Tales of Two Inquisitors: On Reading Small Gods and The Name of the Rose

The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without a smile, truth that is never seized by doubt.
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose


The role that faith plays in peoples’ lives has always intrigued me. The question of belief in a higher power, and how this can define a person, are matters that I explore in Bernardo and the Virgin as well as in The Saint of Santa Fe, the novel I’m currently revising.

Last year, I used Terry Pratchett’s novel, Small Gods, in a couple of my English classes. Coincidentally, around the same time I watched, once again, one of my favorite movies: In the Name of the Rose, based on Umberto Eco’s novel. And on this occasion I found the similarities between both stories striking. As a result, I reread Eco’s work and discovered that both authors explore the use of fear as a tool for keeping the faithful in line. In addition, Eco and Pratchett posit that the greatest foe of the religious authorities that employ fear to control their flocks is humankind’s thirst for knowledge. Following this thread, I offer these thoughts:

Brother William of Baskerville, of Umberto Eco’s In the Name of the Rose, is the embodiment of reason. The narrative pits him against two grim keepers of the faith: Brother Jorge de Burgos and the inquisitor Bernard Gui, both of whom adhere unflinchingly to church dogma and are prepared to kill in its defense.

In this manner, the battle-lines between faith versus reason have been drawn. (And this site of confrontation is of great concern to today’s Catholic Church ). Bernard Gui, intoxicated with the absolute authority the Church has bestowed upon him as inquisitor, gleefully spreads terror as he hunts down heresy with singular ferocity throughout medieval Europe. Nothing else is of consequence to him. An undiluted sadist, Bernard Gui is cloaked behind the investitures of the Inquisition; and the need to inflict pain and suffering so consumes him that he has little interest in the intellectual battle Brother William and Brother Jorge are waging. Because of this, long before the novel’s conclusion, Bernard Gui departs from the unnamed abbey—his blood lust satisfied—leaving his brethren to deal with the death and destruction he has left in his wake.

On another front, Brother William and Brother Jorge are locked in a deadly struggle between faith and reason. What’s at the heart of their clash is the last remaining manuscript of the second tome of Aristotle’s Poetics, a critical masterpiece that was long believed lost. Brother Jorge wishes to keep the existence of this work a secret. He sees the Greek philosopher’s exaltation of comedy and laughter as a powerful threat to the utterly humorless faith he practices. On the other hand, Brother William wishes to bring this unpublished composition to light: Aristotle is his hero and, what’s more, in his eyes, the pinnacle of reason.

Viewing the same predicament from another angle, in Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, Brutha, a young novice, is the incarnation of pure, childlike faith. He has assimilated everything ever taught to him about his god and his religion. More importantly, he never has questioned anything. But this changes when Om—his god now made flesh in the form of a decrepit tortoise—takes Brutha on, unwillingly, as his prophet. Brutha starts to see the world differently, questioning everything he had once believed in. This sets up his confrontation with Vorbis—the chief Inquisitor as well as the most powerful and feared man in the Omnian church. Vorbis wants nothing more than to be acknowledged, worshipped, feared and, above all, obeyed as the next great Prophet—and he will go to any length, including sending thousands of his fellow Omnians to their deaths, to achieve this purpose.

Interestingly, the turning points in both novels take place in libraries. In The Name of the Rose, as the manuscript depository of the abbey is engulfed in flames, Brother William of Baskerville risks his life in an attempt to save centuries worth of knowledge. Sadly, in the end, he is unable to rescue a single text. Reason has been reduced to ashes before Brother William’s eyes, a sight most painful to him, and in this manner, although he wins the battle against Brother Jorge—by proving that the monk was behind several brutal murders—he loses the war against dogma and obscurantism. (That is, until the day, many centuries later, when Umberto Eco discovers Adso de Melk’s lost manuscript).

In Small Gods, as the library of Ephebe, the city of philosophers, is set ablaze by Vorbis’s orders, Brutha employs his prodigious memory to save the content of the books before the flames can consume them. Brutha’s mind devours symbols that he does not understand, for he is illiterate, but in the process, faith merges with reason. Ultimately, because of this prodigious act, Brutha is able to defeat Vorbis and the dark forces of dogma.

The presence of God and the inherent goodness of knowledge are, without question, what differentiates these novels. When God stands alongside reason, as God does in Small Gods, faith also wins. But as seen in The Name of the Rose, when faith acts alone there’s a danger that it may become an agent of fear—for through fear the faithful can be easily controlled—and it is then that the world religious beliefs is intended to serve can end up as a pile of ashes.