The Magic Mountain (66 page)

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Authors: Thomas Mann

BOOK: The Magic Mountain
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“Aha! The reasoning of our great genius turned out in the long run to have the greater validity! No, let us be serious,
Professore!
Answer me this, answer me in the presence of these two young listeners: Do you believe in truth, in objective, scientific truth, to strive after the attainment of which is the highest law of all morality, and whose triumphs over authority form the most glorious page in the history of the human spirit?”
Hans Castorp and Joachim—the first faster than the second—turned their heads from Settembrini to Naphta.
Naphta replied: “There can be no such triumphs as those you speak of; for the authority is man himself—his interests, his worth, his salvation—and thus between it and truth no conflict is possible. They coincide.”
“Then truth, according to you—”
“Whatever profits man, that is the truth. In him all nature is comprehended, in all nature only he is created, and all nature only for him. He is the measure of all things, and his welfare is the sole and single criterion of truth. Any theoretic science which is without practical application to man’s salvation is as such without significance, we are commanded to reject it. Throughout the Christian centuries it was accepted fact that the natural sciences afforded man no edification. Lactantius, who was chosen by Constantine the Great as tutor to his son, put the position very clearly when he asked in so many words what heavenly bliss he could attain by knowing the sources of the Nile, or the twaddle of the physicists anent the heavenly bodies. Answer him if you can! Why have we given the Platonic philosophy the preference over every other, if not because it has to do with knowledge of God, and not knowledge of nature? Let me assure you that mankind is about to find its way back to this point of view. Mankind will soon perceive that it is not the task of true science to run after godless understanding; but to reject utterly all that is harmful, yes, even all that ideally speaking is without significance, in favour of instinct, measure, choice. It is childish to accuse the Church of having defended darkness rather than light. She did well, and thrice well, to chastise as unlawful all unconditioned striving after the ‘pure’ knowledge of things—such striving, that is, as is without reference to the spiritual, without bearing on man’s salvation; for it is this unconditioned, this a-philosophical natural science that always has led and ever will lead men into darkness.”
“Your pragmatism,” Settembrini responded, “needs only to be translated into terms of politics for it to display its pernicious character in full force. The good, the true, and the just, is that which advantages the State: its safety, its honour, its power form the sole criterion of morality. Well and good. But mark that herewith you fling open the door for every sort of crime to enter; while as for human truth, individual justice, democracy, you can see what will become of them—”
“If I might be permitted,” Naphta interpolated, “to introduce a little logic into the premisses, I should state the question thus: either Ptolemy and the schoolmen were right, and the world is finite in time and space, the deity is transcendent, the antithesis between God and man is sustained, and man’s being is dual; from which it follows that the problem of his soul consists in the conflict between the spiritual and the material, to which all social problems are entirely secondary—and this is the only sort of individualism I can recognize as consistent—or else, on the other hand, your Renaissance astronomers hit upon the truth, and the cosmos is infinite. Then there exists no suprasensible world, no dualism; the Beyond is absorbed into the Here, the antithesis between God and nature falls; man ceases to be the theatre of a struggle between two hostile principles, and becomes harmonious and unitary, the conflict subsists merely between his individual and his collective interest; and the will of the State becomes, in good pagan wise, the law of morality. Either one thing or the other.” “I protest!” cried Settembrini, holding his tea-cup outstretched at arm’s length toward his host. “I protest against the imputation that the modern State means the subjugation of the individual to evil ends! I protest against the dilemma in which you seek to place us, between Prussianism and Gothic reaction! Democracy has no meaning whatever if not that of an individualistic corrective to State absolutism of every kind. Truth and justice are the immediate jewels of personal morality. If, at times, they may appear to stand counter, even to be hostile, to the interests of the State, they may do so while all the time holding before their eyes her higher, yes, let us boldly say, her spiritual weal. To find in the Renaissance the origin of Stateworship—what bastard logic! The achievements wrung from the past—I use the word literally, my dear sir—wrung from the past by the Renaissance and the intellectual
revival are personality, freedom, and the rights of man.”
The listeners heaved each a deep sigh—they had been holding their breaths during Herr Settembrini’s great replication. Hans Castorp did not let himself go altogether, yet could not refrain from slapping the edge of the table with his hand. “Magnificent,” he said, between clenched teeth. Joachim too evinced lively approval, despite the word Herr Settembrini had let fall about Prussianism. Both of them turned toward the antagonist who had just suffered this crushing rebuff— Hans Castorp with such eagerness that he fell unconsciously into the very posture he had taken at the pigdrawing, his elbows on the table and his chin in his palm, and peered in suspense into Herr Naphta’s face.
And Naphta sat there, tense and motionless, his lean hands in his lap. He said: “I try to introduce a little logic into the debate, and you answer me with lofty sentiments. I was already tolerably well aware that what is called liberalism—individualism the humanistic conception of citizenship—was the product of the Renaissance. But the fact leaves me entirely cold, realizing as I do that your great heroic age is a thing of the past its ideals defunct, or at least lying at their latest gasp, while the feet of those who will deal them the
coup de grâce
are already before the door. You call yourself, if I am not mistaken, a revolutionist. But you err in holding that future revolutions will issue in freedom. In the past five hundred years, the principle of freedom has outlived its usefulness. An educational system which still conceives itself as a child of the age of enlightenment, with criticism as its chosen medium of instruction, the liberation and cult of the ego the solvent of forms of life which are absolutely fixed—such a system may still, for a time, reap an empty rhetorical advantage; but its reactionary character is, to the initiated, clear beyond any doubt All educational organizations worthy of the name have always recognized what must be the ultimate and significant principle of pedagogy: namely the absolute mandate, the iron bond, discipline, sacrifice, the renunciation of the ego, the curbing of the personality. And lastly, it is an unloving miscomprehension of youth to believe that it finds its pleasure in freedom: its deepest pleasure lies in obedience.”
Joachim sat up straight. Hans Castorp reddened. Herr Settembrini excitedly twisted his fine moustache.
“No,” Naphta went on. “Liberation and development of the individual are not the key to our age, they are not what our age demands. What it needs, what it wrestles after, what it will create—is Terror.”
He uttered the last word lower than the rest; without a motion of his body. Only his eye-glasses suddenly flashed. All three of them, as they heard it, jumped, even Herr Settembrini, who, however, promptly collected himself and smiled.
“And may one ask,” he queried, “whom, or what—you see I am all question, I ask even how to ask—whom, or what you envisage as the bringer of this—this—I repeat the word with some unwillingness—this Terror?”
Naphta sat motionless, flashing like a drawn blade. He said: “I am at your service. I believe I do not err in assuming our agreement in the conception of an original ideal state of man, a condition without government and without force, an unmediated condition as the child of God, in which there was neither lordship nor service, neither law nor penalty, nor sin nor relation after the flesh; no distinction of classes, no work, no property: nothing but equality, brotherhood, and moral perfectitude.”
“Very good. I agree,” declared Settembrini. “I agree with everything except the relations after the flesh, which obviously must at all times have subsisted, since man is a highly developed vertebrate, and, like other creatures of his kind—”
“As you like. I am merely stating our fundamental agreement with respect to the original, paradisial state of man, his freedom from law, and his unmediated relation with God, which state was lost to him by his fall. I believe we may go side by side for another few steps of the way: in that we both explain the State as a social contract, taking account of the Fall and entered into as a safeguard against evil, and that we both see in it the origin of sovereign power—”

Benissimo!”
cried Settembrini. “Social contract—why, that is Enlightenment, that is Rousseau. I had no idea—”
“One moment, pray. We part company here. All power and all control was originally vested in the people, who made it over, together with the right to make laws, to their princes. But from this your school deduces in the first instance the right of the people to revolt from the monarchy. Whereas we, on the contrary—”
“We?” thought Hans Castorp, breathlessly. “Who are ‘we’? I must certainly ask Settembrini afterwards, whom he means by ‘we.’ “
“We, for our part,” Naphta was saying, “perhaps no less revolutionary than you, have consistently deduced the supremacy of the Church over the secular power. The temporal nature of the power of the State is, as it were, written on its forehead; but even if it were not, it would be enough to point to the historical fact that its authority goes back to the will of the people, whereas that of the Church rests upon the divine sanction, to establish its character as a device which, if not precisely contrived by the power of evil, is nevertheless a faulty and inadequate makeshift.” “The State, my dear sir—”
“I am acquainted with your views on the subject of the national State. As your Virgil has it: ‘Fatherland-love conquers all, and hunger unsated for glory.’ You add the corrective of a somewhat liberal individualism—that is democracy, but it leaves quite untouched your fundamental relation to the State. That the soul of democracy is the power of money, apparently does not impugn it—or would you deny the fact? Antiquity was capitalistic, because of its State cult. The Christian Middle Ages clearly recognized the inherent capitalism of the secular State: ‘Money will be emperor’ is a prophecy made in the eleventh century. Would you deny that it has now literally come to pass, and with it the utter bedevilment of life in general?”
“My dear friend, you have the floor. I am only eager to make the acquaintance of the Great Unknown, the bringer of the Terror.”
“A perilous curiosity on your part, as the spokesman of a class of society which has acted as the standard-bearer of freedom—considering it is that very freedom that has dragged the world to the brink of destruction. Your goal is the democratic Imperium, the apotheosis of the principle of the national State in that of the universal, the WorldState. And the emperor of this World-State? Your Utopia is monstrous—and yet, at this point, we find ourselves to a certain extent again on common ground. For your capitalistic world-republic is, in truth, transcendental in character; the World-State is the secular State transcended; and we unite in the faith that the final, perfected State, lying dim upon the far horizon, should correspond to man’s original, primitive perfection. Since the time of Gregory the Great, the founder of the State of God, the Church has always regarded it as her task to bring mankind back under the divine guidance. Gregory’s claim to temporal power was put forward not for its own sake, but rather because his delegated dictatorship was to be the means and the way to the goal of redemption—a transitional stage between the pagan State and the heavenly kingdom. You have spoken to your pupils here of the bloody deeds of the Church, her chastisements and her intolerance; very foolishly so, for it stands to reason that the zeal of the godly cannot be pacifistic in character—Gregory himself said: ‘Cursed be the man who holds back his sword from the shedding of blood.’ That power is evil we know. But if the kingdom is to come, then it is necessary that the dualism between good and evil, between power and the spirit, here and hereafter, must be for the time abrogated to make way for a single principle, which shall unify asceticism and domination. This is what I mean by the necessity for the Terror.” “But the standard-bearer, the standard-bearer?”
“Do you still ask? Is your Manchester liberalism unaware of the existence of a school of economic thought which means the triumph of man over economics, and whose principles and aims precisely coincide with those of the kingdom of God? The Fathers of the Church called mine and thine pernicious words, and private property usurpation and robbery. They repudiated the idea of personal possessions, because, according to divine and natural law, the earth is common to all men, and brings forth her fruits for the common good. They taught that avarice, a consequence of the Fall, represents the rights of property and is the source of private ownership. They were humane enough, anti-commercial enough, to feel that all commercial activity was a danger to the soul of man and its salvation. They hated money and finance, and called the empire of capital fuel for the fires of hell. The fundamental economic principle that price is regulated by the operation of the law of supply and demand, they have always despised from the bottom of their hearts; and condemned taking advantage of chance as a cynical exploitation of a neighbour’s need. Even more nefarious, in their eyes, was the exploitation of time; the montrousness of receiving a premium for the passage of time—interest, in other words—and misusing to one’s own advantage and another’s disadvantage a universal and God-given dispensation.”

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