Just finished The Name of the Rose. Here are some more quotes from it:
On Franciscan leader Michael of Cesena: “Minister general of the order of the Friars Minor, he was in principle the heir of Saint Francis, and actually the heir of his interpreters: he had to compete with the sanctity and wisdom of such a predecessor as Bonaventure of Bagnoregio; he had to assure respect for the Rule and at the same time, the fortunes of the order, so powerful and vast; he had to keep an eye on the courts and on the city magistrates from whom the order, though in the guise of alms, received gifts and bequests, source of prosperity and wealth; and at the same time he had to make sure that the requirement of penance did not lead the more ardent Spirituals to abandon the order, scattering that splendid community of which he was the head, in a constellation of bands of heretics.”
“Finally, I had no more doubts as to the gravity of my situation when I read quotations from the great Avicenna, who defined love as an assiduous thought of a melancholy nature, born as a result of one’s thinking again and again of the features, gestures, or behavior of a person of the opposite sex (with what vivid fidelity had Avicenna described my case!): it does not originate as an illness when, remaining unsatisfied, it becomes obsessive thought (and why did I feel so obsessed, I who, God forgive me, had been well satisfied? Or was perhaps what had happened the previous night not satisfaction of love? But how is this illness satisfied, then?), and so there is an incessant flutter of the eyelids, irregular respiration; now the victim laughs, now weeps, and the pulse throbs (and indeed mine throbbed, and my breathing stopped as I read those lines!).”
“Politely interrupting Abo at this point, Cardinal Bertrand spoke up, saying we should recall how, to complicate matters and to irritate the Pontiff, in 1324 Louis the Bavarian had intervened with the Declaration of Sachsenhausen, in which for no good reason he confirmed the theses of Perugia (nor was it comprehensible, Bertrand remarked, with a thin smile, that the Emperor should acclaim so enthusiastically a poverty he did no practice in the least), setting himself against the lord Pope, calling him inimicus pacis and saying he was bent on fomenting scandal and discord, and finally calling him a heretic, indeed a heresiarch.”
“And on this score two ways of having are posited, one of which is civil and worldly, so that it is one thing to defend in a civil and worldly sense one’s own possession against him who would take it, appealing to the imperial judge—but to say that Christ and the apostles owned things in this sense is heretical, because, as Matthew says, if any man will sue thee at the law and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also; nor does Luke say any differently, where Christ dismisses from himself all power and lordship and imposes the same on his apostles; and consider further Matthew, where Peter says to the Lord that to follow him they have left everything; but in the other way temporal things can yet be held, for the purpose of common fraternal charity, and in this way Christ and his disciples possessed some goods by natural right, to sustain nature.”
“Whereas with goods perishable with use, such as bread and foods, a simple right of use cannot be considered, nor can de-facto use be posited, but only abuse; everything the believers held in common in the primitive church, as is deduced from Acts 2 and 3, they held on the basis of the same type of ownership they had had before their conversion; the apostles, after the descent of the Holy Spirit, possessed farms in Judaea; the vow of living without property does not extend to what man needs in order to live, and when Peter said he had left everything he did not mean he had renounced property; Adam had ownership and property of things; the servant who receives money from his master certainly does not just make use or abuse of it; the words of the Exiit qui seminat to which the Minorites are always referring and which establish that the Friars Minor have only the use of what serves them, without having control and ownership, must be referring only to goods that are not consumed with use; and in fact if the Exiit included perishable goods it would sustain the impossible; de-facto use cannot be distinguished from juridical control; every human right, on the basis of which material goods are owned, is contained in the laws of kings; Christ as a mortal man, from the moment of his conception, was owner of all earthly goods, and as God he received from the Father universal control over everything; he was owner of clothing, food, money for tribute, and offerings of the faithful; and if he was poor, it was not because he had no property, but because he did not receive its fruits; for simple juridical control, separated from the collection of interest, does not enrich the possessor and finally, even if the Exiit had said otherwise, the Roman Pontiff can revoke the decisions of his predecessors and can even make contrary assertions.”
“It has been written that many will be the agitations among those of rank, and among the peoples, the churches that wicked shepherds will rise up, perverse, disdainful, greedy, pleasure-seeking, lovers of gain, enjoyers of idle speech, boastful, proud, avid, arrogant, plunged in lewdness, seekers of vainglory, enemies of the Gospel, ready to repudiate the strait gate, to despise the true word; and they will hate every path of piety, they will not repent their sins, and therefore will spread among all peoples disbelief, fraternal hatred, wickedness, hardness of heart, envy, indifference, robbery, drunkenness, intemperance, lasciviousness, carnal pleasure, fornication, and all the other vices.”
“I had never loved that man, who frightened me; and I will not deny that for a long time I believed him guilty of all the crimes. But now I had learned that he was perhaps a poor wretch, oppressed by unfulfilled passions, an earthenware vessel among vessels of iron, surly because bewildered, silent and evasive because conscious he had nothing to say. I felt a certain remorse toward him, and I thought that praying for his supernatural destiny might allay my feelings of guilt.”
A dream vision: “The skin with each of its folds, wrinkles and scars, with its velvety plains, its forest of hairs, the dermis, the bosom, the pudenda, having become a sumptuous damask, and the breasts, the nails, the horny formations under the heel, the threads of the lashes, the watery substance of the eyes, the flesh of the lips, the thin spine of the back, the architecture of the bones, everything reduced to sandy powder, though nothing had lost its own form or respective placement, the legs emptied and limp as a boot, their flesh lying flat like a chasuble with all the scarlet embroidery of the veins, the engraved pile of the viscera, the intense and mucous ruby of the heart, the pearly file of even teeth arranged like a necklace, with the tongue as a pink-and-blue pendant, the fingers in a row like tapers, the seal of the navel re-knotting the threads of the unrolled carpet of the belly…”
“But if one day—and no longer as plebeian exception, but as ascesis of the learned, devoted to the indestructible testimony of Scripture—the art of mockery were to be made acceptable, and to seem noble and liberal and no longer mechanical; if one day someone could say (and be heard), ‘I laugh at the Incarnation,’ then we would have no weapons to combat that blasphemy, because it would summon the dark powers of corporal matter, those that are affirmed in the fart and the belch, and the fart and the belch would claim the right that is only of the spirit, to breathe where they list!”
“Perhaps 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.”
A dialogue near the end:
“It’s hard 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. So the freedom of God is our condemnation, or at least the condemnation of our pride.”
“But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God and primigenial chaos? Isn’t affirming God’s absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to His own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist?”
“How could a learned man go on communicating his learning if he answered yes to your question?”
“Do you mean that there would be no possible and communicable learning any more if the very criterion of truth were lacking, or do you mean you could no longer communicate what you know because others would not allow you to?”
