by Umberto Eco
It was at this point that Brother Jerome, Bishop of Kaffa, rose vehemently, his beard shaking with wrath even though he tried to make his words sound conciliatory. He began an argumentation that to me seemed fairly confused. “What I will say to the Holy Father, and myself who will say it, I submit to his correction, because I truly believe John is the vicar of Christ, and for this confession I was seized by the Saracens. And I will refer first to an event recorded by a great doctor, in the dispute that arose one day among monks as to who was the father of Melchizedek. Then the abbot Copes, questioned about this, shook his head and declared: Woe to you, Copes, for you seek only those things that God does not command you to seek and neglect those He does command. There, as is readily deduced from my example, it is so clear that Christ and the Blessed Virgin and the apostles held nothing, individually or in common, that it would be less clear to recognize that Jesus was man and God at the same time, and yet it seems clear to me that anyone denying the evidence of the former must then deny the latter!”
He spoke triumphantly, and I saw William raise his eyes to heaven. I suspect he considered Jerome’s syllogism quite defective, and I cannot say he was wrong, but even more defective, it seemed to me, was the infuriated and contrary argumentation of Jean de Baune, who said that he who affirms something about the poverty of Christ affirms what is seen (or not seen) with the eye, whereas to define his simultaneous humanity and divinity, faith intervenes, so that the two propositions cannot be compared.
In reply, Jerome was more acute than his opponent: “Oh, no, dear brother,” he said, “I think exactly the opposite is true, because all the Gospels declare Christ was a man and ate and drank, and as his most evident miracles demonstrate, he was also God, and all this is immediately obvious!”
“Magicians and soothsayers also work miracles,” de Baune said smugly.
“True,” Jerome replied, “but through magic art. Would you compare Christ’s miracles to magic art?” The assembly murmured indignantly that they would not consider such a thing. “And finally,” Jerome went on, feeling he was now close to victory, “would his lordship the Cardinal del Poggetto want to consider heretical the belief in Christ’s poverty, when this proposition is the basis of the Rule of an order such as the Franciscan, whose sons have gone to every realm to preach and shed their blood, from Morocco to India?”
“Holy spirit of Peter of Spain,” William muttered, “protect us.”
“Most beloved brother,” de Baune then cried, taking a step forward, “speak if you will of the blood of your monks, but do not forget, that same tribute has also been paid by religious of other orders. . . .”
“With all due respect to my lord cardinal,” Jerome shouted, “no Dominican ever died among the infidels, whereas in my own time alone, nine Minorites have been martyred!”
The Dominican Bishop of Alborea, red in the face, now stood up. “I can prove that before any Minorites were in Tartary, Pope Innocent sent three Dominicans there!”
“He did?” Jerome said, snickering. “Well, I know that the Minorites have been in Tartary for eighty years, and they have forty churches throughout the country, whereas the Dominicans have only five churches, all along the coast, and perhaps fifteen monks in all. And that settles the question!”
“It does not settle any question at all,” the Bishop of Alborea shouted, “because these Minorites, who produce heretics as bitches produce puppies, claim everything for themselves, boast of martyrs, but have fine churches, sumptuous vestments, and buy and sell like all the other religious!”
“No, my lord, no,” Jerome interrupted, “they do not buy and sell on their own, but through the procurators of the apostolic see, and the procurators have possession, while the Minorites have only the use!”
“Is that so?” the bishop sneered. “And how many times, then, have you sold without procurators? I know the story of some farms that—”
“If I did so, I was wrong,” Jerome hastily interrupted, “not to turn that over to the order may have been a weakness on my part!”
“Venerable brothers,” Abo then intervened, “our problem is not whether the Minorites are poor, but whether our Lord was poor. . . .”
“Well, then”—at this point Jerome raised his voice again—“on that question I have an argument that cuts like a sword. . . .”
“Saint Francis, protect thy sons . . .” William said, without much confidence.
“The argument,” Jerome continued, “is that the Orientals and the Greeks, far more familiar than we with the doctrine of the holy fathers, are convinced of the poverty of Christ. And if those heretics and schismatics so clearly uphold such a clear truth, do we want to be more heretical and schismatical than they, by denying it? These Orientals, if they heard some of our number preaching against this truth, would stone them!”
“What are you saying?” the Bishop of Alborea quipped. “Why, then, do they not stone the Dominicans, who preach precisely against this?”
“Dominicans? Why, no one has ever seen them down there!”
Alborea, his face purple, observed that this monk Jerome had been in Greece perhaps fifteen years, whereas he had been there since his boyhood. Jerome replied that the Dominican Alborea might perhaps have been in Greece, but living a sybaritic life in fine bishops’ palaces, whereas he, a Franciscan, had been there not fifteen years, but twenty-two, and had preached before the Emperor in Constantinople. Then Alborea, running short on arguments, started to cross the space that separated him from the Minorites, indicating in a loud voice and with words I dare not repeat his firm intention to pull off the beard of the Bishop of Kaffa, whose masculinity he called into question, and whom he planned to punish, by the logic of an eye for an eye, shoving that beard in a certain place.
The other Minorites rushed to form a barrier and defend their brother; the Avignonese thought it useful to lend the Dominican a hand, and (Lord, have mercy on the best among thy sons!) a brawl ensued, which the abbot and the cardinal tried to quell. In the tumult that followed, Minorites and Dominicans said grave things to one another, as if each were a Christian fighting the Saracens. The only ones who remained in their seats were William, on one side, and Bernard Gui, on the other. William seemed sad, and Bernard happy, if you can call happiness the faint smile that curled his lip.
“Are there no better arguments,” I asked my master, as Alborea tugged at the beard of the Bishop of Kaffa, “to prove or refute the poverty of Christ?”
“Why, you can affirm both positions, my good Adso,” William said, “and you will never be able to establish on the basis of the Gospels whether, and to what extent, Christ considered as his property the tunic he wore, which he then perhaps threw away when it was worn out. And, if you like, the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas on property is bolder than that of us Minorites. We say: We own nothing and have everything in use. He said: Consider yourselves also owners, provided that, if anyone lacks what you possess, you grant him its use, and out of obligation, not charity. But the question is not whether Christ was poor: it is whether the church must be poor. And ‘poor’ does not so much mean owning a palace or not; it means, rather, keeping or renouncing the right to legislate on earthly matters.”
“Then this,” I said, “is why the Emperor is so interested in what the Minorites say about poverty.”
“Exactly. The Minorites are playing the Emperor’s game against the Pope. But Marsilius and I consider it a two-sided game, and we would like the empire to support our view and serve our idea of human rule.”
“And will you say this when you are called on to speak?”
“If I say it I fulfill my mission, which was to expound the opinions of the imperial theologians. But if I say it my mission fails, because I ought to be facilitating a second meeting in Avignon, and I don’t believe John would agree to my going there to say these things.”
“And so—?”
“And so I am trapped between two opposing forces, like an ass who does not know which of two sacks of hay to eat. The
time is not ripe. Marsilius raves of an impossible transformation, immediately; but Louis is no better than his predecessors, even if for the present he remains the only bulwark against a wretch like John. Perhaps I shall have to speak, unless they end up killing one another first. In any case, Adso, write it all down: let at least some trace remain of what is happening today.”
As we were speaking—and truly I do not know how we managed to hear each other—the dispute reached its climax. The archers intervened, at a sign from Bernard Gui, to keep the two factions apart. But like besiegers and besieged, on both sides of the walls of a fortress, they hurled insults and rebuttals at one another, which I record here at random, unable to attribute them to specific speakers, and with the premise that the phrases were not uttered in turn, as would happen in a dispute in my country, but in Mediterranean fashion, one overlapping another, like the waves of an angry sea.
“The Gospel says Christ had a purse!”
“Shut up! You people paint that purse even on crucifixes! What do you say, then, of the fact that our Lord, when he entered Jerusalem, went back every night to Bethany?”
“If our Lord chose to go and sleep in Bethany, who are you to question his decision?”
“No, you old ass, our Lord returned to Bethany because he had no money to pay for an inn in Jerusalem!”
“Bonagratia, you’re the ass here! What did our Lord eat in Jerusalem?”
“Would you say, then, that a horse who receives oats from his master to keep alive is the owner of the oats?”
“You see? You compare Christ to a horse. . . .”
“No, you are the one who compares Christ to a simoniacal prelate of your court, vessel of dung!”
“Really? And how many lawsuits has the holy see had to undertake to protect your property?”
“The property of the church, not ours! We had it in use!”
“In use to spend, to build beautiful churches with gold statues, you hypocrites, whited sepulchers, sinks of iniquity! You know well that charity, not poverty, is the principle of the perfect life!”
“That is what your glutton Thomas said!”
“Mind your words, villain! The man you call ‘glutton’ is a saint of the holy Roman church!”
“Saint, my foot! Canonized by John to spite the Franciscans! Your Pope can’t create saints, because he’s a heretic! No, a heresiarch!”
“We’ve heard that one before! Words spoken by that Bavarian puppet at Sachsenhausen, rehearsed by your Ubertino!”
“Mind how you speak, pig, son of the whore of Babylon and other strumpets as well! You know Ubertino wasn’t with the Emperor that year: he was right there in Avignon, in the service of Cardinal Orsini, and the Pope was sending him as a messenger to Aragon!”
“I know, I know, he took his vow of poverty at the cardinal’s table, as he now lives in the richest abbey of the peninsula! Ubertino, if you weren’t there, who prompted Louis to use your writings?”
“Is it my fault if Louis reads my writings? Surely he cannot read yours, you illiterate!”
“I? Illiterate? Was your Francis a literate, he who spoke with geese?”
“You blaspheme!”
“You’re the blasphemer; you know the keg ritual!”
“I have never seen such a thing, and you know it!”
“Yes, you did, you and your little friars, when you slipped into the bed of Clare of Montefalco!”
“May God strike you! I was inquisitor at that time, and Clare had already died in the odor of sanctity!”
“Clare gave off the odor of sanctity, but you were sniffing another odor when you sang matins to the nuns!”
“Go on, go on, the wrath of God will reach you, as it will reach your master, who has given welcome to two heretics like that Ostrogoth Eckhart and that English necromancer you call Branucerton!”
“Venerable brothers, venerable brothers!” Cardinal Bertrand and the abbot shouted.
Terce
In which Severinus speaks to William of a strange book, and William speaks to the envoys of a strange concept of temporal government.
The quarrel was still raging when one of the novices guarding the door came in, passing through that confusion like someone walking across a field lashed by hail. He approached William, to whisper that Severinus wanted urgently to speak to him. We went out into the narthex, which was crowded with curious monks trying, through the shouts and noise, to catch something of what was going on inside. In the first rank we saw Aymaro of Alessandria, who welcomed us with his usual condescending sneer of commiseration at the foolishness of the universe. “To be sure, since the rise of the mendicant orders Christianity has become more virtuous,” he said.
William brushed him aside with a certain roughness and headed for Severinus, awaiting us in a corner. He was distressed and wanted to speak to us in private, but it was impossible to find a calm spot in that confusion. We thought to go outside, but Michael of Cesena looked out through the doorway of the chapter hall, bidding William to come back in, because, he said, the quarrel was being settled and the series of speeches should be resumed.
William, torn between two bags of hay, urged Severinus to speak, and the herbalist did his best to keep others from overhearing.
“Berengar certainly came to the infirmary before he went to the balneary,” he said.
“How do you know?” Some monks approached, their curiosity aroused by our confabulation. Severinus’s voice sank still lower, as he looked around.
“You told me that that man . . . must have had something with him. . . . Well, I found something in my laboratory, among the other books . . . a book that is not mine, a strange book. . . .”
“That must be it,” William said triumphantly. “Bring it to me at once.”
“I can’t,” Severinus said. “I’ll explain to you later. I have discovered . . . I believe I have discovered something interesting. . . . You must come, I have to show you the book . . . cautiously. . . .” He broke off. We realized that, silently as was his custom, Jorge had appeared as if by magic at our side. His hands were extended before him, as if, not used to moving in that place, he were trying to sense his direction. A normal person would not have been able to comprehend Severinus’s whispers, but we had learned some time before that Jorge’s hearing, like that of all blind men, was especially sharp.
Still, the old man seemed to have heard nothing. He moved, in fact, in the direction away from us, touched one of the monks, and asked him something. The monk took him gently by the arm and led him outside. At that moment Michael reappeared, again summoning William, and my master made a decision. “Please,” he said to Severinus, “go back at once to the place from whence you came. Lock yourself inside and wait for me. You”—he said to me—“follow Jorge. Even if he did hear something, I don’t believe he will have himself led to the infirmary. In any case, you will tell me where he goes.”
As he started to go back into the hall, he noticed (as I also noticed) Aymaro pushing his way through the jostling crowd in order to follow Jorge outside. Here William acted unwisely, because now in a loud voice, from one end of the narthex to the other, he said to Severinus, who was at the outer threshold, “Make sure those papers are safe. . . . Don’t go back to . . . where they came from!” Just as I was preparing to follow Jorge, I saw the cellarer leaning against the jamb of the outside door; he had heard William’s warnings and was looking from my master to the herbalist, his face tense with fear. He saw Severinus going out and followed him. On the threshold, I was afraid of losing sight of Jorge, who was about to be swallowed up by the fog, but the other two, heading in the opposite direction, were also on the verge of vanishing into the brume. I calculated rapidly what I should do. I had been ordered to follow the blind man, but because it was feared he was going toward the infirmary. Instead, his guide was taking him in another direction: he was crossing the cloister, heading for the church or the Aedificium. The cellarer, on the contrary, was surely following the herbalist, and William was worried
about what could happen in the laboratory. So I started following the two men, wondering, among other things, where Aymaro had gone, unless he had come out for reasons quite removed from ours.
I did not lose sight of the cellarer, who was slowing his pace because he had realized I was following him. He couldn’t be sure the shadow at his heels was mine, as I couldn’t be sure the shadow whose heels I followed belonged to him; but as I had no doubts about him, he had none about me.