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

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Parish Ghost

Illustration by Copilot Designer Fiction Father Joseph woke up hearing two sounds. One was his wall clock striking the midnight hour. The other was totally unfamiliar, esoteric. Like the faint sigh of someone too weary to knock at heaven’s door. Father Joseph thought it was the wind. Until the scent of jasmine, oddly out of season, began to haunt his bedroom in the presbytery which was just a few score metres from the parish cemetery. “Is someone there?” Father Joseph asked without getting up. He was more than a bit scared. He never liked this presbytery which was too close to the cemetery. But he had to endure it until his next transfer. “Yes, father,” an unearthly voice answered. From too close, not outside the room. “Pathrose.” “Pathrose who?” A family name was mentioned in answer. “But that family…” Father Joseph’s voice quivered, “no one of that family is alive as far as I know.” “You’re right,” Pathrose said. “We perished because we were too poor to survive what our...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...