“Oh, he can bend even the theologians to his will,” Michael said sadly.
“Not necessarily,” William replied. “We live in times when those learned in divine things have no fear of proclaiming the Pope a heretic. Those learned in divine things are in their way the voice of the Christian people. Not even the Pope can set himself against them now. And even you will have to agree with those theologians.”
My master was truly very sharp. How could he foresee that Michael himself would later decide to support the theologians of the empire and to support the people in condemning the Pope? How could William foresee that, in four years’ time, when John was first to pronounce his incredible doctrine, there would be an uprising on the part of all Christianity? If the beatific vision was thus postponed, how could the dead intercede for the living? And what would become of the cult of the saints? It was the Minorites themselves who would open hostilities in condemning the Pope, and William of Occam would be in the front rank, stern and implacable in his arguments. The conflict was to last for three years, until John, close to death, made partial amends.
I heard him described, years later, as he appeared in the consistory of December 1334, smaller than he had seemed previously, withered by age, eighty-five years old and dying, his face pale, and he was to say (the fox, so clever in playing on words not only to break his own oaths but also to deny his own stubbornness): “We confess and believe that the souls separated from the body and completely purified are in heaven, in paradise with the angels, and with Jesus Christ, and that they see God in His divine essence, clearly, face to face . . .” and then, after a pause—it was never known whether this was due to his difficulty in breathing or to his perverse desire to underline the last clause as adversative—“to the extent to which the state and condition of the separated soul allows it.” The next morning, a Sunday, he had himself laid on a long chair with reclining back, and he received the cardinals, who kissed his hand, and he died.
But again I digress, and tell things other than those I should tell. Yet, after all, the rest of that conversation at table does not add much to the understanding of the events I am narrating. The Minorites agreed on the stand to be taken the next day. They sized up their adversaries one by one. They commented with concern on the news, announced by William, of the arrival of Bernard Gui. And even more on the fact that such a scourge of heretics as Cardinal Bertrand del Poggetto would be presiding over the Avignon legation. Two inquisitors were too many: a sign they planned to use the argument of heresy against the Minorites.
“So much the worse,” William said. “We will treat them as heretics.”
“No, no,” Michael said, “let us proceed cautiously; we must not jeopardize any possible agreement.”
“As far as I can see,” William said, “though I also worked for the realization of this meeting, and you know it, Michael, I do not believe the Avignonese are coming here to achieve any positive result. John wants you at Avignon alone, and without guarantees. But the meeting will have served at least to make you understand that. It would have been worse if you had gone there before having had this experience.”
“And so you have worked hard, and for many months, to bring about something you believe futile,” Michael said bitterly.
“I was asked to, by the Emperor and by you,” William said. “And ultimately it is never a futile thing to know one’s enemies better.”
At this point they came to tell us that the second delegation was coming inside the walls. The Minorites rose and went out to meet the Pope’s men.
NONES
In which Cardinal del Poggetto arrives, with Bernard Gui and the other men of Avignon, and then each one does something different.
Men who had already known one another for some time, men who without knowing one another had each heard the others spoken of, exchanged greetings in the courtyard with apparent meekness. At the abbot’s side, Cardinal Bertrand del Poggetto moved like a man accustomed to power, as if he were virtually a second pope himself, and to one and all, especially to the Minorites, he distributed cordial smiles, auguring splendid agreement for the next day’s meeting and bearing explicit wishes for peace and good (he used deliberately this expression dear to the Franciscans) from John XXII.
“Excellent,” he said to me, when William was kind enough to introduce me as his scribe and pupil. Then he asked me whether I knew Bologna and he praised its beauty to me, its good food and its splendid university, inviting me to visit the city, rather than return one day, as he said, among those German people of mine who were making our lord Pope suffer so much. Then he extended his ring for me to kiss, as he directed his smile at someone else.
For that matter, my attention immediately turned to the person of whom I had heard most talk recently: Bernard Gui, as the French called him, or Bernardo Guidoni or Bernardo Guido, as he was called elsewhere.
He was a Dominican of about seventy, slender and erect. I was struck by his gray eyes, capable of staring without any expression; I was to see them often flash with ambiguous light, shrewd both in concealing thoughts and passions and in deliberately conveying them.
In the general exchange of greetings, he was not affectionate or cordial like the others, but barely polite. When he saw Ubertino, whom he already knew, he was very deferential, but stared at him in a way that gave me an uneasy shudder. When he greeted Michael of Cesena, his smile was hard to decipher, and he murmured without warmth, “You have been awaited there for some time,” a sentence in which I was unable to catch either a hint of eagerness or a shadow of irony, either an injunction or, for that matter, a suggestion of interest. He met William and looked at him with polite hostility: not because his face betrayed his secret feelings, I was sure of that (even while I was unsure that he harbored any feelings at all), but because he certainly wanted William to feel he was hostile.
William returned his hostility, smiling at him with exaggerated cordiality and saying, “For some time I have been wanting to meet a man whose fame has been a lesson to me and an admonition for many important decisions that have inspired my life.” Certainly words of praise, almost of flattery, for anyone who did not know, as Bernard did know well, that one of the most important decisions in William’s life had been to abandon the position of inquisitor. I derived the impression that, if William would gladly have seen Bernard in some imperial dungeon, Bernard certainly would have been pleased to see William suddenly seized by accidental and immediate death; and since Bernard in those days had men-at-arms under his command, I feared for my good master’s life.
Bernard must already have been informed by the abbot of the crimes committed in the abbey. In fact, pretending to ignore the venom in William’s words, he said to him, “It seems that now, at the abbot’s request, and in order to fulfill the mission entrusted to me under the terms of the agreement that has united us all here, I must concern myself with some very sad events in which the pestiferous stink of the Devil is evident. I mention this to you because I know that in remote times, when you would have been closer to me, you fought as did I—and those like me—in that field where the forces of good are arrayed against the forces of evil.”
“True,” William said calmly, “but then I went over to the other side.”
Bernard took the blow well. “Can you tell me anything helpful about these criminal deeds?”
“No, unfortunately,” William answered with civility. “I do not have your experience of criminal deeds.”
From that moment on I lost track of everyone. William, after another conversation with Michael and Ubertino, withdrew to the scriptorium. He asked Malachi’s leave to examine certain books, but I was unable to hear the titles. Malachi looked at him oddly but could not deny permission. Strangely, they did not have to be sought in the library. They were already on Venantius’s desk, all of them. My master immersed himself in his reading, and I decided not to disturb him.
I went down into the kitchen. There I saw Bernard Gui. He probably wanted to comprehend the layout of the abbey and was roaming about everywhere. I heard him interrogating the cooks and other servants, speaking the local vernacular after a fashion (I recalled that he had been inquisitor in northern Italy). He seemed to be asking for information about the harvest, the organization of work in the monastery. But even while asking the most innocuous questions, he would look at his companion with penetrating eyes, then would abruptly ask another question, and at this point his victim would blanch and stammer. I concluded that, in some singular way, he was carrying out an inquisition, and was exploiting a formidable weapon that every inquisitor, in the performance of his function, possesses and
