The Pendulum Still Swings

No.264: June 27, 2025

Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This is a paid subscription feature with a preview before the paywall, so please consider subscribing to enjoy this weekly missive along with a frequent Pipe & Dram feature of little monologues/conversations in my study, and Wednesday’s “The Quarter Inch,” a quick(er) commentary on current events.

Umberto Eco, (Wikimedia Commons)

Dear Friends,

Step into my study! Shall I fill you a pipe? Pour you a dram? Excellent!

[Yes, this started out as an issue of Pipe & Dram, but it turned into something I’ve decided to publish in the flagship Friday newsletter. So bear with my little adornments.]

Here is a book I’ve mentioned from time to time over the years: Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. I just re-read it because my memory of how it ended was very fuzzy. I also just wanted to read it again. I am glad I did. I read the book so that I can tell you about it and so that you don’t have to read it. There are a lot of reasons you probably don’t want to read this book. But you might grasp and appreciate aspects of its message.

First, a bit about the author. Umberto Eco, who passed away in 2016, was an Italian novelist, but that was sort of his hobby. His day job was being a university professor, specializing in the philosophy of language—particularly semiotics, the study of signs and symbols and communication of meaning. He was a philosopher, then. And so much more. A medievalist, social commentator, and prodigious writer. I read somewhere that his personal library housed 50,000 volumes, from pot-boiler mass market paperbacks to comic books to antiquarian volumes handwritten on vellum. Sort of my “spirit animal.” As close to a Renaissance man as you’re likely to find. He was a man with much to say because he had a voracious mind that took in everything. He was a Renaissance man in another way: he was a religious skeptic. Quite a God-haunted skeptic, but a skeptic nonetheless. More on that in a moment.

He is most famous for his debut novel, The Name of the Rose, a Medieval mystery thriller involving a Franciscan “Sherlock Holmes” named William of Baskerville (a very nice hat tip to Mr. Conan Doyle) and his young adept Adso. Set in the 14th century, it involves Aquinas, Aristotle, Inquisition, church corruption and politics, tragedy and comedy, and much, much more. It was made into a film starring Sean Connery, a young Christian Slater, and F. Murray Abraham. Unfortunately, the Director was pretty ham-fisted. Eco had written a certain scene in the book between young Adso and a young lady (i.e., the “rose”), and had written the entire thing using biblical and Medieval love poetry—it was supremely high brow, fine art. The Director just turned the scene into a dirty porn film. Very sad—although I believe the scene has been cut from some versions.

Describing Foucault’s Pendulum is difficult, to put it mildly. Let’s try this: remember Dan Brown’s idiotic international bestseller, The DaVinci Code? The thriller about secret societies and millennia-long conspiracies to hide a potent, world-shattering “Truth”? Foucault’s Pendulum is to Dan Brown’s book what War & Peace is to a coloring book. Eco beat Brown to the topic by more than a decade, and outclasses him in every single respect. It’s actually obscene to compare them, so wide is the distance.

Before I get into the plot, a few things I love about Eco. First, he wrote in Italian. If you’re reading it in English, it’s been translated. This gives the writing a certain indescribable flavor; it is exotic, not the writing of a native English-speaker. He is strangely provincial; he writes about Italy and quintessential Italian things. Foucault’s Pendulum is full of references to Mussolini, the World War, Fascists, revolutionaries, rural and urban life; he draws the reader into his world. And yet, the breadth of his erudition and knowledge is so staggering as to properly be called universal. He peppers sentences in Latin, French, German, Hebrew, even Arabic throughout, often untranslated. He refuses to treat his readers like they are idiots. He has high standards, and is best read if you know a thing or two.

Case in point: one can read The Name of the Rose with benefit even if one knows nothing about Medieval Christianity. But you will get a lot more out of it if you already have a grasp on things like the difference between a Benedictine and a Franciscan. Likewise, you can read Foucault’s Pendulum without knowing anything about the occult—Kabbalah, hermeticism, alchemy, theosophy, neo-platonism, Gnosticism, etc.—and you might get something out of it. In my case, this time around I was uniquely prepared: I had recently finished reading all five books of Irenaeus’s Against Heresies, his second-century encyclopedic refutation of Gnostic cults. In Foucault’s Pendulum, I am confronted with an absolutely dizzying presentation of precisely those bizarre and fanciful cosmogonies—the plēroma, archons, Demiurge, Sophia, etc., and I get the feeling Eco and I had read the same books.

The occult: that is certainly what the book is about. “Secret knowledge,” gnosis. Mystery religions, secret societies, conspiracy theories. And Eco has written the masterpiece: unlike the childish Dan Brown, who did the boring and predictable thing (make the Roman Catholic Church the baddies), he instead weaves the conspiracy of all conspiracies. He involves everyone. The Templars, the Rosicrucians, the Masons, the Theosophists, Cathars, Kabbalists, Sufis, Wiccans—the list goes on endlessly (including South American animist and syncretist elements) and, yes, it does bring the Jesuits into it, like any self-respecting conspiracy novel!—they are all the baddies; they are all seeking the “secret” knowledge that will bring about godlike powers and they are, well, pretty much insane. And our three protagonists unwisely get themselves mixed up with this bunch of “Diabolicals,” as they call them.