The Name of the Rose

Author(s):	Umberto Eco
Publisher:	Harvest Books

I'd like to add to the many reviews of this book only a few comments about the meaning of the famous Latin sentence "Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus". Literaly it can be translated as "The ancient rose subsists thanks to its name, we have only bare names". It is an ancient sentence often quoted by s.c. nominalist philosophers of Middle Ages who thought that our mind isn't able to discover the true essence of things and so it isn't able a fortiori to have the minimum idea of God. In fact in medieval philosophy God was often compared to the figure of a rose; the nominalists wanted to say with the sentence that even God, the supreme being, persists only through its name, i.e. persists upon an extremely frail thing. Names were seen as simple "flatus vocis", "emission of voice" without value. The nominalist philosophers who declared that even God was a flatus vocis were condemned as heretics (a theme that recurs often in the novel). But here the sentence isn't quoted only for its historical value, but also because it can be applied also to the love of the young monk Adso; he meets in the monastry a young woman and perhaps falls in love with her. In his mind she is just the "rose", i.e. God, of whom he doesn't know the name (the woman and Adso speak different languages). It is then a very pitiful and sad thing that of the woman he doesn't know the name, because, if nominalist theories were true, he won't be able to keep with him, in his heart and mind, in his future life and old age, the remembrances of that encounter and of those days which changed his life and mind forever (cf. the pages of the novel where the old Adso comments on those evets).

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