‘The Name of the Rose’: Not just a whodunnit mystery

Only a few of us may think like Plato or Confucius; but certainly all of us possess inherent wisdom. Merely a handful among us may have grand theories like those of Copernicus and Einstein; but each of us shares access to certain truths. Not many of us may die being revered like Gautama Buddha or any Christian saint; but every human being who passes this earth bears an imprint of the divine.

I am a "religious." And very few would get what I exactly mean by that word. Only a priest, a monk, or a theologian could easily associate that with one who vowed a consecrated life – in obedience, chastity and poverty. A fish vendor who likewise lives religiously is merely an "ordinary faithful." Why the distinction? I do not have a ready answer. For the meantime, charge it to the Dark Ages, to the fuga mundi mentality of the monastics, and to the blind Jorge of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.

As a religious, who allowed a convent to cloister my youth and to shape my entire future, the phrase "murder in the monastery" naturally intrigues me. This very phrase came to me four years ago highlighted at the flipside of a paperback copy of Eco’s masterpiece. I picked up the book and made an initial effort to connect the phrase to the question: What is the name of the rose?" The difficulty I bore in that effort, however, is scratch compared to the task demanded by the book for me to enter into it. The first 15 pages triggered me to almost throw the book for I could not ride with Eco’s word game, until I remembered that he is a semiologist, someone obsessed with the marriage of sign and logic. But I should make it, I told myself. I needed to know the name of the rose.

The Name of the Rose is narrated from the memories of Adso, an aged monk. It was the height of the Dark Ages, the 15th century, when the Church had two Popes. More remembered of the two was John XXII, who acted more of an antipope by rounding off heretics. He represented well the medieval Church’s blindness and exclusivism.

Adso went back to his mid-teenage years, when he deferred his entrance to a monastery for the special chance of being with the renowned William of Baskerville, a Franciscan Church investigator. Their mission: to solve the mysterious murder of a young monk within the famed and wealthiest abbey of the world.

I went with Adso’s fears, worries, excitements and foresights as he traveled with the great inquisitor towards the far-off abbey. With him, I got short of words to affirm the genius of his master. Like Adso, I felt being with a philosopher and a Church doctor combined. A mystical journey, that was.

The mystical journey reached its summit when the abbey was at sight. It was heaven-on-earth far glorious than the words "famed" and "wealthiest." It was a perfect alternative to the City of Man outside, which the monks call hell. Entering the abbey, Adso lost his fears and worries; even his excitements and foresights could not ask for more. Mine too.

But all these were outraced by the events that came fast during their stay. Three more monks were murdered. All had something in common – they were poisoned. Together with William and Adso, I was thrown into a confusing den of suspects – the herbalist, the glassmaker, the cellarer and the librarian.

It was not only the series of murders that changed Adso’s and my own regard of the abbey. There was sodomy, dirty politics – and gruesome self-conceit. The center of this self-conceit is Jorge of Burgos, whose age and blindness failed to destroy his brilliance. There is one thesis he would defend up to his deathbed –"God never ever laughed." For him, laughter is a devil’s craft. A man of God does not laugh as he prays; only the men of the world do so as they are caged by folly, falsehood and evil. This he fought with all his nerves during a debate with William.

Little did Adso and I know that that laughter thing was a link to the murders. The killer was not, directly, human. It was a book, believed to be Aristotle’s lost piece, entitled Finis Africae or The End of Africa. The book acclaimed an African legend, which explains the world as created out of laughter. For Jorge, Africans are evil, like the black witches around the abbey. Finis Africae is the Bible of evil, an anti-truth; thus, it had to be kept in the dark. Only one truth should shine, the truth held by him owing to the conceit of the Church. Jorge filled the book’s core pages with poison so that all who would dare to touch and read them would die like the murdered monks.

It took the sharpest mental power of William to locate the book in a shelf intricately hidden in the abbey’s labyrinthine library. However, it was in the arms of Jorge, who still had the strength to wrestle with Willliam and Adso. The lamp of the inquisitor fell and the whole library including Jorge and Finis Africae, and eventually the whole abbey, was burned.

William and Adso managed to escape. And I was left wondering where is the name of the rose.

I had read the book four times but still could not find the title being justified. But every hour since my first reading I am pushed to see a rose in the wisdom of scavengers in the streets, in the truth formulated by the farmers in my province, and in the divine presence among death convicts. Naming the rose is like explaining reality. It is not reserved to the philosophers, the scientists, and the priests – it is for all to marvel at.

The ghost of the Dark Ages and Jorge’s character swing today in the prevailing hierarchic orders: the spiritual over the material, the white over the black, male over female, the experts over the layman, the "religious" over the "ordinary faithful." In the resolve to uphold a self-held truth, we resemble Jorge who was afraid to see the other side of the rose – of wisdom, truth and the divine; we even destroy those who are not on our side.

Umberto Eco’s novel is much bigger than what I have accounted so that I have to read it the fifth time, and for sure, the sixth time and more. No book has ever dared to command me that way. And I love it.