The Name of the Rose

The novel’s final section, “Seventh Day,” contains only two chapters: “Night,” and “Night, in which the ecpyrosis takes place, and because of excess virtue the forces of hell prevail.” The first chapter encompasses the revelation that Jorge is the mastermind behind all the murders; the second chapter describes the physical battle between Jorge and his would-be captors, a struggle which leads to the devastating fire (“ecpyrosis”) that engulfs first the library and then the entire abbey.

The “forces of hell” represent not only the devastating fire, but the hatred and distortion in Jorge’s soul. Earlier, during Jorge’s excruciating sermon, William had joked that Jorge resembles his own description of the Antichrist. Now, the words that William had spoken in jest have become prophetic. As they watch the abbey burn, William says:

In that face, deformed by hatred of philosophy, I saw for the first time the portrait of the Antichrist…The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born of the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them. Jorge did a diabolical thing because he loved his truth so lewdly that he dared anything in order to destroy falsehood (598).

Jorge is unrepentant to the very end. He must destroy the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics because it is the will of God. William asks why this is book so dangerous, when there are other books, on many blasphemous topics, in the library. But this book was written by “the Philosopher,” Jorge says, the name used for Aristotle by the many medieval theologians and thinkers who revered him. Indeed, Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), the renowned Dominican friar, philosopher, and theologian was known to call Aristotle “the Philosopher.” Aquinas embraced Aristotelian thought and attempted to synthesize his philosophy with the principles of Christianity. It is interesting to note that Aquinas was canonized fifty years after his death, in 1323, by the real Pope John XXII, whose presence looms so large in this novel.

Aristotle’s Poetics (c.a. 335 BCE) is the earliest surviving work of dramatic theory; it is believed to have been comprised of two books, one on tragedy and one on comedy, but only the first book survives. With the loss of the study of ancient Greek in the early medieval Latin West, Aristotle was practically unknown there from c. AD 600 to c. 1100 except through a Latin translation. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, interest in Aristotle revived and Latin Christians had translations made, both from Arabic translations and from the original Greek. After Aquinas’s writings on Aristotle received wide acclaim, the demand for Aristotle's writings grew and stimulated a revival of Aristotelianism in Europe that continued into the Renaissance.

To Jorge, Aristotle “has destroyed a part of the learning that Christianity had accumulated over the centuries” (576). It is the Church fathers and the Bible itself that should hold dominion over the Word of God. But Church Fathers such as Aquinas were “seduced” by the pagan writer. It was Aristotle who took the “divine names” for things, and “renamed them” by “following the proud paths of natural reason” (575-76). The lost secondbook of the Poetics was written to justify comedy, and to elevate laughter itself. In“Night,” Jorge and William have their final debate about the dangers of laughter, and Jorge believes he is “the hand of God” (582). William insists that “the hand of God creates; it does not conceal” (582). But Jorge is certain, otherwise, why did God:

allow this text to be lost over the centuries, and only one copy to be saved, and the copy of that copy, which had ended up God knows where…to lie abandoned in the secrecy of an old library, where I, not you, was called by Providence to find it and to hide it for more years still (583).

William tells Jorge he is the Devil, and Jorge is puzzled. William explains that the devil is “arrogance of the spirit, faith without a smile, trust that is never seized by doubt” (581). Jorge calls William “a clown,” which echoes what he believes to be the central mistake of the Franciscans: their embrace of the “simple” people, whom Jorge wishes would keep silent. Aristotle’s book, with its emphasis on the lives of ordinary folks, “would have justified the tongue of the simple [as] the vehicle of wisdom” (582). But “the simple should not speak,” according to Jorge (582). And Jorge, as God’s rightful agent, will prevent this book from seeing the light of day. Thus, the murder victims were culpable, and they died for their sins–each victim “poisoned himself when he was alone, and only to the extent that he wanted to read” (575).

In the end, as the library burns, William weeps, for “it was the greatest library in Christendom,” and “now the Antichrist is truly at hand” (598). For William, damnation does not consist of books, but in their destruction. William believes that “the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth” (598). Adso is still struggling to accept the ambiguity of William’s world view, and he insists that, in his investigations in the abbey, William has uncovered many truths.

Here, William distinguishes between “truth,” and “signs,” and the novel returns to its semiotic roots (599). He declares, “I have never doubted the ‘truth of signs,’” and these signs are “the only things man has with which to orient himself in the world” (599). But in order to make meaning, one must understand the “relation among signs.” William, now defeated, asks: “where is all my wisdom, then?” (599). He now knows that he was pursuing “a semblance of order,” when he “should have known that there is no order in the universe” (599). Despite this realization, William admits that he too struggles. It is hard for him, he reveals, “to accept the idea that there cannot be an order in the universe because it would offend the free will of God and His omnipotence” (600). For the first and last time in his life, Adso attempts “to express a theological conclusion,” asking if a belief in God’s omnipotence and His absolute free will is “tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist?” (600). The moment is a powerful one. William and his pupil, standing amidst the chaos of death and destruction, debate the very existence of God. But William will only answer, “there is too much confusion here,” and they walk a further distance from the flames (601). It is as if they have glimpsed the mouth of hell itself—the specter of unbelief—and pull themselves away.