salvatore, who is now your friend.”

  “But he will steal!”

  “Are you perhaps your brother’s keeper?” William asked, with the words of Cain. But I saw he was joking and meant to say that God is great and merciful. And so I went looking for Salvatore and found him near the horses’ stalls.

  “A fine animal,” I said, nodding at Brunellus, as a way of starting a conversation. “I would like to ride him.”

  “No se puede. Abbonis est. But you do not need a pulcher horse to ride hard. . . .” He pointed out a sturdy but ill-favored horse. “That one also sufficit. . . . Vide illuc, tertius equi. . . .”

  He wanted to point out to me the third horse. I laughed at his comical Latin. “And what will you do with that one?” I asked him.

  And he told me a strange story. He said that any horse, even the oldest and weakest animal, could be made as swift as Brunellus. You had only to mix into his oats an herb called satirion, chopped fine, and then grease his thighs with stag fat. Then you mount the horse, and before spurring him you turn his face eastward and you whisper into his ear, three times, the words: “Nicander, Melchior, and Merchizard.” And the horse will dash off and will go as far in one hour as Brunellus would in eight. And if you hang around his neck the teeth of a wolf that the horse himself has trampled and killed, the animal will not even feel the effort.

  I asked him whether he had ever tried this. He said to me, coming closer circumspectly and whispering into my ear with his really foul breath, that it was very difficult, because satirion was now cultivated only by bishops and by their lordly friends, who used it to increase their power. Then I put an end to his talk and told him that this evening my master wanted to read certain books in his cell and wished to eat up there.

  “I will do,” he said, “I will do cheese in batter.”

  “How is that made?”

  “Facilis. You take the cheese before it is too antiquum, without too much salis, and cut in cubes or sicut you like. And postea you put a bit of butierro or lardo to rechauffer over the embers. And in it you put two pieces of cheese, and when it becomes tenero, zucharum et cinnamon supra positurum du bis. And immediately take to table, because it must be ate caldo caldo.”

  “Cheese in batter it is, then,” I said to him. And he vanished toward the kitchen, telling me to wait for him. He arrived half an hour later with a dish covered by a cloth. The aroma was good.

  “Here,” he said to me, and he also held out a great lamp filled with oil.

  “What for?” I asked.

  “Sais pas, moi,” he said, slyly. “Peut-être your magister wants to go in dark place esta noche.”

  Salvatore apparently knew more things than I had suspected. I inquired no further, but took the food to William. We ate, and I withdrew to my cell. Or at least, so I implied. I wanted to find Ubertino again, and stealthily I returned to the church.

  After Compline

  In which Ubertino tells Adso the story of Fra Dolcino, after which Adso recalls other stories or reads them on his own in the library, and then he has an encounter with a maiden, beautiful and terrible as an army arrayed for battle.

  I found Ubertino at the statue of the Virgin. Silently I joined him and for a while pretended (I confess) to pray. Then I made bold to speak to him.

  “Holy Father,” I said to him, “may I ask enlightenment and counsel of you?”

  Ubertino looked at me and, taking me by the hand, rose and led me to a bench, where we both sat. He embraced me tightly, and I could feel his breath on my face.

  “Dearest son,” he said, “anything this poor sinner can do for your soul will be done joyfully. What is distressing you? Yearnings?” he asked, almost with yearning himself. “The yearnings of the flesh?”

  “No,” I replied, blushing, “if anything the yearnings of the mind, which wants to know too many things . . .”

  “And that is bad. The Lord knows all things, and we must only adore His knowledge.”

  “But we must also distinguish good from evil and understand human passions. I am a novice, but I will be monk and priest, and I must learn where evil lies, and what it looks like, in order to recognize it o
ne day and teach others to recognize it.”

  “This is true, my boy. What do you want to know, then?”

  “The tare of heresy, Father,” I said with conviction. And then, all in one breath, “I have heard tell of a wicked man who has led others astray: Fra Dolcino.”

  Ubertino remained silent, then he said: “That is right, you heard Brother William and me refer to him the other evening. But it is a nasty story, and it grieves me to talk about it, because it teaches (yes, in this sense you should know it, to derive a useful lesson from it)—because, I was saying, it teaches how the love of penance and the desire to purify the world can produce bloodshed and slaughter.” He shifted his position on the bench, relaxing his grasp of my shoulders but still keeping one hand on my neck, as if to communicate to me his knowledge or (I could not tell) his intensity.

  “The story begins before Fra Dolcino,” he said, “more than sixty years ago, when I was a child. It was in Parma. There a certain Gherardo Segarelli began preaching, exhorting all to a life of penitence, and he would go along the roads crying ‘Penitenziagite!’ which was the uneducated man’s way of saying ‘Penitentiam agite, appropinquabit enim regnum coelorum.’ He enjoined his disciples to imitate the apostles, and he chose to call his sect the order of the Apostles, and his men were to go through the world like poor beggars, living only on alms. . . .”

  “Like the Fraticelli,” I said. “Wasn’t this the command of our Lord and of your own Francis?”

  “Yes,” Ubertino admitted with a slight hesitation in his voice, sighing. “But perhaps Gherardo exaggerated. He and his followers were accused of denying the authority of the priests and the celebration of Mass and confession, and of being idle vagabonds.”

  “But the Spiritual Franciscans were accused of the same thing. And aren’t the Minorites saying today that the authority of the Pope should not be recognized?”

  “Yes, but not the authority of priests. We Minorites are ourselves priests. It is difficult, boy, to make distinctions in these things. The line dividing good from evil is so fine. . . . In some way Gherardo erred and became guilty of heresy. . . . He asked to be admitted to the order of the Minorites, but our brothers would not receive him. He spent his days in the church of our brothers, and he saw the paintings there of the apostles wearing sandals on their feet and cloaks wrapped around their shoulders, and so he let his hair and beard grow, put sandals on his feet, and wore the rope of the Friars Minor, because anyone who wants to found a new congregation always takes something from the order of the Blessed Francis.”