The Name of the Rose: including the Author's Postscript
by Umberto Eco
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Book Summary Information
Author: Umberto EcoTranslator: William Weaver
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1994-09-28
ISBN: 0156001314
Number of pages: 536
Publisher: Harvest Books
Book Reviews of The Name of the Rose: including the Author's Postscript
Book Review: "Naturally, a Manuscript..." In the Beginning was the Word.
Summary: 5 Stars
The Rose by any name is always the same.
This book is everything the "DaVinci Code" pretended to be. And oh so very very much more. The DaVinci Code is stale pop rocks to Eco's exquisite cannoli. Cannoli dolci, rivetingly rich and complex. But your palate has to be ready for the experience- if all you've known is pop rocks, you won't taste it well. You may be overwhelmed.
Umberto Eco is an Italian professor of semiotics and esoterica, as well as a sometime novelist. This book is his pulp masterpiece, one which will persist and translate down generations, becoming a minor classic to equal triumphs such as Ben Hur, the Scarlet Pimpernel, or the Four Feathers. Like those other pulp classics, The Name of the Rose already has one film version made of it - One starring Sean Connery & Christian Slater. See it, it's good, but nowhere as sweet as the book. Mark this: Hollywood being as creatively bankrupt as it is, this glorious story will be revisited.
In any case, unlike those books, Eco's is heavily levened with philosophic and historical references, which if you pursue them, will - no joke - give you at least a semester's worth of quality undergraduate education in the humanities.
To the story: Umberto's hero, Brother William, is a Franciscan monk in the mold of St. Bonaventure & Roger Bacon, one of those early mystical empiricists for whom light - and hence the entire material world which was revealed in it - was a testament of the Living God Whom illumines all things, and Who clarifies all thought.
This same science - Bacon's empiricism, and the Franciscans' fascination with optics (manifested especially in an obsession with grinding lenses, as Br. William has in the book) feeds the rise of modern astronomy, and hence Brahe, Kepler, Copernicus & Galileo.
The book begins with William's novice Adso, narrator of the story, quoting the first verse of the Gospel of St. John: "In the beginning was the Word.. and the Word was God." In the ensuing narrative, set in one of those grand medieval monasteries which translated classical thought - Greek, Latin & Hebraic - unto the Germans, thus creating the modern world; the monastery along with its library (one of the largest collections of manuscripts in late medieval Europe) is burnt to the ground.
Thus the word is set alight, consumed, and then extinguished. The skeins of vellum (skin, or flesh) upon which the scribes inscribed the knowledge were thus reduced to ash, dust. To nothing. Meaning disintegrated, annihilated. Returned to dust. Embers left frigid, encased in icy Alpine snows.
The fact that William, a student of that other seminal Franciscan influence on modern science, William of Occam (Occam's Razor ring a bell?) uses empirical methods to discern who commits this atrocity, and all the other crimes committed in the story, is significant. For, even though William is an exquisite scientist, in the end it is all fruitless. The criminal escapes human justice, and human truth is annihilated. It is all fleeting, insubstantial.
Adso ends his story with a modified quote from St. Bernard of Clairvaux: "Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus," which means : "The Rose stands in its ancient name, naked names are all we have."
(In St. Bernard's original, the word "Rosa" was written "Roma," I believe.. But what ever could have Holy Bernard meant by that??? How strange.. Seriously.. the Middle Ages were so very very much more interesting than what they will ever teach you in school. Catholic triumphalism, Protestant black legends, and secularist sneering aside. If you want to understand the modern world, what & who we are, understand Bernard. Whatever was the problem he had with Abelard, anyway?)
In any case: "nomine nuda tenemus" - This is nominalism. The rejection of the universal; of mystical integral sacramental unity in things. It is nihilistic, an assertion that destroyed things leave only names. That they have no transcendent reality in themselves. As Abelard said "Nulla rosa est." Names finally point to nothing. This is an implicit denial of the eternally present apocalypse, the present parousia, of reality. Of sacramental grace. Of the Church. Of the Eucharist. It is nascent protestantism. Which is to say incipient secularism; sterile rationalism. It is the annihilation of mystery, enlightenment by which nothing is to be understood.
There is a direct untrammeled line of descent from this failure of medieveal scholasticism to the consubstantial eucharistic theology and textual fetischism of the "Reform," then to Cartesian dualism & rationalism, and ultimately to the enfeebled wordgames of Derrida & Co.
But ignore all that - mere nihilism for fools. Faith is not rooted in some sterile text. The Word did not become book, contrary to what the Muslims, Protestants & "Post Modernists" profess (if "Post Modernists" could profess anything ontologically at all..)
No. He became man, His crucified flesh now transfigured, transcendent, the Seed from which springs a new creation. There is no flame more fierce than the purgatorial flame of Pentecost; flesh of that flame cannot be consumed.
For the Bush still burns. Bare your feet & souls.
"I am Who am."
From this assertion, all meaning springs.
Every word.
For our knowledge of the Rose is a supra-rational, dare I say Mystical, experience.
Adso's name is a pun off "Ad Simplicio," Simplicio being Galileo's Aristotilean foil in his seminal "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems." This is where Galileo destroys the Ptolemaic cosmology associated with, and defended by Aristole, the master of the Scholastics. Adso plays Thomas Aquinas (theologian) disciple to William's Albert the Great (naturalist/scientist) master. Though Adso & William were Franciscan & Aquinas & Albert Domincans, they all four were Aristotileans, all scholastics. But (ironically) the "scientist" teaches the "theologian," in both cases. And after intense experiences, both Adso & St. Thomas come to question their rationalistic approach. Both theologians come to doubt their knowledge. As Aquinas so famously said of his work: "It's all straw." So too the aged, nearly blind Adso pens his final line about the Rose.
The Scholastics are thus undone, not by science (which is far more teleologically frustrated - questions of what orbits where or how fast physical bodies fall will be irrelevant when you are dead) but by the Mystery. Aristotle falls short, both emperically and spiritually. Yet the modern world is a product of Aristotle as communicated, interpreted and critiqued by Muslims such as Ibn Sina & Ibn Rushd, and the Church (universities & monastaries are consummate ecclesial institutions, after all).. Many scoff at that assertion, but it is true. Science, afterall, is nothing categorigization, logic, empiricism, applied mathematics and cataloguing. All Aristotle. All rooted in the scholastic tradition, & then intensely enlivened by its collapse (metaphysics is dead, believe what you like - physics is now our god.) Galileo - and we - can try to disassociate ourselves, like teenagers complaining about the old man to a therapist, but we still owe it all to him. And them.
Pigmaei gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes vident, as they say.
The overarching epistemological problem though, is this: the categories, measurements and figures are ours. And so by definition finally imperfect, partial, indistinct. A rose doesn't give a damn what we call it, or of how many molecules it is made. Platonic reality? The Rose is what she is.
Next time you run into Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins ask them for their empirical proof that YWH doesn't exist.
Punny, eh? Anyway...
So when you read Umberto's story remember that he is riven by all this. Like Brother Adso he is tempted by nihilism. Yet he still believes, but knows it is contre l'esprit de l'age, and he's too hip to say it vividly. So he couches it in Masonic haze. Don't be fooled, though. He knows the score. I only pray he keeps it.
More The Name of the Rose: including the Author's Postscript reviews:
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