Free Baudolino by Umberto Eco

concerning Jesus Christ Our Lord and his most holy mother. You see, we firmly believe that there exists a single divine nature and that nevertheless the Trinity, within the unity of this nature, is composed of three distinct persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. But we believe further that in Christ there was a sole person, the divine one, and two natures, the human and the divine. Nestorius on the contrary sustained that in Christ there are, indeed, two natures, human and divine, but there are also two persons. So Maria had begotten only the human person and could not thus be called the mother of God, but only the mother of Christ the man, not
Theotokos,
or God-bearer, she who has begotten God, but at most
Christotokos.
"
    "Is it bad to think that?"
    "It's bad and it isn't...." Otto became impatient. "You can still love the Blessed Virgin even if you consider her as Nestorius did, but it is certain that you are paying her less honor. And besides, the person is the individual substance of a rational being, and if in Christ there were two persons, were there then two individual substances of two rational beings? Where would this all end? Would we be saying that Jesus one day reasoned in one way and the next day in another? This said, it isn't that Presbyter Johannes is a perfidious heretic, but it would be well for him to enter into contact with a Christian emperor who would make him appreciate the true faith, and since he is surely an honest man, he could only be converted. However, it is certain that if you don't set yourself to studying a bit of theology, you will never understand these things. You are quick-witted, Rahewin is a good teacher as far as reading and writing go, and doing sums, and learning a few rules of grammar; but trivium and quadrivium are a different matter. To arrive at theology you should study dialectics, and these are things you cannot learn here at Morimond. You must go off to some
studium,
one of those schools that exist only in the great cities."
    "But I don't want to go to a
studium,
whatever that is."
    "When you understand what it is, you'll be pleased to go. You see, my son, everyone is accustomed to saying that the human community is based on three forces: warriors, monks, and peasants, and this may have been true until yesterday. But we live in new times, in which the man of learning is becoming equally important, even if he is not a monk but a man who studies law, philosophy, the movement of the stars, and many other things, and who doesn't always give an account of what he is doing to his bishop or to his king. And these
studia,
which are slowly growing up in Bologna and in Paris, are places where learning is cultivated and transmitted, and learning is a form of power. I was a pupil of the great Abélard, may God have mercy on this man who sinned greatly but also suffered and expiated. After his misfortune, when through a bitter vendetta he was robbed of his virility, he became a monk, an abbé, and lived apart from the world. At the peak of his glory he was a master in Paris, worshiped by his students, and respected by the mighty precisely because of his learning."
    Baudolino told himself he would never leave Otto, from whom he continued to learn so many things. But before the trees had blossomed for the fourth time since Baudolino had met him, Otto was reduced to a shadow of himself by malarial fevers, pains in all his joints, fluxions of the chest, not to mention gallstone. Numerous physicians, including some Arabs and some Jews, and therefore the best that a Christian emperor could offer a bishop, had tormented his now fragile body with countless leeches, but—for reasons that those pillars of wisdom were unable to explain—after almost all his blood had been extracted, he was worse than if they had left him with it.
    Otto first called Rahewin to his bedside, to entrust to him the continuation of his account of the feats of Frederick, assuring him that it was easy: