The Magic Mountain (76 page)

“For,” he added, “it has nothing to do with life. Life is based on conditions and built up on foundations which are partly the result of experience, and partly belong to the domain of ethics. We call the first kind time, space, and causality; the second, morality and reason. But one and all of these are not only foreign to, utterly a matter of indifference to the nature of religion; they are even hostile to it. For they are precisely what make up life—the so-called normal life, which is to say, arch Philistinism, ultra-bourgeoisiedom, the absolute antithesis of which, the very genius of antithesis to which, is the life of religion.”

Naphta went on to say that he would not deny to the other sphere the possibility of genius. There was much to admire in the monumental respectability, the majestic Philistinism of the middle-class consciousness. But one must never forget that as it stood, straddle-legged, firmly planted on earth, hands behind the back, chest well out, it was the embodiment of irreligion.

Hans Castorp, like a schoolboy, put up his hand. He wished, he said, not to offend either side. But since they were talking about progress, and thus, to a certain extent also, about politics, and the republic of eloquence and the civilization of the educated Occident, he might say that it seemed to him the difference—or, if Herr Naphta insisted, the antithesis—between life and religion went back to that between time and eternity. Only in time was there progress; in eternity there was none, nor any politics or eloquence either. There, so to speak, one laid one’s head back in God, and closed one’s eyes. And that was the difference between religion and morality—he was aware that he had put it very badly.

The way he put it, Settembrini remarked, naïve as it was, was less objectionable than his fear of giving offence, his inclination to give ground to the Devil.

Oh, as far as the Devil was concerned, they two had talked about him aforetime, hadn’t they? “O
Satana
,
O ribellione.”
But which devil was it he had been giving ground to just now? Was it Carducci’s one—rebellion, activity, critical spirit—or was it the other? It was pretty dangerous having a devil on either hand, like this; how in the Devil’s name should we get out of it?

That, Naphta said, was no proper description of the state of affairs as Herr Settembrini looked at them. For the distinctive feature of his cosmos was that he made God and the Devil two distinct persons or principles, with “life” as a bone of contention between them—which, by the by, was just the way the Middle Ages had envisaged them. But in reality, God and the Devil were at one in being opposed to life, to bourgeoisiedom, reason and virtue, since they together represented the religious principle.

“What a disgusting hodge-podge—
che guazzabuglio proprio stomachevole!”
Good and evil, sanctification and criminal conduct, all mixed up together! Without judgment! Without direction! Without the possibility of repudiating what was vile! Did Herr Naphta realize what it was he denied and disavowed in the presence of youth, when he flung God and the Devil together and in the name of this mad two-inoneness refused to admit the existence of an ethical principle? He denied every standard of values, he denied goodness! Horrible!—Very well, then there existed neither good nor evil, nothing but a morally chaotic All! There was not even the individual in possession of a critical faculty—there was only the all-consuming, the all-levelling universal communalty, and mystic immersion in her!

It was delicious, Herr Settembrini’s thinking of himself as an individualist! For to be that, one had at least to recognize the difference between morality and blessedness, which our honoured illuminant and monist most certainly did not! A society in which life was stupidly conceived as an end in itself, with no questions asked about its ulterior meaning and purpose, was governed by a tribal and social ethic, indeed, a vertebrate morality, if you liked, but certainly not by individualism. For individualism belonged, singly and solely, in the realm of the religious and mystical, in the so-called “morally chaotic All.” And this morality of Herr Settembrini’s, what was it, what did it want? It was life-bound, and thus entirely utilitarian; it was pathetically unheroic. Its end and aim was to make men grow old and happy, rich and comfortable—and that was all there was to it. And this Philistine philosophy, this gospel of work and reason, served Herr Settembrini as an ethical system. As far as he, Naphta, was concerned, he would continue to deny that it was anything but the sheerest and shabbiest bourgeoisiedom.

Settembrini enjoined him to be calm—his own voice shaking with passion. He found Herr Naphta’s talk about bourgeoisiedom simply insufferable—and God knew why he should put on that contemptuous, aristocratic air! As if the opposite of life— and we all knew what that was—was likely to be more refined than life itself! New cries, new catchwords! Now it was the “aristocratic principle.” Hans Castorp, all flushed and depleted from taxing his brains in the cold, shaky as to his capacity for clear expression, hot and cold with his own audacity, heard himself babble that always since a child he had pictured death to himself as wearing a starched ruff, or at least a sort of half-uniform, with a stand-up collar, while life, on the other hand, wore an ordinary collar. His words sounded, even to himself, like a drunken impropriety; he hastened to assure the company that that was not at all what he had meant to say. And yet—wasn’t it a fact that one couldn’t imagine certain people dead, simply because they were so very ordinary? That must mean they were very fit for life, but could not die, because unfit for the consecration of death.

Herr Settembrini said he was confident Hans Castorp uttered such stuff merely for the sake of being contradicted. The young man would find him ever ready to lend a hand in the intellectual warfare, against attacks like the present. The Engineer had used the expression “fit for life”; had he intended it in a derogatory sense? To him it was synonymous with “worthy of life,” the two conceptions being perfectly harmonious, and suggesting by a natural process of association another equally beautiful, “worthy of love.” One might with truth say that he who was worthy of the one was fully worthy of the other. And both together, loveworthy and life-worthy, made up the true nobility.

Hans Castorp found that charming—most edifying. Herr Settembrini had quite won him over with his plastic theory. Say what you like—and there was a lot to be said for the idea that illness had something solemn and ennobling about it—yet after all, you couldn’t deny that illness was an accentuation of the physical, it did throw man back, so to speak, upon the flesh and to that extent was detrimental to human dignity. It dragged man down to the level of his body. Thus it might be argued that disease was un-human.

On the contrary, Naphta hastened to say. Disease was very human indeed. For to be man was to be ailing. Man was essentially ailing, his state of unhealthiness was what made him man. There were those who wanted to make him “healthy,” to make him “go back to nature,” when, the truth was, he never had been “natural.” All the propaganda carried on to-day by the prophets of nature, the experiments in regeneration, the uncooked food, fresh-air cures, sun-bathing, and so on, the whole Rousseauian paraphernalia, had as its goal nothing but the dehumanization, the animalizing of man. They talked of “humanity,” of nobility—but it was the spirit alone that distinguished man, as a creature largely divorced from nature, largely opposed to her in feeling, from all other forms of organic life. In man’s spirit, then, resided his true nobility and his merit—in his state of disease, as it were; in a word, the more ailing he was, by so much was he the more man. The genius of disease was more human than the genius of health. How, then, could one who posed as the friend of man shut his eyes to these fundamental truths concerning man’s humanity? Herr Settembrini had progress ever on his lips: was he aware that all progress, in so far as there was such a thing, was due to illness, and to illness alone? In other words, to genius, which was the same thing? Had not the normal, since time was, lived on the achievements of the abnormal? Men consciously and voluntarily descended into disease and madness, in search of knowledge which, acquired by fanaticism, would lead back to health; after the possession and use of it had ceased to be conditioned by that heroic and abnormal act of sacrifice. That was the true death on the cross, the true Atonement.

“Aha!” thought Hans Castorp. “You unorthodox Jesuit, you, with your interpretations of the Crucifixion! It’s plain why you never became a priest,
joli
jésuite à la petite tache humide!
Now roar, lion!” he mentally addressed Herr Settembrini. And the lion roared. He characterized all Naphta had said as quibbling, sophistry, and confusion.

“Say it!” he cried to his opponent, “say it in your character as schoolmaster, say it in the hearing of plastic youth, say straight out, that the soul is—disease! Verily you will thereby encourage them to a belief in the spiritual. Disease and death as nobility, life and health as vulgarity—what a doctrine whereby to hold fast the neophyte to the service of humanity! Da
vvero
,
è criminoso!”
And like a crusader he entered the lists in defence of the nobility of life and health, of that which nature gave, for the soul of which one did not need to fear. “The Form,” he said; and Naphta rejoined bombastically: “The Logos.” But he who would have none of the Logos answered: “The Reason,” and the man of the Logos retorted with “The Passion.” It was confusion worse confounded.

“The Object,” cried one, the other: “The Ego!” “Art” and “critique” were bandied back and forth, then once more “nature” and “soul,” and as to which was the nobler, and concerning the “aristocratic problem.” But there was no order nor clarity, not even of a dualistic and militant kind. Things went not only by contraries, but also all higgledy-piggledy. The disputant not only contradicted each other, they contradicted themselves. How often had Settembrini not spent his oratory in praise of criticism, as being the aristocratic principle? Yet now it was for its opposite, for “art,” that he made the same claim. How often had Naphta not stood for instinct, what time Settembrini called nature a blind force, mere “
factum et fatum
,” before which reason and human pride must never abdicate! But here now was Naphta on the side of the soul and disease, wherein alone true nobility and humanity resided, while Settembrini flung himself into advocacy of nature and her noble sanity, regardless of his inconsistency on the score of emancipation from her. The “Object” and the “Ego” were no less involved in confusion—yes, and here the confusion, moreover, remained constant, was the most literal and incorrigible; so that nobody any longer knew who was the devout and who the free-thinker. Naphta sharply forbade Settembrini to call himself an individualist, for so long as he denied the antithesis between God and nature, saw in the problem of man’s inward conflict no more than the struggle between individual and collective interest, and was vowed to a materialistic and bourgeois ethic, in which life became an end in itself, limited to utilitarian aims, and the moral law subserved the interest of the State. He, Naphta, was well aware that man’s inner conflict based upon the antagonism between the sensible and the supra-sensible; it was he, not Settembrini, who represented the true, the mystical individualism. He, not Settembrini, was in reality the free-thinker, the man who looked for guidance within himself. Hans Castorp reflected that if that were true, then what about the “anonymous and communal”—not to mention any other contradiction? And what about those striking comments he had made to Father Unterpertinger on the subject of Hegel’s Catholicism, and the affinity between Catholicism and politics, and the category of the objective which they together comprised? Had not statecraft and education always been the special province of the Society to which Naphta belonged? And what an education! Herr Settembrini himself was certainly a zealous pedagogue, zealous to the point of tedium; but he could simply not compete with Naphta in the matter of ascetic, self-mortifying objectivity. Absolute authority, iron discipline, coercion, submission, the Terror! All that might have its own value, but it paid scant homage to the individual and the dignity of his critical faculty. It was the army regulations of the Prussian Frederick, the Exercise-book of the Spanish Loyola all over again; it was rigid, it was devout, to the very marrow. But one question remained to be asked: how had Naphta arrived at this savage absolutism, he who, by his own account, believed not at all in pure knowledge or unfettered research, in other words not in truth, the objective, scientific truth, to strive after which was for Ludovico Settembrini the highest law of human morality. Here was the object of his rigid devotion, whereas Naphta with reprehensible looseness referred truth back to mankind itself, and declared that that was truth which advantaged man. Wasn’t it the most utter bourgeoisiedom, the sheerest utilitarian Philistinism, to make truth depend on the interest of mankind? It certainly could not be considered strict objectivity, there was much more free-thinking and subjectivity about it than Leo Naphta would admit—it was, indeed, quite as much politics as Herr Settembrini’s didactic phrase: “Freedom is the law of love of one’s kind.” That, obviously, was to make freedom, as Naphta made truth, depend upon man, and thus was more orthodox than liberal. But here again were distinctions that tended to disappear in the process of definition.

Ah, this Settembrini—it was not for nothing he was a man of letters, son of a politician and grandson of a humanist! He had lofty ideas about emancipation and criticism—and chirruped to the girls in the street. On the other hand, knife-edged little Naphta was bound by the strictest sort of vows; yet in thought he was almost a libertine, whereas the other was a very fool of virtue, in a manner of speaking. Herr Settembrini was afraid of “Absolute Spirit,” and would like to see it everywhere wedded to democratic progress; he was simply outraged at the religious licence of his militant opponent, which would jumble up together God and the Devil, sanctification and bad behaviour, genius and disease, and which knew no standards of value, no rational judgment, no exercise of the will. But who then was the orthodox, who the freethinker? Where lay the true position, the true state of man? Should he descend into the all-consuming all-equalizing chaos, that ascetic-libertine state; or should he take his stand on the “Critical-Subjective,” where empty bombast and a bourgeois strictness of morals contradicted each other? Ah, the principles and points of view constantly did that; it became so hard for Hans Castorp’s civilian responsibility to distinguish between opposed positions, or even to keep the premisses apart from each other and clear in his mind, that the temptation grew well-nigh irresistible to plunge head foremost into Naphta’s “morally chaotic All.” The confusion, the crosspurposes, became general, and Hans Castorp suspected that the antagonists would have been less exacerbated had not the dispute bitten into their very souls.