I liked the book a lot. I only have a hazy memory of the movie, but one grip I have with the movie is: Bernard Gui died in it.
(Spoilers below)
“Now,” he added, “the Antichrist is truly at hand, because no learning will hinder him any more. For that matter, we have seen his face tonight.”
“Whose face?” I asked, dazed.
“Jorge, I mean. In his face, deformed by hatred of philosophy, I saw for the first time the portrait of the Antichrist, who does not come from the tribe of Judas, as his heralds have it, or from a far country. The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from 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. Jorge feared the second book of Aristotle because it perhaps really did teach how to distort the face of every truth, so that we would not become slaves of our ghosts. 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.”
I think this is the irony of Jorge: Jorge considered laughter a most dangerous exercise of liberty that easily leads to doubt, and is a subversive force that could undermine established authority and customs, and so it is an enemy of the truth that should be purged. So he jealously protected the lost second book of Aristotle’s
Poetics, which (in this novel) deals with comedy, to the point of committing murder. Jorge’s piety has turned him into a monster, an image of the Antichrist. (This glorification of laughter is actually very post-modern: the Reformation and the Renaissance brought the idea of laughter as an enemy of reason.)
(This quote really speaks to me because I see modern-day fundamentalists and extremists of various religions or none as similar to Jorge: their extreme zeal and love of their truth transforms them into monsters that do more harm than good.)
William, however, in solving the case, realizes that humans are misguided in their attempts to establish a clearly-defined and stable order in the world; for him, laughter is the embodied recognition of the ultimate omnipotence and freedom of the divine that makes a mockery of all human attempts to order the world in God’s name. In the book, William by the end realizes that the ‘pattern’ of the murders only referred to the seven trumpets of Revelation by accident: “There was no plot, and I discovered it by mistake.”
“I have never doubted the truth of signs, Adso; they are the only things man has with which to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand was the relation among signs. I arrived at Jorge through an apocalyptic pattern that seemed to underlie all the crimes, and yet it was accidental. I arrived at Jorge seeking one criminal for all the crimes and we discovered that each crime was committed by a different person, or by no one. I arrived at Jorge pursuing the plan of a perverse and rational mind, and there was no plan, or rather, Jorge himself was overcome by his own initial design and there began a sequence of causes, and concauses, and of causes contradicting one another, which proceeded on their own, creating relations that did not stem from any plan. Where is all my wisdom then? I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.”
“But in imagining an erroneous order you still found something …”
“What you say is very fine, Adso, and I thank you. The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.
Er muos gelischesame die leiter abewerfen, so er an ir ufgestigen. He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.] … Is that how you say it?”
“That is how it is said in my language. Who told you that?”
“A mystic from your land. He wrote it somewhere, I forget where. And it is not necessary for somebody one day to find that manuscript again. The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.”
“You have no reason to reproach yourself: you did your best.”
“A human best, which is very little. It’s hard to accept the idea that there cannot be an order in the universe because it would offen the free will of God and His omnipotence. So the freedom of God is our condemnation, or at least the condemnation of our pride.”
I dared, for the first and last time in my life, to express a theological conclusion: “But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God and primogenial 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?”
William looked at me without betraying any feeling in his features, and he said, “How could a learned man go on communicating his learning if he answered yes to your question?” I did not understand the meaning of his words. “Do you mean,” I asked, “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?”
