But on the day when the Philosopher’s word would justify the marginal jests of the debauched imagination, or when what has been marginal would leap to the center, every trace of the center would be lost. The people of God would be transformed into an assembly of monsters belched forth from the abysses of the terra incognita, and at that moment the edge of the known world would become the heart of the Christian empire, the Arimaspi on the throne of Peter, Blemmyes in the monasteries, dwarfs with huge bellies and immense heads in charge of the library! Servants laying down the law, we (but you, too, then) obeying, in the absence of any law.
A Greek philosopher (whom your Aristotle quotes here, an accomplice and foul auctoritas) said that the seriousness of opponents must be dispelled with laughter, and laughter opposed with seriousness. The prudence of our fathers made its choice: if laughter is the delight of the plebeians, the license of the plebeians must be restrained and humiliated, and intimidated by sternness. And the plebeians have no weapons for refining their laughter until they have made it an instrument against the seriousness of the spiritual shepherds who must lead them to eternal life and rescue them from the seductions of belly, pudenda, food, their sordid desires.
But if one day somebody, brandishing the words of the Philosopher and therefore speaking as a philosopher, were to raise the weapon of laughter to the condition of subtle weapon, if the rhetoric of conviction were replaced by the rhetoric of mockery, if the topics of the patient construction of the images of redemption were to be replaced by the topics of the impatient dismantling and upsetting of every holy and venerable image—oh, that day even you, William, and all your knowledge, would be swept away!”
“Why? I would match my wit with the wit of others. It would be a better world than the one where the fire and red-hot iron of Bernard Gui humiliate the fire and red-hot iron of Dolcino.”
“You yourself would by then be caught in the Devil’s plot. You would fight on the other side at the field of Armageddon, where the final conflict must take place. But by that day the church must be able to impose once again its rule on the conflict. Blasphemy does not frighten us, because even in the cursing of God we recognize the deformed image of the wrath of Jehovah, who curses the rebellious angels. We are not afraid of the violence of those who kill the shepherds in the name of some fantasy of renewal, because it is the same violence as that of the princes who tried to destroy the people of Israel.
We are not afraid of the severity of the Donatists, the mad suicide of the Circumcellions, the lust of the Bogomils, the proud purity of the Albigensians, the flagellants’ need for blood, the evil madness of the Brothers of the Free Spirit: we know them all and we know the root of their sins, which is also the root of our holiness. We are not afraid, and, above all, we know how to destroy them—better, how to allow them to destroy themselves, arrogantly carrying to its zenith the will to die that is born from their own nadir. Indeed, I would say their presence is precious to us, it is inscribed in the plan of God, because their sin prompts our virtue, their cursing encourages our hymn of praise, their undisciplined penance regulates our taste for sacrifice, their impiety makes our piety shine, just as the Prince of Darkness was necessary, with his rebellion and his desperation, to make the glory of God shine more radiantly, the beginning and end of all hope.
But if one day—and no longer as plebeian exception, but as ascesis of the learned, devoted to the indestructible testimony of Scripture—the art of mockery were to be made acceptable, and to seem noble and liberal and no longer mechanical; if one day someone could say (and be heard), ‘I laugh at the Incarnation,’ then we would have no weapons to combat that blasphemy, because it would summon the dark powers of corporal matter, those that are affirmed in the fart and the belch, and the fart and the belch would claim the right that is only of the spirit, to breathe where they list!”
“Lycurgus had a statue erected to laughter.”
“You read that in the libellus of Cloritian, who tried to absolve mimes of the sin of impiety, and where it is said that a sick man was healed by a doctor who helped him laugh. What need was there to heal him, if God had established that his earthly day had reached its end?”
“I don’t believe the doctor cured him. He taught him to laugh at his illness.”
“Illness is not exorcised. It is destroyed.”
“With the body of the sick man.”
“If necessary.”
“You are the Devil,” William said then.
Jorge seemed not to understand. If he had been able to see, I would say he stared at his interlocutor with a dazed look. “I?” he said.
“Yes. They lied to you. The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came. You are the Devil, and like the Devil you live in darkness. If you wanted to convince me, you have failed. I hate you, Jorge, and if I could, I would lead you downstairs, across the ground, naked, with fowl’s feathers stuck in your asshole and your face painted like a juggler and a buffoon, so the whole monastery would laugh at you and be afraid no longer.
I would like to smear honey all over you and then roll you in feathers, and take you on a leash to fairs, to say to all: He was announcing the truth to you and telling you that the truth has the taste of death, and you believed, not in his words, but in his grimness. And now I say to you that, in the infinite whirl of possible things, God allows you also to imagine a world where the presumed interpreter of the truth is nothing but a clumsy raven, who repeats words learned long ago.”
“You are worse than the Devil, Minorite,” Jorge said. “You are a clown, like the saint who gave birth to you all. You are like your Francis, who de toto corpore fecerat linguam, who preached sermons giving a performance like a mountebank’s, who confounded the miser by putting gold pieces in his hand, who humiliated the nuns’ devotion by reciting the ‘Miserere’ instead of the sermon, who begged in French, and who disguised himself as a tramp to confound the gluttonous monks, who flung himself naked in the snow, spoke with animals and transformed the very mystery of the Nativity into a village spectacle, called the lamb of Bethlehem by imitating the bleat of a sheep. . . . It was a good school. Was that Friar Diotisalvi of Florence not a Minorite?”
“Yes.” William smiled. “The one who went to the convent of the preachers and said he would not accept food if first they did not give him a piece of Brother John’s tunic to preserve as a relic, and when he was given it he wiped his behind and threw it in the dungheap and with a stick rolled it around in the dung, shouting: Alas, help me, brothers, because I dropped the saint’s relic in the latrine!”
“This story amuses you, apparently. Perhaps you would like to tell me also the one about that other Minorite Friar Paul Millemosche, who one day fell full length on the ice; when his fellow citizens mocked him and one asked him whether he would not like to lie on something better, he said to the man: Yes, your wife . . . That is how you and your brothers seek the truth.”
“That is how Francis taught people to look at things from another direction.”
“But we have disciplined them. You saw them yesterday, your brothers. They have rejoined our ranks, they no longer speak like the simple. The simple must not speak. This book would have justified the idea that the tongue of the simple is the vehicle of wisdom. This had to be prevented, which I have done. You say I am the Devil, but it is not true: I have been the hand of God.”
“The hand of God creates; it does not conceal.”
“There are boundaries beyond which it is not permitted to go. God decreed that certain papers should bear the words ‘hic sunt leones.’”
“God created the monsters, too. And you. And He wants everything to be spoken of.”
Jorge reached out his shaking hands and drew the book to him. He held it open but turned it around, so that William could still see it in the right position. “Then why,” he said, “did He allow this text to be lost over the course of the centuries, and only one
