The Name of the Rose (21 page)

As he spoke, he turned his face to the nave. A shaft of light from above was illuminating his countenance, through a special benevolence of the daystar, and his hands, which he had extended in the form of a cross, caught up as he was in his fervor. “Every creature,” he said, “visible or invisible, is a light, brought into being by the father of lights. This ivory, this onyx, but also the stone that surrounds us, are a light, because I perceive that they are good and beautiful, that they exist according to their own rules of proportion, that they differ in genus and species from all other genera and species, that they are defined by their own number, that they are true to their order, that they seek their specific place according to their weight. And the more these things are revealed to me, the more the matter I gaze on is by its nature precious, and the better illuminated is the divine power of creation, for if I must strive to grasp the sublimity of the cause, inaccessible in its fullness, through the sublimity of the effect, how much better am I told of the divine causality by an effect as wondrous as gold and diamond, if even dung or an insect can speak to me of it! And then, when I perceive in these stones such superior things, the soul weeps, moved to joy, and not through terrestrial vanity or love of riches, but through the purest love of the prime, uncaused cause.”

“Truly this is the sweetest of theologies,” William said, with perfect humility, and I thought he was using that insidious figure of speech that rhetors call irony, which must always be prefaced by the pronunciatio, representing its signal and its justification—something William never did. For which reason the abbot, more inclined to the use of figures of speech, took William literally and added, still in the power of his mystical transport, “It is the most immediate of the paths that put us in touch with the Almighty: theophanic matter.”

William coughed politely. “Er . . . hm . . .” he said. This is what he did when he wanted to introduce a new 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.

“Eh . . . oh . . .” William continued. “We should talk of the meeting and the debate on poverty.”

“Poverty . . .” the abbot said, still lost in thought, as if having a hard time coming down from that beautiful region of the universe to which his gems had transported him. “Ah, yes, the meeting . . .”

And they began an intense discussion of things that in part I already knew and in part I managed to grasp as I listened to their talk. As I said at the beginning of this faithful chronicle, it concerned the double quarrel that had set, on the one hand, the Emperor against the Pope, and, on the other, the Pope against the Franciscans, who in the Perugia chapter, though only after many years, had espoused the Spirituals' theories about the poverty of Christ; and it concerned the jumble that had been created as the Franciscans sided with the empire, a triangle of oppositions and alliances that had now been transformed into a square, thanks to the intervention, to me still very obscure, of the abbots of the order of Saint Benedict.

I never clearly grasped the reason why the Benedictine abbots had given refuge and protection to the Spiritual Franciscans, some time before their own order came to share their opinions to a certain extent. Because if the Spirituals preached the renunciation of all worldly goods, the abbots of my order—I had seen that very day the radiant confirmation—followed a path no less virtuous, though exactly the opposite. But 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.

I had often heard repeated the motto according to which the people of God were divided into shepherds (namely, the clerics), dogs (that is, warriors), and sheep (the populace). But I later learned that this sentence can be rephrased in several ways. The Benedictines had often spoken, not of three orders, but of two great divisions, one involving the administration of earthly things and the other the administration of heavenly things. As far as earthly things went, there was a valid division into clergy, lay lords, and populace, but this tripartite division was dominated by the presence of the ordo monachorum, direct link between God's people and heaven, and the monks had no connection with those secular shepherds, the priests and bishops, ignorant and corrupt, now supine before the interests of the cities, where the sheep were no longer the good and faithful peasants but, rather, the merchants and artisans. The Benedictine order was not sorry that the governing of the simple should be entrusted to the secular clerics, provided it was the monks who established the definitive regulation of this government, the monks being in direct contact with the source of all earthly power, the empire, just as they were with the source of all heavenly power. 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.

These were the reasons, I then deduced, why Abo was now preparing to collaborate with William, the Emperor's envoy, and to act as mediator between the Franciscan order and the papal throne. In fact, even in the violence of the dispute that so endangered the unity of the church, Michael of Cesena, several times called to Avignon by Pope John, was ultimately prepared to accept the invitation, because he did not want his order to place itself in irrevocable conflict with the Pontiff. As general of the Franciscans, he wanted at once to see their positions triumph and to obtain papal assent, not least because he surmised that without the Pope's agreement he would not be able to remain for long at the head of the order.

But many had assured him the Pope would be awaiting him in France to ensnare him, charge him with heresy, and bring him to trial. Therefore, they advised that Michael's appearance at Avignon should be preceded by negotiations. Marsilius had had a better idea: to send with Michael an imperial envoy who would present to the Pope the point of view of the Emperor's supporters. Not so much to convince old Cahors but to strengthen the position of Michael, who, as part of an imperial legation, would not then be such easy prey to papal vengeance.

This plan, however, had numerous disadvantages and could not be carried out immediately. Hence the idea of a preliminary meeting between the imperial legation and some envoys of the Pope, to essay their respective positions and to draw up the agreement for a further encounter at which the safety of the Italian visitors would be guaranteed. To organize this first meeting, William of Baskerville had been appointed. Later, he would present the imperial theologians' point of view at Avignon, if he deemed the journey possible without danger. A far-from-simple enterprise, because it was supposed that the Pope, who wanted Michael alone in order to be able to reduce him more readily to obedience, would send to Italy a mission with instructions to make the planned journey of the imperial envoys to his court a failure, as far as possible. William had acted till now with great ability. After long consultations with various Benedictine abbots (this was the reason for the many stops along our journey), he had chosen the abbey where we now were, precisely because the abbot was known to be devoted to the empire and yet, through his great diplomatic skill, not disliked by the papal court. Neutral territory, therefore, this abbey where the two groups could meet.

But the Pope's resistance was not exhausted. He knew that, once his legation was on the abbey's terrain, it would be subject to the abbot's jurisdiction; and since some of his envoys belonged to the secular clergy, he would not accept this control, claiming fears of an imperial plot. He had therefore made the condition that his envoys' safety be entrusted to a company of archers of the King of France, under the command of a person in the Pope's trust. I had vaguely listened as William discussed this with an ambassador of the Pope at Bobbio: it was a matter of defining the formula to prescribe the duties of this company—or, rather, defining what was meant by the guaranteeing of the safety of the papal legates. A formula proposed by the Avignonese had finally been accepted, for it seemed reasonable: the armed men and their officers would have jurisdiction “over all those who in any way made an attempt on the life of members of the papal delegation or tried to influence their behavior or judgment by acts of violence.” Then the pact had seemed inspired by purely formal preoccupations. Now, after the recent events at the abbey, the abbot was uneasy, and he revealed his doubts to William. If the legation arrived at the abbey while the author of the two crimes was still unknown (and the following day the abbot's worries were to increase, because the crimes would increase to three), they would have to confess that within those walls someone in circulation was capable of influencing the judgment and behavior of the papal envoys with acts of violence.

Trying to conceal the crimes committed would be of no avail, because if anything further were to happen, the papal envoys would suspect a plot against them. And so there were only two solutions. Either William discovered the murderer before the arrival of the legation (and here the abbot stared hard at him as if reproaching him for not having yet done so) or else the Pope's envoy had to be informed frankly and his collaboration sought, to place the abbey under close surveillance during the course of the discussions. The abbot did not like this second solution, because it meant renouncing a part of his sovereignty and submitting his own monks to French control. But he could run no risks. William and the abbot were both vexed by the turn things were taking; however, they had few choices. They proposed, therefore, to come to a final decision during the next day. Meanwhile, they could only entrust themselves to divine mercy and to William's sagacity.

“I will do everything possible, Your Sublimity,” William said. “But, on the other hand, I fail to see how the matter can really compromise the meeting. Even the papal envoy will understand that there is a difference between the act of a madman or a sanguinary, or perhaps only of a lost soul, and the grave problems that upright men will meet to discuss.”

“You think so?” the abbot asked, looking hard at William. “Remember: the Avignonese know they are to meet Minorites, and therefore very dangerous persons, close to the Fraticelli and others even more demented than the Fraticelli, dangerous heretics who are stained with crimes”—here the abbot lowered his voice—“compared with which the events that have taken place here, horrible as they are, pale like mist in the sun.”

“It is not the same thing!” William cried sharply. “You cannot put the Minorites of the Perugia chapter on the same level as some bands of heretics who have misunderstood the message of the Gospel, transforming the struggle against riches into a series of private vendettas or bloodthirsty follies. . . .”

“It is not many years since, not many miles from here, one of those bands, as you call them, put to fire and the sword the estates of the Bishop of Vercelli and the mountains beyond Novara,” the abbot said curtly.

“You speak of Fra Dolcino and the Apostles. . . .”

“The Pseudo Apostles,” the abbot corrected him. And once more I heard Fra Dolcino and the Pseudo Apostles mentioned, and once more in a circumspect tone, with almost a hint of terror.

“The Pseudo Apostles,” William readily agreed. “But they had no connection with the Minorites. . . .”

“. . . with whom they shared the same professed reverence for Joachim of Calabria,” the abbot persisted, “and you can ask your brother Ubertino.”

“I must point out to Your Sublimity that now he is a brother of your own order,” William said, with a smile and a kind of bow, as if to compliment the abbot on the gain his order had made by receiving a man of such renown.

“I know, I know.” The abbot smiled. “And you know with what fraternal care our order welcomed the Spirituals when they incurred the Pope's wrath. I am not speaking only of Ubertino, but also of many other, more humble brothers, of whom little is known, and of whom perhaps we should know more. Because it has happened that we accepted fugitives who presented themselves garbed in the habit of the Minorites, and afterward I learned that the various vicissitudes of their life had brought them, for a time, quite close to the Dolcinians. . . .”

“Here, too?” William asked.

“Here, too. I am revealing to you something about which, to tell the truth, I know very little, and in any case not enough to pronounce accusations. But inasmuch as you are investigating the life of this abbey, it is best for you to know these things also. I will tell you, further, that on the basis of things I have heard or surmised, I suspect—mind you, only suspect—that there was a very dark moment in the life of our cellarer, who arrived here, in fact, two years ago, following the exodus of the Minorites.”

“The cellarer? Remigio of Varagine a Dolcinian? He seems to me the mildest of creatures, and, for that matter, the least interested in Sister Poverty that I have ever seen . . .” William said.

“I can say nothing against him, and I make use of his good services, for which the whole community is also grateful to him. But I mention this to make you understand how easy it is to find connections between a friar of ours and a Fraticello.”

“Once again your magnanimity is misplaced, if I may say so,” William interjected. “We were talking about Dolcinians, not Fraticelli. And much can be said about the Dolcinians without anyone's really knowing who is being discussed, because there are many kinds. Still, they cannot be called sanguinary. At most they can be reproached for putting into practice without much consideration things that the Spirituals preached with greater temperance, animated by true love of God, and here I agree the borderline between one group and the other is very fine. . . .”