Knowledge and Secrecy Theme Analysis

William of Baskerville and Adso of Melk’s investigation into the mysterious deaths at the abbey increasingly revolves around the abbey’s library, where many of the dead monks worked as scholars, scribes and illuminators. Although monks may work in the scriptorium, few are authorized to enter the library, a vast labyrinth accessible only through hidden doors. As William and Adso find their way through the labyrinth, they also come closer to unraveling the mystery—not only of the identity of the murderer, but of the forbidden book hidden in the library’s secret chamber, the “finis Africae.” In this sense, the overlapping of the murder mystery plot and the discovery of the lost book of Aristotle’s Poetics suggests that the quest for knowledge and the process of solving a murder are inherently linked. Both plots involve fighting for justice and bringing the truth to light. However, the library and its labyrinthine design also poses other philosophical questions, such as whether the ideas contained in books can be dangerous, and if so, who should have access to them.

William describes the abbey’s library as “the greatest in Christendom,” containing books in Latin, Greek, French, Italian, English, German, Arabic, and many other languages. However, all that knowledge is, quite literally, under lock and key: only the librarian may enter the library. As the librarian Malachi of Hildesheim explains, the monk asks the librarian for the text he wishes to consult and the librarian fetches it from the library above—but only if the request is “justified and devout.” Access to books, then, is regulated by the librarian, who alone can enter the library and who decides whether a request is “justified.” When Adso asks how Malachi locates books in the library, the librarian says sternly that it is “right and sufficient that only the librarian know how to decipher these things.” And indeed, the library is designed as a labyrinth for the very purpose of deceiving intruders: it takes William and Adso several visits to discover that the plan of the library is laid out as a map of the world, and that the books are organized according to their country of origin.

The effect of all this mystery, shrouding, and secrecy is that many of the books in the library are never read and are not accessible to the monks at the abbey, let alone the broader public. William laments this state of affairs when he says that “without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb” (the word “dumb” here meaning “unable to speak”). In the absence of readers, in other words, a book is just a collection of marks on a page and signifies nothing. The librarians—Malachi, and then Benno of Upsala after him—claim that the library exists to preserve and protect its collections. Although the library may have been created “to save the books it houses,” William observes, “now it lives to bury them.” William’s words prove prophetic: when the abbey’s library burns to the ground at the end of the novel, it becomes a graveyard for the books it had been built to protect.

Throughout the book, religious officials associate certain forms of knowledge with sin—a direct reference to the story of the Garden of Eden, in which Adam and Eve are cast out of the garden because they eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Therefore, the secrecy surrounding the library is intended to rein in the monks’ appetite for knowledge. For example, Ubertino of Casale accuses the dead Adelmo of Otranto of “pride of the intellect,” connecting desire for knowledge to the sin of pride. He accuses William of this vice too, advising him to “mortify [his] intelligence, learn to weep over the wounds of the lord, [and] throw away [his] books.” Several monks make the link between sexual desire and desire for the knowledge contained in books: Ubertino asks Adso if he is troubled by “yearnings of the flesh,” and Adso responds that he is disturbed instead by “the yearnings of the mind, which wants to know too many things.” And when Berengar of Arundel offers to acquire a mysterious book for Adelmo in exchange for sex, Berengar is impelled by physical desire, but Adelmo is motivated by his passion for learning. As William observes, “there is lust not only of the flesh.” The Name of the Rose suggests that lust for books can be as powerful as more physical forms of desire, and that attempting to suppress either impulse can lead to disaster. Adelmo, for instance, is tormented by guilt after his sexual encounter with Berengar and kills himself, while Venantius of Salvemec and Malachi both die when they are tempted to try to read the forbidden book. Desire is natural, Willam implies, but the disastrous fates that befall Adelmo, Venantius, and Malachi are anything but natural, suggesting that there are murderous forces of repression at work in the abbey.

People tend to think of a library as a repository of knowledge preserved for future generations and made accessible to all. The abbey’s library, however, seems to operate on opposite principles: secrecy, obscurity, confusion, and exclusion. “Is a library, then, an instrument not for distributing the truth but for delaying its appearance?” Adso asks. Just as the truth of the murders becomes ever more shrouded in mystery, the secret at the center of the library proves similarly elusive. Eventually, Jorge of Burgos burns down the library in his attempt to keep the hidden book from coming to light, in a final demonstration of the way the library’s secrecy proves its undoing. As Adso observes sadly, “the library had been doomed by its own impenetrability, by the mystery that protected it, by its few entrances.” In this sense, the novel’s tragic ending strongly suggests that a library should not be a fortress designed to keep out intruders, and the destruction of the library demonstrates that attempts to suppress the mind’s hunger for knowledge can lead only to violence and catastrophe.