CULTURAL DESK

Books of The Times; Medieval Mystery

By WALTER GOODMAN
Published: June 4, 1983, Saturday

THE NAME OF THE ROSE. By Umberto Eco. 502 pages.
A Helen and Kurt Wolfe Book. Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich. $15.95.

At the center of this medieval mystery tale, which has won critical and popular success in Europe, is the greatest library in 14thcentury Christendom. The pride of a Benedictine abbey in northern Italy, the library is a labyrinth, designed to keep its treasures of knowledge in the control of the few who have mastered its secrets. These churchmen appreciate the power of the word and are uneasily aware of the threat that books hold for the faith of the multitude and their own positions.

The opposing symbol is a pair of spectacles, a new invention worn by William of Baskerville, an English member of the Franciscan order, who believes that learning should be used to help men, not to dominate them. ''This place of forbidden knowledge,'' he observes unhappily on his first inspection of the library-labyrinth, ''is guarded by many and cunning devices. Knowledge is used to conceal rather than to enlighten. I don't like it.'' William believes ''the good of a book lies in its being read.'' He speaks in a distinctively modern voice: ''Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.''

William has come to the small rich abbey to represent the Emperor Louis in his Christendom-shaking dispute with Pope John, then resident at Avignon. He is accompanied by a young disciple from Germany, the engaging novice Adso, who, in his old age will serve as narrator of ''The Name of the Rose.'' It is a time of political and doctrinal turmoil - ''Two emperors for a single throne and a single pope for two: a situation that, truly, fomented great disorder.''

William, influenced by Roger Bacon and William of Occam, maintains that the church has no business attempting to legislate over earthly matters; he has given up his role of inquisitor as a matter of principle as well as out of a humanist's deep aversion to the methods of the Inquisition. During his days as an inquisitor, in a period when any gesture toward church reform could be condemned as heresy, William used his skill to discover what the accused had done rather than torturing him to confess what it pleased the Inquisition to believe he had done. He tells Adso that he found ''the most joyful delight in unraveling a nice, complicated knot.'' At the abbey, his skills at knot-unraveling are put to a hard test by a series of mysterious deaths among the monks.

In this first novel, Umberto Eco, a noted Italian scholar, has made ingenious use of his acquaintance with medieval life, church practices and doctrinal struggles to create a fortress world of faith. Compounded of scholarship, wisdom and superstition, it is racked by bitter internal battles over the church's relationship to the poor and beset by pressures from secular forces and ideas. Mr. Eco manages, too, to get in a few advertisements for his specialty of semiotics, an enthusiasm for the study of signs that his hero William apparently shares. He tells Adso: ''A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things.''

The reader of this intriguing work may safely put his faith in the ability of William of Baskerville, with the aid of his spectacles and the impressionable Adso, to find the solution to the deaths - though not so smoothly as Sherlock of Baker Street might have done. There are clues imbedded in theological discourses along the way that signal to the alert reader that the solution is related to the ideals of freedom of thought and conscience exemplified by William.

At times, in style as well as substance, and despite his religious calling, William sounds like a forerunner of the Englightenment. He tells his credulous novice as they inspect the relics of the abbey: ''I have seen many other fragments of the cross, in other churches. If all were genuine our Lord's torment could not have been on a couple of planks nailed together, but on an entire forest.'' And he observes dryly: ''Some time ago, in the Cathedral of Cologne, I saw the skull of John the Baptist at the age of 12.''

Given the roadblocks of description and metaphysics that periodically stop the action, the dependence on secret passages and the off-and-on pace of William's detective work, it is a wonder that Mr. Eco's elaborate tale works so well. Part of its success is owed to strong scenes, artfully translated by William Weaver, such as the kitchen seduction of Adso by a beautiful but doomed peasant girl and the brutal inquisition of a wretched monk by William's nemesis, Bernard Gui, who ''is interested, not in discovering the guilty, but in burning the accused.'' Even the pious Adso is driven to conclude that ''often inquisitors create heretics.''

Adso and William make agreeable and instructive company, sharing information along the way on the medieval arts of calligraphy, cookery and the use of herbs for benign and murderous purposes. One may find some of the digressions a touch self-indulgent, as Adso finds William's, yet be carried along by Mr. Eco's knowledge and narrative skills. And if at the end the solution strikes the reader as more edifying than plausible, he has already received ample compensation from a richly stocked and eminently civilized intelligence.

No doubt medievalists will find errors in Mr. Eco's vision, and some may be offended by the intrusion of a personification of modern skepticism into the 14th century. But in this novel, imagination carries the day. William of Baskerville may be an anachronism, but Mr. Eco wants us to know that his rationality, tolerance and compassion would have added light to what used to be known as the Dark Ages. As much might be said of our age.

Published: 6 - 4 - 1983 , Late City Final Edition , Section 1 , Column 3 , Page 18

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