by Umberto Eco
But William had watched them coldly and had said to me this was not true penitence. He spoke then much as he had only a short while ago, this very morning: the period of the great penitential cleansing was finished, and these were the ways preachers now organized the devotion of the mobs, precisely so that they would not succumb to a desire for penance that—in this case—really was heretical and frightened all. But I was unable to understand the difference, if there actually was any. It seemed to me that the difference did not lie in the actions of the one or the other, but in the church’s attitude when she judged this act or that.
I remembered the discussion with Ubertino. William had undoubtedly been insinuating, had tried to say to him, that there was little difference between his mystic (and orthodox) faith and the distorted faith of the heretics. Ubertino had taken offense, as one who saw the difference clearly. My own impression was that he was different precisely because he was the one who could see the difference. William had renounced the duties of inquisitor because he could no longer see it. For this reason he was unable to speak to me of that mysterious Fra Dolcino. But then, obviously (I said to myself), William has lost the assistance of the Lord, who not only teaches how to see the difference, but also invests his elect with this capacity for discrimination. Ubertino and Clare of Montefalco (who was, however, surrounded by sinners) had remained saints precisely because they knew how to discriminate. This and only this is sanctity.
But why did William not know how to discriminate? He was such an acute man, and as far as the facts of nature went, he could perceive the slightest discrepancy or the slightest kinship between things. . . .
I was immersed in these thoughts, and William was finishing his milk, when we heard someone greet us. It was Aymaro of Alessandria, whom we had met in the scriptorium, and who had struck me by the expression of his face, a perpetual sneer, as if he could never reconcile himself to the fatuousness of all human beings and yet did not attach great importance to this cosmic tragedy. “Well, Brother William, have you already become accustomed to this den of madmen?”
“It seems to me a place of men admirable in sanctity and learning,” William said cautiously.
“It was. When abbots acted as abbots and librarians as librarians. Now you have seen, up there”—and he nodded toward the floor above—“that half-dead German with a blind man’s eyes, listening devoutly to the ravings of that blind Spaniard with a dead man’s eyes; it would seem as though the Antichrist were to arrive every morning. They scrape their parchments, but few new books come in. . . . We are up here, and down below in the city they act. Once our abbeys ruled the world. Today you see the situation: the Emperor uses us, sending his friends here to meet his enemies (I know something of your mission, monks talk and talk, they have nothing else to do); but if he wants to control the affairs of this country, he remains in the city. We are busy gathering grain and raising fowl, and down there they trade lengths of silk for pieces of linen, and pieces of linen for sacks of spices, and all of them for good money. We guard our treasure, but down there they pile up treasures. And also books. More beautiful than ours, too.”
“In the world many new things are happening, to be sure. But why do you think the abbot is to blame?”
“Because he has handed the library over to foreigners and directs the abbey like a citadel erected to defend the library. A Benedictine abbey in this Italian region should be a place where Italians decide Italian questions. What are the Italians doing today, when they no longer have even a pope? They are trafficking, and manufacturing, and they are richer than the King of France. So, then, let us do the same; since we know how to make beautiful books, we should make them for the universities and concern ourselves with what is happening down in the valley—I do not mean with the Emperor, with all due respect for your mission, Brother William, but with what the Bolognese or the Florentines are doing. From here we could control the route of pilgrims and merchants who go from Italy to Provence and vice versa. We should open the library to texts in the vernacular, and those who no longer write in Latin will also come up here. But instead we are controlled by a group of foreigners who continue to manage the library as if the good Odo of Cluny were still abbot. . . .”
“But your abbot is Italian,” William said.
“The abbot here counts for nothing,” Aymaro said, still sneering. “In the place of his head he has a bookcase. Wormeaten. To spite the Pope he allows the abbey to be invaded by Fraticelli. . . . I mean the heretical ones, Brother, those who have abandoned your most holy order . . . and to please the Emperor he invites monks from all the monasteries of the North, as if we did not have fine copyists and men who know Greek and Arabic in our country, and as if in Florence or Pisa there were not sons of merchants, rich and generous, who would gladly enter the order, if the order offered the possibility of enhancing their fathers’ prestige and power. But here indulgence in secular matters is recognized only when the Germans are allowed to . . . O good Lord, strike my tongue, for I am about to say improper things!”
“Do improper things take place in the abbey?” William asked absently, pouring himself a bit more milk.
“A monk is also human,” Aymaro declared. Then he added, “But here they are less human than elsewhere. And what I have said: remember that I did not say it.”
“Very interesting,” William said. “And are these your personal opinions, or are there many who think as you do?”
“Many, many. Many who now mourn the loss of poor Adelmo, but if another had fallen into the abyss, someone who moves about the library more than he should, they would not have been displeased.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have talked too much. Here we talk too much, as you must have noticed already. Here, on the one hand, nobody respects silence any more. On the other, it is respected too much. Here, instead of talking or remaining silent, we should act. In the golden age of our order, if an abbot did not have the temper of an abbot, a nice goblet of poisoned wine would make way for a successor. I have said these things to you, Brother William, obviously not to gossip about the abbot or other brothers. God save me, fortunately I do not have the nasty habit of gossiping. But I would be displeased if the abbot had asked you to investigate me or some others like Pacificus of Tivoli or Peter of Sant’ Albano. We have no say in the affairs of the library. But we would like to have a bit of say. So uncover this nest of serpents, you who have burned so many heretics.”
“I have never burned anyone,” William replied sharply.
“It was just a figure of speech,” Aymaro confessed with a broad smile. “Good hunting, Brother William, but be careful at night.”
“Why not during the day?”
“Because during the day here the body is tended with good herbs, but at night the mind falls ill with bad herbs. Do not believe that Adelmo was pushed into the abyss by someone’s hands or that someone’s hands put Venantius in the blood. Here someone does not want the monks to decide for themselves where to go, what to do, and what to read. And the powers of hell are employed, or the powers of the necromancers, friends of hell, to derange the minds of the curious. . . .”
“Are you speaking of the father herbalist?”
“Severinus of Sankt Wendel is a good person. Of course, he is also a German, as Malachi is a German. . . .” And, having shown once again his aversion to gossip, Aymaro went up to work.
“What did he want to tell us?” I asked.
“Everything and nothing. An abbey is always a place where monks are in conflict among themselves to gain control of the community. At Melk, too, but perhaps as a novice you were not able to realize it. But in your country, gaining control of an abbey means winning a position in which you deal directly with the Emperor. In this country, on the other hand, the situation is different; the Emperor is far away, even when he comes all the way down to Rome. There is no court, not even the papal court now. There are the cities, as you will have seen.”
“Certainly, and I was impressed b
y them. A city in Italy is something different from one in my land. . . . It is not only a place to live, it is also a place to decide, the people are always in the square, the city magistrates count far more than the Emperor or the Pope. The cities are like . . . so many kingdoms. . . .”
“And the kings are the merchants. And their weapon is money. Money, in Italy, has a different function from what it has in your country, or in mine. Money circulates everywhere, but much of life elsewhere is still dominated and regulated by the bartering of goods, chickens or sheaves of wheat, or a scythe, or a wagon, and money serves only to procure these goods. In the Italian city, on the contrary, you must have noticed that goods serve to procure money. And even priests, bishops, even religious orders have to take money into account. This is why, naturally, rebellion against power takes the form of a call to poverty. The rebels against power are those denied any connection with money, and so every call to poverty provokes great tension and argument, and the whole city, from bishop to magistrate, considers a personal enemy the one who preaches poverty too much. The inquisitors smell the stink of the Devil where someone has reacted to the stink of the Devil’s dung. And now you can understand also what Aymaro is thinking about. A Benedictine abbey, in the golden period of the order, was the place from which shepherds controlled the flock of the faithful. Aymaro wants a return to the tradition. Only the life of the flock has changed, and the abbey can return to the tradition (to its glory, to its former power) only if it accepts the new ways of the flock, becoming different itself. And since today the flock here is dominated, not with weapons or the splendor of ritual, but with the control of money, Aymaro wants the whole fabric of the abbey, and the library itself, to become a workshop, a factory for making money.”
“And what does this have to do with the crimes, or the crime?”
“I don’t know yet. But now I would like to go upstairs. Come.”
The monks were already at work. Silence reigned in the scriptorium, but it was not the silence that comes from the industrious peace of all hearts. Berengar, who had preceded us by only a short time, received us with embarrassment. The other monks looked up from their work. They knew we were there to discover something about Venantius, and the very direction of their gaze drew our attention to a vacant desk, under a window that opened onto the interior, the central octagon.
Although it was a very cold day, the temperature in the scriptorium was rather mild. It was not by chance that it had been situated above the kitchen, whence came adequate heat, especially because the flues of the two ovens below passed inside the columns supporting the two circular staircases in the west and south towers. As for the north tower, on the opposite side of the great room, it had no stair, but a big fireplace that burned and spread a happy warmth. Moreover, the floor had been covered with straw, which muffled our footsteps. In other words, the least-heated corner was that of the east tower, and in fact I noticed that, although there were few places left vacant, given the number of monks at work, all of the monks tended to avoid the desks located in that part. When I later realized that the circular staircase of the east tower was the only one that led, not only down to the refectory, but also up to the library, I asked myself whether a shrewd calculation had not regulated the heating of the room so that the monks would be discouraged from investigating that area and the librarian could more easily control the access to the library.
Poor Venantius’s desk had its back to the great fireplace, and it was probably one of the most desired. At that time I had passed very little of my life in a scriptorium, but I spent a great deal of it subsequently and I know what torment it is for the scribe, the rubricator, the scholar to spend the long winter hours at his desk, his fingers numb around the stylus (when even in a normal temperature, after six hours of writing, the fingers are seized by the terrible monk’s cramp and the thumb aches as if it had been trodden on). And this explains why we often find in the margins of a manuscript phrases left by the scribe as testimony to his suffering (and his impatience), such as “Thank God it will soon be dark,” or “Oh, if I had a good glass of wine,” or also “Today it is cold, the light is dim, this vellum is hairy, something is wrong.” As an ancient proverb says, three fingers hold the pen, but the whole body works. And aches.
But I was telling about Venantius’s desk. It was rather small, like the others set around the octagonal courtyard, since they were meant for scholars, whereas the larger ones under the windows of the outer walls were meant for illuminators and copyists. Venantius also worked with a lectern, because he probably consulted manuscripts on loan to the abbey, of which he made a copy. Under the desk was a low set of shelves piled with unbound sheets, and since they were all in Latin, I deduced they were his most recent translations. They were written hastily and did not represent the pages of a book, for they had yet to be entrusted to a copyist and an illuminator. For this reason they were difficult to read. Among the pages were a few books, in Greek. Another Greek book was open on the lectern, the work on which Venantius had been exercising his skill as translator in the past days. At that time I knew no Greek, but my master read the title and said this was by a certain Lucian and was the story of a man turned into an ass. I recalled then a similar fable by Apuleius, which, as a rule, novices were strongly advised against reading.
“Why was Venantius making this translation?” William asked Berengar, who was at our side.
“The abbey was asked to do it by the lord of Milan, and the abbey will gain from it a preferential right to the wine production of some farms to the east of here.” Berengar pointed with his hand toward the distance. But he promptly added, “Not that the abbey performs venal tasks for laymen. But the lord who has given us this commission went to great pains to have this precious Greek manuscript lent us by the Doge of Venice, who received it from the Emperor of Byzantium, and when Venantius had finished his work, we would have made two copies, one for the lord of Milan and one for our library.”
“Which therefore does not disdain to add pagan fables to its collection,” William said.
“The library is testimony to truth and to error,” a voice then said behind us. It was Jorge. Once again I was amazed (but I was to be amazed often in the days that followed) by the old man’s way of suddenly, unexpectedly appearing, as if we did not see him and he did see us. I wondered also why on earth a blind man was in the scriptorium, but I realized later that Jorge was omnipresent in all corners of the abbey. And often he was in the scriptorium, seated on a stool by the fireplace, and he seemed to follow everything going on in the room. Once I heard him ask from his place, in a loud voice, “Who is going upstairs?” and he turned to Malachi, who was going toward the library, his steps silenced by the straw. The monks all held him in high esteem and often had recourse to him, reading him passages difficult to understand, consulting him for a gloss, or asking counsel on how to depict an animal or a saint. And he would look into the void with his spent eyes, as if staring at pages vivid in his memory, and he would answer that false prophets are dressed like bishops and frogs come from their mouths, or would say what stones were to adorn the walls of the heavenly Jerusalem, or that the Arimaspi should be depicted on maps near the land of Prester John—urging that their monstrosity not be made excessively seductive, for it sufficed to portray them as emblems, recognizable, but not desirable, or repellent to the point of laughter.
Once I heard him advise a scholiast on how to interpret the recapitulatio in the texts of Tyconius according to the thought of Saint Augustine, so that the Donatist heresy could be avoided. Another time I heard him give advice on how, in making commentary, to distinguish heretics from schismatics. Or again, he told a puzzled scholar what book to seek in the library catalogue, and more or less on what page he would find it listed, assuring him that the librarian would certainly give it to him because it was a work inspired by God. Finally, on another occasion I heard him say that such-and-such a book should not be sought because, though it did indeed exist in the catalogue, it had b
een ruined by mice fifty years earlier, and by now it would crumble to powder in the fingers of anyone who touched it. He was, in other words, the library’s memory and the soul of the scriptorium. At times he admonished monks he heard chatting among themselves: “Hurry, and leave testimony to the truth, for the time is at hand!” He was referring to the coming of the Antichrist.
“The library is testimony to truth and to error,” Jorge had said.
“Undoubtedly Apuleius and Lucian were reputed to be magicians,” William said. “But this fable, beneath the veil of its fictions, contains also a good moral, for it teaches how we pay for our errors, and, furthermore, I believe that the story of the man transformed into an ass refers to the metamorphosis of the soul that falls into sin.”
“That may be,” Jorge said.
“But now I understand why, during that conversation of which I was told yesterday, Venantius was so interested in the problems of comedy; in fact, fables of this sort can also be considered kin to the comedies of the ancients. Both tell not of men who really existed, as tragedies do; on the contrary, as Isidore says, they are fictions: ‘fabulas poetae a fando nominaverunt, quia non sunt res factae sed tantum loquendo fictae. . . .’”
At first I could not understand why William had embarked on this learned discussion, and with a man who seemed to dislike such subjects, but Jorge’s reply told me how subtle my master had been.
“That day we were not discussing comedies, but only the licitness of laughter,” Jorge said grimly. I remembered very well that when Venantius had referred to that discussion, only the day before, Jorge had claimed not to remember it.
“Ah,” William said casually, “I thought you had spoken of poets’ lies and shrewd riddles. . . .”
“We talked about laughter,” Jorge said sharply. “The comedies were written by the pagans to move spectators to laughter, and they acted wrongly. Our Lord Jesus never told comedies or fables, but only clear parables which allegorically instruct us on how to win paradise, and so be it.”
