The Abbey Church

The Abbey Church is the central place of worship within the unnamed abbey, a robust, fortress-like structure whose carved portal presents a terrifying vision of the Apocalypse that foreshadows the novel's events. It serves as the primary setting for the monks' daily offices, for the arrival and departure of the papal and imperial legations, and for the final, fiery destruction of the abbey's treasures.

Architecture and Portal

The church is not built in the soaring Gothic style of Strasbourg or Chartres but is firmly set on the earth, broader than it is high, and surmounted by square battlements. Its entrance is a single great arch, but the multiple embrasures and columns draw the gaze into an abyss-like doorway crowned by a great tympanum. This tympanum depicts the Seated One of the Apocalypse, stern and impassive, surrounded by the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders, while the central pillar is entwined with lions rampant. Below the tympanum, the capitals and embrasures are carved with a bestiary of monsters—sirens, centaurs, gorgons, and chimeras—that represent the damned and the defeated of Armageddon. The novice Adso of Melk is stunned by this sight, which he interprets as a prophecy of the celestial massacre he is about to witness within the abbey.

Liturgical and Political Center

The church is the setting for the canonical hours that structure the monks' days, from the mystic ardor of matins to the solemnity of compline. It is here that the abbot Abo washes William of Baskerville's hands upon his arrival, and where the blind monk Jorge of Burgos delivers his terrifying sermon on the coming of the Antichrist, a sermon that follows the discovery of the fourth corpse. The church also serves as a neutral ground for the arrival of the papal legation led by Cardinal Bertrand del Poggetto and the inquisitor Bernard Gui, and for the departure of the Franciscan delegation under Michael of Cesena. The crypt beneath the church houses the abbey's treasure, a collection of relics and precious objects that the abbot displays with pride, arguing that such splendor glorifies God.

Destruction by Fire

On the seventh and final day of the narrative, the fire that begins in the library spreads to the church. The wooden structures within the stone walls—the altars, the choir stalls, the roof beams—catch fire easily, and the church is soon engulfed in flames. The monks and servants, already overwhelmed by the conflagration in the Aedificium, are unable to save it. The portal that so impressed Adso is reduced to a few traces, with only the left eye of the enthroned Christ and part of the lion's face surviving, eroded by mold and lichens. The church, like the rest of the abbey, is left as a ruin, a monument to the destruction of the world it once represented.