The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
(London, Vintage, 2014)
I find few reasons for publishing my Italian version of the obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth-century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German monk toward the end of the fourteenth century.
Page 4.
In 1322 Louis the Bavarian defeated his rival Frederick. Fearing a single emperor even more than he had feared two, John excommunicated the victor, who in return denounced the Pope as a heretic.
Page 13.
They decided to place me under the direction of a learned Franciscan, Brother Willian of Baskerville, about to undertake a mission that would lead him to famous cities and ancient abbeys. Thus I became William’s scribe and disciple at the same time, nor did I ever regret it, because with him I was witness to events worthy of being handed down, as I am now doing, to those who will come after me.
Page 14.
It is characteristic of the young to become bound to an older and wiser man not only by the spell of his words and the sharpness of his mind, but also by the superficial form of his body, which proves very dear, like the figure of a father, whose gestures we study and whose frowns, whose smile we observe - without the shadow of lust to pollute this form … of corporal love.
Page 15.
Brother William was larger in statue than a normal man and so thin that he seemed still taller. His eyes were sharp and penetrating, his thin and slightly beaky nose gave his countenance the expression of a man on the lookout, even if his long freckle-covered face - such as I often saw among those born between Hibernia and Northumbria - could occasionally express hesitation and puzzlement.
Pages 15-16.
William might perhaps have seen fifty springs and was therefore already very old, but his tireless body moved with an agility I myself often lacked.
Page 16.
I learned subsequently that the men of his land often define things in ways in which it seems that the enlightening power of reason has scant function.
Page 17.
This strange man carried with him, in his bag, instruments that I had never seen before then, which he called his “wondrous machines.” Machines, he said, are an effect of art, which is nature’s ape, and they reproduce not its forms but the operation itself. He explained to me thus the wonders of the clock, the astrolabe, and the magnet. But at the beginning I feared it was witchcraft, and I pretended to sleep on certain clear nights when he (with a strange triangle in his hand) stood watching the stars.
Page 17.
The Aedificium. This was an octagonal construction that form a distance seemed a tetragon (a perfect form, which expresses the sturdiness and impregnability of the City of God), whose southern sides stood on the plateau of the abbey, while the northern ones seemed to grow form the steep side of the mountain, a sheer drop, to which they were bound.
Page 23.
My master, in every respect a man of the highest virtue, succumbed to the vice of vanity when it was a matter of demonstrating his acumen. … He wanted to reach his destination preceded by a firm reputation as a man of knowledge.
Page 25.
“During our whole journey, I have been teaching you to recognize the evidence through which the world speaks to us like a great book.”
Page 26.
Such is the power of the truth that, like good, it is its own propagator.
Page 27.
Architecture, among all the arts, is the one that most boldly tries to reproduce in its rhythms the order of the universe, which the ancients called “kosmos.”
Page 29.
My master did not share the austere habits of the Benedictines, and did not like to eat in silence.
Page 30.
I 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.
Page 33.
“You are distressed because an evil force, whether natural of supernatural, is at work in the abbey.|”
Page 36.
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-Akami, that the number of your Bibles equals the two thousand four hundred Korans that are the pride of Cairo.
Page 39.
“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 bac then to their own house, not without having brought you in exchange some other manuscript of great rarity that you will copy and add to your treasure.”
Page 39.
If God is now given our order a mission, it is to oppose this race to the abyss, by preserving, repeating, and defending the treasure of wisdom our fathers entrusted to us.
Page 40.
Only the librarian has … the right to move through the labyrinth of the books, he alone knows where to find them and where to replace them, he alone is responsible for their safekeeping. The other monks work in the scriptorium and may know the list of the volumes that the library houses. But a list of titles often tells very little; only the librarian knows, form the collocation of the volumes, from its degree of inaccessibility, what secrets, what truths or falsehoods, the volumes contain.
Page 41.
“Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the Creator is revealed.”
Page 41.
“If for a hundred and a hundred years everyone had been able freely to handle our codices, the majority of them would no longer exist. So the librarian protects them not only against mankind but also against nature, and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion, the enemy of truth.”
Page 42.
“The library defends itself, immeasurable as the truth it houses, deceitful as the falsehood it preserves. A spiritual labyrinth, it is also a terrestrial labyrinth. You might enter and you might not emerge.”
Page 42.
“A man who described my horse Brunellus without seeing him, and the death of Adelmo though knowing virtually nothing of it, will have no difficulty studying places to which he does not have access.”
Page 42.
Images are the literature of the layman.
Page 45.
When I met him for the first time, Salvatore seemed to me, because of both his face and his way of speaking, a creature not unlike the hairy and hoofed hybrids I had just seen under the portal.
Page 52.
What I was to see at the abbey would make me think that it is often inquisitors who create heretics. And not only in the sense that they imagine heretics where these do not exist, but also that inquisitors repress the heretical putrefaction so vehemently that many are driven to share in it, in their hatred for the judges.
Page 55.
Advocating the poverty of Christ was clearly a very sort step from advocating the poverty of the church, and a poor church would have become weak in comparison to the Emperor.
Pages 57-58.
The way Ubertino stigmatized the vice of others did not inspire virtuous thoughts in me.
Page 63.
Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him.
Page 65.
“I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.”
Page 65.
“There was something … feminine, and therefore diabolical, about that young man who is dead.”
Page 66.
“Be on your guard here at the abbey. Id do not like this place.”
Page 69.
I like … to listen to words, and then I think about them.
Page 70.
It is only petty men who seem normal.
Page 71.
There are no plants good for food that are not good for treating the body, too, provided they are taken in the right quantity. Only excess makes them cause illness.
Page 72.
Three things concur in creating beauty: first of all integrity or perfection, and for this reason we consider ugly all incomplete things; then proper proportion or consonance; and finally clarity and light, and in fact we call beautiful those things of definite color.
Page 78.
Monks working in the scriptorium were exempted from the offices of terce, sext, and nones so they would not have to leave their work during the hours of daylight, and they stopped their activity only at sunset, for vespers.
Page 78.
Roger Bacon … had said that the aim of learning was also to prolong human life.
Page 80.
“If the monk must refrain from good speech because of his vow of silence, all the more reason why he should avoid bad speech. And as there is bad speech there are also bad images. And they are those that lie about the form of creation and show the world as the opposite of what it should be, has always been, and always will be throughout the centuries until the end of time. But you come form another order, where I am told that merriment, even the most inopportune sort, is viewed with indulgence.”
Page 86.
Little by little the man who depicts monsters and portents of nature to reveal the things of God per speculum et in animate, comes to enjoy the very nature of the monstrosities he creates and to delight in them, and as a result he no longer sees except through them.
Page 87.
“The knowledge that we have of God on this earth. He shows Himself here more in that which is not than in that which is, and therefore the similitudes of those things furthest from God lead us to a more exact notion of Him, for thus we know that He is above what we say and think.”
Page 89.
“If memory is a gift of God, then the ability to forget can also be good, and must be respected.”
Page 90.
“There are two forms of magic. There is a magic that is the work of the Devil and which aims at man’s downfall through artifices of which it is not licit to speak. But there is a magic that is divine, where God’s knowledge is made manifest through the knowledge of man, and it serves to transform nature, and one of its ends is to prolong man’s very life.”
Page 94.
Often the treasures of learning must be defended not against the simple but, rather, against other learned men.
Page 95.
The life of learning is difficult, and it is difficult to distinguish good from evil.
Page 96.
What is certain is that in the abbey they want no one to enter the library at nighty and that many, on the contrary, have tried or are trying to do so.
Page 98.
“One should not multiply explanations and causes unless it is strictly necessary.”
Page 99.
“In the Aedificium there is an atmosphere of reticence; they are all keeping something quiet.”
Page 99.
The abbeys take pride in the produce of their lands and their barns, and in the skill of their cooks.
Pahe 102.
“Don’t laugh. As you have seen, within these walls laughter doesn’t enjoy a good reputation.”
Page 104.
"Learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.”
Page 105.
Symbol sometimes of the Devil, sometimes of the Risen Christ, no animal is more untrustworthy than the cock.
Page 109.
We are fragile creatures, I said to myself; even among these learned and devout monks the Evil One spreads petty envies, foments subtle hostilities, but all these are as smoke then dispersed by the strong wind of faith, the moment all gather in the name of the Father, and Christ descends into their midst.
Page 110.
“Snow, dear Adso, is an admirable parchment on which men’s bodies leave very legible writing.”
Page 114.
“If Venantius had died, been killed, in the refectory, in the kitchen, or in the scriptorium, why not leave him there? But if he died in the library, then he had to be carried elsewhere, both because in the library the body would never have been discovered (and perhaps the murderer was particularly interested in it being discovered) and because the murderer probably does not want attention to be concentrated on the library.”
Page 115.
“Ours is a hard task . … A hard task, that of the inquisitor, who must strike the weakest, and at their moment of greatest weakness.”
Page 118.
“Jorge became enraged because he said the psalms are works of divine inspiration and use metaphors to convey the truth, while the works of the pagan poets are metaphors to convey falsehood and for purposes of mere pleasure.”
Page 119.
“We are trying to understand what has happened among men who live among books, with books, form books, and so their words on books are also important.”
Page 120.
“We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.”
Page 120.
The two persons who have recently died in mysterious circumstances had asked something of Berengar.
Page 121.
These monks read perhaps too much, and when they are excited they relive visions they learned from books.
Page 126.
“In these last few years, as never before, to stimulate piety and terror and fervor in the populace, and obedience to human and divine law, preachers have used distressing words, macabre threats. … Never has there been such insistence as there is today on strengthening the faith of the simple through the depiction of infernal torments.”
Page 127.
“In order for there to be a mirror of the world, it is necessary that the world have a form,” concluded William, who was too much of a philosopher for my adolescent mind.
Page 129.
An abbey is always a place where monks are in conflict among themselves to gain control of the community.
Page 135.
Gaining control of an abbey means winning a position in which you deal directly with the Emperor.
Page 135.
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, tension and argument, and the whole city, from bishop to magistrate, considers a personal enemy the one who preaches poverty too much.
Page 136.
When I … 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 that area and the librarian could more easily control the access to the library.
Page 137.
As an ancient proverb says, three fingers hold the pen, but the whole body works. And aches.
Page 138.
“The library is testimony to truth and to error.”
Page 139.
“Laughter shakes the body, distorts the features of the face, makes man similar to the monkey.”
“Monkeys do not laugh; laughter is proper to man, it is a sign of his rationality,” William said.
“Speech is also a sign of human rationality, and with speech a man can blaspheme against God. Not everything that is proper to man is necessarily good. He who laughs does not believe in what he laughs at, but neither does he hate it. Therefore, laughing at evil means not preparing oneself to combat it, and laughing at good means denying the power through which good is self-propagating.
Page 141.
“This is why Christ did not laugh. Laughter foments doubt.”
Page 142.
Of us God demands that we apply our reason to many obscure things about which Scripture has left us free to decide. And when someone suggests you believe in a proposition, you must first examine it to see whether it is acceptable, because our reason was created by God, and whatever pleases our reason can but please divine reason, of which, for that matter, we know only what we infer from the processes of our own reason by analogy and often by negation. Thus, you see, to undermine the false authority of an absurd proposition that offends reason, laughter can sometimes also be a suitable instrument. And serves to confound the wicked and to make their foolishness evident.
Page 143.
The library was full of secrets, and especially of books that had never been given to the monks.
Page 146.
The monkish vows keep us far from that sink of vice that is the female body, but often they bring us close to other errors.
Page 147.
William coughed politely. “Er … hm …” he said. This is what he did when he wanted to introduce and we subject. He managed to do it gracefully because it was his habit - and I believe this is typical of the men of his country - to begin every remark with long preliminary moans, as if starting the exposition of a completed thought cost him a great mental effort. Whereas, I am now convinced, the more groans he uttered before his declaration, the surer he was of the soundness of the proposition he was expressing.
Page 155.
I believe the abbots felt that excessive power for the Pope meant excessive power for the bishops and the cities, whereas my order had retained its power intact through the centuries precisely by opposing the secular clergy and the city merchants, setting itself as direct mediator between earth and heaven, and as adviser of sovereigns.
Page 156.
This, I believe, is why many Benedictine abbots, to restore dignity to the empire against the government of the cities (bishops and merchants united), agreed to protect the Spiritual Franciscans, whose ideas they did not share but whose presence was useful to them, since it offered the empire good syllogisms against the overweening power of the Pope.
Page 157.
“I know that heretics are those who endanger the order that sustains the people of God. And I defend the empire because it guarantees that order for me. I combat the Pope because he is handling the spiritual power over to the bishops of the cities, who are allied with the merchants and the corporations and will not be able to maintain this order.”
Page 164.
“Then we are living in a place abandoned by God,” I said, disheartened.
“Have you found any places where God would have felt at home?” William asked me, looking down from his great height.
Then he sent me to rest. As I lay on my pallet, I concluded that my father should not have sent me out into the world, which was more complicated than I had thought. I was learning too many things.
Page 166.
“The millennium is not calculated from the death of Christ but from the donation of Constantine, three centuries later.”
Page 170.
“The world all around the abbey is rank with heresy.”
Page 170.
He stuck his fingers into the sockets of the fleshless face, and at once we heard a kind of hoarse creak. The altar moved, turning on a hidden pivot, allowing a glimpse of a dark aperture. As I shed light on it with my raised lamp, we made out some damp steps.
Page 172.
"In centuries past this was a fortress, and it must have more secret entrances than we know of.”
Page 173.
It is always better when the person who frightens us is also afraid of us.
Page 173.
“Bacon was right in saying that the conquest of learning is achieved through the knowledge of languages.”
Page 177.
“The first rule in deciphering a message is to guess what it means.”
Page 177.
“The first duty of a good inquisitor is to suspect especially those who seem sincere to him.”
Page 179.
Holding the lamp in front of me, I ventured into the next rooms. A giant of threatening dimensions, a swaying and fluttering form came toward me, like a ghost.
“A devil!” I cried … On a corrugated sheet of glass, now that the light illuminated it more closely, I saw our two images, grotesquely misshapen, changing form and height as we moved closer or stepped back.
Page 183.
Herbs, mirrors … This place of forbidden knowledge is guarded by many and most cunning devices. Knowledge is used to conceal, rather than to enlighten.
Pages 187-188.
Young people seem to need sleep more than the old, who have already slept so much and are preparing to sleep for all eternity.
Page 195.
A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.
Page 196.
I was not surprised that the mystery of the crimes should involve the library. For these men devoted to writing, the library was at once the celestial Jerusalem and an underground world on the border between terra incognita and Hades. They were dominated by the library, by its promise and by its prohibitions.
Page 197.
The very knowledge that the abbeys had accumulated was now used as barter goods, cause for pride, motive for boasting and prestige; just as knights displayed armor and standards, our abbots displayed illuminated manuscripts.
Page 197.
I saw Pacificus of Tivoli, leafing through an ancient volume whose pages had become stuck together because of the humidity. He moistened his thumb and finger with his tongue to leaf through his book, and at every touch of his saliva those pages lost vigor; opening them meant folding them, exposing them to the har4sh action of air and dust, which would erode the subtle wrinkles of the parchment, and would produce mildew where the saliva had softened gut also weakened the corner of the page.
Page 198.
This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain.
Page 201.
The lords did not want the Shepherds to jeopardize their possessions, and it was a great good fortune for them that the Shepherds’ leaders spread the notion that the greatest wealth belonged to the Jews.
Page 206.
“Men are animals but rational, and the property of man is the capacity for laughing.”
Page 211.
When you burn a man you burn his individual substance and reduce to pure nothing that which was a concrete act of existing, hence in itself good, at least in the eyes of God, who kept him in existence.
Page 211.
The body of the church, which for centuries was also the body of all society, the people of God, has become too rich, and wide, and it carries along the dross of all the countries it has passed through, and it has lost its own purity.
Page 212.
The simple cannot choose their personal heresy, Adso; they cling to the man preaching in their land, who passes through their village or stops in their square.
Page 214.
“The people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body.”
Page 216.
The powerful always knew this. Acknowledging the outcasts meant reducing their own privileges, so the outcasts who were acknowledged as outcasts had to be branded as heretics whatever their doctrine.
Page 218.
“The faith a movement proclaims doesn’t count; what counts is the hope it offers.”
Page 218.
To be a cleric and to be wise was the same thing. Today that is no longer the case: learned men grow up outside the monasteries and the cathedrals, even outside the universities.
Page 221.
“The very concept that universal laws and an established order exist would imply that God is their prisoner, whereas God is something absolutely free, so that if He wanted, with a single act of His will He could make the world different.”
Page 222.
It’s difficult to say what effect is produced by what cause.
Page 222.
"Only in the mathematical sciences, as Averroës says, are things known to us identified with those known absolutely.”
Page 231.
“Mathematical notions are propositions constructed by our intellects in such a way that they function always as truth, either because they are innate or because mathematics was invented before the other sciences.”
Page 231.
“The Lord knows all things, and we must only adore His knowledge.”
Page 237.
“The female is a vessel of the Devil.”
Page 240.
“Never forget - it is through woman that the Devil penetrates men’s hearts!”
Page 242.
“It is characteristic of heresy the it transforms the most upright thoughts and aims them at consequences contrary to the law of God.”
Page 244.
“Did holiness consist in waiting for God to give us what His saints had promised, without trying to obtain it through earthly mean?”
Page 244.
“The order of things must not be transformed even inf we must fervently hope for its transformation.”
Page 244.
“You always find the mark of heresy in pride.”
Page 244.
I remain amazed by the possessors of such steadfastness only because I do not know, even today, whether what prevails in them is a proud love of the truth they believe, which leads them to death, or a proud desire for death, which leads them to proclaim their truth, whatever it may be. And I am overwhelmed with admiration and fear.
Page 254.
The magic of mirrors is such that even when you know they are mirrors they still upset you.
Page 256.
Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another’s fear.
Page 259.
I have determined to tell, of those remote events, the whole truth, and truth is indivisible, it shines with its own transparency and does not allow itself to be diminished by our interests or our shame.
Page 260.
Thinking that the duty of every good Christian is to succor his neighbor, I approached her with great gentleness and in good Latin told her she should not fear, because I was a friend. … I sensed that she did not understand my Latin and instinctively I addressed her in my German vernacular, and this frightened her greatly. … Then I smiled, considering that the language of gestures and of the face is more universal than that of words, and she was reassured. … this reference to my comeliness, though mendacious, fell sweetly on my ears and filled me with an irrepressible emotion … I felt a kind of delirium.
Page 261.
My tongue and my mind had not been instructed in how to name sensations of that sort.
Page 262.
Suddenly the girl appeared to me to be as the black but comely virgin of whom the Song of Songs speaks.
Page 262.
Then the creature came still closer to me, throwing into a corner the dark package she had till then held pressed to her bosom; and she raised her hand to stroke my face. … my head was throbbing as if the trumpets of Joshua were about to bring down the walls of Jericho. … she smiled with great joy, emitted the stifled moan of a pleased she-goat, and undid the strings that closed her dress over her bosom, slipped the dress from her body like a tunic, and stood before me as Eve must have appeared to Adam in the garden of Eden. … Inadvertently I found myself against her body, feeling its warmth and the sharp perfume of unguents never known before … whether what I felt was a snare of the Enemy or a gift of heaven, I was now powerless against the impulse that moved me … and jewels were the joints of her thighs, the work of the hands of a cunning workman. O love, daughter of delights, a king is held captive in your tresses, I murmured to myself, and I was in her arms, and we fell together onto the bare floor of the kitchen, and, whether on my own initiative or through her wiles, I found myself free of my novice’s habit and we felt no shame at our bodies.
Page 263.
Who was she, who was she who rose like the dawn, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, terrible as an army with banners?
Page 264.
O Lord, when the soul is transported, the only virtue lies in loving what you see …, the supreme happiness in having what you have.
Page 264.
I was immediately convinced that my scruples were indeed devilish, for nothing could be more right and good and holy than what I was experiencing, the sweetness of which grew with every moment.
Page 264.
There is a mysterious wisdom by which phenomena among themselves disparate can be called by analogous names, just as diving things can be designated by terrestrial terms, and through equivocal symbols God can be called lion or leopard; and death can be called sword; joy, flame,; flame, death; death, abyss; abyss, perdition; perdition, raving; and raving, passion.
Page 265.
If love of the flame and of the abyss are the metaphor for the loge of God, can they be the metaphor for love of death and love of sin?
Page 266.
According to the rules of syllogism … no law can be drawn from two single facts.
Page 279.
I had always believed logic was a universal weapon, and now I realized how its validity depended on the way it was employed.
Page 280.
“Of course, it’s absurd. But we mustn’t dismiss any hypothesis, no matter how farfetched.”
Page 281.
“We have a daytime abbey and a nighttime abbey, and the nighttime one seems, unhappily, the more interesting. So, every person who roams about at night interests us.”
Page 286.
Even in holy places such as abbeys the temptations of the noontime Devil are never wanting.
Page 289.
As you grow old, you grow not wise but greedy.
Page 292.
I must tell everything, decently but without shame.
Page 297.
I lost myself in the contemplation of nature, trying to forget my thoughts and to look only at beings as they appear, and to forget myself, joyfully, in the sight of them.
How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by the often perverse wisdom of man!
Page 301.
I thought no more of the girl, or, rather, I made an effort to transform the ardor I felt for her into a sense of inner happiness and devout peace.
Page 303.
In every crime committed to possess an object, the nature of the object should give us an idea, however faint, of the nature of the assassin.
Page 305.
“To know what one book says you must read others?”
“At times this can be so. Often books speak of other books. Often a harmless book is like a seed that will blossom into a dangerous book, or it is the other way around: it is the sweet fruit of a bitter stem. In reading Albert, couldn’t I learn what Thomas might have said? Or in reading Thomas, know what Averoës said?”
“True,” I said, amazed. Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thin, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.
Page 306.
At that altitude it was difficult to distinguish the mists that rose from below and those that came down from above. It was becoming hard to discern the bulk of the more distant buildings.
Page 307.
Such is the magic of human languages, that by human accord often the same sounds mean different things.
Page 308.
“It is never a futile thing to know one’s enemies better.”
Page 320.
I won, but I might also have lost. The others believed me wise because I won, but they didn’t know the many instances in which I have been foolish because I lost, and they didn’t know that a few seconds before winning I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t lose.
Page 326.
“Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means.”
Page 338.
True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.
Page 339.
There are words that give power, others that make us all the more derelict, and to this latter category gelong the vulgar words of the simple, to whom the Lord has not granted the boon of self-expression in the universal tongue of knowledge and power.
Page 352.
“If you look at her and feel desire, that alone makes her a witch.”
Page 353.
The beauty of the body stops at the skin. … If it revolts you to touch mucus or dung with our fingertips, how could we desire to embrace the sack that contains that dung?”
Page 353.
That morning the condition of the air seemed painfully kin to the condition of my soul, and the sadness with which I had awakened increased as I slowly approached the chapter house.
Page 357.
“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.”
Page 368.
No one on this earth can be forced through torture to follow the precepts of the Gospel: otherwise what would become of that free will on the exercising of which each of us will be judged in the next world? The church can and must warn the heretic that he is abandoning the community of the faithful, but she cannot judge him on earth and force him against his will.
Page 377.
I wondered if it were ever possible to read in the stiffened pupil, as it has been said in some cases, the image of the murderer, the last vestige of the victim’s perception.
Page 383. In
"In libraries it can happen that several ancient manuscripts are bound together, collecting in one volume various and curious texts, on in Greek, one in Aramaic ….”
Page 390.
“You see?” Bernard cried, addressing the other judges. “They’re all alike! When one of them is arrested, he faces judgement as if his conscience were at peace and without remorse. And they do not realize this is the most obvious sign of their guilt, because a righteous man on trial is uneasy!”
Page 395.“
What terrifies you most in purity?” I asked.
“Haste,” William answered.
Page 410.
“To kill someone it is not necessary to strike: the Devil does it for you, if you know how to command the Devil.”
Page 413.
“Under torture or the threat of torture, a man says not only what he has done but what he would have liked to do even if he didn’t know it.”
Page 414.
“He who openly practices heresy is not the only kind of heretic. Heresy’s supporters can be distinguished by five indicators. First, there are those who visit heretics secretly when they are in prison; second, those who lament their capture and have been their intimate friends (it is, in fact, unlikely that one who has spent much time with a heretic remains ignorant of his activity); third, those who declare the heretics have been unjustly condemned, even when their guilt has been proved; fourth those who look askance and criticize those who persecute heretics and preach against them successful, and this can be discovered from the eyes, nose, the expression they try to conceal, showing hatred toward those for whom they feel bitterness and love towards those whose misfortune so grieves them.; the fifth sign, finally, is the fact that they collect the charred bones of burned heretics and make the an object of veneration … But I attach great value also to a sixth sign, and I consider open friends of heretics the authors of those books where (even if they do not openly offend orthodoxy) the heretics have found the premises with which to syllogize in their perverse way.”
Pahe 415.
The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God’s will, the less I value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do; and as the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently, without asking to many questions.
Page 420.
“Madmen and children always speak the truth.”
Page 420.
“Bernard is interested, not in discovering the guilty, but in burning the accused. And I, on the contrary, find the most joyful delight in unraveling a nice, complicated knot. And it must also be because, at a time when as philosopher I doubt the world has an order, I am consoled to discover, if not an order, at least a series of connections in small areas of the world’s affairs.”
Page 420.
There is lust not only of the flesh. Bernard Gui is lustful; his is a distorted lust for justice that becomes identified with a lust for power. Our holy and no longer roman Pontiff lusts for riches. And the cellarer as a youth had a lust to testify and transform and do penance, and then a lust for death. And Benno’s lust is for books. Like all lusts, including that of Onan, who spilled his seed on the ground, it is sterile and has nothing to do with love, not even carnal love.
Page 422.
“True love wants the good of the beloved.”
Page 422.
“The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb. This library was perhaps born to save the books it houses, but now it lives to bury them. This is why it has become a sink of iniquity.”
Pages 422-423.
Preservation of, I say, not search for, because the property of knowledge, as a divine thing, is that it is complete and has been defined since the beginning, in the perfection of the Word which expresses itself to itself. Preservation, I say, and not search, because it is a property of knowledge, as a human thing, that I has been defined and completed over the course of the centuries, from the preaching of the prophets to the interpretation of the fathers of the church. There is no progress, no revolution of ages, in the history of knowledge, but at most a continuous and sublime recapitulation.
Page 426.
I am He who is, said the God of the Jews. I am the way, the truth, and the life, said our Lord. There you have it: knowledge is nothing but the awed comment on these two truths.
Page 426.
Everything that involves commentary and clarification of Scripture must be preserved, because it enhances the glory of the divine writings; what contradicts must not be destroyed, because only if we preserve it can it be contradicted in its turn by those who can do so and are so charged, in the ways and times that the Lord chooses.
Page 427.
What is the sin of pride that cn tempt a scholar-monk? That of considering as his task not preserving but seeking some information not yet vouchsafed mankind, as if the last word had not already resounded.
Page 427.
This was the only earthly love of my life, and I could not, then or ever after, call that love by name.
Page 435.
“I proceed as if the murderer and I think alike.”
Page 446.
In my country, when you joke you say something and then you laugh very noisily, so everyone shares in the joke. But William laughed only when he said serious things, and remained very serious when he was presumably joking.
Page 454.
I had always thought that dreams were divine messages, or at worst absurd stammerings of the sleeping memory about things that had happened during the day. I was now realizing that one can also dream books, and therefore dream of dreams.
Page 467.
“We already have so manty truths in our possession that if the day came when someone insisted on deriving a truth even from our dreams, then the day of the Antichrist would truly be at hand.”
Page 468.
“A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.”
Page 468.
“Everything turns on the theft and possession of a book, which was concealed in the finis Africae, and which is now there again thanks to Malachi’s intervention.”
Page 477.
“A series of crimes was committed to prevent many from discovering something that it was considered undesirable for them to discover.”
Page 477.
“When a man has little time, he must take care to maintain his calm.”
Page 482.
For Benedictines hospitality is sacred.
Page 485.
“You did not destroy it because a man like you does not destroy a book, but simply guards it and makes sure no one touches it. I want to see the second book of the Poetics of Aristotle, the book everyone has believed lost or never written, and of which you hold perhaps the only copy.”
Pages 498-499.
You cannot see: I have gloves on. With my fingers made clumsy like this, I cannot detach one page from the next. I should proceed with bare hands, moistening my fingers with my tongue, as I happened to do this morning while reading in the scriptorium, so that suddenly that mystery also became clear to me. And I should go on leafing like that until a good portion of the poison had passed to my mouth. I am speaking of the poison that you, one day long ago, took from the laboratory of Severinus. Perhaps you were already worried then, because you had heard someone in the scriptorium display curiosity, either about the finis Africae or about the lost book of Aristotle, or about both.
Page 501.
“Comedy is born from the komai - that is, from the peasant villages - as a joyous celebration after a meal or a feast. Comedy does not tell of famous or powerful men, but of base and ridiculous creatures, though not wicked. … It achieves the effect of the ridiculous by showing the defects and vices or ordinary men.”
Page 505.
“Every word of the Philosopher, by whom now even saints and prophets swear, has overturned the image of the world. But he had not succeeded in overturning the image of God. If this book were to become an object for open interpretation, we would have crossed that last boundary.”
Page 507.
“Laughter frees the villein from fear of the Devil, because in the feast of fools the Devil also appears poor and foolish, and therefore controllable. But this book could teach that freeing oneself of the fear of the Devil is wisdom. … what in the villein is still, fortunately, an operation of the belly would be transformed into an operation of the brain. That laugher is proper to man is a sign or our limitation.”
Page 508.
“This book would have justified the idea that the tongue of the simple is the vehicle of wisdom.”
Page 512.
He spoke, and with his fleshless, diaphanous hands he began slowly tearing to strips and shreds the limp pages of the manuscript, stuffing them into his mouth, slowly swallowing as if he were consuming the host and he wanted to make It flesh of his flesh.
Page 514.
We could have taken him calmly, but we fell on him with violence.
Page 517.
The room, after the spill Jorge caused, was invaded by parchments waiting only to be transformed into another element.
Page 519.
I realized the whole labyrinth was nothing but an immense sacrificial pyre, all prepared for the first spark.
Page 519.
The house of God appears beautiful and well defended as the heavenly Jerusalem itself thanks to the stone it proudly displays, but the walls and ceilings are supported by a fragile, if admirable, architecture of wood, and if the church of stone recalls the most venerable forests with its columns rising high, bold as oaks, to the vaults of the ceilings, these columns often have cores of oak - and many of the trappings are also of wood: the altars, the choirs, the painted panels, the benches, the stalls, the candelabra.
Page 524.
The library had been doomed by its own impenetrability, by the mystery that protected it, by its few entrances.
Page 524.
“The Antichrist can be born f rom piety itself, f rom excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer.”
Page 526.
“Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.”
Page 527.
“I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.”
Page 527.
“The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.”
Page 528.
The abbey burned for three days and three nights, and the last efforts were of no avail.
Page 533.
On the third day, when the wounded had been treated and the corpses found outside had been buried, the monks and all the others collected their belongings and abandoned the still-smoking abbey, as a place accursed. They scattered, I do not know whereto.
Pages 533-534.
When we came to Munich, I had to take leave of my good master amid many tears. His destiny was uncertain, and my family preferred for me to return to Melk.
Pages 534-535.
I never saw him again. I learned much later that he had died during the great plague that raged through Europe toward the middle of this century.
Page 535.
It is cold in the scriptorium, my thumb aches.
Page 538.
A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would not have written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.
Page 541.
The idea of calling my book The Name of the Rose came to me virtually by chance, and I liked it because the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning left.
Page 542.
A title must muddle the reader’s ideas, not regiment them.
Page 543.
The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.
Page 544.
I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
Page 545.
Telling how you wrote something does not mean proving it is “well” written. Poe said that the effect of the work is one thing and the knowledge of the process is another.
Page 545.
I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.
Page 549.
The problem is to construct the world: the words will practically come on their own.
Page 550.
It is only between Bacon and Occam that signs are used to acquire knowledge of individuals. So I had to set the story in the fourteenth century.
Page 552.
The characters are obliged to act according to the laws of the world in which they live. In other words, the narrator is the prisoner of his own premises.
Page 553.
In the Middle Age, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagine a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.
Page 553.
Art is an escape from personal emotion.
Page 557.
Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away.
Page 559.
A great novel is one in which the author always knows just when to accelerate, when toe apply the brakes, and how to handle the clutch, within a basic rhythm that remains constant.
Page 559.
When a work is finished, a dialogue is established between the text and its readers (the author is excluded).
Page 561.
Whether the writer believes he is writing for a public standing there, money in hand, just outside the door, or whether he means to write for a reader still to come, writing means constructing, though the text, one’s own model reader.
Page 561.
A text is meant to be an experience of transformation for its reader.
Page 563.
The fine thing about pacts with the devil is that when you sign them you are well aware of their conditions.
Page 563.
I believe people like thrillers not because there are corpses or because there is a final celebratory triumph of order (intellectual, social, legal, and moral) over the disorder of evil.
Page 564.
The modern novel has sought to diminish amusement resulting form the plot in order to enhance other kinds of amusement.
Page 566.
Much science fiction is pure romance. Romance is the story of an elsewhere.
Page 574.
But I believe a historical novel should do this, too: not only identify in the past the causes of what came later, but also trace the process through which those causes began slowly to produce their effects.
If a character of mine, comparing two medieval ideas, produces a third, more modern, idea, he is doing exactly what culture did.
Page 575.
Everyone has his own idea, usually corrupt, of the Middle Ages. Only we monks of the period know the truth, but saying it can sometimes lead to the stake.
Page 575.
As the decision is made to revise and correct, one tends to become pedantic.
Page 578.
I wasn’t worried then - nor am I now - whether the Latin references are understood, especially when they are simply the titles of books; they are there to give the feeling of historical distance.
Page 578.