That day I could not refrain from questioning him further about the matter of the horse.
“All the same,” I said, “when you read the prints in the snow and the evidence of the branches, you did not yet know Brunellus. In a certain sense those prints spoke of all horses, or at least all horses of that breed. Mustn’t we say, then, that the book of nature speaks to us only of essences, as many distinguished theologians teach?”
“Not entirely, dear Adso,” my master replied. “True, that kind of print expressed to me, if you like, the idea of ‘horse,’ the verbum mentis, and would have expressed the same to me wherever I might have found it. But the print in that place and at that hour of the day told me that at least one of all possible horses had passed that way. So I found myself halfway between the perception of the concept ‘horse’ and the knowledge of an individual horse. And in any case, what I knew of the universal horse had been given me by those traces, which were singular. I could say I was caught at that moment between the singularity of the traces and my ignorance, which assumed the quite diaphanous form of a universal idea. If you see something from a distance, and you do not understand what it is, you will be content with defining it as a body of some dimension. When you come closer, you will then define it as an animal, even if you do not yet know whether it is a horse or an ass. And finally, when it is still closer, you will be able to say it is a horse even if you do not yet know whether it is Brunellus or Niger. And only when you are at the proper distance will you see that it is Brunellus (or, rather, that horse and not another, however you decide to call it). And that will be full knowledge, the learning of the singular. So an hour ago I could expect all horses, but not because of the vastness of my intellect, but because of the paucity of my deduction. And my intellect’s hunger was sated only when I saw the single horse that the monks were leading by the halter. Only then did I truly know that my previous reasoning, had brought me close to the truth. And so the ideas, which I was using earlier to imagine a horse I had not yet seen, were pure signs, as the hoofprints in the snow were signs of the idea of ‘horse’; and sins and the signs of signs are used only when we are lacing things.”
On other occasions I had heard him speak with great skepticism about universal ideas and with great respect about individual things; and afterward, too, I thought this tendency came to him from his being both a Briton and a Franciscan. But that day he did not have the strength to face theological disputes, so I curled up in the space allotted me, wrapped myself in a blanket, and fell sound asleep.
Anyone coming in could have mistaken me for a bundle. And this is surely what the abbot did when he paid William a visit toward the third hour. So it was that I could listen, unnoticed, to their first conversation.
And so Abo arrived. He apologized for the intrusion, repeated his welcome, and said that he had to speak with William privately, about a very serious matter.
He began by congratulating his guest on the skill demonstrated in the business of the horse, and asked how he had been able to give such confident information about an animal he had never seen. William explained to him briefly and with detachment the path he had followed, and the abbot complimented him highly on his acumen. He said he would have expected nothing less from a man preceded by a reputation for great wisdom. He said he had received a letter from the abbot of Farfa that not only spoke of William’s mission for the Emperor (which they would discuss in the coming days) but also added that in England and in Italy my master had acted as inquisitor in some trials, where he had distinguished himself by his perspicacity, along with a great humility.
“I was very pleased to learn,” the abbot continued, “that in numerous cases you decided the accused was innocent. I believe, and never more than during these sad days, in the constant presence of the Evil One in human affairs”—and he looked around, imperceptibly, as if the enemy were lurking within those walls—“but I believe also that often the Evil One works through second causes. And I know that he can impel his victims to do evil in such a way that the blame falls on a righteous man, and the Evil One rejoices then as the righteous man is burned in the place of his succubus. Inquisitors often, to demonstrate their zeal, wrest a confession from the accused at all costs, thinking that the only good inquisitor is one who concludes the trial by finding a scapegoat. …”
“An inquisitor, too, can be impelled by the Devil,” William said.
“That is possible,” the abbot admitted with great circumspection, “because the designs of the Almighty are inscrutable, and far be it from me to cast any shadow of suspicion on such worthy men. Indeed, it is as one of them that I need you today. In this abbey something has happened that requires the attention and counsel of an acute and prudent man such as you are. Acute in uncovering, and prudent (if necessary) in covering. If a shepherd errs, he must be isolated from other shepherds, but woe unto us if the sheep begin to distrust shepherds.”
“I see your point,” William said. I had already had occasion to observe that when he expressed himself so promptly and politely he was usually concealing, in an honest way, his dissent or puzzlement.
“For this reason,” the abbot continued, “I consider that any case involving the error of a shepherd can be entrusted only to men like you, who can distinguish not only good from evil, but also what is expedient from what is not. I like to think you pronounced a sentence of guilty only when ...”
“... the accused were guilty of criminal acts, of poisoning, of the corruption of innocent youths, or other abominations my mouth dares not utter …”
“… that you pronounced sentence only when,” the abbot continued, not heeding the interruption, “the presence of the Devil was so evident to all eyes that it was impossible to act otherwise without the clemency’s being more scandalous than the crime itself.”
“When I found someone guilty,” William explained, “he had really committed crimes of such gravity that in all conscience I could hand him over to the secular arm.”
The abbot was bewildered for a moment. “Why,” he asked, “do you insist on speaking of criminal acts without referring to their diabolical cause?”
“Because reasoning about causes and effects is a very difficult thing, and I believe the only judge of that can be God. We are already hard put to establish a relationship between such an obvious effect as a charred tree and the lightning bolt that set fire to it, so to trace sometimes endless chains of causes and effects seems to me as foolish as trying to build a tower that will touch the sky.
“Let us suppose a man has been killed by poisoning. This is a given fact. It is possible for me to imagine, in the face of certain undeniable signs, that the poisoner is a second man. On such simple chains of causes my mind can act with a certain confidence in its power. But how can I complicate the chain, imagining that, to cause the evil deed, there was yet another intervention, not human this time, but diabolical? I do not say it is impossible: the Devil, like your horse Brunellus, also indicates his passage through clear signs. But why must I hunt for these proofs? Is it not already enough for me to know that the guilty party is that man and for me to turn him over to the secular arm? In any case his punishment will be death, God forgive him.”
“But I have heard that in a trial held at Kilkenny three years ago, in which certain persons were accused of having committed loathsome crimes, you did not deny diabolical intervention, once the guilty parties had been identified.”
“Nor did I affirm it openly, in so many words. I did not deny it, true. Who am I to express judgments on the plots of the Evil One, especially,” he added, and seemed to want to insist on this reason, “in cases where those who had initiated the inquisition, the bishop, the city magistrates, and the whole populace, perhaps the. accused themselves, truly wanted to feel the presence of the Devil? There, perhaps the only real proof of the presence of the Devil was the intensity with which everyone at that moment desired to know he was at work. …”
“Are you telling me, then,” the abbot said in a
worried tone, “that in many trials the Devil does not act only within the guilty one but perhaps and above all in the judges?”
“Could I make such a statement?” William asked, and I noticed that the question was formulated in such a way that the abbot was unable to affirm that he could; so William took advantage of his silence to change the direction of their dialogue. “But these, after all, are remote things. I have abandoned that noble activity and if I did so, it was because the Lord wished it ...”
“No doubt,” the abbot admitted.
“... and now,” William continued, “I concern myself with other delicate questions. And I would like to deal with the one that distresses you, if you will speak to me about it.”
I felt the abbot was pleased to be able to conclude that discussion and return to his problem. He then began telling, with very careful choice of words and with long paraphrases, about an unusual event that had taken place a few days before and had left in its wake great distress among the monks. He was speaking of the matter with William, he said, because, since William had great knowledge both of the human spirit and of the wiles of the Evil One, Abo hoped his guest would be able to devote a part of his valuable time to shedding light on a painful enigma. What had happened, then, was this: Adelmo of Otranto, a monk still young though already famous as a master illuminator, who had been decorating the manuscripts of the library with the most beautiful images, had been found one morning by a goatherd at the bottom of the cliff below the Aedificium. Since he had been seen by other monks in choir during compline but had not reappeared at matins, he had probably fallen there during the darkest hours of the night. The night of a great snowstorm, in which flakes as sharp as blades fell, almost like hail, driven by a furious south wind. Soaked by that snow, which had first melted and then frozen into shards of ice, the body had been discovered at the foot of the sheer drop, torn by the rocks it had struck on the way down. Poor, fragile, mortal thing, God have mercy on him. Thanks to the battering the body had suffered in its broken fall, determining from which precise spot it had fallen was not easy: certainly from one of the windows that opened in rows on the three stories on the three sides of the tower exposed to the abyss.
“Where have you buried the poor body?” William asked.
“In the cemetery, naturally,” the abbot replied. “Perhaps you noticed it: it lies between the north side of the church, the Aedificium, and the vegetable garden.”
“I see,” William said, “and I see that your problem is the following. If that unhappy youth, God forbid, committed suicide, the next day you would have found one of those windows open, whereas you found them all closed, and with no sign of water at the foot of any of them.”
The abbot, as I have said, was a man of great and diplomatic composure, but this time he made a movement of surprise that robbed him totally of that decorum suited to a grave and magnanimous person, as Aristotle has it. “Who told you?”
“You told me,” William said. “If the window had been open, you would immediately have thought he had thrown himself out of it. From what I could tell from the outside, they are large windows of opaque glass, and windows of that sort are not usually placed, in buildings of this size, at a man’s height. So even if a window had been open, it would have been impossible for the unfortunate man to lean out and lose his balance; thus suicide would have been the only conceivable explanation. In which case you would not have allowed him to be buried in consecrated ground. But since you gave him Christian burial, the windows must have been closed. And if they were closed—for I have never encountered, not even in witchcraft trials, a dead man whom God or the Devil allowed to climb up from the abyss to erase the evidence of his misdeed—then obviously the presumed suicide was, on the contrary, pushed, either by human hand or by diabolical force. And you are wondering who was capable, I will not say of pushing him into the abyss, but of hoisting him to the sill; and you are distressed because an evil force, whether natural or supernatural, is at work in the abbey.”
“That is it ...” the abbot said, and it was not clear whether he was confirming William’s words or accepting the reasons William had so admirably and reasonably expounded. “But how can you know there was no water at the foot of any window?”
“Because you told me a south wind was blowing, and the water could not be driven against windows that open to the east.”
“They had not told me enough about your talents,” the abbot said. “And you are right, there was no water, and now I know why. It was all as you say. And now you understand my anxiety. It would already be serious enough if one of my monks had stained his soul with the hateful sin of suicide. But I have reason to think that another of them has stained himself with an equally terrible sin. And if that were all ...”
“In the first place, why one of the monks? In the abbey there are many other persons, grooms, goatherds, servants. ...”
“To be sure, the abbey is small but rich, the abbot agreed smugly. “One hundred fifty servants for sixty monks. But everything happened in the Aedificium. There, as perhaps you already know, although, on the ground floor are the kitchen and the refectory, on the two upper floors are the scriptorium and the library. After the evening meal the Aedifïcium is locked, and a very strict rule forbids anyone to enter.” He guessed William’s next question and added at once, though clearly with reluctance, “Including, naturally, the monks, but …”
“But?”
“But I reject absolutely—absolutely, you understand—the possibility that a servant would have had the courage to enter there at night.” There was a kind of defiant smile in his eyes, albeit brief as a flash, or a falling star. “Let us say they would have been afraid, you know ... sometimes orders given to the simpleminded have to be reinforced with a threat, a suggestion that something terrible will happen to the disobedient, perforce something supernatural. A monk, on the contrary ...”
“I understand.”
“Furthermore, a monk could have other reasons for venturing into a forbidden place. I mean reasons that are ... reasonable, even if contrary to the rule. …”
William noticed the abbot’s uneasiness and asked a question perhaps intended to change the subject, though it produced an even greater uneasiness.
“Speaking of a possible murder, you said, ‘And if that were all.’ What did you mean?”
“Did I say that? Well, no one commits murder without a reason, however perverse. And I tremble to think of the perversity of the reasons that could have driven a monk to kill a brother monk. There. That is it.”
“Nothing else?”
“Nothing else that I can say to you.”
“You mean that there is nothing else you have the power to say?”
“Please, Brother William, Brother William,” and the abbot underlined “Brother” both times.
William blushed violently and remarked, “Eris sacerdos in aeternum.”
“Thank you,” the abbot said.
O Lord God, what a terrible mystery my imprudent superiors were broaching at that moment, the one driven by anxiety and the other by curiosity. Because, a novice approaching the mysteries of the holy priesthood of God, humble youth that I was, I, too, understood that the abbot knew something but had learned it under the seal of confession. He must have heard from someone’s lips a sinful detail that could have a bearing on the tragic end of Adelmo. Perhaps for this reason he was begging Brother William to uncover a secret he himself suspected, though he was unable to reveal to anyone—and he hoped that my master, with the powers of his intellect, would cast light on—what he, the abbot, had to shroud in shadows because of the sublime law of charity.
“Very well,” William said then, “may I question the monks?”
“You may.”
“May I move freely about the abbey?”
“I grant you that power.”
“Will you assign me this mission coram monachis?”
“This very evening.”
“I shall begin, however, today, before t
he monks know what you have charged me to do. Besides, I already had a great desire—not the least reason for my sojourn here—to visit your library, which is spoken of with admiration in all the abbeys of Christendom.”
The abbot rose, almost starting, with a very tense face. “You can move freely through the whole abbey, as I have said. But not, to be sure, on the top floor of the Aedificium, the library.”
“Why not?”
“I would have explained to you before, but I thought you knew. You see, our library is not like others. …”
“I know it has more books than any other Christian library. I know that in comparison with your cases, those of Bobbio or Pomposa, of Cluny or Fleury, seem the room of a boy barely being introduced to the abacus. I know that the six thousand codices that were the boast of Novalesa a hundred or more years ago are few compared to yours, and perhaps many of those are now here. I know your abbey is the only light that Christianity can oppose to the thirty-six libraries of Baghdad, to the ten thousand codices of the Vizir Ibn al-Alkami, that the number of your Bibles equals the two thousand four hundred Korans that are the pride of Cairo, and that the reality of your cases is luminous evidence against the proud legend of the infidels who years ago claimed (intimates as they are of the Prince of Falsehood) the library of Tripoli was rich in six million volumes and inhabited by eighty thousand commentators and two hundred scribes.”
“You are right, heaven be praised.”
“I know that many of the monks living in your midst come from other abbeys scattered all over the world. Some stay here a short time, to copy manuscripts to be found nowhere else and to carry them back then to their own house, not without having brought you in exchange some other unavailable manuscript that you will copy and add to your treasure; and others stay for a very long time, occasionally remaining here till death, because only here can they find the works that enlighten their research. And so you have among you Germans, Dacians, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Greeks. I know that the Emperor Frederick, many and many years ago, asked you to compile for him a book of the prophecies of Merlin and then to translate it into Arabic, to be sent as a gift to the Sultan of Egypt. I know, finally, that such a glorious abbey as Murbach in these very sad times no longer has a single scribe, that at St. Gall only a few monks are left who know how to write, that now in the cities corporations and guilds arise, made up of laymen who work for the universities, and only your abbey day after day renews, or—what am I saying?—it exalts to ever greater heights the glories of your order. …”
The name of the rose Page 59
