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. Yamini MacLeanNovember 11, 2022 at 9:06 PM

    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. Rajeev MoothedathNovember 11, 2022 at 10:53 PM

    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
44 comments
Read more

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The
62 comments
Read more

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so
39 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
36 comments
Read more

Octlantis

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r
34 comments
Read more