Skip to main content

Faith without smile



“Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt,” says William to Jorge. William and Jorge are respectively the protagonist and the antagonist of Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose, which sold over 50 million copies since its publication in 1983. The original was published in Italian in 1980. William and Jorge are both Catholic monks. One is a hero and the other is a villain. You can be a hero or a villain irrespective of the system you belong to. The problem is not with the system but with you. That is the quintessential message of Eco’s novel.

The novel begins with the journey of William and his young disciple Adso to an abbey in Italy in Nov 1327. William is a monk and Adso is a novice. They belong to two different congregations: Franciscans and Benedictines respectively. It was the time when Pope John XXII and King Louis IV were at loggerheads with each other and the Franciscans had the support of the king while the Benedictines chose to kiss the Pope’s ring. William’s journey to the abbey has something to do with this Pope-King conflict.

But that conflict is relegated to the background when a series of deaths takes place in the abbey. No less than five monks are found dead in the abbey one by one under very mysterious circumstances all of which find associations with the Antichrist of the biblical Revelation in Jorge’s interpretation. William’s shrewd mind is determined to find out the truth about the deaths/murders. William was an Inquisitor of the Catholic Church until he realised the folly and villainy of Inquisition.

The Pope’s delegate who comes to solve the current problem between the King and the Pope is a leading Inquisitor. He doesn’t solve the problem. Instead, he finds three individuals to be burnt at the stake: two monks who became monks out of poverty and a village girl who gratified the lust of the monks out of poverty. The Church never understands poverty or any issue of the common people. As long as the Church can burn someone at the stake and thus assert its authority, it is contended. “Bernard (the Inquisitor) is interested, not in discovering the guilty, but in burning the accused,” as William tells Adso. William is not interested in witch-hunt, however. He will prove what is actually wrong with the whole system. That is what this novel is about.

“You are the Devil,” William tells Bernard, the Pope’s representative. The Catholic Church was a diabolic institution in the medieval period. Eco’s novel shows how it behaved like a devil rather than a spiritual enterprise. It had no heart. And no brain, either. It had power. It lusted after power. The deadliest lust is not sex. In fact, sex can be an ecstasy as Adso realises during his intercourse with the girl who later is burned at the stake as a heretic for earning her bread by selling her body to the monks. Woman is the source of too many evils in the scriptures of the Semitic religions.

Happiness is evil, according to Jorge and most other monks. Did Jesus ever smile? Did Jesus laugh? The novel has some interesting discussions on that. The issue is quite serious. Murderous, in fact. I don’t want to bring in spoilers for those who would like to read the novel now.

This is the third time I’m reading this novel. I read it first in the late 1980s when its English translation was available in India. My second reading was when my school in Delhi was under siege due to the greed of a religious organisation called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB]. RSSB has always reminded me of medieval Christianity. If you visit their headquarters in Beas, Punjab, you may be reminded of the abbey in this novel in spite of many differences. Differences are superficial. The spirit is diabolic. Faith without smile. Truth without doubt.

Those who love mankind must make people laugh at the truth, says William. What is truth? Is it what the evangelists preach in Bible Conventions? Is it what the godmen and godwomen preach from their perches in quirky ashrams? What about the madrassas with their straitjacket-truths? The devil is a product of piety, says Eco boldly in the novel. “Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them.”

I think this novel is still relevant though it is not an easy read at all with its excesses of Latin, theology, history, and philosophy. But it has plenty of suspense. It is a thriller with a difference. Something that today’s thriller writers must read to understand how thrillers can be good literature too. Something that today’s patriots must read to know that their truths, like anybody’s truths, are never absolute. Something that cynics like me must read to remind themselves that there should be tenderness even in the hearts of intellectuals.

 

 

 

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    I too have read this novel more than once - though not, now, for about a decade. Your reminder of it is a fine prompt! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nice...Thriller set in a unusual ambience.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...