The Name of the Rose (32 page)

Salvatore apparently knew more things than I had suspected. I inquired no further, but took the food to William. We ate, and I withdrew to my cell. Or at least, so I implied. I wanted to find Ubertino again, and stealthily I returned to the church.

In which Ubertino tells Adso the story of Fra Dolcino, after which Adso recalls other stories or reads them on his own in the library, and then he has an encounter with a maiden, beautiful and terrible as an army arrayed for battle.

 

I found Ubertino at the statue
of the Virgin. Silently I joined him and for a while pretended (I confess) to pray. Then I made bold to speak to him.

“Holy Father,” I said to him, “may I ask enlightenment and counsel of you?”

Ubertino looked at me and, taking me by the hand, rose and led me to a bench, where we both sat. He embraced me tightly, and I could feel his breath on my face.

“Dearest son,” he said, “anything this poor sinner can do for your soul will be done joyfully. What is distressing you? Yearnings?” he asked, almost with yearning himself. “The yearnings of the flesh?”

“No,” I replied, blushing, “if anything the yearnings of the mind, which wants to know too many things . . .”

“And that is bad. The Lord knows all things, and we must only adore His knowledge.”

“But we must also distinguish good from evil and understand human passions. I am a novice, but I will be monk and priest, and I must learn where evil lies, and what it looks like, in order to recognize it one day and teach others to recognize it.”

“This is true, my boy. What do you want to know, then?”

“The tare of heresy, Father,” I said with conviction. And then, all in one breath, “I have heard tell of a wicked man who has led others astray: Fra Dolcino.”

Ubertino remained silent, then he said: “That is right, you heard Brother William and me refer to him the other evening. But it is a nasty story, and it grieves me to talk about it, because it teaches (yes, in this sense you should know it, to derive a useful lesson from it)—because, I was saying, it teaches how the love of penance and the desire to purify the world can produce bloodshed and slaughter.” He shifted his position on the bench, relaxing his grasp of my shoulders but still keeping one hand on my neck, as if to communicate to me his knowledge or (I could not tell) his intensity.

“The story begins before Fra Dolcino,” he said, “more than sixty years ago, when I was a child. It was in Parma. There a certain Gherardo Segarelli began preaching, exhorting all to a life of penitence, and he would go along the roads crying ‘Penitenziagite!' which was the uneducated man's way of saying ‘Penitentiam agite, appropinquabit enim regnum coelorum.' He enjoined his disciples to imitate the apostles, and he chose to call his sect the order of the Apostles, and his men were to go through the world like poor beggars, living only on alms. . . .”

“Like the Fraticelli,” I said. “Wasn't this the command of our Lord and of your own Francis?”

“Yes,” Ubertino admitted with a slight hesitation in his voice, sighing. “But perhaps Gherardo exaggerated. He and his followers were accused of denying the authority of the priests and the celebration of Mass and confession, and of being idle vagabonds.”

“But the Spiritual Franciscans were accused of the same thing. And aren't the Minorites saying today that the authority of the Pope should not be recognized?”

“Yes, but not the authority of priests. We Minorites are ourselves priests. It is difficult, boy, to make distinctions in these things. The line dividing good from evil is so fine. . . . In some way Gherardo erred and became guilty of heresy. . . . He asked to be admitted to the order of the Minorites, but our brothers would not receive him. He spent his days in the church of our brothers, and he saw the paintings there of the apostles wearing sandals on their feet and cloaks wrapped around their shoulders, and so he let his hair and beard grow, put sandals on his feet, and wore the rope of the Friars Minor, because anyone who wants to found a new congregation always takes something from the order of the Blessed Francis.”

“Then he was in the right. . . .”

“But somewhere he did wrong. . . . Dressed in a white cloak over a white tunic, with his hair long, he acquired among simple people the reputation for saintliness. He sold a little house of his, and having received the money, he stood on a stone from which in ancient times the magistrates were accustomed to harangue, and he held the little sack of gold pieces in his hand, and he did not scatter them or give them to the poor, but, after summoning some rogues dicing nearby, he flung the money in their midst and said, ‘Let him take who will,' and those rogues took the money and went off to gamble it away, and they blasphemed the living God, and he who had given to them heard and did not blush.”

“But Francis also stripped himself of everything, and today from William I heard that he went to preach to ravens and hawks, as well as to the lepers—namely, to the dregs that the people who call themselves virtuous had cast out. . . .”

“Yes, but Gherardo somehow erred; Francis never set himself in conflict with the holy church, and the Gospel says to give to the poor, not to rogues. Gherardo gave and received nothing in return because he had given to bad people, and he had a bad beginning, a bad continuation, and a bad end, because his congregation was disapproved by Pope Gregory the Tenth.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “he was a less broad-minded pope than the one who approved the Rule of Francis. . . .”

“He was, but Gherardo somehow erred. And finally, boy, these keepers of pigs and cows who suddenly became Pseudo Apostles wanted to live blissfully and without sweat off the alms of those whom the Friars Minor had educated with such efforts and such heroic examples of poverty! But that is not the point,” he added promptly. “The point is that to resemble the apostles, who had still been Jews, Gherardo Segarelli had himself circumcised, which is contrary to the words of Paul to the Galatians—and you know that many holy persons proclaim that the future Antichrist will come from the race of the circumcised. . . . But Gherardo did still worse: he went about collecting the simple people and saying, ‘Come with me into the vineyard,' and those who did not know him went with him into another's vineyard, believing it his, and they ate another's grapes. . . .”

“Surely the Minorites didn't defend private property,” I said impertinently.

Ubertino stared at me severely. “The Minorites ask to be poor, but they have never asked others to be poor. You cannot attack the property of good Christians with impunity; the good Christians will label you a bandit. And so it happened to Gherardo. They said of him finally that to test his strength of will and his continence he slept with women without having carnal knowledge of them; but when his disciples tried to imitate him, the results were quite different. . . . Oh, these are not things a boy should know: the female is a vessel of the Devil. . . . And then they began to brawl among themselves over the command of the sect, and evil things happened. And yet many came to Gherardo, not only peasants but also people of the city, and Gherardo made them strip themselves so that, naked, they could follow the naked Christ, and he sent them out into the world to preach, but he had a sleeveless tunic made for himself, white, of strong stuff, and in this garb he looked more like a clown than like a religious! They lived in the open air, but sometimes they climbed into the pulpits of the churches, disturbing the assembly of devout folk and driving out their preachers, and once they set a child on the bishop's throne in the Church of Sant'Orso in Ravenna. And they proclaimed themselves heirs of the doctrine of Joachim of Floris. . . .”

“But so do the Franciscans,” I said, “and also Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, and you, too!” I cried.

“Calm yourself, boy. Joachim of Floris was a great prophet and he was the first to understand that Francis would begin a renewal of the church. But the Pseudo Apostles used his doctrine to justify their follies. Segarelli took with him a female apostle, one Tripia or Ripia, who claimed to have the gift of prophecy. A woman, you understand?”

“But, Father,” I tried to counter, “the other evening you yourself spoke of the saintliness of Clare of Montefalco and Angela of Foligno. . . .”

“They were saints! They lived in humility, recognizing the power of the church; they never claimed the gift of prophecy! But the Pseudo Apostles asserted that women could go preaching from city to city, as many other heretics also said. And they recognized no difference among the wed and the unwed, nor was any vow considered perpetual. In short, Bishop Obizzo of Parma finally decided to put Gherardo in irons. But here a strange thing happened that tells you how weak is human nature, and how insidious the weed of heresy. Because in the end the bishop freed Gherardo and received him at his own table, and laughed at his japes, and kept him as his buffoon.”

“But why?”

“I do not know—or, rather, I fear I do know. The bishop was a nobleman and did not like the merchants and craftsmen of the city. Perhaps he did not mind Gherardo's preaching against them with his talk of poverty, or did not care that from begging for alms Gherardo proceeded to robbery. But in the end the Pope intervened, and the bishop resumed his proper severity, and Gherardo ended on the pyre as an impenitent heretic.”

“And what do these things have to do with Fra Dolcino?”

“They are connected, and this shows you how heresy survives even the destruction of the heretics. This Dolcino was a priest's bastard, who lived in this part of Italy, a bit farther north. He was a youth of sharp mind and he was educated in letters, but he stole from the priest who housed him and fled eastward, to the city of Trent. And there he resumed the preaching of Gherardo, declaring that he was the only true apostle of God and that everything should be common in love, and that it was licit to lie indiscriminately with all women, whereby no one could be accused of concubinage, even if he went with both a wife and a daughter. . . .”

“Did he truly preach those things, or was he just accused of preaching them? I have heard that the Spirituals, like those monks of Montefalco, were accused of similar crimes. . . .”

“De hoc satis,” Ubertino interrupted me sharply. “They were no longer monks. They were heretics. And befouled by Fra Dolcino himself. And, furthermore, listen to me: it is enough to know what Fra Dolcino did afterward to call him a wicked man. How he became familiar with the Pseudo Apostles' teachings, I do not even know. Perhaps he went through Parma as a youth and heard Gherardo. And it is known for certain that he began his preaching at Trent. There he seduced a very beautiful maiden of noble family, Margaret, or she seduced him, as Héloïse seduced Abelard, because—never forget—it is through woman that the Devil penetrates men's hearts! At that point, the Bishop of Trent drove him from the diocese, but by then Dolcino had gathered more than a thousand followers, and he began a long march, which took him back to the area where he was born. And along the way other deluded folk joined him, seduced by his words, and perhaps he was also joined by many Waldensian heretics who lived in the mountains he passed through. When he reached the Novara region, Dolcino found a situation favorable to his revolt, because the vassals governing the town of Gattinara in the name of the Bishop of Vercelli had been driven out by the populace, who then welcomed Dolcino's outlaws as their worthy allies.”

“What had the bishop's vassals done?”

“I do not know, and it is not my place to judge. There was a conflict among certain families in the city of Vercelli, and the Pseudo Apostles took advantage of it, and these families exploited the disorder brought by the Pseudo Apostles. The feudal lords hired mercenaries to rob the citizens, and the citizens sought the protection of the Bishop of Novara.”

“What a complicated story. But whose side was Dolcino on?”

“I do not know; he was a faction unto himself; he entered into all these disputes and saw them as an opportunity for preaching the struggle against private ownership in the name of poverty. Dolcino and his followers, who were now three thousand strong, camped on a hill near Novara known as Bald Mountain, and they built hovels and fortifications, and Dolcino ruled over that whole throng of men and women, who lived in the most shameful promiscuity. From there he sent letters to his faithful in which he said and wrote that their ideal was poverty and they were not bound by any vow of external obedience, and that he, Dolcino, had been sent by God to break the seals of the prophecies and to understand the writings of the Old and the New Testaments. And he called secular clerics—preachers and Minorites—ministers of the Devil, and he absolved everyone from the duty of obeying them. And he identified four ages in the life of the people of God: The first was that of the Old Testament, the patriarchs and prophets, before the coming of Christ, when marriage was good because God's people had to multiply. The second was the age of Christ and the apostles, and this was the epoch of saintliness and chastity. Then came the third, when the popes had first to accept earthly riches in order to govern the people; but when mankind began to stray from the love of God, Benedict came, and spoke against all temporal possessions. When the monks of Benedict also then went back to accumulating wealth, the monks of Saint Francis and Saint Dominic came, even more stern than Benedict in preaching against earthly power and riches. But finally now, when again the lives of so many prelates were contradicting all those good precepts, we had reached the end of the third age, and it was necessary to follow the teachings of the Apostles.”

“Then Dolcino was preaching the things that the Franciscans had preached, and among the Franciscans, the Spirituals in particular, and you yourself, Father!”