The California observatory has a pendulum. I remember standing at the edge of a drop - like the girl in the first chapter and not understanding what I was looking at. I understand now. The truth of the pendulum is that we are fixed and unmoving while we are moved. The pendulum is not spectacular in itself, but it spills the secret.
George Grant once said this was well worth reading if you got through the first two hundred pages to the plot. I think he said more specifically it was a book that would test your mettle as a reader. Now that I’ve read it, I can’t find where he said this to find out why.
This is the book where I figured out I do not read for plot. In fact, most of the time if I have a gut feeling on something I would rather spoil the ending than trust the author. I read for the interesting eddies.
Foucoult’s Pendulum is 80% side notes. The plot does not start until three hundred pages in, and I was four chapters from the end wondering if he was going to land the ending.
But he lands it because he pivots in the last chapter and reframes everything.
Spoilers here:
It moves from a story of conspiracies and traps to the tale of a man who has to live a story when he can’t write one. Everything about the Templars, history, cosmology, and creating your own cancer is not the point. It never was. The men make up their own story about how all of the happenstances and codes could be true and then tell the wrong person. What happens after that is human - you have to live with it. Or die.
Errare humanum est.
This works because it is a tragedy. One dies of cancer he believes he caused by twisting the truth in a believable way. One dies facing the fact that the villains won’t believe the truth and they already killed his love after destroying her.
And one saves the girl and his child, but expects to die because he did not believe her and the truth has been so believably twisted that no one would believe him.
It is the knowledge of good and evil that kills them.
The fuzzy outer edges
Understanding Eco is a problem because he believes authorial intent is bunk. To that I say bull, but I would love to ask him of he means the reader is god of the work or if that writing in harmony with nature and her God does not need explanation like a man walking down the street does not. I kept reading it and trying to figure out what he was doing (online) with no success. In an Omnibus text book I had on hand, the essayist explained the concept of reader receptivity and had something to say about it under the Name of the Rose, but it is hard to find commentary either because he has fallen out of fashion or those engaging with him are not working in English.
I fully expect to reread this and receive more from it now that the shock value is gone.
He for sure references Walter Percy and angelism (or Gone With the Wind was a heavy influence for both) I don’t quite get that connection yet.
Positivism
The snake twining around reality in this is only explained in half a line at the beginning. Positivism is the idea that to have proved something means that you have encompassed the entire thought without any external truth being able to add or take away from it. So, if you can make a compelling argument that the moon is made of cheese or that the world is flat, it must be so. If they could weave history together and construct a logical, evidence oriented argument, that proves its own veracity.
This excludes the idea that there is something beyond what you understand or that anything can come in and break your matrix. It can be positivist to have a medieval idea of the cosmos or to insist on a Copernican idea of the Cosmos. It can be positivist to say magic explains everything or to declare you understand everything about the world materially because all of those things exclude something beyond yourself. There is also biblical positivism and my understanding at this point is that means that a current Western reading of scriptures gives you everything you need to know, not everything you need to know for the gospel truth but everything you need to know about God - historical/grammatical approach. There is no middle ground to it. And of course, as there is ultimate truth, you can be a positivist and be right. But I’m fairly certain as a human we can’t be positivists alone, we need divine revelation at the least and humans beyond ourselves.
Which is something this book was short on to the point that the Cancer Patient admitted that he turned away from the Torah in twisting the truth believably.
All that to say - this book could be completely true and the Bible is still completely true, not because I believe the Holy Blood, Holy Grail stuff, but because that is not what this book is about. I need to be completely clear on this.
This book is not about the truth, but what happens when you twist it. The most they get to is an elaborate what if, a positivist Indiana Jones they sell to those who would carve themselves to pieces for it to be real power they can grab at. And when they do, human nature does its own due diligence.
This is way more well written than a Dan Brown novel and I’m reading it in translation. It gives you more facts to work with - around a hundred pages of working over history to sell a bill of goods. Eco hitting the church in the twenty aughts would have been more catastrophic than the DaVinci Code because he weaves a better story.
The gift is the sexuality of the thing. There is a barrier to the knowledge of the serpent, a willingness to twist truth a different way sexually resulting in social sodomy. You either pursue the sodomy and get the demon, pursue the power at any cost, or pursue the demonic spirituality and enslave yourself to all and sundry. It is a trap and it was never about the knowledge of good and evil, but the Satanic getting his way.
You can’t accept all points of the twisting of history by the same crew committing the twisting of bodies. And Eco mocks that, but it took time for me to understand he was mocking it because I found the references so revolting.
Dante and Eco
He really has it out for Dante in this to the point of damning his highest monk in Paradiso for the most heinous deeds. And he may be right about the guy. I am not as educated as either. I would love to be a fly on the wall at their meeting (which I’m hopeful for).
But I think he is less anteDante and more shaping characters in a modern world - those who want a material explanation for everything. They have seen the clearly demonic and still balk at it. They want it to just be man.
Conspiracy is the modern response to the spiritual.
Naomi Wolf recently admitted in her Substack that 2020 was too well planned and executed for man - the Old gods, the demons must be back. It does explain the rampant murder and perversion.
In Eco’s case history is woven in a storied and sensical way. Someone has to be blamed for this. There is probably sex involved. Quick blame the Templars.
Wolf’s understanding could be true - Ishtar and Molech could be skulking about. But it could also be encompassed by the Dantean Primum Mobile, bringing a snake or two to the surface to crush under the cross of Christ.
I tend to think we have the system of secondary causes, the angels, as the manifestation of God’s Providence (a la Sayers/Reynolds - Paradiso) and the demons both have fallen and are still bound to their job. They just use nasty tricks like Mothman and aliens to manipulate and terrorize - instead of a weird stoplight or the niggling thoughts at the back of your head. Christ did conquer them and his work is not done yet, so it is a wee bit complicated.
Modern Tech and the A.I Seeing Eye
This came out in the 80’s closely followed by Snow Crash and the idea of Babel is in both.
We want to build a tower to heaven. Our shaky towers of human knowledge are encased in rituals meant to entrap and enslave in Foucault’s Pendulum. AI is just the latest stair stepped compilation attempting to achieve the throne of God. For the first time we are able to look at time on many directions at once and we misunderstand information about a time as being in that time and knowing what it was for.
The more we can connect and pin like a beetle on a board, the more we believe we own and control. It isn’t living time in our fingers, just a reflection of ourselves or a demonic rationality using it. We are too big for our britches.
The Crux of the Matter
We have history and adventure coming together around a man who was courageous once in his life and could never live up to himself at twelve. He stood there and faced down the grabbers of knowledge and power, the devourers and the demented, and died without giving them what they wanted, but instead became “the fixed point, the Place from which the vault of the world is hung…”
And later it says, “So Belbo - God knows for how long - had been thinking about the Pendulum as both a Sinai and a Calvary…”
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If it was what it advertised itself as, it would be ridiculous. How to Catch a Cosmic Cowlick.
But it is not that. It is sad. Sad and good.
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