by Umberto Eco
“Then he was in the right. . . .”
“But somewhere he did wrong. . . . Dressed in a white cloak over a white tunic, with his hair long, he acquired among simple people the reputation for saintliness. He sold a little house of his, and having received the money, he stood on a stone from which in ancient times the magistrates were accustomed to harangue, and he held the little sack of gold pieces in his hand, and he did not scatter them or give them to the poor, but, after summoning some rogues dicing nearby, he flung the money in their midst and said, ‘Let him take who will,’ and those rogues took the money and went off to gamble it away, and they blasphemed the living God, and he who had given to them heard and did not blush.”
“But Francis also stripped himself of everything, and today from William I heard that he went to preach to ravens and hawks, as well as to the lepers—namely, to the dregs that the people who call themselves virtuous had cast out. . . .”
“Yes, but Gherardo somehow erred; Francis never set himself in conflict with the holy church, and the Gospel says to give to the poor, not to rogues. Gherardo gave and received nothing in return because he had given to bad people, and he had a bad beginning, a bad continuation, and a bad end, because his congregation was disapproved by Pope Gregory the Tenth.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “he was a less broad-minded pope than the one who approved the Rule of Francis. . . .”
“He was, but Gherardo somehow erred. And finally, boy, these keepers of pigs and cows who suddenly became Pseudo Apostles wanted to live blissfully and without sweat off the alms of those whom the Friars Minor had educated with such efforts and such heroic examples of poverty! But that is not the point,” he added promptly. “The point is that to resemble the apostles, who had still been Jews, Gherardo Segarelli had himself circumcised, which is contrary to the words of Paul to the Galatians—and you know that many holy persons proclaim that the future Antichrist will come from the race of the circumcised. . . . But Gherardo did still worse: he went about collecting the simple people and saying, ‘Come with me into the vineyard,’ and those who did not know him went with him into another’s vineyard, believing it his, and they ate another’s grapes. . . .”
“Surely the Minorites didn’t defend private property,” I said impertinently.
Ubertino stared at me severely. “The Minorites ask to be poor, but they have never asked others to be poor. You cannot attack the property of good Christians with impunity; the good Christians will label you a bandit. And so it happened to Gherardo. They said of him finally that to test his strength of will and his continence he slept with women without having carnal knowledge of them; but when his disciples tried to imitate him, the results were quite different. . . . Oh, these are not things a boy should know: the female is a vessel of the Devil. . . . And then they began to brawl among themselves over the command of the sect, and evil things happened. And yet many came to Gherardo, not only peasants but also people of the city, and Gherardo made them strip themselves so that, naked, they could follow the naked Christ, and he sent them out into the world to preach, but he had a sleeveless tunic made for himself, white, of strong stuff, and in this garb he looked more like a clown than like a religious! They lived in the open air, but sometimes they climbed into the pulpits of the churches, disturbing the assembly of devout folk and driving out their preachers, and once they set a child on the bishop’s throne in the Church of Sant’Orso in Ravenna. And they proclaimed themselves heirs of the doctrine of Joachim of Floris. . . .”
“But so do the Franciscans,” I said, “and also Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, and you, too!” I cried.
“Calm yourself, boy. Joachim of Floris was a great prophet and he was the first to understand that Francis would begin a renewal of the church. But the Pseudo Apostles used his doctrine to justify their follies. Segarelli took with him a female apostle, one Tripia or Ripia, who claimed to have the gift of prophecy. A woman, you understand?”
“But, Father,” I tried to counter, “the other evening you yourself spoke of the saintliness of Clare of Montefalco and Angela of Foligno. . . .”
“They were saints! They lived in humility, recognizing the power of the church; they never claimed the gift of prophecy! But the Pseudo Apostles asserted that women could go preaching from city to city, as many other heretics also said. And they recognized no difference among the wed and the unwed, nor was any vow considered perpetual. In short, Bishop Obizzo of Parma finally decided to put Gherardo in irons. But here a strange thing happened that tells you how weak is human nature, and how insidious the weed of heresy. Because in the end the bishop freed Gherardo and received him at his own table, and laughed at his japes, and kept him as his buffoon.”
“But why?”
“I do not know—or, rather, I fear I do know. The bishop was a nobleman and did not like the merchants and craftsmen of the city. Perhaps he did not mind Gherardo’s preaching against them with his talk of poverty, or did not care that from begging for alms Gherardo proceeded to robbery. But in the end the Pope intervened, and the bishop resumed his proper severity, and Gherardo ended on the pyre as an impenitent heretic.”
“And what do these things have to do with Fra Dolcino?”
“They are connected, and this shows you how heresy survives even the destruction of the heretics. This Dolcino was a priest’s bastard, who lived in this part of Italy, a bit farther north. He was a youth of sharp mind and he was educated in letters, but he stole from the priest who housed him and fled eastward, to the city of Trent. And there he resumed the preaching of Gherardo, declaring that he was the only true apostle of God and that everything should be common in love, and that it was licit to lie indiscriminately with all women, whereby no one could be accused of concubinage, even if he went with both a wife and a daughter. . . .”
“Did he truly preach those things, or was he just accused of preaching them? I have heard that the Spirituals, like those monks of Montefalco, were accused of similar crimes. . . .”
“De hoc satis,” Ubertino interrupted me sharply. “They were no longer monks. They were heretics. And befouled by Fra Dolcino himself. And, furthermore, listen to me: it is enough to know what Fra Dolcino did afterward to call him a wicked man. How he became familiar with the Pseudo Apostles’ teachings, I do not even know. Perhaps he went through Parma as a youth and heard Gherardo. And it is known for certain that he began his preaching at Trent. There he seduced a very beautiful maiden of noble family, Margaret, or she seduced him, as Héloïse seduced Abelard, because—never forget—it is through woman that the Devil penetrates men’s hearts! At that point, the Bishop of Trent drove him from the diocese, but by then Dolcino had gathered more than a thousand followers, and he began a long march, which took him back to the area where he was born. And along the way other deluded folk joined him, seduced by his words, and perhaps he was also joined by many Waldensian heretics who lived in the mountains he passed through. When he reached the Novara region, Dolcino found a situation favorable to his revolt, because the vassals governing the town of Gattinara in the name of the Bishop of Vercelli had been driven out by the populace, who then welcomed Dolcino’s outlaws as their worthy allies.”
“What had the bishop’s vassals done?”
“I do not know, and it is not my place to judge. There was a conflict among certain families in the city of Vercelli, and the Pseudo Apostles took advantage of it, and these families exploited the disorder brought by the Pseudo Apostles. The feudal lords hired mercenaries to rob the citizens, and the citizens sought the protection of the Bishop of Novara.”
“What a complicated story. But whose side was Dolcino on?”
“I do not know; he was a faction unto himself; he entered into all these disputes and saw them as an opportunity for preaching the struggle against private ownership in the name of poverty. Dolcino and his followers, who were now three thousand strong, camped on a hill near Novara known as Bald Mountain, and they built hovels and fortifications, and Dolcino ruled over t
hat whole throng of men and women, who lived in the most shameful promiscuity. From there he sent letters to his faithful in which he said and wrote that their ideal was poverty and they were not bound by any vow of external obedience, and that he, Dolcino, had been sent by God to break the seals of the prophecies and to understand the writings of the Old and the New Testaments. And he called secular clerics—preachers and Minorites—ministers of the Devil, and he absolved everyone from the duty of obeying them. And he identified four ages in the life of the people of God: The first was that of the Old Testament, the patriarchs and prophets, before the coming of Christ, when marriage was good because God’s people had to multiply. The second was the age of Christ and the apostles, and this was the epoch of saintliness and chastity. Then came the third, when the popes had first to accept earthly riches in order to govern the people; but when mankind began to stray from the love of God, Benedict came, and spoke against all temporal possessions. When the monks of Benedict also then went back to accumulating wealth, the monks of Saint Francis and Saint Dominic came, even more stern than Benedict in preaching against earthly power and riches. But finally now, when again the lives of so many prelates were contradicting all those good precepts, we had reached the end of the third age, and it was necessary to follow the teachings of the Apostles.”
“Then Dolcino was preaching the things that the Franciscans had preached, and among the Franciscans, the Spirituals in particular, and you yourself, Father!”
“Ah, yes, but he derived a perfidious syllogism from them! He said that to bring to an end this third age of corruption, all the clergy, monks, and friars had to die a very cruel death; he said that all prelates of the church, all clerics, religious male and female, Dominicans, Franciscans, hermits, and even Boniface the Pope had to be exterminated by the Emperor he, Dolcino, had chosen, and this was to be Frederick of Sicily.”
“But didn’t that same Frederick receive with favor in Sicily the Spirituals expelled from Umbria, and isn’t it the Minorites who ask that the Emperor destroy the temporal power of the Pope and the cardinals?”
“It is characteristic of heresy that it transforms the most upright thoughts and aims them at consequences contrary to the law of God. The Minorites have never asked the Emperor to kill other priests.”
He was mistaken, I know now. Because, a few months later, when the Bavarian established his own order in Rome, Marsilius and other Minorites did to religious who were faithful to the Pope exactly what Dolcino had asked to have done. By this I don’t mean that Dolcino was right; if anything, Marsilius was equally wrong. But I was beginning to wonder, especially after that afternoon’s conversation with William, if it were possible for the simple people who followed Dolcino to distinguish between the promises of the Spirituals and those of Dolcino. Was he not perhaps putting into practice what presumably orthodox men had preached, in a purely mystical fashion? Or was that perhaps where the difference lay? Did holiness consist in waiting for God to give us what His saints had promised, without trying to obtain it through earthly means? Now I know this is the case and I know why Dolcino was in error: the order of things must not be transformed, even if we must fervently hope for its transformation. But that evening I was in the grip of contradictory thoughts.
“Finally,” Ubertino was saying to me, “you always find the mark of heresy in pride. At a certain point, Dolcino was appointed supreme head of the Apostolic congregation, and named a woman, the perfidious Margaret, as one of his lieutenants. And he announced that the Angelic Pope, of whom the abbot Joachim had spoken, would be chosen by God, and then Dolcino and all his people (who at this point were already four thousand) would receive together the grace of the Holy Spirit. But in the three years preceding his coming, all evil would have to be consummated. And this Dolcino tried to do, carrying war everywhere. But the pope who then came, and here you see how the Devil mocks his familiars, was in fact Clement the Fifth, who proclaimed the crusade against Dolcino. And it was right, because in his letters at this point Dolcino declared that the Roman church is a whore, that obedience is not due priests, that only the Apostles represented the new church, the Apostles could annul matrimony, no pope could absolve sin, tithes should not be paid, a more perfect life was lived without vows than with vows, and a consecrated church was worth less than a stable, and Christ could be worshiped both in the woods and in the churches.”
“Did he really say these things?”
“He did worse. After he had settled on Bald Mountain, to procure provisions he began to carry out raids on the villages below. Meanwhile one of the harshest winters in recent decades had come, and there was great famine all around; life on Bald Mountain had become intolerable, and they grew so hungry that they ate the flesh of horses and other animals, and boiled hay. And many died.”
“But whom were they fighting against now?”
“The Bishop of Vercelli had appealed to Clement the Fifth, and a crusade had been called against the heretics. A plenary indulgence was granted to anyone taking part in it, and Louis of Savoy, the inquisitors of Lombardy, the Archbishop of Milan were prompt to act. Many took up the cross to aid the people of Vercelli and Novara, even from Savoy, Provence, France; and the Bishop of Vercelli was the supreme commander. There were constant clashes between the vanguards of the two armies, but Dolcino’s fortifications were impregnable, and somehow the wicked received help.”
“From whom?”
“From other wicked men, I believe, who were happy to foment this disorder. Toward the end of the year 1305, the heresiarch was forced, however, to abandon Bald Mountain, leaving behind the wounded and ill, and he moved into the territory of Trivero, where he entrenched himself on a mountain that was called Zubello at the time and later was known as Rubello or Rebello, because it had become the fortress of the rebels of the church. In any case, I cannot tell you everything that happened. There were terrible massacres, but in the end the rebels were forced to surrender, Dolcino and his people were captured, and they rightly ended up on the pyre.”
“The beautiful Margaret, too?”
Ubertino looked at me. “So you remembered she was beautiful? She was beautiful, they say, and many local lords tried to make her their bride to save her from the stake. But she would not have it; she died impenitent with her impenitent lover. And let this be a lesson to you: beware of the whore of Babylon, even when she assumes the form of the most exquisite creature.”
“But now tell me, Father: I have learned that the cellarer of the convent, and perhaps also Salvatore, met Dolcino and were with him in some way. . . .”
“Be silent! Do not utter rash statements. I found the cellarer in a convent of Minorites. I do not know where Remigio had been before that. I know he was always a good monk, faithful to the teachings of the church. As for the rest, alas, the flesh is weak. . . .”
“What do you mean?”
“These are not things you should know.” He drew me close again, embracing me and pointing to the statue of the Virgin. “You must be introduced to the immaculate love. There is she in whom femininity is sublimated. This is why you may call her beautiful, like the beloved in the Song of Songs. In her,” he said, his face carried away by an inner rapture, like the abbot’s the day before when he spoke of gems and the gold of his vessels, “in her, even the body’s grace is a sign of the beauties of heaven, and this is why the sculptor has portrayed her with all the graces that should adorn a woman.” He pointed to the Virgin’s slender bust, held high and tight by a cross-laced bodice, which the Child’s tiny hands fondled. “You see? As the doctors have said: Beautiful also are the breasts, which protrude slightly, only faintly tumescent, and do not swell licentiously, suppressed but not depressed. . . . What do you feel before this sweetest of visions?”
I blushed violently, feeling myself stirred as if by an inner fire. Ubertino must have realized it, or perhaps he glimpsed my flushed cheeks, for he promptly added, “But you must learn to distinguish the fire of supernatural love from the raving of the
senses. It is difficult even for the saints.”
“But how can the good love be recognized?” I asked, trembling.
“What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man nor Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing. Nothing exists that so fills and binds the heart as love does. Therefore, unless you have those weapons that subdue it, the soul plunges through love into an immense abyss. And I believe that without Margaret’s seductions Dolcino would not have damned himself, and without the reckless and promiscuous life on Bald Mountain, fewer would have felt the lure of his rebellion. Mind you, I do not say these things to you only about evil love, which of course all must shun as a thing of the Devil; I say this also, and with great fear, of the good love between God and man, between man and his neighbor. It often happens that two or three people, men or women, love one another quite cordially and harbor reciprocal, special fondness, and desire to live always close, and what one party wishes, the other desires. And I confess that I felt something of the kind for most virtuous women, like Angela and Clare. Well, that, too, is blameworthy, even though it is spiritual and conceived in God’s name. . . . Because even the love felt by the soul, if it is not forearmed, if it is felt warmly, then falls, or proceeds in disorder. Oh, love has various properties: first the soul grows tender, then it sickens . . . but then it feels the true warmth of divine love and cries out and moans and becomes as stone flung in the forge to melt into lime, and it crackles, licked by the flame. . . .”