Griffin

The Griffin is a hybrid beast, part lion and part eagle, that appears in the art and architecture of the abbey, embodying the tension between the monstrous and the sacred that pervades the novel. It is first encountered in the marginal illuminations of Adelmo of Otranto, whose fantastical creations include "gryphons whose tails turned into an archer in battle array" . These images are part of a "world reversed" that delights the monks but provokes the ire of Jorge of Burgos, who denounces such "ridiculous grotesques" and "monstrous shapes" as a perversion of the divine order . The Griffin also appears among the "whole population of the nether world" carved on the church doorway, a menagerie of chimeras and hybrids that Adso finds both terrifying and fascinating (E00318–E00319). For Jorge, the Griffin and its ilk are "bad images" that "lie about the form of creation" and lead the soul away from God . Yet William of Baskerville defends such art as a means of teaching truth through distortion, citing the Areopagite's doctrine that "the more the simile becomes dissimilar, the more the truth is revealed" . The Griffin thus becomes a figure for the novel's central debate: whether laughter, monstrosity, and the carnivalesque can serve wisdom, or whether they are snares of the Devil that must be suppressed at all costs.