“So Francis wanted to incite the outcasts to revolt?”
“No, that was what Fra Dolcino and his followers wanted, if anybody did. Francis wanted to call the outcast, ready to revolt, to be part of the people of God. If the flock was to be gathered again, the outcasts had to be found again. Francis didn’t succeed, and I say it with great bitterness. To recover the outcasts he had to act within the church, to act within the church he had to obtain the recognition of his rule, from which an order would emerge, and this order, as it emerged, would recompose the image of a circle, at whose margin the outcasts remain. So now do you understand why there are bands of Fraticelli and Joachimites who again gather the outcasts around themselves?”
“But we weren’t talking about Francis; we were talking about how heresy is produced by the simple and the outcast.”
“Yes. We were talking about those excluded from the flock of sheep. For centuries, as pope and emperor tore each other apart in their quarrels over power, the excluded went on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true lepers are only the illustration ordained by God to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying ‘lepers’ we would understand ‘outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities.’ But we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign. Excluded as they were from the flock, all of them were ready to hear every sermon that, harking back to the word of Christ, would in effect condemn the behavior of the dogs and shepherds and would promise their punishment one day.
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. And for their part, maddened by their exclusion, they were not interested in any doctrine. This is the illusion of heresy. The faith a movement proclaims doesn’t count: what counts is the hope it offers. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only to keep the leper as he is. As for the lepers, what can you ask of them? That they distinguish between two definitions of the Trinity or of the Eucharist? Come, Adso, these games are for us men of learning. The simple have other problems. And mind you, they solve them all in the wrong way. This is why they become heretics.”
“But why do some people support them?”
“Because it serves their purposes, which concern the faith rarely, and more often the conquest of power.”
“Is that why the church of Rome accuses all its adversaries of heresy?”
“That is why, and that is also why it recognizes as orthodoxy any heresy it can bring back under its own control or must accept because the heresy has become too strong. But there is no precise rule. This holds true also for kings and commoners. Some time ago, in Cremona, the Emperor’s followers helped the Cathars, but only to embarrass the church of Rome. Sometimes the city magistrates encourage the heretics only so that they translate the Gospel into the vernacular: the vernacular by now is the language of the cities, Latin the language of Rome and the monasteries. And sometimes the magistrates support the Waldensians, because they declare that all, men and women, lowly and mighty, can teach and preach, and so they eliminate the distinction that makes clerics irreplaceable!”
“But why, then, do the same city magistrates rebel against the heretics and give the church a powerful hand in having them burned?”
“Because they realize the heretics jeopardize also the privileges of the laity who speak in the vernacular. Two hundred years ago, during a council, it was said that no credence should be given to those foolish and illiterate men the Waldensians. It was said, if I recall properly, that they have no fixed dwelling, they go about barefoot and possess nothing, holding everything as common property, following naked the naked Christ, but if given too much room they will drive out everyone else. To avoid this calamity, the cities then favored the mendicant orders, and us Franciscans in particular: we fostered a harmonious balance between the need for penance and the life of the city, between the church and the burghers, concerned for their trade. . . .”
“Was harmony achieved, then, between love of God and love of trade?”
“No, the movements of spiritual renewal were blocked; they were channeled within the bounds of an order recognized by the Pope. But what circulated underneath was not channeled. It flowed, on the one hand, into the movements of the flagellants, who endanger no one, or into the armed bands like Fra Dolcino’s, or into the witchcraft rituals of the monks of Montefalco that Ubertino was talking about. . . .”
“But who was right, who is right, who was wrong?” I asked, bewildered.
“They were all right in their way, and all were mistaken.”
“And you,” I cried, in an access almost of rebellion, “why don’t you take a position, why won’t you tell me where the truth is?”
William remained silent for a while, holding the lens he was working on up to the light. Then he lowered it to the table and showed me, through the lens, a tool. “Look,” he said to me. “What do you see?”
“The tool, a bit larger.”
“There: the most we can do is look more closely.”
“But the tool remains always the same!”
“The manuscript of Venantius, too, will remain the same when, thanks to this lens, I’ve been able to read it. But perhaps when I’ve read the manuscript I’ll know a part of the truth better. And perhaps we’ll be able to make the life of the abbey better.”
“But that isn’t enough!”
“I’m saying more than I seem to be, Adso. This isn’t the first time I’ve spoken to you of Roger Bacon. Perhaps he was not the wisest man of all time, but I’ve always been fascinated by the hope that inspired his love of learning. Bacon believed in the strength, the needs, the spiritual inventions of the simple. He wouldn’t have been a good Franciscan if he hadn’t thought that the poor, the outcast, idiots and illiterate, often speak with the mouth of our Lord. The simple have something more than do learned doctors, who often become lost in their search for broad, general laws. The simple have a sense of the individual, but this sense, by itself, is not enough. The simple grasp a truth of their own, perhaps truer than that of the doctors of the church, but then they destroy it with actions to which they give no thought. What must be done?
Give learning to the simple? Too easy, or too difficult. The Franciscan teachers considered this problem. The great Bonaventure said that the wise must enhance conceptual clarity with the truth implicit in the actions of the simple. . . .”
“Like the chapter of Perugia and the learned memories of Ubertino, which transform into theological decisions the summons of the simple to poverty,” I said.
“Yes, but as you have seen, this happens too late, and when it happens, the truth of the simple has already been transformed into the truth of the powerful, more useful for the Emperor Louis than for a Friar of the Poor Life. How are we to remain close to the experience of the simple, maintaining, so to speak, their operative virtue, the capacity of working toward the transformation and betterment of their world? This was the problem for Bacon. Quod enim laicali ruditate turgescit non habet effectum nisi fortuito, the experience of the simple has savage and uncontrollable results.
Sed opera sapientiae certa lege vallantur et in finem debitum efficaciter diriguntur: he thought that the new natural science should be the great new enterprise of the learned: to coordinate the elementary needs that represented also the heap of expectations, disordered but in its way true and right, of the simple. According to Bacon, this enterprise was to be directed by the church, but I believe he said this because, in his time, 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. So I think that, since I and my friends today believe that for the management of human affairs it is not the church that should legislate but the assembly of the people, then in the future the community of the learned will have to propose this new and humane theology which is natural philosophy and positive magic.”
“A splendid enterprise,” I said, “but is it possible?”
“Bacon thought so.”
“And you?”
“I think so, too. But to believe in it we must be sure that the simple are right in possessing the sense of the individual, which is the only good kind. However, if the sense of the individual is the only good, how will science succeed in recomposing the universal laws through which, and interpreting which,
